Obscuring The Reality
By Kalpana Sharma
Photographs tell stories; they also hide the reality. Ali Ismail Abbas is the face of the civilian casualties in Iraq. The image of this 12-year-old, with stumps where once there were arms, with his small body covered with 60 per cent burns, and his confused, appealing eyes, has seared its way into the conscience of people around the world.
Yet, why is Ali in this state? We are being asked to forget. The image and the story that accompanies it are both designed to induce selective amnesia. And to obscure the harsh and dreadful reality that Ali was felled by an American missile that ki lled the rest of his family. Also that Ali is just one of thousands of other children and adults, who will live deformed and terrible lives for no crime except that they got in the way of America's killer technology.
A full two weeks after the so-called "victory" of the "coalition" forces in Iraq, we have yet to hear about the numbers of Iraqi civilians or soldiers killed or injured. The Americans say it is not their job to count the Iraqi dead. And there is no Iraqi administration left to do that now. As Mark Burgess, a researcher at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, a private research group, said in a newspaper interview, the powerful munitions used by the American and the British Air Force probably left hundreds or thousands of battlefield victims pulverised, burnt or buried in rubble.
The hype surrounding Ali's condition also obscures the reality of the conditions of thousands of other children in Iraq. Doctors speak of wounds of a kind they have never seen in previous wars. These wounds are the consequence of the weapons of destruction perfected by the American arms industry and used indiscriminately during the Iraq bombings.
Earlier this month, a Baghdad-based Belgian doctor interviewed on BBC spoke with considerable anger and frustration about the situation in the Iraqi capital. He pointed out that it was incumbent on the "occupying" forces to restore water and electricity and to safeguard the hospitals. He said, children were dying not just of the wounds they had received from the bombings, but from diarrhoea because they did not have clean drinking water, something that they did have before this "war". He also said that everyday, more people were being brought in because the "occupying" forces were shooting at civilians who did not stop when asked to do so. No such thing as a warning shot, or firing at the tyres of a vehicle. People were the targets.
Yet, little of this is being reported. Instead, there is endless speculation about the "democratic" future of Iraq; there are columns and columns about America's chosen man to lead Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, and precious little about his unsavoury past. You also see scores of descriptive articles about Saddam Hussein's opulent lifestyle, about the gold taps in his bathrooms, his palaces, the stashes of millions of dollars that are being recovered, and the torture chambers. It is as if the media is joining the Governments of the "coalition" to justify the attack on Iraq by ensuring that the world knows just how horrid Saddam Hussein was.
It is also striking the regularity with which "news" about possible weapons of mass destruction that have been located in Iraq keeps popping up. From the beginning, none of this "news" could be substantiated. Yet, the professional Western media, which boasts of its freedom from Government control, appears to have set aside all standards of professionalism, honesty and essential scepticism. How else can one explain a newspaper like The New York Times running a report on April 21 about "a scientist" (nationality not disclosed) who has stated that Iraq destroyed its chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment just before the war began.
The story was written by Judith Miller who travelled with, or was possibly "embedded'' with, a specialised unit of the American army, the MET Alpha, that is supposed to have found this unnamed scientist. Even more surprising, the paper has run her story even though she admits in the text that "under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. These officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted... While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried." By what stretch of imagination would a report, obtained under such circumstances, be deemed credible? Yet, just when Hans Blix, the United Nations weapons inspector, goes on record to criticise the U.S. on this issue, The New York Times runs the story.
John Pilger, when interviewed in The Progressive magazine about the media's role in conflict (November 2002) made this telling comment: "Journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words `impartiality' and `objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over. `Impartiality' and `objectivity' now mean the establishment point of view." The comment was made before the advent of "embedded" journalism. He went on to speak of the consequences of such an attitude: "They internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity. This leads journalists to make a distinction between people who matter and people who don't matter. The people who died in the Twin Towers in that terrible crime mattered. The people who were bombed to death in dusty villages in Afghanistan didn't matter, even though it now seems that their numbers were greater. The people who will die in Iraq don't matter. Iraq has been successfully demonised as if everybody who lives there is Saddam Hussein. In the build-up to this attack on Iraq, journalists have almost universally excluded the prospect of civilian deaths, the numbers of people who would die, because those people don't matter."
We already know the long-term impact of Gulf War I on the Iraqi people. Literally millions died because American bombs destroyed essential infrastructure, because depleted uranium was used, and because sanctions prevented essential medication from reaching the ailing.
The story today is not very different. Children are dying of diarrhoea because of weeks without electricity and clean drinking water. Reports have already begun appearing of a typhoid and cholera epidemic in Baghdad. According to an agency report, 50 to 60 per cent of the children brought to the Al-Iskan children's hospital in Baghdad were suffering from dehydration and diarrhoea. In the absence of functioning laboratories, doctors are unable to diagnose whether the sick children have cholera or typhoid. Also, they admit that shortage of antibiotics is forcing them to split single doses between two patients. These are the very "Iraqi people" in whose name this senseless "war of liberation" was conducted.
And even if the Western media chooses to ignore their plight, to many people across the world, these "Iraqi people" do matter, they do count.