Iraq
And Darfur: The Politics
Of War Crimes
By James Cogan
10 February, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
international response to two cases of mass killing—the civil
war in the Darfur region of Sudan and the US-led occupation of Iraq—demonstrate
the sheer hypocrisy of the claims by the major capitalist powers and
the United Nations to defend human rights and uphold international law.
In March 2003, the Bush administration,
supported by the Blair government in Britain and the Howard government
in Australia, violated the Geneva Convention and launched an unprovoked
war of aggression. Every pretext for the invasion was crude propaganda
and deliberate lies—from the claims that Iraq had weapons of mass
of destruction to the allegations that the regime of Saddam Hussein
supported international terrorism.
Thousands of Iraqis died
from the “shock-and-awe” tactics carried out by the invaders.
The US-led forces have since attempted to crush the legitimate resistance
of the Iraqi people with indiscriminate bombings, mass detentions and
torture at prisons like Abu Ghraib, and massacres in cities such as
Fallujah, Najaf and Tal Afar. The economic, cultural and social infrastructure
of Iraq has been devastated and the population impoverished.
US policies encouraged sectarian
and communalist divisions and are directly responsible for a bloody
civil war wracking parts of the country. The US-created Iraqi military
and police forces overwhelmingly consist of Shiite Muslims and ethnic
Kurds, who are conducting a reign of terror against Sunni Arab communities
that sympathise with the anti-occupation insurgency.
There is no precise count
of how many Iraqis have died due to the criminal actions of the Bush
administration and its allies. The US military has deliberately not
kept a record. A scientifically-based estimate is in the public domain
however.
In October 2006, the Lancet
medical journal published the results of John Hopkins University’s
comprehensive survey into the number of deaths caused by the US invasion
and occupation of Iraq. A total of 1,849 households—close to 12,000
people—were interviewed as to the fatalities in their family,
and the cause of death, from 14 months prior to the invasion through
to the time they were questioned. Death certificates were provided in
the majority of cases.
The sample was taken across
Iraq. The conclusion was that the crude mortality rate in Iraq had soared
from 5.5 per 1,000, before March 2003, to 7.5, then to 10.9, and to
a staggering 19.8 between June 2005 and June 2006.
Extrapolated to the entire
population, John Hopkins estimated that 393,000 to 943,000 additional
deaths had taken place under US occupation, with the median estimate
being 655,000 deaths. The vast majority died as a result of violence,
including gun shots, car bombs and other explosive devices, and air
strikes. Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths and US or
allied forces were directly involved in an estimated 31 percent.
The impact of the war has
been far greater than even the horrifying number of deaths indicated
by the university’s work. The number of persons physically and
psychologically injured has not yet been assessed. UN agencies conservatively
estimate that close to two million Iraqis have fled the country and
a further 1.7 million are considered internally displaced persons. In
other words, the illegal invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq can
credibly be held responsible for the death, injury or displacement of
well over 20 percent of the country’s population.
The response to the John
Hopkins study, however, was silence in the chambers of the United Nations,
which has repeatedly extended a “mandate” to the US occupation
to continue its repression of the Iraqi people. The European ruling
elite, which had postured as opponents of the Iraq war in 2003, also
remained mute. The US media, including so-called liberal newspapers
such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, buried the report.
President George Bush’s
dismissal of the report as “not credible” was not publicly
challenged. His close ally Prime Minister John Howard ignorantly declared
on Australian television: “I don’t believe that John Hopkins
research. It’s not plausible. It’s not based on anything
other than a house-to-house survey.” He was not opposed in the
media.
In fact, the methodology
used by the John Hopkins researchers is the basis for a claim universally
accepted by the UN, the EU and the Bush, Blair and Howard governments
that between 200,000 and 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict
raging in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Surveys are the source of
the estimated number of deaths caused by the collective punishment of
civilians in Darfur by Sudanese troops and a pro-government militia
known as the Janjaweed. The aim of the killings has been to suppress
an uprising among the region’s ethnic African population that
broke out in March 2003 against the Arab-dominated regime of President
Omar Hassan al-Bashir. In the course of four years of fighting, an estimated
2,000 ethnic African villages have been destroyed by the Janjaweed or
government forces.
As in Iraq, no precise death
count exists. In late 2004, however, the now defunct US-based Coalition
for International Justice (CIG) used the accepted scientific method
of arriving at an approximate estimate: it surveyed 1,136 refugees on
the Chad-Sudan border as to how many of their family members had died
violent deaths or were missing. By extrapolating they arrived at a mortality
rate for the entire population of Darfur. The CIG issued a report in
April 2005 estimating that up to 140,000 people had been killed in the
civil war.
The World Health Organisation
(WHO) also surveyed 17,000 refugees in early 2005 as to how many of
their family had died from malnutrition or disease. Using the same method,
WHO arrived at an estimate of 70,000 deaths during 2004, with 10,000
additional deaths anticipated each month.
Combining these two studies
together, politicians and journalists around the world regularly report
that between 200,000 and 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur.
At least another two million people have been forced to flee their homes
by militia terror and the destruction of homes and crops.
In this case, the deaths
have produced international expressions of moral outrage and calls for
justice. On September 9, 2004, President Bush, echoing the sentiments
of a Congressional resolution, labelled the atrocities in Darfur as
“genocide”. He declared: “We have concluded that genocide
has taken place in Darfur. We urge the international community to work
with us to prevent and suppress acts of genocide. We call on the United
Nations to undertake a full investigation of the genocide and other
crimes in Darfur.”
The European parliament joined
with the Bush administration and stated in September 2004 that the actions
of the Sudanese government were “tantamount to genocide”.
John Kerry and senators Joseph
Lieberman, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton are among the high-profile
Democrats in the US to declare that “genocide” is taking
place in Darfur and call for greater US action against the Bashir government.
Within the UN, there have
been not only Darfur aid conferences, a military intervention by an
African Union peace-keeping force and calls for harsh sanctions against
Sudan, but also the commissioning of war crimes investigations.
On March 31, 2005, the UN
Security Council instructed the International Criminal Court (ICC) in
the Hague under Resolution 1593 to investigate alleged war crimes in
Darfur. The court’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced
in December that he would table initial charges this month. The ICC
statement declared: “The evidence in this emerging first case
points to specific individuals who appear to bear the greatest responsibility
for war crimes and crimes against humanity including persecution, torture,
murder, and rape....”
Hinting that Sudanese officials
at the highest level may be indicted, the ICC stated: “Perhaps
most significant, the evidence reveals the underlying operational system
that enabled the commission of these massive crimes.” At an emergency
meeting on the situation in Darfur convened by the UN Human Rights Council
on December 12, retiring UN secretary general Kofi Annan declared: “It
is urgent that we take action to prevent further violations, including
by bringing to account those responsible for the numerous crimes that
have already been committed.”
The contrast between the
two cases could not be sharper. The underlying reason can be summed
up with the one word that explains a great deal of contemporary politics:
oil.
US imperialism invaded Iraq
primarily to seize control of its energy resources. The Democrats supported
this agenda to the hilt. Not wanting to challenge the US, the other
major powers, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and
China, either joined in or remained silent over the war crimes against
the Iraqi people. The UN stepped in and gave its blessing to this illegal
war of aggression.
Sudan is also an oil-rich
and strategically located state. However, the rising power that has
secured the greatest influence in the country is China. Beijing’s
attempts to develop political and economic influence in Africa is viewed
as a threat in both the US and Europe. The moral outage over Darfur
is a convenient means for undermining Chinese influence and providing
the US and its allies with a pretext if a broader military intervention
is deemed necessary.
The United Nations is simply
the clearing house for these imperialist intrigues. Its top officials
are little more than mouthpieces for the major powers, providing sanctimonious
expressions of disquiet about the desperate situation of the people
of Darfur, while maintaining a studied silence on US crimes in Iraq.
The very last concern of the representatives of the UN and the major
imperialist powers is the plight of millions of ordinary working people
in Darfur, Iraq and anywhere else in the world.
Note: The current February
2007 issue of John Hopkins magazine contains a detailed defense of the
study and its methodology. See: “The Number”, by Dale Keiger,
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