Where
Nobody Is Accountable
By Ali al-Fadhily
26 May, 2007
Inter Press Service
BAGHDAD, May 21 (IPS)
- Killings, crime, lack of medical care, collapse of education, the
list goes on. But with the occupation by U.S.-led forces now into a
fifth year, and a supposedly democratic government in place, no one
knows who to hold accountable for all that is going wrong.
It is the occupation forces,
particularly the United States and Britain, that must be held accountable,
many Iraqis say.
"It is good of these
people to discuss accountability for theft, but the most important thing
to account for is Iraqi blood," Numan Ahmed, a human rights activist
from the Adhamiya neighbourhood in Baghdad told IPS.
The British medical journal
Lancet has reported that by July 2006, 655,000 people had died as "a
consequence of the war." It has reported that the risk of death
among civilians is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion
in March 2003.
"By now a million Iraqis
have been killed for no reason, and many millions disabled or badly
injured just because of some thieves in Baghdad and Washington,"
Ahmed said. "We are prepared to reveal the documents to condemn
them even if takes us a lifetime."
But Iraqis have no means
to take action against occupiers.
The United States has not
accepted jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has
the power to investigate complaints of genocide. The United States took
the view that the court could conduct "politically motivated investigations
and prosecutions of U.S. military and political officials and personnel."
U.S. opposition to the ICC
is in stark contrast to the strong support for the Court by most of
its closest allies. But Iraqis have found no way to proceed against
these either.
With no doors of justice
open to them, many Iraqis are now taking to unlawful ways to hit back
at occupation forces and government targets.
"The only way to do
it is at gunpoint," 32-year-old Ali Aziz from Ramadi, 100 km west
of Baghdad, told IPS. "They invaded us at gunpoint and we find
it ridiculous to talk about any other way of getting back what belongs
to us."
Aziz said he had lost several
friends in attacks by U.S. soldiers. "The whole world is dealing
with this in a hypocritical way, and there is only us to claim our rights
the way we find proper."
The human rights group al-Raya
filed a case in a local court in Fallujah against U.S. forces in 2004,
following a massive military crackdown. About three-quarters of all
buildings in the city were destroyed or heavily damaged during the U.S.
assault in November 2004.
But U.S.-backed Iraqi security
forces have hit out at the human rights group. "The secretary-general
for the organisation has now been arrested by Fallujah police for reasons
that we are not aware of, and the organisation is not functioning any
more," a member of the board, speaking on condition of anonymity,
told IPS in Baghdad.
"It is not the right
time to talk about accountability when daily killings by U.S. and Iraqi
soldiers are still ongoing. God knows if it will ever be possible."
A case for accountability
could well be made. A judge from the United States wrote at the time
of the trial of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in Germany in 1946:
"To initiate a war of aggressionàis not only an international
crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other
war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole."
The U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq was judged by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Sep. 16, 2004
as "an illegal act that contravened the UN charter."
The lack of accountability
appears now to be leading to greater support for armed resistance against
occupation forces.
"What accountability
are you talking about, sir," said Abu Jassim from Fallujah, who
lost four members of his family when a U.S. bomb destroyed his home
during the first U.S. offensive in the city in April 2004. "Americans
are criminals, and the whole world is covering up for their crimes."
They will be held accountable, he said, by "Allah" and by
"the heroes of the Iraqi resistance."
Iraqis are also angry over
destruction of their civilian infrastructure, for which no one has been
held responsible.
"The U.S. crime of deliberately
crushing Iraqi infrastructure must be looked at as a crime against humanity,"
chief engineer Jalal Abdulla at Baghdad's Ministry of Electricity told
IPS. "They did not have to do this to support their military effort,
but they did it just to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths for no
reason but cruelty."
Others vent their frustration
against what they see as an impotent United Nations. "The UN should
be the place for asking those Americans why they committed so many crimes
in Iraq," said Baghdad resident Malik Hammad.
(*Ali, our correspondent
in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based
specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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