Secret Slaughter
By Night,
Lies And Blind Eyes By Day
By Robert Fisk
16 September 2003:
Independent. UK
In
the Pentagon, they've been re-showing Gillo Pontecorvo's terrifying
1965 film of the French war in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers, in black
and white, showed what happened to both the guerrillas of the FLN and
the French army when their war turned dirty. Torture, assassination,
booby-trap bombs, secret executions. As the New York Times revealed,
the fliers sent out to the Pentagon brass to watch this magnificent,
painful film began with the words: "How to win a battle against
terrorism and lose the war of ideas..." But the Americans didn't
need to watch The Battle of Algiers.
They've already
committed many of the French mistakes in Iraq, and the guerrillas of
Iraq are well into the blood tide of the old FLN. Sixteen demonstrators
killed in Fallujah? Forget it. Twelve gunned down by the Americans in
Mosul? Old news. Ten Iraqi policemen shot by US troops outside Fallujah?
"No information," the occupation authorities told us last
week. No information? The Jordanian embassy bombing? The bombing of
the UN headquarters? Or Najaf with its 126 dead? Forget it. Things are
improving in Iraq. There's been 24-hour electricity for three days now
and - until two US
soldiers were killed on Friday - there had been five days without an
American death.
That's how the French
used to report the news from Algeria. What you don't know doesn't worry
you. Which is why, in Iraq, there are thousands of incidents of violence
that never get reported; attacks on Americans that cost civilian lives
are not even recorded by the occupation authority press officers unless
they involve loss of life among "coalition forces". Go to
the mortuaries of Iraq's cities and it's clear that a slaughter occurs
each night. Occupation powers insist that journalists obtain clearance
to visit hospitals - it can take a week to get the right papers, if
at all, so goodbye to statistics - but the figures coming from senior
doctors tell their own story.
In Baghdad, up to
70 corpses - of Iraqis killed by gunfire - are brought to the mortuaries
each day. In Najaf, for example, the cemetery authorities record the
arrival of the bodies of up to 20 victims of violence a day. Some of
the dead were killed in family feuds, in looting, or revenge killings.
Others have been gunned down by US troops at checkpoints or in the
increasingly vicious "raids" carried out by American forces
in the suburbs of Baghdad and the Sunni cities to the north. Only last
week, reporters covering the killing of the Fallujah policemen were
astonished to see badly wounded children suddenly arriving at the hospital,
all shot - according to their families - by an American tank which had
opened up at a palm grove outside the town. As usual, the occupation
authorities had "no information" on the incident.
But if you count
the Najaf dead as typical of just two or three other major cities, and
if you add on the daily Baghdad death toll and multiply by seven, almost
1,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every week - and that may well
be a conservative figure. Somewhere in the cavernous marble halls of
proconsul Paul Bremer's palace on the Tigris, someone must be calculating
these awful statistics. But of course, the Americans are not telling
us.
It's like listening
to Iraq's American-run radio station. Death - unless it's on a spectacular
scale like the Jordanian or UN or Najaf bombings - simply doesn't get
on the air. Even the killing of American troops isn't reported for 24
hours. Driving the highways of Iraq, I've been reduced to listening
to the only radio station with up-to-date news on the guerrilla war
in Iraq: Iran's "Alam Radio", broadcasting in Arabic from
Tehran.
It's as if the denizens
of Mr Bremer's chandeliered chambers do not regard Iraq as a real country,
a place of tragedy and despair whose "liberated" people increasingly
blame their "liberators" for their misery. Even when US troops
on a raid in Mansour six weeks ago ran amok and gunned down up to eight
civilians - including a 14-year-old boy - the best the Americans could
do was to say that they were "enquiring" into the incident.
Not, as one US colonel quickly pointed out to us, that this meant a
formal enquiry. Just a few questions here and there. And of course the
killings were soon forgotten.
What is happening
inside the US occupation army is almost as much a mystery as the nightly
cull of civilians. My old friend Tom Friedman, in a break from his role
as messianic commentator for the New York Times, put his finger on the
problem when - arranging a meeting with an occupation official -- he
reported asking an American soldier at a bridge checkpoint for his location.
"The enemy side of the bridge," came the reply.
Enemy. That's how
the French came to see every native Algerian. Talk to the soldiers in
the streets here in Baghdad and they use obscene language - in between
heartfelt demands to "go home" - about the people they were
supposedly rescuing from Saddam Hussein. A Polish journalist in Karbala
saw just how easily human contact can break down. "The American
guards are greeting passers-by with a loud 'Salaam aleikum' [peace be
with you]. Some young Iraqi boys with a donkey and cart say something
in Arabic and suddenly, together, they run their fingers across their
throats.
"'Motherfucker!"
shout the Marines, before their translator explains to them that the
boys are just expressing their happiness at the death of Saddam Hussein's
sons ..." Though light years from the atrocities of Saddam's security
forces, the US military here is turning out to be as badly disciplined
and brutal as the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its
"recon-by-fire", its lethal raids into civilian homes, its
shooting of demonstrators and children during fire-fights, its destruction
of houses, its imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis without trial or
contact with their families, its refusal to investigate killings, its
harassment - and killing - of journalists, its constant refrain that
it has "no information" about bloody incidents which it must
know all too much about, are sounding like an echo-chamber of the Israeli
army.
Worse still, their
intelligence information is still as warped by ideology as was the illegal
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Having failed to receive the welcome
deserved of "liberators", the Americans have to convince themselves
that their tormentors - save for the famous Saddam "remnants"
- cannot be Iraqis at all. They must be members of "al-Qa'ida",
Islamists arriving from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan
... Among its 1,000 "security" prisoners at Baghdad airport
- the total number of detainees held without trial in Iraq is around
5,500 - about 200 are said to be "foreigners". But in many
cases, US intelligence cannot even discover their nationalities and
some may well have been in Iraq since Saddam invited Arabs to defend
Baghdad before the invasion.
In reality, no one
has produced a shred of evidence al-Qa'ida men are streaming into the
country. Not a single sighting has been reported of these mysterious
men, save for the presence of armed Iranians outside the shrines of
Najaf after last month's bombing. Yet President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
have talked up their supposed presence to the point where the usual
right-wing columnists in the US press and then reporters in general
write of them as a proven fact. With powerful irony, Osama bin Laden's
ominous 11 September tape suggests that he is as anxious to get his
men into Iraq as the Americans are to believe that they are already
there.
In practice, fantasy
takes over from reality. Thus while the Americans can claim they are
being assaulted by "foreigners" - the infamous men of evil
against whom Mr Bush is fighting his "war on terror" - they
can equally suggest that the suicide bombing of the UN headquarters
in Baghdad was the work of the Iraqi security guards whom the UN had
kept on from the Saddam regime. Whatever the truth of this - and the
suicidal expertise of the UN attack might suggest a combination of both
Baathists and Islamists - the message was simple enough: Americans are
attacked by "international terrorists" but the wimps of the
UN are attacked by the same Iraqi killers they helped to protect through
so many years of sanction-busting.
There are foreign
men and women aplenty in Baghdad - Americans and Britons prominent among
them - who work hard to bring about the false promises uttered by Messrs
Bush and Blair to create a decent, democratic Iraqi society. One of
them is Chris Woolford, whose account of life in Bremer's marble palace
appeared only in the internal newsletter of the UK regulatory Office
of Telecommunications, for whom he normally works. Mr Woolford insists
that there are signs of hope in Iraq - the payment of emergency salaries
to civil servants, for example, and the reopening of schools and administrative
offices.
But it's worth recording
at length his revealing description of life under Bremer. "Life
in Baghdad can only be described as bizarre," he writes. "We
are based within a huge compound... in Sadam (sic) Hussein's former
Presidential Palace. The place is awash with vast marble ballrooms,
conference rooms (now used as a dining room), a chapel (with murals
of Scud
missiles) and hundreds of function rooms with ornate chandeliers which
were probably great for entertaining but which function less well as
offices and dormitories ... I work in the 'Ministries' wing of the palace
in the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Within this wing, each
door along the corridor represents a separate ministry; next door to
us, for example, is the Ministry of Health and directly across the corridor
is the Finance Ministry. Behind each door military and civilian coalition
members (mainly American with the odd Brit dotted about) are beavering
away trying to sort out the economic, social and political issues currently
facing Iraq. The work is undoubtedly for a good cause but it cannot
but help feel strange as our contact with the outside world - the real
Iraq - is so limited." Mr Woolford describes how meetings with
his Iraqi counterparts are difficult to arrange and, besides, "key
decisions are still very much taken behind the
closed doors of the CPA (the Coalition Provisional Authority), or for
the most significant decisions, back in Washington DC". So much,
then, for the interim council and the appointed Iraqi "government"
that supposedly represents the forthcoming "democracy" of
Iraq. As for contacting his Iraqi counterparts, Mr Woolford admits that
Iraqi officials are sometimes asked to "stand outside in their
garden between 7pm and 8pm so that we can ring them on satellite phones"
- a process that is followed by the departure of CPA staff for their
meeting with "bullet-proof vests and machine-gun mounted Humvees
(a sort of beefed-up American Jeep) both in front and behind our own
four-wheel drive..." Thus are America and Britain attempting to
"reconstruct" a broken land that is now the scene of an increasingly
cruel guerrilla war. But there is a pervading feeling - among Iraqis
as well as journalists covering this conflict - that something is wrong
with our Western response to New Iraq. Our lives are more valuable than
their lives. The "terrible toll" of the summer months - a
phrase from a New York Times news report last week - referred only to
the deaths of Western soldiers.
What is becoming
apparent is that we don't really care about the Iraqis. We may think
we want to bring them democracy but, on an individual level, we don't
care very much about them or their lives. We liberated them. They should
be grateful to us. If they die now, well, no one said democracy was
easy.
Donald Rumsfeld
- who raged away about weapons of mass destruction before the invasion
- now admits he didn't even discuss WMD with David Kay, the head of
the US-led team looking for these mythical weapons, on his recent visit
to Baghdad. Of course not. Because they don't exist. Mr Rumsfeld is
equally silent about the civilian death toll here. It's the followers
of his nemesis Bin Laden that now have to be publicised.
Bin Laden must be
grateful. So must the Palestinians. In the refugee camps of Lebanon
last week, they were talking of the events in Iraq as a form of encouragement.
"If Israel's superpower ally can be humbled by Arabs," a Palestinian
official explained to me in one of the Beirut camps, "why should
we give up our struggle against the Israelis who cannot be as efficient
soldiers as the Americans?" That's the lesson the Algerians drew
when they saw France's mighty army reduced to surrender at Dien Bien
Phu. The French, like the Americans, had succeeded in murdering or "liquidating"
many of the
Algerians who might have negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search
for an interlocuteur valable was one of de Gaulle's most difficult tasks
when he decided to leave Algeria. But what will the Americans do? Their
interlocuteur valable might have been the United Nations. But now the
UN has been struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing in Baghdad.
And the Bin Ladens and the adherents of the Wahabi sect are not interested
in negotiations of any kind. Mr Bush declared "war without end".
And it looks as though Iraqis - along with ourselves -- are going to
be its principal