Anti-Colonial
War
By Robert
Fisk
20 April, 2003
It's going wrong,
faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of "liberation"
has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening
to fight the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation".
At night on
every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men
with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of
the insults being flung at them. "Go away! Get out of my face!"
an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the
wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched
the man's face suffuse with rage. "God is Great! God is Great!"
the Iraqi retorted.
"Fuck you!"
The Americans
have now issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad", a
document as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. "Please
avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers
and before the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of
the city. "During this time, terrorist forces associated with the
former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements,
are known to move through the area ... please do not leave your homes
during this time. During all hours, please approach Coalition military
positions with extreme caution ..."
So now - with
neither electricity nor running water - the millions of Iraqis here
are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It's
a form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command
of the 1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.
"If I was
an Iraqi and I read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I
would become a suicide bomber." And all across Baghdad you hear
the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that
the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon - very soon - a
guerrilla resistance must start. No doubt the Americans will claim that
these attacks are "remnants" of Saddam's regime or "criminal
elements". But that will not be the case.
Marine officers
in Baghdad were holding talks yesterday with a Shia militant cleric
from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city. I
met the prelate before the negotiations began and he told me that "history
is being repeated". He was talking of the British invasion of Iraq
in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British.
Everywhere are
the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that America's promises
of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to be honoured.
Why, Iraqis
are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to
escape? And they're right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two
sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the
Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr A K
Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who, long ago,
in the days before journalists cosied up to him, was the official who
read out the list of executed "brothers" in the purge that
followed Saddam's revolution - relatives of prisoners would dose themselves
on valium before each Sahaf appearance.
Here's what
Baghdadis are noticing - and what Iraqis are noticing in all the main
cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam
surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy that
was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was campaigning
for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, would
be brought to trial. The 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are
empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi
Intelligence Service.
I have been
to many of them. But there is no evidence even that a single British
or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth of documents
lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former places
of torment. Is this idleness. Or is this wilful?
Take the Qasimiyeh
security station beside the river Tigris. It's a pleasant villa - once
owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s.
There's a little lawn and a shrubbery and at first you don't notice
the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the fact that big
sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over
the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the floors,
in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering.
They show, for example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem
al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid al-Nababy.
Mohammed Aish
Jassem, an ex-prisoner, showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling
by Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious
Dawa party. "They put my hands behind my back like this and tied
them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," he told
me. "They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the
ceiling, then they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder
when I fell."
The hooks in
the ceiling are just in front of Captain Isawi's desk. I understood
what this meant. There wasn't a separate torture chamber and office
for documentation. The torture chamber was the office. While the man
or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain Isawi would sign papers,
take telephone calls and - given the contents of his bin - smoke many
cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.
Were they monsters,
these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working
for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly - indeed some of them may well
be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside
the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the US Marines'
Civil Affairs Unit.
The names of
the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad are in papers
lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman
Abbas and Moham-med Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to find
this out. So Messrs Alawi, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply
to work for them.
There are prisoner
identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened
to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud?A lady in a
black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers
had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened,
she was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave. She
never saw or buried their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that there is
a mass grave in the Khedeer desert, but no one - least of all Baghdad's
new occupiers - are interested in finding it.
And the men
who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? "We committed
no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison duties
had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and faeces
after each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did they
do this to us?
"America,
yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to
us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must
go."
If the Americans
and the British want to understand the nature of the religious opposition
here, they have only to consult the files of Saddam's secret service
archives. I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24 February this year on
the conflict between Sheikh Mohammed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr, the
22-year-old grandson of Mohammed Sadr, who was executed on Saddam's
orders more than two decades ago.
The dispute
showed the passion and the determination with which the Shia religious
leaders fight even each other. But of course, no one has bothered to
read this material or even look for it.
At the end of
the Second World War, German-speaking British and US intelligence officers
hoovered up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux
across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In
Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence.
There's an even
more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad - the headquarters
of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that
was bombed by the US and a series of villas and office buildings that
are stashed with files, papers and card indexes. It was here that Saddam's
special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation -
electricity being an essential part of this - and it was here that Farzad
Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before
his dispatch to the hangman.
It's also graced
with delicately shaded laneways, a creche - for the families of the
torturers - and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in
English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There's also
a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street" and
flowerbeds and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq.
I met - extraordinarily
- an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking around the compound, a colleague
of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr Sharistani. "This
is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it,"
he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in all the
world."
The top security
men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours, shredding millions
of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at
the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of
papers. Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and reconstituted
to learn their secrets?
Even the unshredded
files contain a wealth of information. But again, the Americans have
not bothered - or do not want - to search through these papers. If they
did, they would find the names of dozens of senior intelligence men,
many of them identified in congratulatory letters they insisted on sending
each other every time they were promoted. Where now, for example, is
Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain Saad Ahmed
al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of others?
We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.
Iraqis are right
to ask why the Americans don't search for this information, just as
they are right to demand to know why the entire Saddam cabinet - every
man jack of them - got away. The capture by the Americans of Saddam's
half-brother and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu Abbas, whose last
violent act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation for this.
Now here's another
question the Iraqis are asking - and to which I cannot provide an answer.
On 8 April, three weeks into the invasion, the Americans dropped four
2,000lb bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. They claimed
they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill civilians
because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a "risk free
venture" (sic). So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians
in Mansur, most of them members of a Christian family.
The Americans
said they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until they could carry
out forensic tests at the site. But this turns out to have been a lie.
I went there two days ago. Not a single US or British official had bothered
to visit the bomb craters. Indeed, when I arrived, there was a putrefying
smell and families pulled the remains of a baby from the rubble.
No American
officers have apologised for this appalling killing. And I can promise
them that the baby I saw being placed under a sheet of black plastic
was very definitely not Saddam Hussein. Had they bothered to look at
this place - as they claimed they would - they would at least have found
the baby. Now the craters are a place of pilgrimage for the people of
Baghdad.
Then there's
the fires that have consumed every one of the city's ministries - save,
of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil - as
well as UN offices, embassies and shopping malls. I have counted a total
of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising.
Yesterday I
found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by US troops,
some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of the clouds
of smoke swirling down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural
Irrigation. Hard to believe, isn't it, that they were unaware that someone
was setting fire to the next building?
Then I spotted
another fire, three kilometres away. I drove to the scene to find flames
curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher Education's
Department of Computer Science. And right next to it, perched on a wall,
was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring hospital and
didn't know who had lit the next door fire because "you can't look
everywhere at once".
Now I'm sure
the marine was not being facetious or dishonest - should the Americans
not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd Regiment,
4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiancée, Jessica, in the States
for him to pass on his love - but something is terribly wrong when US
soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast ministries being burnt by
mobs and do nothing about it.
Because there
is also something dangerous - and deeply disturbing - about the crowds
setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries
and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come first.
The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed
one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it
sped out of town.
The official
US line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an explanation
that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started by "remnants
of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no
doubt, who feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad
don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And
neither do I.
The looters
make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be paid. The
passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their targets.
If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires. The moment
he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the
whole project.
So who are they,
this army of arsonists? I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged,
unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me he pointed
a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he working for?
In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure
of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the Americans stop
this?
As I said, something
is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is going on which demands
that serious questions be asked of the United States government. Why,
for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence, claim last week
that there was no widespread looting or destruction in Baghdad? His
statement was a lie. But why did he make it?
The Americans
say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. This is also
untrue. If they don't, what are the hundreds of soldiers deployed in
the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the
hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?
So the people
of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural
heritage: the looting of the archaeological treasures from the national
museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives;
the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim
we are going to create for them.
Why, they ask,
do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is
it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, destroyed?
Why are they issued with orders for a curfew by their so-called liberators?
And it's not
just the people of Baghdad, but the Shias of the city of Najaf and of
Nasiriyah - where 20,000 protested at America's first attempt to put
together a puppet government on Wednesday - who are asking these questions.
Now there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly set fire to
the pro-American governor's car after he promised US help in restoring
electricity.
It's easy for
a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war that lacked
all international legitimacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists
in the Middle East, especially for false optimists who invade oil-rich
nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations,
such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still unproved. So I'll
make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation"
is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin.
In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.