Posted on 14-4-2003
Crime
Against Humanity
by John Pilger , Z Magazine,Thursday 10
April 2003
A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by
an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly
fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding
the phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of
the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's
the sound of freedom."
Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being
ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever
designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller
in mind when he wrote the weasel headline: "The moment
young Omar discovered the price of war". These cowardly
words accompanied a photograph of an American marine reaching
out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just participated in
the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters and brother
during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in breach
of the most basic law of civilised peoples.
No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper;
no honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered
this boy's family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother,
sisters and brother dismembered and blood-soaked by automatic
fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture have been
appearing in the Anglo-American press since the invasion began:
tender cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling, ministering
to their "liberated" victims.
And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where
80 men, women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from
the Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small children
holding up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs forced their
families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in a British high
street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right to see
it.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges
in the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is 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." In stating
this guiding principle of international law, the judges specifically
rejected German arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive
attacks against other countries.
Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their
media court do now will change the truth of their great crime
in Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood by the majority
of humanity, if not by those who claim to speak for "us".
As Denis Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo against
Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the history books".
It was Halliday who, as assistant secretary general of the United
Nations, set up the "oil for food" programme in Iraq
in 1996 and quickly realised that the UN had become an instrument
of "a genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned
in protest, as did his successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described
"the wanton and shaming punishment of a nation".
I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly
because their names and their witness have been airbrushed from
most of the media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at
Halliday on Newsnight shortly after his resignation: "So
are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set
the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost
gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail
Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, described the
BBC's war coverage as "extraordinary - it almost feels
like World Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another
theatre of war somewhere else and you're switching between battles".
He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and
no one will say so, even when they are murdering journalists.
They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless
people the same racist, homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam,
where they had a whole programme of murder called Operation
Phoenix. This runs through all their foreign wars, as it does
through their own divided society. Take your pick of the current
onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their tanks swept heroically
into Baghdad and out again. They murdered people along the way.
They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children.
Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape:
"We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm
the morgues and hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs
and painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn
in humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and
paid for by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation
with minimal anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound
of freedom".
Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British helicopter
pilot who came to blows with an American who had almost shot
him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't have a fucking
air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot reflect on the truth
he had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against a stricken
third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt
it. The British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying.
By any standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American
machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small arms
and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans and reduced
the British military class to one of its specialities - mendacious
condescension.
The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums",
"pockets of Ba'ath Party loyalists", "kamikaze"
and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real people: cultured
and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary of dishonour
has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from the
broadcasting box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked
the Today programme's presenter of a former general embedded
in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging, isn't it?"
he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy voices,
are their bond.
On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former
BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this
"hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on
Sky News of British soldiers smashing their way into a family
home in Basra, pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling,
hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering
with terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political
prisoners and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence, given
Britain's long unfamiliarity with this territory and its inhabitants
. . . The least this ugly display will do is remind Arabs and
Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards - we
can show your prisoners in . . . degrading positions, but don't
you dare show ours.".
Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World
Cup football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate
refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are overflowing.
All this misery is due entirely to the "coalition"
invasion and the British siege, which forced the United Nations
to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic
relief agency, which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard
humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres
per person per day.
Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people drinking
from contaminated wells. According to the World Health Organisation,
1.5 million people across southern Iraq are without water, and
epidemics are inevitable. And what are "our boys"
doing to alleviate this, apart from staging childish, theatrical
occupations of presidential palaces, having fired shoulder-held
missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?
A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock
that "it is difficult to deliver aid in an area that is
still an active battle zone". The logic of his own words
mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and
the Americans were not defying international law, there would
be no difficulty in delivering aid.
There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda
coming from these PR-trained British officers, who have not
a clue about Iraq and its people. They describe the liberation
they are bringing from "the world's worst tyranny",
as if anything, including death by cluster bomb or dysentery,
is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient
truth is that, according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the
most modern health service in the Middle East.
No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime;
but Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create
a modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle class.
Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per cent clean water
supply and with free education. All this was smashed by the
Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990,
the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system
that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation described as
"a model of efficiency . . . undoubtedly saving Iraq from
famine". That, too, was smashed when the invasion was launched.
Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to
put on protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles
hit by American "friendly fire"? The reason is that
the Americans are using solid uranium coated on missiles and
tank shells. When I was in southern Iraq, doctors estimated
a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where depleted uranium
was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under
the subsequent embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied
equipment with which to clean up its contaminated battlefields.
The hospitals in Basra have wards overflowing with children
with cancers of a variety not seen before 1991. They have no
painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin.
With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little
of this has been reported. Instead, the media have performed
their preordained role as imperial America's "soft power":
rarely identifying "our" crime, or misrepresenting
it as a struggle between good intentions and evil incarnate.
This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen
dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition
in Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China.
George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I
was just following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg
judges left in no doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow
their conscience in an illegal war of aggression. Two British
soldiers have had the courage to seek status as conscientious
objectors. They face court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually
no questions have been asked about them in the media. George
Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same question as
Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons,
are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.
Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime
Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague.
This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is
a war criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or
another, accessories should be reported to the International
Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts
few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to
Iraq.
A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that
the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University
wrote, to investigate "not only the regime, but also the
UN bombing and sanctions which violated the human rights of
Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war,
whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant
Islam. The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning.
Such is the magnitude of their crime.
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