Posted on 20-4-2003
Robert
Fisk: Not Liberation, New Colonial Oppression
The Independent UK, Thursday 17 April 2003
- America's war of 'liberation' may be over. But Iraq's war of
liberation from the Americans is just about to begin
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
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