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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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December 1st,
2006 - Democracy Strangled at Birth |
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Haifa Zangana The Guardian/Comment is free December 1, 2006 08:00 AM Five children were killed in
their house in Ramadi, in the Anbar province, western Iraq, yesterday. The
youngest female casualty was six months old and the eldest was aged 10.
Another female at the scene was injured but refused treatment, the US
military said in a statement. A US patrol fired tank
rounds, machine gun and small arms fire at " two men who were shooting
from the roof of a house", the statement said. After the
"battle" there were no US casualties but the US patrol found six
bodies (five children and a female adult) inside the house. The new massacre, like many
others, follows the same pattern of actions by US troops: kill, try to cover
up the crime, then issue a statement blaming it on the "insurgents"
either directly or indirectly. But these days the US
massacres barely prickle the consciousness of the public. We are being
repeatedly told that the main story in Iraq is Iraqis killing Iraqis in their
hundreds each day, and that the main question is whether it has yet become a
sectarian civil war, as if the victims care about the label. So the scores of
Iraqi girls killed, in various cities, by the occupation troops are just a
minor part of the picture. For Iraqis, it is not. The presence of occupation
troops and their crimes are the main picture. Sectarian strife has been
created by the occupation and is not due to its failure. The
"dormant" sectarian tensions have been nurtured so as to explode at
any moment. The problem facing the occupation is that its failure does not
allow it enough time for the explosion. For Iraqis, the link between
occupation and sectarian-looking atrocities goes beyond the occupation's
deliberate imposing of the sectarian quota basic law on a secular country,
which has revived the dark moribund sectarian groups. The link between
blatant crimes of occupation soldiers high on impunity and the rest of the
mayhem in Iraq is even more direct than the deliberate planned dismantling of
the Iraqi state, starting with abolishment of the army and several key
ministries. While the US and British
governments and the media talk about "mistakes", and cite the
"regrettable episode" of looting of museums, burning of libraries
and all that occurred in the first days of occupation, Iraqis perceive bad
faith and deliberate planning, which extend to explain the wave after wave of
sectarian-looking atrocities. They do not need to intuit more than what has
already been proven in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador under Negroponte
in the 80s, who was appointed first to rule Baghdad, then moved to coordinate
all US security. After each successful
resistance's attack against occupying forces, the terrified or maddened
marines or soldiers would retaliate. Those attacks against the troops have
now reached one every 15 minutes. If an atrocity then occurs
in a nearby marketplace or a mosque - car bombs and mortar fire aimed at
people with ready statements by real or imaginary groups with sectarian
affiliation - Iraqis suspect that even if these are carried out by Iraqis,
they are managed by mercenaries labelled contractors or advisors, whether in
battalions that are both within and outside the control of the puppet
government's ministries, or in the Facilities Protection Force which,
according to Prime Minister Maliki, numbered 120,000 including at one point
over 30,000 foreign security agents. Most Iraqis are aware that
the atrocities are intended to drive them, against their will, and through
the expected traditions of revenge by unhinged or uncontrolled young and
semi-criminal groups in neighbourhoods and tribes, to fight each other on a
sectarian basis. Acts like these happen frequently in parallel with
resistance acts targeting occupation forces only, and puppet forces who act
under their commands or act as shields for them. Every now and then a
spectacular atrocity seems to be planned together with prepared retaliation
responses like the bombing of the Samarra Mosque and the subsequent burning
of mosques, identity killing and evictions, and last week's six car bombs in
Sadr City followed by mortar attacks on Adhamiya. The atrocities assigned to
al-Qaida, the Mahdi Army or death squads serve this strategic purpose, but
also serve in the short term as the main story to cover up the continuing
murders by the defeated army of the so-called superpower. An example is the al-Qaim
wedding massacre in May 2004, when American bombing killed 42 members of the
Rakat and Sabah families, including women, children and babies, the US
insisted it was responding to fire from foreign fighters. The chief US
military spokesman in Iraq stated that "Bad people have parties
too." In the Haditha massacre in
November 2005, 24 Iraqis were killed. The first died when a car full of young
men came up the road, and, according to local witnesses, others were killed
when marines went from house to house. Those who died included a 76-year-old
man, and a three-year-old child. There were also several women among the
dead. In Ishaqi, about 60 miles
north of Baghdad, on March 15 2006, US troops were allegedly responsible of
rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in a house, including five
children and four women, before blowing up the building. In Mahmudiyah, 20 miles
south of Baghdad, A'beer, a 15-year-old girl, was killed with her father,
mother, and her nine-year-old sister, when US troops raided their house, on
March 12 2006. They were accused of raping A'beer and setting her body on
fire in an attempt to cover up their crime. Her uncle said he found A'beer
sprawled dead in a corner, her hair and a pillow next to her consumed by
fire, and her dress pushed up to her neck. In the timeline of bloodshed
since the invasion in 2003, there are more: A squad of seven marines and a
Navy corpsman kidnapped a man in the town of Hamdania, west of Baghdad, took
him to a roadside hole and shot him, then tried to cover up the killing. Seven British soldiers
carried out an attack on a group of Iraqi civilians that led to the death of
an unarmed teenager from severe head injuries. The paratroopers used rifle
butts, helmets, fists and feet to batter the occupants of a pick-up truck.
Two women who tried to intervene were hit. One of them was pregnant. The
soldiers were laughing and clapping. Less reported are the mass
deaths caused by indiscriminate US shelling. In November 2006, medical
officials in Ramadi city said that shelling killed 31 civilians, mostly women
and children. How is this carnage, the
killing of women and children in particular, perceived by the British prime
minister, Tony Blair? Tony Blair who, following Washington's last minute
realisation that the suffering of "Iraqi women" could be used to
build up public support for the war, met a group of seven Iraqi women in
Downing Street in November 2002, two of whom wept as they told him their
stories. According to Tony Blair,
Iraq "is a child of democracy struggling to be born. They [Iraqi regime]
and we, the international community, are the midwives." For many Iraqis, the reality
of life under occupation is nothing but democracy being strangled at birth by
the midwives. External link: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/haifa_zangana/2006/12/how_midwives_killed_the_child.html |