- BABYLON - The wounds are
vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face,
the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in
the flesh. The wards of the Hilla teaching hospital are proof that something
illegal ÷ something quite outside the Geneva Conventions ÷
occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
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- The wailing children, the young women with breast and
leg wounds, the ten patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery
to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the
explosives fell ãlike grapesä from the sky. Cluster bombs,
the doctors say ÷ and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets
of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri
shows ÷ that they are right.
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- Were they American or British aircraft which showered
these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The
61 dead who have passed through the Hilla hospital since Saturday night
cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting
in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village,
spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring
through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs
of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
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- Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30 on Sunday morning,
when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard ãthe voice
of explosionsä and looked out of the door to see ãthe sky raining
fireä. She said the bomblets were a black-gray color. Muhammad Moussa
described the clusters of ãlittle boxesä that fell out of the
sky in the same village and thought they were silver colored. They fell
like ãsmall grapefruit,ä he said. ãIf it hadnât
exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately,ä he said. ãThey
exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home,
unexploded.ä
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- Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires
attached to them ÷ perhaps the metal ãbutterflyä which
contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and which springs open to release
them in showers above the ground. Some died at once, mostly women and children,
some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house
mortuary at the back of the Hilla hospital.
-
- The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since
Saturday night ÷ the 61 dead are only those who were brought to
the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed
to have been buried in their home villages ÷ and of these doctors
say about 80 percent were civilians.
-
- Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics
are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the
mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village
men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted
there were no military installations around their homes. True or false?
Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby
field ÷ as they were along the highway north to Baghdad yesterday?
But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they
are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs
in these villages ÷ even if aimed at military targets ÷ thus
crosses the boundaries of international law.
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- So it was that 27-year-old Asil Yamin came to receive
those awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbasi
was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abul-Hamza in the eyes, chest
and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said that the containers
which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted
on them. ÎâIt is like a grenade and they came into the houses,ä
he said. ãSome stayed on the land, others exploded.ä
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- Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old
Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over
her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself, and wounds to the
stomach and thighs. I didnât realize that Hoda, standing by her sisterâs
bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girlâs
scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head,
just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound
still gently bleeding.
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- Their mother described how she had been inside her home
and heard an explosion and found her daughters in a pool of blood near
the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their
pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to
show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.
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- The Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready
to allow us journalists access to these patients. But there was no way
these children and often uneducated parents could manufacture their stories
of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr
village where the remains of the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside
the scorch marks of the explosions, and where could be found the remains
of the tiny parachutes upon which the bomb clusters float to the ground
once their containers have broken open. A crew from Sky Television even
managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with
them, the wicked little metal balls that are intended to puncture the human
body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath.
They were of a black color which glinted silver when held against the light.
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- So were the aircraft that dropped these terrible weapons
American or British? The deputy administrator of the Hilla hospital and
one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city
in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge Special Forces
troops on the road to Karbala; one of their operations ÷ if the
hospital personnel are to be believed ÷ went spectacularly wrong
one night when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterward, the
cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that were targeted appear
to have been on the other side of Hilla to the abortive American attack.
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- One thing was clear: that there is no ãfront lineä
in the fighting around Babylon, that US forces strike into the land around
the Tigris River by air and then withdraw and that Iraqi forces do much
the same in the other direction. Only the Americans and British, of course,
have air superiority ÷ indeed there is no evidence that a single
Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the Anglo-American invasion
÷ so even the US and British officers back at their Qatar command
headquarters can hardly claim the cluster bombs were dropped by Iraq.
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- The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday when 11 civilians
were killed ÷ two of them women and three of them children ÷
in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect the corpses reported
to the hospital that the only living thing he found in the area of the
bodies was a hen. Iraqi bomb disposal officers were ordered into the villages
yesterday afternoon to clear the unexploded ordnance.
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- Needless to say, it is not the first time that cluster
bombs have been used against civilians. During Israelâs 1982 siege
of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for
the US Navy across several areas of the city, especially in the Fakhani
and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical
to those I saw in Hilla on Tuesday. Angry at the misuse of their weapons,
which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the Reagan
administration withheld a shipment of fighter bombers for Israel ÷
then relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway.
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