- Let's talk war crimes. Yes, I know about the war crimes
of Saddam. He slaughtered the innocent, gassed the Kurds, tortured his
people and ö though it is true we remained good friends with this
butcher for more than half of his horrible career ö could be held
responsible for killing up to a million people, the death toll of the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq war. But while we are congratulating ourselves on the "liberation"
of Baghdad, an event that is fast turning into a nightmare for many of
its residents, it is as good a time as any to recall how we've been conducting
this ideological war.
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- So let's start with the end ö with the Gone With
The Wind epic of looting and anarchy with which the Iraqi population have
chosen to celebrate our gift to them of "liberation" and "democracy".
It started in Basra, of course, with our own shameful British response
to the orgy of theft that took hold of the city. Our defence minister,
Geoff Hoon, made some especially childish remarks about this disgraceful
state of affairs, suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of
Basra were merely "liberating" ö that word again ö
their property from the Baath party. And the British Army enthusiastically
endorsed this nonsense.
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- Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed
around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal
Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that "it' s absolutely
not my business to get in the way." But of course it is Colonel Blackman's
business to "get in the way". Pillage merits a specific prevention
clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention
upon which the Geneva delegates based their "rules of war". "Pillage
is prohibited," the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman
and Mr Hoon should glance at Crimes of War, published in conjunction with
the City University Journalism Department ö page 276 is the most dramatic
ö to understand what this means.
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- When an occupying power takes over another country' s
territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its
civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in
Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered
for his car in the first day of that city's "liberation". The
Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and Slovak embassies
that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis on Thursday, and for the French
Cultural Centre, which was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq,
which was torched yesterday afternoon.
-
- But the British and Americans have simply discarded this
notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And
we journalists have allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children
when the Americans "assisted" the Iraqis in bringing down the
statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras this week,
and yet we went on talking about the "liberation" of Baghdad
as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with
flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the
looting of their capital.
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- We journalists have been co-operating, too, with a further
collapse of morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing
of the residential Mansur area of Baghdad last week. The Anglo-American
armies ö or the "coalition", as the BBC still stubbornly
and mendaciously calls the invaders ö claimed they believed that Saddam
and his two evil sons Qusay and Uday were present there. So they bombed
the civilians of Mansur and killed at least 14 decent, innocent people,
almost all of them ö and this would obviously be of interest to the
religious feelings of Messrs Bush and Blair ö Christians.
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- Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio
next morning to question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute
a bit of an immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to
kill Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter
of these innocent civilians as "a new twist" in the war to target
Saddam ö as if it was quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly
and in cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant. The BBC's
correspondent in Qatar ö where the Centcom boys pompously boasted
that they had "real-time" intelligence (subsequently proved to
be untrue) that Saddam was present ö used all the usual military jargon
to justify the unjustifiable. The "coalition", he announced,
knew it had "time-sensitive material" ö ie that they wouldn't
have time to know whether they were killing innocent human beings in the
furtherance of their cause or not ö and that this "actionable
material" (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch) was not "risk-free".
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- And then he went on to describe, without a moment of
reflection, on the moral issues involved, how the Americans had used four
2,000lb "bunker-buster bombs to level the civilian homes". These
are, of course, the very same pieces of ordnance that the same US air force
used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains.
So now we use them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad
ö folk who would otherwise be worthy of the "liberation"
we wished to bestow upon them ö in the hope that a gamble, a bit of
faulty "intelligence" about Saddam, will pay off.
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- The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this.
They specifically refer to civilians as protected persons, as persons who
must have the protection of a warring power even if they find themselves
in the presence of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded
for southern Lebanese civilians when Israel launched its brutal "Grapes
of Wrath" operation in 1996. When an Israeli pilot, for example, fired
a US-made Hellfire missile into an ambulance, killing three children and
two women, the Israelis claimed that a Hezbollah fighter had been in the
same vehicle. The statement proved to be totally untrue. But Israel was
rightly condemned for killing civilians in the hope of killing an enemy
combatant. Now we are doing exactly the same. And Ariel Sharon must be
pleased. No more namby-pamby western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters
have been dropped on Mansur.
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- More and more, we are committing these crimes. The mass
slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the Amariyah air raid shelter in
Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would
kill Saddam. Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war we rightly demand
that others should obey? Why do we journalists ö yet again, war after
war ö connive in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and
illegal act into a "new twist" or into "time-sensitive material"?
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- Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into
cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up
fantasy colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions
into war with us, along with that little book from the City University.
For the only people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next
generation of Saddam Husseins.
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396346
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