Libby Purves writes in the Times today. Her article, uncharacteristically leaves much to be desired.
But we are at war. Laying aside all technicalities about “handover of power to interim government”, we are still in it, right up to our necks. In Fallujah the dogs eat bloated bodies in the streets. Parents are watching wounded children slowly die because they cannot get to medical help. Or pain relief. Hungry old men forage for roots in rubble-strewn gardens. In Mosul the bodies of 12 Iraqi policemen and soldiers have been dumped in the street in the past few days; in Baghdad a peaceable vegetable seller has his head shot off by a passing US patrol; in Ramadi American soldiers killed seven people by firing on a civilian bus. In Latifiya, rebels stopped a car and hauled out three men in civilian clothes, and on discovering police uniforms in the boot, shot them. Heroic Margaret Hassan is dead. So is a wounded Iraqi, shot on camera by a US soldier inside a mosque with a brusque: “Is he dead? He is now.”
Atrocity, in this war, is bilateral. Apart from Abu Ghraib, it is fair to say that “our” side’s atrocities have been less grotesquely sadistic than those of the hostage-taking tormentors on the insurgent side, but the American-led coalition is not conducting this war according to the Geneva Convention. Not by a long chalk. Don’t take my word for it: listen to Pierre Kraehenbuhl, the director of operations of the International Red Cross.
“Every day,” he said, in a furious but thinly reported statement, “seems to bring news of yet another act of utter contempt for the most basic tenet of humanity: the obligation to protect human life and dignity … Like any other armed conflict, this one is subject to limits, and they must be respected at all times. For the parties to this conflict, complying with international humanitarian law is an obligation not an option.”
Purves is right to note these incidents but the fact is that the soldiers involved are then subject to tribunals and investigations. They don’t go unpunished, they don’t carry out these actions with complete impunity and that is what Purves fails to grasp. No war since the Geneva conventions’ inception has been fought with absolute adherence to its articles on the ground - when the first Allied soldiers arrived at Dachau they were so horrified they executed the camp guards on the spot.
Universal adherence to the Geneva conventions is almost impossible. The closest we can get is a thorough punishment of those individuals who do not follow the articles. All efforts should be made to try and prevent contravention of the code but it’s utterly unrealistic to expect a soldier to risk his life and the lives of his fellow soldiers if he has reason to believe that they are in jeopardy, especially against a foe which has proven itself time and time again to be beyond contempt - whether by attacking under a white flag of false surrender, taking children as human shields or wearing the uniforms of an Iraqi national guardsman.
Coalition forces continue to lend insurgents the benefit of the doubt in an almost astonishingly majority of cases.
He goes on to remind both sides of what the 140-year-old Geneva Convention actually says. “There is an absolute prohibition on the killing of persons who are not taking active part in the hostilities or have ceased to do so … furthermore, the parties to the conflict must provide adequate medical care for the wounded, friend or foe, on the battlefield or allow them to be taken elsewhere for treatment. They must do everything possible to help civilians caught up in the fighting obtain the basics of survival such as food, water and healthcare …”
If there was widespread disregard for these rules we wouldn’t currently have thousands of captured insurgents, we’d just have a big old hole and a dire need for a dozen or so bulldozers - Saddam style.
As I’ve noted coalition forces abide by the Geneva convention with applaudable regularity and those times where their actions contravene the conventions are never wanton, frivolous or borne out of an indifference towards human life. By contrast the insurgents fight exclusively in violation of the conventions.
How many wounded marines are given medical treatment by terrorists? How many noncombatants were spared the sickening dismembering swipe of the mujahadeen’s sword? Not many judging by the cages, bloodied torture rooms and the dismembered torsos that floated down the river that flanks Fallujah.
Every word breathes horrified rage. Apart from hideous collateral damage on our side and hideous hostage-taking on the other, neutral humanitarian organisations are not being speeded into places such as Fallujah to assist and protect civilians. They are being impeded. Nor are they routinely able to visit prisoners. This is the angriest statement I have ever read from the Red Cross. It should be heard. It should shock us rigid.
‘Hideous’ collateral damage? Thousands of marines, tanks, helicopter gunships and spectre gunships have descended to unleash massive payloads upon terrorist hotspots and yet the city appears nothing like the burnt out husks that we normally associate with urban combat. Anyone recall the photos from Saigon? Let alone any and every urban theatre of World War 2. There is rubble strewn yes and many homes have been destroyed, however this is an operation with a historically low level of collateral damage.
What’s more the Interim Government has set aside billions for the reconstruction of Fallujah, what has been destroyed shall be rebuilt anew. I find it rather hard to be outraged at the destruction of many houses which civilians begged marines to destroy - giving them directions to their dwellings usurped by terrorists.
As for impeding the flow of aid, the coalition’s claim that almost the entirety of Fallujah’s citizenry had fled seems to be supported by the pictures and reports from the city. A hospital waits on the edge of the city, stocked with medical supplied but with no one to treat. The coalition is not blocking off aid entry to the city in an effort to kill off wounded insurgents either - thousands have been treated by medical forces upon capture.
The US seems to take the robust line that anyone who was not a criminal insurgent would have left Fallujah weeks ago, and has repeatedly spoken of “precision attacks” and “surgical” bombing. The US Marines are a force admirable for their hardness, but not their Geneva discipline. It was always clear that harmless civilians would die in the city, and more than 20,000 of them probably have. In the middle of last week a respected Iraqi journalist who remains there filed to the BBC a note saying that he and others are living on a few dried dates and scarce water. “We keep hearing that aid has arrived at the hospital on the outskirts, which is held by Americans, but most people in this area are too weak or scared to make the journey.” They can pick and choose reasons to be scared; it might be Americans, but equally it might be Iraqi national guardsmen. Eyewitnesses report ill-regulated local military molesting young girls.
Oh dear Libby, have you been reading the Lancet again? I’d wager so, as you’ve chosen to parrot its laughable and demonstrably flawed figures. Any death toll towards 20,000 civilians when the anti-war IraqBodyCount.net refuses to acknowledge more than 16,673 deaths for the whole country since the invasion began can only come from extrapolating the Lancet’s spurious bunkum.
This is a very nasty war: not only deplored by the UN, but now conducted with widespread contempt — Kraehenbuhl’s word, not mine — for the Geneva conventions. We are mired deeper every day: soon our troops may be in closer collaboration with US forces, as mass civilian deaths and allied neglect of humanitarian duty enrage peaceable Iraqis into joining the insurgents. It is hard to see an end to it. When you have the International Red Cross berating both sides for breaking the rules, you are in a very bad war indeed.
It saddens me to think that anyone can speak of the “allied neglect of humanitarian duty” in the face of the many projects like this, which operate in Iraq. If there was such a neglect we’d be facing a humanitarian refugee disaster on an epic scale - wasn’t that what we were promised when we ousted Saddam last year?
And we did not have to be in it. Many Nato allies are not. We are not fighting for our lives and our land. Macho commentators shrugging “Well, darling, that’s war” at every atrocity seem to forget this. Now that the last shred of credibility has been ripped from the “WMD” claims, the only remaining justification for our presence is the liberation of Iraq from tyranny and fear. We are there, explicitly, to make things better. But things keep getting worse.
We, the invaders, have no power to enforce Geneva standards on the other side. We do have the power to enforce them on ourselves. I would expect a British Government to be making urgent, daily, insistent demands of its senior ally: blowing the humanitarian whistle, flatly refusing to endorse heavy artillery pounding of civilian homes, and demanding that invaders led by the world’s richest nation should throw in twenty times the resources to help the wounded and homeless. Politically, such barracking might cost us. But it would mitigate our disgrace.
We are told to “move on” and that Iraq will not be an election issue. Until the Red Cross is happier, I for one will find that move impossible.
In summary, I don’t want to sound like someone “looking the other way” whilst our allies greedily despoil Iraq but kindly get a grip on reality Mrs Purves. Civilian casualties are lower than your estimates by a factor of 10, contravention of the Geneva conventions is met with full investigation and court martial, aid has been getting through with astonishing consistency given the circumstances, collateral damage is at a historic low, reconstruction waits in the wings and ultimately we’re fighting as you’ve said for the liberation of Iraq from tyranny and fear. On the day that we start hacking up civilians and stringing them up/floating them downstream on a bloody tide I’ll join your anxious horror but right now, it’s just not warranted.
Care about war crimes in Fallujah? Check out this site. (link via Smash)
60% of Mosques used as weapons caches and operational command centres, 3 Hospitals used as defensive positions and so far 3 torture/slaughter houses have been uncovered. That is contempt for the Geneva conventions and don’t expect a tribunal.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at November 24, 2004 12:30 AM | TrackBack