Collective Punishment Is Escalating in Iraq

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Collective Punishment Is Escalating in Iraq

A War Crime in Real Time: Obliterating Fallujah

Occupation Watch Bulletin

By Haifa Zangana, The Guardian, November 18, 2004

In a statement that directly echoed George Bush, Qasim Daoud, Iraq’s interim minister of state for national security, told a news conference at the weekend: "Mission accomplished ... Fallujah has been liberated." He proudly recited the list of the dead – 1,400 terrorists, foreigners and Saddamists. And what about civilians, the women and children trapped in the fighting zone. Any casualties? He avoided the question.

At the same time, thousands of Iraqis demonstrated in Baghdad, Basra and Heet in support of the people of Fallujah. Many were arrested, some were beaten. The US-appointed Allawi regime responded by imposing new curfews. The US military is still struggling to contain a spreading wave of resistance, in Najaf and now Mosul.

Around Fallujah, camps have been erected to receive displaced women and children. Men aged 15-50 were not allowed to leave the city, so 150,000 wait in anguish for news of fathers, husbands and sons.

Will they survive the US military’s wrath? Many will not. The execution-style killing of the wounded Iraqi inside a mosque by a US Marine, captured by NBC television, was one of many, according to an eyewitness interviewed by Al-Jazeera television yesterday.

Yet all members of Allawi’s regime have greeted the suffering of Iraqi civilians with complete silence. The dignified voice of Firdus Al-Abadi, spokeswoman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad, has haunted us for days. Appealing for relief supplies, she said simply: "Conditions in Fallujah are catastrophic." The Red Crescent suggested yesterday that as many as 800 civilians had died during the bombardment.

The plight of the people of Fallujah is not unique. Since the nominal handover of sovereignty on June 30, we have witnessed an escalation of Israeli-style collective punishment of Iraqi cities. Civilian carnage, coupled with enormous damage to homes and infrastructure, has become our daily reality.

In Tall Afar, in the north, US troops cut off water for three days last month and blocked food supplies to 150,000 refugees. Then in Samarra, residents cowered in their homes as tanks and warplanes pounded the city. Bodies were strewn in the streets but could not be collected for fear of American snipers. Of the 130 Iraqis killed, most were civilians. Hospital access was denied to the injured. And Qasim Daoud hailed the massacre as a "very clean" operation.

Every day of occupation brings fresh atrocities. But the architects of that occupation claim that it is Iraqis themselves who are beyond the reach of democracy. They are "militants" and "insurgents", bent on terrorizing their own people and destroying hopes of reconstruction. Why can’t they get involved in the peaceful democratic political process?

But they did, and they continue to do so. Over the last 19 months there have been protests, appeals, initiatives to set up a reasonable programme for elections, the opening of human rights centres, lecturing at universities, even poetry writing. This torrent of activism is still being practiced by a broad variety of political parties, groups and individuals who oppose the foreign occupation. And they have been ignored. Newspapers were closed. Editors were arrested. Demonstrators were shot at, arrested, abused and tortured.

On the fourth day of the ground attack on Fallujah, last Friday, joint Shiite-Sunni prayers were held in the four mosques in Baghdad, and were massively well attended. Inter-communal prayers were the hallmark of the 1920 revolution, revived early this year by the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, a loose umbrella organization of academics, cross-sectarian clerics and veteran political leaders. Early on, Allawi set the tone for building democracy in the "sovereign" Iraq by insisting: "We will stand up to destroy the terrorists." This language has become the daily currency of the interim ministers, who like children in a school choir echo their instructor, the US military spokesman.

But time after time, it has been shown to be false. Most fighters in Iraq are Iraqis who are outraged to see their country’s resources robbed while they live in slums, drink water mixed with sewage and have no say in the political process. Nineteen months after "liberation" they can see how little the liberators have done to ease their suffering. No wonder an increasing number of Iraqis are either joining or supporting the resistance, realizing that, as in the past, they must fight on their own.

The overwhelming popular support for the people of Fallujah is a salute to young fighters wearing flip-flops, who carry ancient weapons, and yet continue to resist.

Western governments, led by the US and UK, supported Saddam’s regime against the will of the Iraqi people for decades. They are committing a similar crime now.

* Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist and former prisoner of the Saddam regime.

- Francis A Boyle, CounterPunch, November 15, 2004 -

The obliteration of Fallujah continues apace. Article 6(b) of the 1945 Nuremberg Charter defines a Nuremberg War Crime in relevant part as the "... wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages..." According to this definitive definition, the Bush Jr administration's destruction of Fallujah constitutes a war crime for which Nazis were tried and executed. There is nothing surprising about that.

Since the Bush Jr administration's installation in power by the United States Supreme Court in January of 2001, the peoples of the world have witnessed a government in the United States of America that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, international organisations, and human rights, let alone appreciation of the requirements for maintaining international peace and security. What the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international legal order by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and domestic affairs. This is not simply a question of giving or withholding the benefit of the doubt when it comes to complicated matters of foreign affairs and defence policies to a US government charged with the security of both its own citizens and those of its allies in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific. Rather, the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policy constitutes ongoing criminal activity under well-recognised principles of both international law and US domestic law, in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles. So their obliteration of Fallujah was to be expected.

One generation ago the peoples of the world asked themselves: Where were the "good" Germans? Well, there were some good Germans. The Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the foremost exemplar of someone who led a life of principled opposition to the Nazi-terror state even unto death.

Today the peoples of the world are likewise asking themselves: Where are the "good" Americans? Well, there are some good Americans. Like three Catholic Nuns in Denver, they are getting arrested and going to jail for protesting against United States weapons of mass destruction (WMD) whose power for human extermination far exceeds even the wildest fantasies of Hitler and the Nazis. Or else for protesting against illegal US military interventions around the world. Just recently the Nuclear Resister estimated that since the Fall of 2002, there have been more than 9,500 anti-war related arrests in the United States alone. Many more will be coming.

In international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, due to its formulation and undertaking of aggressive war policies that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the Nazi regime. As a consequence, American citizens possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the US Constitution, to engage in acts of non-violent civil resistance in order to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by US government officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defence and counter-terrorism.

This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its nefarious foreign accomplices such as Blair, Berlusconi, Howard, Koizumi, Kwasniewski, etc. by all non-violent means possible. If it is not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War.

The time for preventive action is now. Civil resistance is the way to go. People power can overcome power politics. Popular movements have succeeded in toppling tyrannical, dictatorial and authoritarian regimes throughout former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, and most recently in Latin America. It is time once again to exercise People Power here in the United States of America: "When in the Course of human Events... We hold these Truths to be self-evident.... we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and sacred Honour."

Despite the best efforts by the Bush Jr Leaguers to the contrary, we American Citizens still have our First Amendment Rights: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom to Petition our Government for the Redress of these massive Grievances, Civil Resistance, etc. We are going to have to start vigorously exercising all of our First Amendment Rights right now. We must use them or else, as the saying goes, we will lose them. We must act not only for the good of the Peoples of Southwest Asia, but for our future, that of our children, that of our nation as a democratic society committed to the Rule of Law and the US Constitution. The Nazis had their "homeland" too.

* Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press.

By Marjorie Lasky, November 21, 2004

Slowly, very slowly, the story about what has happened in Falluja is emerging. The numbers of killed and wounded civilians might never be known but we do know that hospitals were flooded with wounded Iraqis, 80% of the 300,000 residents of Falluja fled to neighbouring towns, US troops and their Iraqi counterparts destroyed the town, and the US refused access to trucks carrying humanitarian aid. There are also narratives about starving and wounded Iraqis, more than 50 dead and hundreds of wounded US military personnel, the deaths of 1200 "insurgents" and the arrest of approximately 1,500 more, a US marine killing an injured and unarmed Iraqi in a mosque, and the discovery of hostage houses where hostages might have been tortured and slain. One needs to remember that most of these reports emanate from either military personnel or reporters embedded with US troops. Occasionally, refugee stories have reached the media, but the lack of coverage from varying perspectives, tends to provide a limited view of what actually occurred in Falluja.

A commentary by Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell offers a collage of materials from eyewitness reports in Fallujah, mainly appearing in the mainstream media:

"Even the dogs have started to die, their corpses strewn among twisted metal and shattered concrete in a city that looks like it forgot to breathe. The aluminium shutters of shops on the main highway through town have been transformed by the force of war into mangled accordion shapes, flat, sharp, jarring slices of metal that no longer obscure the stacks of silver pots, the plastic-wrapped office furniture, the rolls of carpet...

[T]he Insurgents were putting up their most tenacious resistance as US and Iraqi forces pursued them through a bleak landscape of bombed-out cinder block factories and houses reminiscent of the movie Blade Runner Driving down Highway 10, the main street running east to west through the heart of Fallujah, is like entering a film that is set sometime on the other side of Armageddon. Cars sit on the roofs of buildings. Lampposts lie at odd angles on the street. Just south of the highway, a minaret has been snapped off near the base like a pretzel stick, and another minaret is missing a huge chunk. Fire has blackened the facade of building after building the city revealed a picture of utter destruction, with concrete houses flattened, mosques in ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering the empty streets. The northwest Jolan district, once an insurgent stronghold, looked like a ghost town, the only sound the rumbling of tank tracks...

Restaurant signs were covered in soot. Pavements were crushed by 70-ton Abrams tanks, and rows of crumbling buildings stood on both sides of deserted streets. Upmarket homes with garages looked as if they had been abandoned for years. Cars lay crushed in the middle of streets..."

Opinions on what the battle of Falluja accomplished vary considerably – from the US military's pronouncement that the battle had broken the back of the Iraqi insurgency, a view echoed by Qasim Daoud, Iraq's interim minister of state for national security, who told a news conference: "Mission accomplished ... Fallujah has been liberated," to the belief that the insurgents, most of whom are believed to have left Falluja, will simply fight in other places, at other times.

On November 18, the BBC's website featured one of the most poignant pictures to emerge from Falluja – a headless Iraqi corpse lying in a street, one arm draped (in protection?) around a dead child who is lying on the corpse. Clearly, barbarity was and is evident and abundant on both sides in Fallujah (and elsewhere). And one needs to ask, in judging the depth and level of barbarity, how does a corpse, decapitated by hand, differ from a corpse decapitated by technology? Indeed, the events of Falluja and elsewhere have led the International Committee of the Red Cross to condemn the "utter contempt for humanity" shown by all sides of the Iraq War.

Of course, as anyone who has been following events in Iraq during the last few weeks knows, the resistance to the US occupation took a new and virile form throughout Iraq, but particularly amidst the Sunnis, almost from the day that Fallujah was attacked. For a recent report on these attacks see:

The US administration stated that one major reason for the Falluja assault was the need to safeguard Iraq's upcoming January elections. Now that a date for those elections has been set (January 30), the threat of wide scale boycotts by various Iraqi groups and the continuing chaos occasioned by the resistance to the US occupation have led many observers to question the possibility of "free and democratic" Iraqi elections.