So far, 2,000
U.S. soldiers have been killed since the March 2003 illegal and unprovoked U.S.
war on Iraq. The number has been meticulously pronounced and printed in every
Western media outlet. What about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi
men, women and children who have been needlessly massacred by the combined
U.S.-British sanctions and war? It is a deliberate genocide.
With the exception of the war on the former Republic of
Yugoslavia (Serbia)--an Orthodox nation--U.S. wars of aggression have been
consistently against defenceless people of colour. "They are the poor of
the planet, being made poorer, dominated and exploited by the foreign policy of
the U.S. and its rich allies designed for domination, exploitation and triage,"
wrote Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general in the Carter Administration.
The U.S.-Britain wars on Iraq bear all the hallmarks of
Western racism. Iraqis are not only dehumanised, they are abused and tortured
to make the mass murder palatable to Western public. Meanwhile the corporate
media and Western governments have masked imperialism in the black faces of
Condoleezza Rice and Kofi Annan.
A comprehensive study conducted in December 1991 by the
British Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than 200,000
Iraqis had died during and immediately after the massacre of the 1991 U.S. war,
the so-called the "Gulf War," as a direct or indirect consequence of
attacks on civilian infrastructure. In addition, since August 1990, Iraq has
been under economic and military attacks that contributed to the mass murder of
Iraqi men, women and children in particular.
The forgotten genocidal sanctions is estimated to have
killed more than 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including 500,000 children under
the age of five. The wholesale destruction of Iraqi children was defended as "a
price worth it," by Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of
State. Can you imagine anyone saying; the killing of 3000 people in the 9/11
attack is "a price worth it."
The U.S. and Britain first
systematically bombed Iraq's civilian infrastructure, including; water
purification plants, sewage treatment plants, electrical power grids,
pharmaceutical plants, transportation, communication, manufacturing, commercial
properties, housing, mosques and churches out of existence. Food production,
including baby milk, processing, storage, distribution, fertiliser and
insecticide production, was targeted for destruction. Then the U.S. and Britain
continued the sanctions to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair or
replace most of what had been destroyed. The point of this carefully calculated
mass murder was to bully and intimidate not only Iraq, but also any other
defenceless nation that dares resist as Iraq did. In addition, to
bleeding Iraq to death, the U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq to pay more than
$50 billion in reparations claims to Kuwait, U.S. corporations, and to many
fraudulent and dubious claimants.
Despite Iraq's compliance with the terms of the 1991 war's
cease-fire, the sanctions and the weekly bombings--"anything that flies on
anything that moves"--of Iraqi cities and towns continued in order to harm
the Iraqi people. "For me what is tragic, in addition to the tragedy of
Iraq itself, is the fact that the United Nations Security Council member states
. . . are maintaining a program of economic sanctions deliberately, knowingly
killing thousands of Iraqis each month. And that definition fits genocide,"
said Denis Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.
The Oxford Dictionary defines genocide as the deliberate
extermination of a nation or race of people." In the 1948 Genocide Convention,
the word genocide was defined as any act "committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group as such."
Hence, genocidal acts included causing serious "mental harm" or
inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. Can anything
be clearer than what the U.S. and Britain are committing against the Iraqi
people?
"It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream
media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public," wrote
American economist Edward Herman. The art of normalising mass atrocities has
always been a prerequisite to neutralise a disciplined Western population in
order to remove any conscience for moral responsibility.
According to John and Karl Mueller (Sanctions of Mass Destruction,
Foreign Affairs May/June 1999, p. 43.), the sanctions alone "have
taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all so-called
weapons of mass destruction throughout history." Therefore Iraq's genocide
"arguably was the greatest genocide of the post World War II era,"
conducted and perpetuated with the tacit support of the U.N. member states.
Today, the U.N. is complicit in the continuing war crimes
against the Iraqi people, and the destruction of the Iraqi society. Consistent
with its role as the "handmaiden" of Western imperialism, immediately
after the illegal invasion of Iraq, the U.N. legitimised the U.S. Occupation of
a sovereign nation, and stands to support all U.S. violations of international
laws, including the U.N. Charter.
Corruption and self-interest are the endemic characteristics
of the U.N. member states and their staff. The Saddam government was able to
exploit this and extract some revenues to keep Iraq functioning as a state
despite the unjust sanctions. It was the only way available for Iraq to break
out of the sanctions by corrupting the corruptible. By the end of 2002, the
signs of genocidal sanctions were visible everywhere in Iraq.
Will the U.N. pass a resolution--like the one demanding
Syria to "cooperate fully" with a U.N. investigation into the death
of businessman and former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri--demanding
the U.S. and Britain cooperate fully with a U.N. investigation into the death
of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and the theft of tens of billion of
dollars from Iraq's wealth? Will the U.N. Security Council condemn Israeli for
its criminal and "medieval
practice of political assassination" of Palestinian political
leaders? Not likely.
The U.S. criminal invasion and occupation have only doubled
the atrocity of sanctions. A recent UNICEF rapid assessment survey reveals that
acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had almost doubled since before the
war, jumping from 4 percent to almost 8 percent. The survey adds that; "Acute
malnutrition sets in very fast and is strong indicator of the overall health of
children." The general health of Iraqi children, the elderly and pregnant
women in particular has declined because of deteriorating living conditions, including; lack of access to potable water, food,
hospital care, and sharp decline in purchasing power.
In fact, U.S. occupying forces are
deliberately starving Iraqis by cutting food and water supplies, and
blackmailing Iraqis to submit to the Occupation. "A drama is taking place
in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using
hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian
population," said Professor Jean Ziegler, the U.N. human rights
investigator at a press conference in Geneva on 15 October 2005. "Starvation
of civilians as a method of warfare is a flagrant violation of international
law," added the Swiss-born sociologist.
The 15-years long U.S. aggression and genocidal sanctions
against Iraq have devastated Iraq's human resources for many generations. The
brave generation of Iraqi men and women that lifted Iraq out of poverty and
made Iraq the beacon of progress in the Middle East have been destroyed by the
combined U.S.-British genocidal sanctions and criminal wars of aggression
perpetuated and normalised by complicit corporate media.
It has been a taboo in Western corporate media and among
Western elites to mention the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Only
dead U.S. soldiers are counted as humans. Iraqis do not count. As far as I
know, no one has lit candles for the more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed
by the U.S. forces from March 2003 to October 2004. The conservative estimate
was published on 29 October 2004 in the reputed and peer-reviewed British
medical journal The Lancet. If one
includes the atrocities of Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Qaim, Tel Afar, Hillah, Baghdad
and the daily bloodshed instigated by U.S. forces and their collaborators, the
number of Iraqis killed since March 2003 would be in the 200,000 mark or even
more. The majority of the victims were innocent women and children, betrayed by
Western media complicity in hiding U.S. war crimes from the outside world.
Dr. Les Roberts of John Hopkins University and the lead
author of The Lancet study had
expected a "moral outrage" response by the public; instead he was
shocked by the muted reception. The experienced researcher, who used the same
methodology to study mortality caused by war around the world, was praised by
the scientific community for his Iraq's study. His study's findings in the
Congo have been used by the U.N. and the International Red Cross.
"Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results
time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity,"
he told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
However, the Iraq study was deliberately ignored or dismissed by the
British-American corporate media. In fact the study is censored because it
reported genocide.
The word genocide has been used selectively by Western
powers, the media and the elites to describe crimes allegedly--never proven--committed
by the regime of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. Halabja in Iraq and
Srebrenica in Bosnia are often used to describe crimes--with little or no
evidence--allegedly committed by Hussein and Milosevic. The 'symbols' of
Halabja and Srebrenica are the pretexts to justify the West's imperialist
ambitions. We know now that Srebrenica was used to justify the attack on
Serbia, and Halabja was used to justify the war on Iraq. Both criminal acts
were disguised as 'humanitarian interventions'.
Genocide is never used to describe the mass murder of Iraqi
civilians by U.S.-sponsored genocidal sanctions and U.S. wars. Saddam was
demonised to justify the criminal policy of the West against the Iraqi people.
The motives for this deliberate genocide are the colonisation of Iraq to
enhance U.S. imperial dominance, the destruction of Arab nationalism, and
support for Israel's Zionist expansion and criminal policies against the
Palestinians.
Iraq is littered with countless U.S.-committed mass murders
masked as "U.S. operations against al-Qaida fighters." The recent
indiscriminate attacks--bombing the city water supply, electricity grid and
communication networks and heavy use of cluster bombs in civilian areas--on
towns and villages in western Iraq is a reminder of the Fallujah massacre. The
Italian daily, La Republica reported,
"The Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional
weapons, the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused,"
quoting an Italian investigative story, which will be broadcast on Italian
RAI-3 TV on 08 November 2005 [1]. U.S. forces and their collaborators are
fighting indigenous Iraqi Resistance fighters defending their country against
new a form of U.S.-led fascism.
A new Fallujah massacre is in the making. According to
recent Iraqi and Arab media reports in al-Qaim, the "defence minister"
in the puppet government (Saadoun al-Dulaimi) is calling on U.S. forces to "wipe
out entire families and destroy the houses of resistance fighters with their
women and children inside." Iraqi community leaders have condemned the
attacks as "killing operations" and are calling on the "International
Community" to intervene to stop the mass murder of civilians. "We
call all humanitarians and those who carry peace to the world to intervene to
stop the repeated bloodshed in the western parts of Iraq," said Sheikh
Osama Jadaan, a community leader in Husaybah, close to the Syrian boarder. "He
rightly added; "we say to the American occupiers to get out and leave Iraq
to the Iraqis." The daily bloodshed and the destruction of the country by
the U.S. forces are committed with the full complicity of the corporate media
and Western elites.
The occupying forces and the media explain the violence in
cultural terms, as "Iraqis against Iraqis," a colonial cliché to
justify the Occupation. The U.S. aim is to make the public focus on the
violence of the occupied and oppressed--the Iraqis--and justify the action of
the occupiers. However, this "sectarian violence" is created and
nurtured by the U.S. and Britain in order to terrorise the Iraqi population and
push them into the arms of the occupiers for "protection." It is also
the only way to justify an ongoing Occupation. Iraqis are well aware of that
and have united to demand the end to U.S. violence and occupation.
We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq since 1991, and the sanctions and wars were the tools for a
deliberate genocide. As it was predicted, the invasion and occupation of Iraq
have brought only disaster and misery to the Iraqi people. More than 82 percent
of Iraqis "strongly oppose" the
U.S. Occupation of their country. "Less than 2 percent of Iraqis [brought
into Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks] believe coalition forces are responsible
for any improvement in security," according to the British Ministry of
Defence's recent poll. It follows that those who oppose the withdrawal of U.S.
forces from Iraq, are acting as U.S. imperial propagandists complicit in
normalising a deliberate genocide against the Iraqi people.
Today, most Iraqis view U.S. forces as "murderous
maniacs." After the "handover" of fake sovereignty, the
fraudulent January 2005 elections, and the recent massive fraud to pass the
illegal U.S.-crafted constitution, the U.S. administration is left with one
fraudulent card to play; the scheduled December elections. After that, it is
time to put an end to the genocide and withdraw all U.S. and foreign forces
from Iraq. The sooner this will happen, the fewer Iraqi lives will be lost.
Then the "International Community" has a legal duty to prosecute
those who committed these war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Note:
[1] Fallujah. La strage nascosta (Fallujah,
The Concealed Massacre) will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at
07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM satellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by
HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 and over the next two days.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.