History Repeats Itself in Fallujah

By Felicity Arbuthnot
Freelance Journalist - UK

21/04/2004 

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, raping, and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage… and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines.

- John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

Every conflict brings with it an encapsulation of the whole unimaginable horror in a single act, which instantly enters the global psyche: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Baghdad’s bombed Ameriyah Shelter in 1991, charred bodies lying in rows in the peach dawn on Dresden’s Anniversary, a lone violinist playing in the ruins of Sarajevo. It is tempting to say that the massacre in and siege of Fallujah is Iraq’s Mai Lai. In truth, though, it is Iraq’s Sabra and Shatila - the pitiless slaughter in the Lebanon refugee camps in 1982, instigated by Israel’s now Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Or maybe Iraq’s Jenin. It is the Israeli forces who have trained Iraq’s US troops in their ruthless, brutal methods. Ironically, the combined numbers of those killed and injured in Fallujah equal almost exactly those dead in Sabra and Shatila.

Winning “hearts and minds,” freedom, democracy, common civility and decency have no place - just arbitrary slaughter on suspicion, random bombings, demolition of homes of “suspects,” rounding up families, women and children, in night raids. “They have even taken our right to get undressed for bed,” one Fallujah man remarked to Rahul Mahajan, writer and anti-war activist. His door was smashed during the night, his house, he related, trashed, cash and gold, in a familiar tale, stolen by the soldiers. He, his wife and children were herded outside in their nightclothes. A shame and humiliation in conservative, though largely secular Iraq beyond thinking - as, also, the humiliation of a man in front of his family. The Lebanization, or Palestinization, of Iraq is gathering pace.

“At least Saddam ordered you to report [to the security police] and then the torture started. But never humiliation in front of the family,” another man told Mahajan in Fallujah. Things go badly awry when the “liberated” get wistful about Saddam’s torture methods: “At least he is one of us, understands our culture” is an increasingly familiar refrain, and “if we left him alone, he left us alone,” is another. The same cannot be said of the Americans. Forget “precision targeting”; Collective punishment is the order of the day (or night).

Attacks on Fallujah, with its particular history, were always going to ignite Iraq, as was witnessed in April last year, when US troops shot dead 20 Iraqi demonstrators (numbers hard to fully verify), who were proved unarmed by journalists’ careful investigations. Britain’s General Stanley Maude stood in Fallujah in 1917 and said, “We come as liberators, not as invaders.” When the British left Iraq, illiteracy was around 90 percent and the average life expectancy was 26.

In 1991, the packed market place in Fallujah was bombed by British or American planes; a housing complex and those in it were flattened. When rescuers ran to help, in a familiar tale, planes circled, returned, and bombed the rescuers. General Maude is buried in Baghdad’s North Gate Cemetery - and Fallujans have a long memory.

Attacks on ancient Samarra in the north, Kut, south of Baghdad, and the southern holy cities of Najav and Karbala - all historic flashpoints - were guaranteed to pour gasoline on a nascent fire; every heavy-handed lethal, unwarranted action - thefts, stamping on Qurans and lack of respect for a nationalistic, proudest of people - fuels the flames.

Many of the reported 700 dead in Fallujah are women and children (doctors also report unaccounted deaths, those buried by trapped families within their gardens and compounds) with a further estimated 1500 injured, the town sealed and the injured unable to reach the main hospitals. Makeshift clinics have been set up, but doctors delivering emergency medical aid have been turned back, one reportedly shot by US forces. Reminiscent of Palestine: the sick cannot reach hospitals with harrowing stories also of pregnant women giving birth without medical help. One in severe distress in the ninth month of pregnancy was turned home and her baby born dead. The reported burnt bodies of those trying to flee Fallujah’s tragedy, some little more than ash and barely recognizable bones. Human Rights Watch quoted refugees as describing, “streets littered with bodies,” adding, curiously, that they were not sure yet whether there had been “any human rights violation.” Collective punishment per se is a human rights violation.

“REGRETTABLE NECESSITY, n. An avoidable atrocity. The term is often employed by presidents and prime ministers when announcing bombings of civilian targets and invasions of small countries” (Chaz Bufe, The Devil’s Dictionaries).

Compounding an impending disaster, Iraq’s “Viceroy” Paul Bremer, isolated in his Palace, closed the newspaper of Shi’ite leader Moqtada Al-Sadr, mistakenly dismissing him as a firebrand with little following. If Sadr had had little following, Baghdad’s Saddam City wouldn’t have been unanimously renamed Sadr City, last April, to honor his family of which he is, to many now, the mantle holder. The paper (Al-Hawza) had just 10,000 prints, run in a 25-million population - hardly likely to cause great problems. But its censorship did. Saddam methods: Bremer has long been a new Saddam to Iraqis.

Now Najav and Karbala are surrounded by US troops avowed to capture Sadr “dead or alive.” Either options, or violation of these revered, sacred cities and shrines will make Vietnam a tea party. Further, hordes of Saudis, Iranians and others, for whom the cities are equally sacrosanct, will flood in, through Iraq’s now unsecured borders, to fight the invaders. Bloodbath comes to mind.

The bloody slaughter and mutilation of four mercenaries in Fallujah led to the US’ response. But again, the signals have not been heard by the “Authority,” isolated in their bunkered “Green Zone.” In 1958, the last British imposed Prime Minister, Nuri Sa’ad, in a bloody uprising, was dragged through the streets until he was referred to as shish kebab. For months, many have been saying they will not rest until they do to Bremer what they did to Nuri Sa’ad. They cannot get Bremer (yet) but that’s what they did, tragically, in Fallujah to those they regarded as the next best thing - mercenaries perceived to be authorized by him. Iraqis will give their lives to protect a guest; they will do exactly the same to defeat an invader. Time to abandon this historic folly of a “Crusade.” “Crusaders” fared badly in the Middle East.

Oh yes, and now Fallujah has its very own mass graves - courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited Iraq on numerous occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written and broadcast widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John Pilger's award-winning documentary - Paying the Price Killing the Children of Iraq.