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THE HANDSTAND |
MAY 2003 |
 Robert Fisk Interview, on Democracy Now Date: 4/23/03 An Anti-Colonial War Against The Americans May Have Already Begun Robert Fisk and Amy Goodman; Democracy Now; April 22, 2003 Goodman: After spending a month in Iraq, could you describe your thoughts? Fisk: Well, my assumption is that history has a way or repeating itself. I was talking to a very military Shiite Muslim from Nashas about only five days ago and a journalist was saying to him "do you realize how historic these days are?" and I said to him "do you realize how history is repeating itself?" and he turned to me and said "yes history is repeating itself, and I knew what he meant. He was referring to the British invasion of Iraq in 1917 and Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, when we turned up in Baghdad and Sir Stanley Maude issued a document saying "we have come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny." And within three years we were losing hundreds of men every year in the guerilla war against the Iraqis who wanted real liberation not by us from the Ottomans but by them from us and I think that's what's going to happen with the Americans in Iraq. I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon, which of course will be first referred to as a war by terrorists, by al Qaeda, by remnants of Saddam's regime, remnants < BR>(remember that word) but it will be waged particularly by Shiite Muslims against the Americans and the British to get us out of Iraq and that will happen. And our dreams that we can liberate these people will not be fulfilled in this scenario. So what I've been writing about these past few days is simply the following. We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people, and yet my own count of gov= ernment buildings burning in Baghdad before I left was 158, of which the only buildings protected by the United States army and the marines were the Ministry of Interior, which has the intelligence corp of Iraq and the Ministry of Oil, and I needn't say anything else about that. Every other ministry was burning. Even the Ministry of Higher Education/Computer Science was burning. And in some cases American marines were sitting on the wall next to the ministries watching them burn. The Computer Science Minister actually talked to the marine, Corporal Tinaha, in fact, I actually called his fiance to tell her he was safe and well. So the Americans have allowed the entire core and infrastructure of the next government of Iraq to be destroyed,keeping only the Ministry of Interio r and the Ministry of Oil. That tells it's own story. On top of that I was one of the first journalists to walk in to the National Archaeological Museum and the National Library of Archives with all the Ottoman and state archives and the Koranic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment and all were burned. Petrol was poured on these documentations over them and they were all burned in 3000 degrees of heat. Ironically, with all that irony, I managed to rescue 26 pages of the Ottoman documentation, the Ottoman library. Documents of Ottoman armies, camel thieves, letters from the sheriff Hussein of Mecca to Ali Pasha (Ottoman ruler of Baghdad) and when I got to the Jordanian border the Jordanian customs authorities stole these documents from me and refused to even give me a receipt for them, a shattering comment I'm afraid to say on the Arab world but particularly on the American occupation of Baghdad. After the Koranic Library was set on fire I raced to the headquarters of the Third Marine Force Division in Baghdad and I said there is this massive Koranic Library on fire and I said what can you do? And under the Geneva Conventions the US Occupation Forces have a moral, whatever occupations forces there are, and they happen to be American, have a legal duty to protect documents and various embassies. There was a young officer who got on the radio and said "there was some kind of Biblical library on fire," biblical for heavens sake, and I gave him a map of the exact loc= ations, the collaterals on the locations to the marines and nobody went there, and all the Korans were burned, Korans going back to the 16th Century totally burned. So, somebody has an interest in destroying the center of a new government and the cultural identity of Iraq. Now th= e American line is these are Saddamite remnants, remnants of a Saddam regime. I don't believe this. If I was a remnant of a Saddam regime and say I was given $20,000 to destroy the library I would say thank you very much and when the regime was gone I would pocket the money. I wouldn't go and destroy the library, I don't need to, I've got the money. Somebody or some institution or some organization today now is actively setting out to destroy the cultural identity of Iraq and the ministries that form the core of a new Iraq government. Who would be behind that and who would permit it to happen, and why is it that the US military, so famed for its ability to fight its way across the Tigris and the Euphrates river and come into Baghdad will not act under the Geneva Convention to protect these institutions? That is the question. And I do not have the answer to it. Goodman: There was a report today that said that the US army ignored warnings from its own civilian advisors that could have prevented the looting of Baghdad's National Museum-- this is from the London Observer. It said that the Office of the Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance set up to supervise reconstruction identified the museum as a prime target for looters in a memo to army commanders a month a go. The memo said it should be the second priority for the army after securing the national bank. General Jay Garner, who's taking over, is saidto be livid. One angry reconstruction official told the Observer "we ask for just a few soldiers at each building or if they feared snipers then at least one or two tanks. The tanks were doing nothing once they got inside the city, yet the generals refused to deploy them. Fisk: Yeah, well the Observer is always quite a bit late on the story. There was a website set up between American archaeologists and the Pentagon many weeks ago listing those areas of vital national heritage to Iraq which might be looted, damaged, stormed, burned. The museum was on that list. The museum, I have seem physically marked on the satellite pictures which the marines have to move around in Baghdad. They know it's there, they know what it is. Now, when I got to the museum, which is far more than a week ago, there were gun battles going on between rioters and looters , bullets skittering up the walls of apartment blocks outside. It was quite clear when I walked in that looting was quite clearly…. Some one has opened the doors, the huge safe doors of the storeroom of the museum with a key. The looting was on a most detailed, precise and coordinated scale. The people knew what the wanted to go for. Those Grecian statues they didn't want they decapitated and threw to the floor. Those earrings and gold ornaments and bullring gods that they wanted to take, they took. And within a few days those priceless heritage items of Iraq's < BR> history were on sale in Europe and in America. I don't believe that that happened by chance. Two of the interesting things: number one is the looters knew exactly what they wanted and they got it out of a country with a speed that we as journalists cannot get our stories out of the country. Secondly, a much more serious in the long term. The arsonists , the men who were going around burning, they must have had maps, they knew where to go, they knew what would not be defended by the Americans. In one case, you know this is a city without electricity, without water, I recognized one of the men who was burning things. He had a small beard, a goatee beard and he had a red t-shirt, and the second time I saw him, I looked at him and he pointed a [inaudible] rifle at me, he realized I recognized him. They were coming to the scenes of arsonists in blue and white buses. God knows where these buses were from. They weren't city corporation buses, although city corporation buses were being used by looters. But the arsonists were an army. They were calculated and they knew where to go, they had maps, they were told where to go. Who told them where to go? Who told them where the Americans would not shoot at them or would not harm them? This is a very, very important question that still needs to be reconciled and answered. And I do not have an answer. And none of my colleagues unfortunately have asked the American military in Qatar, in Doha what the answer is. Somebody told these people where to go, they had the maps, they knew the places to go and burn, they knew the American military would not be there and they went there and they burned. Who gave them those instructions, I don't know the answer. I really don't know the answer, but there is an answer, and we should know what this. Goodman: Maguire Gibson, a leading Mesopotamian scholar from the University of Chicago, said he has good reason to believe that the looting or the stealing of the artifacts from the museum with men going in with forklifts and even keys to vaults…he has good reason to believe this was orchestrated from outside the country. Fisk: There is certainly a reason to believe, Amy, that there were keys involved because some of the vaults I saw were opened with keys and not with hammers or guns or explosives. Fork lift trucks? They had the ability to move heavy statues into trucks. When I got there, they had just done that. But I don't know if they used fork lift trucks, I think that might be a little too Hollywood. There were men who were guards to the museum in long gray beards who had taken rifles, [inaudible] Ak-47's weapons to defend what was left. But if you're saying to me "do I have eviden= ce of fork lift trucks?" -- No. Do I have evidence that they knew what they were coming for, yes! Do I have evidence that this was premeditated, yes! Do I believe that the arsonists were trained and organized from outside who knew whether or not the Americans would be present or whether the American military would defend certain buildings, yes! They undoubtedly did know the Americans would not confront them. And the Americans did not confront them. I actually got to a point where I was going around Baghdad a few days ago, and every time I saw a tongue of flame or smoke I'd race off in my car to the area, and the last place I went to that was burning was the Department of Higher Education/Computer Scienc e and as I approached it I saw a marine sitting on the wall. I bounded out of the car and raced back and thought I had better see this guy and I took his name down. His name was Ted Nyhom and he was a member of the Third Marine Fourth Regiment or Fourth Marine Third Regiment. He gave me the number of his fiancé Jessica in the states. I actually rang her up and said "your man loves you dearly" (he's a real person) and I said how the hell is this happening next door and he said "well, we're guarding a hospital" and I said "there's a fire next door, a whole bloody government ministry is burning. And he said, "yeah we can't look everywhere at the same time." I said, "Ted, what happened?" and he said "I don't know." Now when you go to sit down…he was a nice guy, I was happy to ring his fiancé up and tell her that he was safe. But something happened there. There was a fire, an entire government ministry was burning down next to him and he did nothing. It didn't seem strange to him that he wasn't asked to do anything. Now there's something strange about that. It's not a question of whether American academic said, you know, is there something wrong with the moral property of an army that doesn't stop looting and arson. There's something terribly wrong there. My country's army in Basra was also remiss in this way. Our Minister of Defense, Geoff Hoon, said `oh well they were liberating their own property' when people were looting hospitals, for god's sakes. So the British don't get off on this either, but the Americans were the most remiss. And in the city of Baghdad against all the international conventions, particularly the Geneva Convention, which have a specific reference to pillage… in fact pillage appears as a crime against humanity in the Hague Conventions in 1907 upon in which the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were based. There is a whole reference to pillage and the Americans did nothing. They did nothing to prevent the pillage of the entire cultural history of Iraq, of the museum, or the documentary history of the National Archives, or the Koranic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment or of the 155 other government locations around Baghdad. And one has to ask the question, why was this permitted to happen. I don't know the answer. An interesting advertisement: HAARETZ
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Auction #29
will be held at the Dan Tel Aviv Hotel, Monday 21st
April, 2003 at 7:00pm.