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Robert Fisk: Intentional Bombing of the Mansur
residential neighborhood is a war crime
by Robert Fisk, Independent.co.uk Saturday April 12,
2003 at 03:11 AM
A young woman's severed head and torso and a small
boy's body were pulled Tuesday from a smoking crater
carved into the earth by four U.S. bombs, so powerful
they yanked orange trees from their roots. Once again,
civilians had suffered. When the broken body of the
20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then
the head her mother started crying uncontrollably,
then collapsed. She was helped into a car by two male
relatives. -- Hamza Hendawi, AP,
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/098/world/Death_fear_grief_at_Baghdad_bo:.shtml
We journalists have been co-operating, too, with a
further collapse of morality in this war. Take, for
example, the ruthless bombing of the residential
Mansur area of Baghdad last week. The Anglo-American
armies � or the "coalition", as the BBC still
stubbornly and mendaciously calls the invaders �
claimed they believed that Saddam and his two evil
sons Qusay and Uday were present there. So they bombed
the civilians of Mansur and killed at least 14 decent,
innocent people, almost all of them � and this would
obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of
Messrs Bush and Blair � Christians.
Now one might have expected the BBC World Service
Radio next morning to question whether the bombing of
civilians did not constitute a bit of an immoral act,
a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill
Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described
the slaughter of these innocent civilians as "a new
twist" in the war to target Saddam � as if it was
quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in
cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant.
The BBC's correspondent in Qatar � where the Centcom
boys pompously boasted that they had "real-time"
intelligence (subsequently proved to be untrue) that
Saddam was present � used all the usual military
jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The "coalition",
he announced, knew it had "time-sensitive material" �
ie that they wouldn't have time to know whether they
were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance
of their cause or not � and that this "actionable
material" (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch)
was not "risk-free".
And then he went on to describe, without a moment of
reflection, on the moral issues involved, how the
Americans had used four 2,000lb "bunker-buster bombs
to level the civilian homes". These are, of course,
the very same pieces of ordnance that the same US air
force used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin
Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. So now we use them,
knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad
� folk who would otherwise be worthy of the
"liberation" we wished to bestow upon them � in the
hope that a gamble, a bit of faulty "intelligence"
about Saddam, will pay off.
The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all
this. They specifically refer to civilians as
protected persons, as persons who must have the
protection of a warring power even if they find
themselves in the presence of armed antagonists. The
same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese
civilians when Israel launched its brutal "Grapes of
Wrath" operation in 1996. When an Israeli pilot, for
example, fired a US-made Hellfire missile into an
ambulance, killing three children and two women, the
Israelis claimed that a Hezbollah fighter had been in
the same vehicle. The statement proved to be totally
untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing
civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant.
Now we are doing exactly the same. And Ariel Sharon
must be pleased. No more namby-pamby western criticism
of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped
on Mansur.
More and more, we are committing these crimes. The
mass slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the
Amariyah air raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf
War was carried out in the hope that it would kill
Saddam. Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war
we rightly demand that others should obey? Why do we
journalists � yet again, war after war � connive in
this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and
illegal act into a "new twist" or into "time-sensitive
material"?
Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into
cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists
into nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels. But
surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into
war with us, along with that little book from the City
University. For the only people to benefit from our
own war crimes will be the next generation of Saddam
Husseins.
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