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For Iraqis in Harm�s Way, $5,000 and �I�m Sorry�
March 17, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 16 - Nearly a year ago, Ali Kadem
Hashem watched his wife burn to death and his three
children die after an American missile hit his house.
Last week, he got $5,000 from the United States government
and an "I'm sorry" from a young captain.
Mr. Hashem sat for a few moments staring at the stack of
bills, crisp $100's.
"Part of me didn't want to take it," he said. "It was an
insult."
But the captain, Jonathan Tracy, insisted. "A few thousand
dollars isn't going to bring anybody back," he explained
later. "But right now, it's all we can do."
It has been nearly a year since the war in Iraq started but
American military commanders are just now reckoning with
the volume of civilian casualties streaming in for
assistance. Twice a week, at a center in Baghdad, masses of
grief-weary Iraqis line up, some on crutches, some
disfigured, some clutching photographs of smashed houses
and silenced children, all ready to file a claim for money
or medical treatment. It is part of a compensation process
devised for this war.
Outside the room where the captain was saying he was sorry,
a long line of people waited. One was Ayad Bressem, a
12-year-old boy scorched by a cluster bomb. His face is
covered by ugly blue freckles. Children call him "Mr.
Gunpowder."
"I just want something," the burned boy said.
"Come back
later," a guard told him. "You'll get some money. But we're
busy."
Military officials say they do not have precise figures or
even estimates of the number of noncombatant Iraqis killed
and wounded by American-led forces in Iraq.
"We don't keep a list," said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt.
Cmdr. Jane Campbell. "It's just not policy."
But nonprofit groups in Iraq and the United States say
there were thousands of civilian casualties. According to
Civic, a nonprofit organization that has surveyed Iraqi
hospitals, burial societies and hundreds of families, more
than 5,000 civilians were killed between March 20, when the
war started, and May 1, when major combat operations ended.
"It says a lot that the military doesn't even keep track of
these things," said Marla Ruzicka, Civic's founder.
The Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan arms
control think tank in Cambridge, Mass., tracked Iraqi
civilian casualties through hospital surveys and
demographic analysis. The group estimated that the number
of innocents killed in heavy combat was between 3,200 and
4,300.
Whatever the true figures, the list is growing. Since May
1, many Iraqi civilians have been cut down by American
forces in checkpoint shootings and crossfires, accidents
and mishaps. Last week, a 14-year-old Kurdish girl was
killed by an American mortar round near the northern city
of Mosul. Army officials said soldiers fired the mortar at
terrorists. It fell short. A few months ago, according to
an official with the Iraqi Interior Ministry, American
soldiers shot and killed a man driving in his car because
he had a hole in his muffler and the sputtering exhaust
sounded like gunfire.
"The Americas are so jumpy," said Jameel Ghani Hashim,
manager of homicide statistics for the Interior Ministry.
Mr. Hashim has a five-inch-thick stack of reports detailing
civilian casualties. He said preliminary figures indicated
that about 500 Iraqi civilians had been killed by
American-led forces during the occupation. Mohammed
al-Mosawi, deputy director of the Human Rights Organization
of Iraq, said more than 400 families had filed reports of
wrongful deaths at the hands of American soldiers.
American commanders declined to quantify how many Iraqi
civilians had been killed by their forces during the
occupation. "We do keep records of innocent civilians who
are killed accidentally by coalition force soldiers," said
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant commander for the First
Armored Division, which patrols Baghdad. "And, in fact, in
every one of those innocent death situations, we conduct
internal investigations to determine what happened."
Nonprofit groups tracking civilian casualties said the
military had learned some lessons from the conflict in
Afghanistan, in which hundreds of civilians were killed
after faulty intelligence steered bombs into the wrong
villages. The groups credited the military with doing a
better job in Iraq of selecting targets to minimize
civilian casualties.
But many groups faulted the military for its continued use
of cluster bombs, explosives within explosives that
sprinkle hundreds of soda-can size "bomblets" over a wide
area. Steve Goose, an arms expert at Human Rights Watch, an
organization that published two reports on civilian
casualties in Iraq, said that while the Air Force showed
greater restraint using cluster bombs, the Army did not.
"The Army is still using older weapons and firing them into
heavily populated areas," Mr. Goose said.
A Pentagon spokesman defended the use of cluster bombs,
saying, "Coalition forces used cluster munitions in very
specific cases against valid military targets."
One of the problems with cluster bombs is that some
bomblets do not explode right away. That is what disfigured
Ayad, the boy whose face looks as if it was tattooed. Ayad
said that on April 25, he was tending cows in the village
of Kifil, south of Baghdad, when a bomblet in the grass
burst open. It embedded bits of metal in his face, leaving
him blind in one eye and coating his skin with dark dots
that look like pencil stabs.
His mother, Nazar, rushed him to the village doctor. Ayad
was in a coma for weeks. When he emerged, his mother looked
down at a face she barely knew. "He used to be so
beautiful," she said. His father, Ali, went to dozens of
Army hospitals and bases. Army doctors said Ayad's cornea
was scarred and that rehabilitation would be difficult.
Ayad is a smiley boy but sometimes he flies into rage. "He
beats me for no reason," his mother said. "He threatens to
cut my throat. But I don't care. I am his mother."
This week, Ayad and his father took a bus to Baghdad. Ayad
wore sunglasses and a scarf over his face. He does that
often, even when it is boiling hot. "The children tease
him," his father explained.
When the two arrived at the center run by Captain Tracy,
there was a crowd pressing against the doors. On Sundays
and Thursdays, Captain Tracy sits in a room on the second
floor of the convention center and doles out stacks of cash
to civilian casualty victims. The Army calls them "sympathy
payments."
Captain Tracy also helps process claims under the Foreign
Claims Act, which covers damages and wrongful deaths but
only in noncombat situations. Captain Tracy checks each
claim a civilian files against a database of military
incident reports. If they match, the military pays the
civilians, but does not issue a formal apology or claim of
responsibility. Of 540 claims filed, he said he had paid
261. While occasional payments were made to families
wrongly bombed in Afghanistan, there was nothing this
formalized before.
Captain Tracy, 27, said he had absorbed a lot of grief in
that little room. "I'm getting pretty burned out," he said.
He is limited in what he can pay. Guidelines set the
maximum sympathy payments at $1,000 per injury, $2,500 per
life. With the daily patter of bombings, rocket attacks and
inadvertent killings, life in Iraq may seem cheap. But many
Iraqis say it is not that cheap.
"This war of yours cost billions," said Said Abbas Ahmed,
who was given $6,000 after an American missile killed his
brother, his sister, his wife and his six children. "Are we
not worth more than a few thousand?"
In the cases of Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Hashem, whose wife and
three children were killed, military officials acknowledged
the victims' houses had been hit by allied missiles.
Ayad's family say they need money to pay for eye surgery.
But by the time Ayad and his father reached the front of
the line, Captain Tracy was closing for the day. While Ayad
pleaded with a guard, his father held up a small piece of
paper to the glass doors. "I have a serious problem," it
read. "I need help. I wish I have a translator."
Nobody responded. A few hours later, the two were back on
the bus, headed home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/17/international/middleeast/17CIVI.html?ex=1080569013&ei=1&en=6185829a071dbd40
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