OFF: HW: Fwd: [chaoskaos] The human cost

[Ben Fagin]

Focus: The human cost
'Does Tony have any idea what the flies are like that feed off the dead?'
By Robert Fisk

Independent, January 26, 2003

On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses
of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a
decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead
fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve
flapping in the wind.

"Just for the record,'' the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV
would never show such footage. The things we see - the filth and obscenity
of corpses - cannot be shown. First because it is not "appropriate" to
depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was
shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war.

That of course was in 1991. The "highway of death", they called it - there
was actually a parallel and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles to the
east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up to film
it - and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the photograph of
the shrivelled, carbonised Iraqi soldier in his truck. This was an iconic
illustration of a kind because it did represent what we had seen, when it
was eventually published.

For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War - there
was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing - it was
necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on
their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those First World War
paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die benignly and
without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without a trace of shit
or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on to the morning
news programmes.

I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had shelled
Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106 civilians,
more than half of them children, I came across a young woman holding in her
arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. "My father, my father," she kept
crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of his legs was missing -
the Israelis used proximity shells which cause amputation wounds - but when
that scene reached television screens in Europe and America, the camera was
close up on the girl and the dead man's face. The amputations were not to be
seen. The cause of death had been erased in the interests of good taste. It
was as if the old man had died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his
daughter's shoulder to die in peace.

Today, when I listen to the threats of George Bush against Iraq and the
shrill moralistic warnings of Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this
terrible reality. Does George, who declined to serve his county in Vietnam,
have any idea what these corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest
conception of what the flies are like, the big bluebottles that feed on the
dead of the Middle East, and then come to settle on our faces and our
notepads?

Soldiers know. I remember one British officer asking to use the BBC's
satellite phone just after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking
to his family in England and I watched him carefully. "I have seen some
terrible things," he said. And then he broke down, weeping and shaking and
holding the phone dangling in his hand over the transmission set. Did his
family have the slightest idea what he was talking about? They would not
have understood by watching television.

Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic population -
albeit only about 20 per cent in support of this particular Iraqi folly -
has been protected from the realities of violent death. But I am much struck
by the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of the Second World
War, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an inalienable
memory of torn limbs and suffering.

I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead,
howling like an animal - which is, of course, what we all are - before he
died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me when an
Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly, murderously, for
throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg sticking out of her
stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after a Palestinian bomber
had decided to execute the families inside; and the heaps of Iraqi dead at
the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war - the stench of their bodies
wafted through our helicopter until the mullahs aboard were sickened; and
the young man showing me the thick black trail of his daughter's blood
outside Algiers where armed "Islamists" had cut her throat.

But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all the
other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have to think
of these vile images. For them it's about surgical strikes, collateral
damage and all the other examples of war's linguistic mendacity. We are
going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the people of Iraq - some
of whom we will obviously kill - and we are going to give them democracy and
protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes trials and we are going to be
ever so moral, and we are going to watch our defence "experts" on TV with
their bloodless sandpits and their awesome knowledge of weapons which rip
off heads.

Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped
neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee convoy
in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit. His head lay
in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a Tudor executioner.
Months later, I learned his name and talked to the girl who was hit by the
severed head during the US air strike and who laid the head reverently in
the grass where I found it. Nato, of course, did not apologise to the
family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry after war. No one acknowledges
the truth of it. No one shows you what we see. Which is how our leaders and
our betters persuade us - still - to go to war.

26 January 2003 06:17












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