The New Statesman last week published a letter from the Defence
Secretary, George Robertson, who took exception to my description of his
government’s recent actions in Iraq as murder.
The government sent 14 pilots to join the Americans in a wholly
illegal adventure over Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of at least 82
innocent people. In international law, that is a crime. Craven military
euphemisms, such as “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage” are
understandably preferred in government and media circles in this
country. That does not make it any less of a crime. Nor does Saddam
Hussein’s reputation make it any less of a crime.
Should Robertson doubt this, he might visit the grieving family of
25-year-old Fadila Amier. A bomb exploded near her home in Baghdad. A
journalist described how she “lay on the ground clutching her stomach,
blood pouring from abdomen and thighs”. She was pregnant. She was
peppered with shrapnel. Her sister said, “We got Fadila to the nearest
hospital, but they had no facilities so they could not operate on her.
All they could do was put her on a drip.”
The hospital she was taken to had no facilities because sanctions
imposed on Iraq by the British and American governments, behind a UN
veil, ban the import of the most basic medical equipment. Operations are
performed without anaesthetics; X-ray machines no longer work;
antibiotics, even bandages, are denied to ordinary people.
To Robertson and his generals, Fadila was “collateral damage”. It is
not known what she thought of Saddam. Robertson and the generals did not
ask her. Certainly, many Iraqis regard Saddam as the brutal tyrant he
is, and dream of his demise. During the Gulf slaughter in 1991, these
people suffered disproportionately under the Anglo-American-led
bombardment. The Shi’a and Kurdish minorities, Saddam’s implacable
opponents, were conscripted into his army, only to become the targets of
American “turkey shoots”; many were buried alive by armoured American
bulldozers.
Robertson complains that I omitted to write what a monster Saddam is.
I have written it over and over again. I wrote it when Douglas Hurd
flew to Baghdad in 1981. Hurd was then a junior Foreign Office minister
and his assignment was to celebrate with Saddam the anniversary of the
coming to power of the Iraqi Ba’athists in 1968, one of the bloodiest
events in modern Middle Eastern history. Like British emissaries before
and after him, Hurd knew the man to whom he offered his government’s
congratulations was renowned as the interrogator and torturer of
Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the “Palace of the End”. But Hurd had another mission;
he was, reported the Guardian at the time, “a top-level salesman” who
had tried to sell the tyrant an entire British Aerospace air defence
system which “would be the biggest sale of its kind ever achieved”.
Robertson conducts similar missions with equally monstrous tyrants.
The list is long. Consider the gang running Indonesia. Here is more of
the letter he wrote to Robin Cook last year, which I referred to in my
last column.
Dear Robin,
I understand that you have reservations concerning an export licence
application submitted by Courtauld’s Aerospace to export six armoured
Land Rovers to Indonesia . . . The vehicles are specifically for use by
Group 5 within Kopassus . . . The head of Kopassus is General Prabowo,
the son-in-law of President Suharto. The general is recognised as an
enlightened officer, keen to increase professionalism within the armed
forces and educate them in areas such as human rights . . .”
Yours,
George
What Robertson left out was that Kopassus was the Waffen-SS-style
force that spearheaded the invasion of East Timor, that murdered five
journalists including two Britons, that is responsible for the worst
atrocities in that illegally occupied territory. The documentation is
available. As for the “enlightened” General Prabowo, with his passion
for “human rights” and Land Rovers, his name so reeks that, when his
father-in-law Suharto was toppled from his throne (if not from power),
the general was also fired, as a sop to the “new democracy”. In at least
one of Kopassus’s massacres, Land Rovers were observed filled with the
dead and wounded.
The most serious omission from Robertson’s indignant letter to the
Statesman is that Saddam Hussein – like Generals Prabowo and Suharto –
would not exercise such power today were it not for the backing and
weapons he received from Britain and the United States. Saddam survived
the 1991 “war” because the Americans and British wanted to keep his
regime intact. They could well imagine the “chaos” in his wake, with
Kurds wanting to secede and democrats wanting democracy. The
Anglo-American objective is to install not a democrat in Baghdad, but
another, less uppity, Saddam Hussein.
So tell us, George Robertson, how do you justify the killing of Iraqi
civilians? You and Tony Blair have prattled about having “caged”
Saddam. The news last week from the “no-fly zone” suggests he is
anything but caged. On the contrary, by seeing off a great and powerful
enemy, his tyranny is reinforced; he may even be more popular. You have
ensured that UN weapons inspectors almost certainly will not be allowed
back. You have ensured that British citizens are now targets for attack.
What you achieved was the violent death of the Fadilas and their unborn
children. And that, as I say, is a crime.
