The results of occupation (17 June 2006)

The recent massacres by US soldiers in Iraq demonstrate what has become of the occupation, argues Glen Rangwala

The murder by US marines of at least 23 unarmed civilians in Haditha in western Iraq on 19th November last year underlines the predicament for Iraqis still living under US occupation. Most obviously, it demonstrated the brutality of that occupation. The victims included six children, aged from three to fourteen, four women, and one elderly man in a wheelchair, all shot in their homes. The morgue director to whom the bodies were taken recorded that the victims were shot at close range with bullets aimed at the head and chest. The video footage of the scene, taken the following day by a local Iraqi journalism student, showed no bullet holes in the walls or ceiling: these were not people killed in a hail of gunfire by panicking soldiers caught in confusion. They appear to have been carefully and deliberately executed as punishment for the death of one US soldier earlier that day. The occupation, long shorn of legitimacy to ordinary Iraqis, perpetuates itself only by trying to instil fear into a terrified population.

The way the account of the massacre came to the attention of the wider world is also revealing. The US military originally claimed that the dead were made up of 15 people killed by the same roadside bomb blast that killed the US soldier, and eight insurgents who were firing at other soldiers. This was clearly untrue: none of the Iraqis killed died in a bomb blast, and their deaths were some five hours after the US fatality. But that is how the Iraqi deaths would have been recorded – more cases of Iraqis killing Iraqis or insurgents caught in the act – if it hadn’t been for the brave Iraqi student who filmed the aftermath of the killings and passed the tape through a series of intermediaries to a US journalist.

It was only with imminent publication of the story that the US military changed its account and began an investigation. As it was only a mixture of luck and sheer dedication that brought the massacre and the lies of the US military to light, there is every reason to believe that the other reports of large-scale killings could well be true – most notably, of 11 civilians at the village of Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, in March this year.

The aftermath of the killings has also underlined who is in charge of Iraq. Despite calls from the Iraqi government for both the Ishaqi and Haditha deaths to be subjected to a full Iraqi-led investigation, the US has made it clear that it will allow nothing more than its internal military investigations – and any finding of fault will result in US disciplinary action, not prosecution in Iraq. The result of the torture practised by the US at Abu Ghraib was a military panel handing out sentences and fines to junior personnel; only three low-level officers have been given sentences longer than a year, and no policy-makers will be prosecuted even though it is clear that senior Pentagon officials authorised torture at Abu Ghraib. The US claimed to investigate the Ishaqi killings, and released a short statement denying wrongdoing in early June: it contradicted the Iraqi police account in almost every detail, but Iraqis have no mechanisms to seek redress or further investigation.

The killings once again demonstrated the absurdity of the argument made by Bush and Blair that they are keeping their soldiers in Iraq to protect Iraqis from each other. The common portrayal to outsiders of the nature of violence in Iraq is that it is between Iraqis of different religious traditions – but this is simply false. According to the Pentagon’s latest report to Congress from May, over two-thirds of all attacks in Iraq in the first part of this year, not counting those by the official armed forces, have been against US and UK military personnel. The US, with its loyal allies, remains the central focus of violence in Iraq – being attacked, and much more lethally attacking others. The primary reason why sectarian animosity is on the rise in Iraq is not pre-existing tension between the religious sects: all countries of the region have a mix of Sunni and Shi‘a populations, with no animosity between them, just as Iraq had in the past. It is because the US made it a key objective to turn key Shi‘a parties into its clients in Iraq, setting them up in a position of power over the Sunni Arab population.

The results of this long-standing imperialist tactic is all too obvious, as the results of Belgian recruitment of the Tutsi to serve as their substitute ruling class in Rwanda from 1916 showed. The result in Iraq is that many Sunni Arabs see sectors of the Shi‘a community as having aligned itself with a foreign power to occupy their towns and massacre their populations. The solution to this is not, as Blair would have it, to deepen that foreign control in order subjugate one community even further, but to remove that control that has distorted and destroyed the lives of so many Iraqis.

Glen Rangwala’s latest book, co-authored with Eric Herring, is Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy. It will be published by Hurst & Co. in July.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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