[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after

[Jim Buell]

Fisk continues to be the premier chronicler of this still-unraveling 
US-made tragedy - at once an unflinching eyewitness and a penetrating 
historian. Here's his article for today from the Independent in London.

jb

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396051


>Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after
>Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery, 
>suspicion and a suicide bombing
>11 April 2003
>It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled 
>the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag – 
>flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section – as a mob of 
>middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through 
>the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books 
>from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.
>At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve 
>the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of 
>thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of 
>each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy 
>death rates and nutrition across the floors.
>The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of 
>thousands of thieves – they came in families and cruised the city in 
>trucks and cars searching for booty – seem to have a different idea of 
>what liberation means.
>American control of the city is, at best, tenuous – a fact underlined 
>after several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to 
>the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, 
>in the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.
>Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam 
>loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more 
>than four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in 
>the Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved 
>untrue, that Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken 
>flight there.
>As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies 
>and UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were 
>driving past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs 
>out of the front gate.
>It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that 
>American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I 
>saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the 
>streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters – two 
>of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators – 
>blocked the highway beneath.
>Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the 
>unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth 
>visiting because "we've already taken everything". Understandably, the 
>poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of 
>Saddam's regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes 
>quite literally, for more than two decades.
>I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim 
>al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a 
>former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security 
>advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid – "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and 
>was killed last week in Basra – and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private 
>secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts 
>pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive 
>villas.
>It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that 
>senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and 
>richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian 
>carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the 
>gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in 
>a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam 
>of looters outside.
>On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of 
>stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete 
>reservation and still lay dead at the wheel.
>But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his 
>hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw 
>no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy 
>worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed 
>out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs 
>while children were used to unscrew door hinges and – in the UN offices – 
>to remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take 
>a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.
>On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could 
>be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white 
>hunting dogs that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white 
>ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a 
>glimpse of four of Saddam's horses – including the white stallion he had 
>used in some presidential portraits – being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq 
>Aziz's villa was also looted, right down to the books in his library.
>Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, 
>computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the 
>Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they 
>had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can 
>hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the 
>government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that 
>the state's property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one 
>to make of the scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner 
>of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the 
>looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate and armed 
>attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being 
>observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the US 3rd 
>Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks – doing nothing. The UN 
>offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a US Marine checkpoint.
>And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of 
>occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a 
>motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US 
>soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers – in front of other 
>civilians, including women – to prove they were not suicide bombers.
>After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American 
>Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, 
>including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and 
>killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of 
>the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of 
>another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a 
>young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the 
>killings took place.
>Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians – many of 
>them killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week – lay rotting in 
>their still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the 
>"liberation" of Baghdad.