The Independent, 17 June 2007
A cry for justice from a good man who expected us to protect his
son
by Robert Fisk
A report from the man who broke the original story...
see also our report from 21 May 2004 about a show of solidarity with Iraqi victims of British military
violence in Derry: families read accounts of how their own relatives were killed by
the British military in Derry and Belfast. The families’ testimonials also
included references to particular Iraqi victims of British state violence.
>>>> Getting Away With Murder - From Derry (North of Ireland) to Basra <<<<
From the moment I knocked on the front door of Daoud Mousa al-Maliki's home
in Basra, I knew something had gone terribly wrong in the British Army in
southern Iraq.
I had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland - I had even been
threatened by British officers in Belfast - but I somehow thought that
things had changed, that a new, more disciplined army had emerged from the
dark, sinister days of the Irish conflict. But I was wrong. Baha Mousa,
Daoud's son, had died from the injuries he received in British custody, a
young, decent man whose father was a cop, who did nothing worse than work as
a receptionist in a Basra hotel.
Then I went to see Kifah Taha, who had been so badly beaten by British
troops in the presence of Baha Mousa that he had terrible wounds in the
groin. He told me how the soldiers would call their Iraqi prisoners by the
names of football stars - Beckham was one name they used - before kicking
them around the detention headquarters in Basra. There were stories of Iraqi
prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked and punched
in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders, forced to sit with their
heads down lavatory holes.
All this is among the evidence which ex-prisoners - and Baha Mousa's father
- are taking to the High Court, now that the courts martial which followed
Mousa's death have produced just one solitary conviction, a soldier jailed
for a year and dismissed from the Army for "mistreating" prisoners.
There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in the field. If
you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were a hundred others that
will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances",
hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra. US
troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in
Iraq. If one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a US
unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many others have died in
circumstances we shall never discover?
The My Lai atrocity in Vietnam was revealed relatively soon after it
occurred. But it was more than 40 years after the Korean War that we learned
US soldiers had fired into thousands of unarmed Korean civilian refugees,
because they feared troops were hiding among them. How many air strikes in
Afghanistan and Iraq kill the innocent yet go unrecorded, because
journalists are no longer safe to travel in these remote, dangerous areas?
Looking back, I found out about Baha Mousa only because it was still safe -
just - to move around in Basra in 2004, to knock on front doors, visit
hospitals, interview grieving relatives without the fear of being kidnapped
or having my throat cut. Baha Mousa's young wife had died only a few months
before him - from a tumour of the brain - and his two small children sat
devastated in their home, staring at me as if I were a war criminal. His
father, Daoud, said to me then, as he says in his latest affidavit: "As for
me, Baha was not just my son, he was my friend."
His indignation at the failure of the British courts martial to convict
anyone for Baha's murder rings through his affidavit, a moving cry for
justice from a good man in Iraq who expected British troops to protect his
family, not kill his son. He even believed an officer who promised to look
after Baha, two days before Daoud was invited to inspect and identify his
broken body.
How have we failed these people! What culture created these young men who
treated their civilian prisoners with such contempt, cursing them and - if
the documents are accurate - calling them "shit" and treating them like
animals? Did it come from Glasgow or Cardiff or London or from some prison -
yes, quite a lot of British soldiers are ex-prisoners themselves, former
guests of Her Majesty who know all about prison rules and prison abuse.
How come the Americans tortured men at Abu Ghraib - officially permitted to
do so, as we now know - without realising that they were breaking the rules
of ordinary humanity? Is this the result, perhaps, of all those violent,
virtual reality worlds so shockingly documented by Tim Guest in his new
book, Second Lives, where pain no longer hurts, where lives are only
"virtual", where killing is easy?
Yes, I know the old saw, that our chaps are up against it, risking their
lives in the front line, occasionally running over the traces amid the fear
and drama of battle, a few rotten apples, etc. That's what we said about the
1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment when they killed 14 innocent Catholic
civilians in Derry in 1972. First Para? Salt of the earth. Maybe they just
broke after so much abuse and danger - except that 1st Para were a reserve
battalion at the time, largely confined to Palace Barracks outside Belfast.
And the soldiers in Basra? They were beating their prisoners in the comfort
of their barracks - "Chemical Ali's" old jail, of course - in the
comparative safety of Basra in the immediate post-invasion months.
It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old clichés
about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. Maybe
there are hearts and minds to be maintained inside the Green Zone in Baghdad
or any of the other "green zones" around the Middle East where our Western
forces shelter from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader
castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high ground - if
ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and George Bush's illegal
invasion - has long ago been abandoned.
We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to
Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's
death with him for ever - to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow
we leave behind for them.
Copyright © The Independent 2007
