British government agrees £3m Iraqui damage payment

CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES

‘Wars, conflict, it’s all business. One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.’
Charlie Chaplin

Sunday 2nd April 2006

It had been two years since the US forces sealed off the Iraqi city of Fallujah, before embarking on a killing spree that would leave 572 civilians, including over 300 women and children, dead, and hundreds of others wounded. Various peace groups, including the London Catholic Worker, had gathered in Parliament Square in defiance of the exclusion zone to read the names of 1,000 Iraqis who had died as a result of Fallujah and countless other atrocities during the invasion and occupation or Iraq.

It was to be hoped that the naming of 1,000 dead in front of parliament would help to bring it home to the politicians the true price of claptrap and spin. That the pin stripe accuracy of their rhetoric, didn’t translate into the pinpoint accuracy of their weapons.

So I joined them under the slogan ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, because the politicians who had talked up this war evidently couldn’t care less that so many innocent civilians had been slaughtered and continue to be slaughtered in the cause of cheap oil. Why, they were already beginning to talk up another slaughter that they wouldn’t care less about in Iran.

Amongst the crowd was the actress Joanna Lumley, who apparently had brought her chequebook along, ready to pay the fines of anyone arrested.

And so we learnt ‘WHO DIES?’ Whose lives had been snuffed out in our name?

Hamid Rabi’a
Doctor
Killed by US Air Strike on Fallujah
9 November 2004

Nazar Allawi Mehdi
Aged 16

Lubna Arkan
Aged 12
Killed by US bombing of Al-Quaim
November 2005

One name every thirty seconds.
Zainab Hamoodi (18)
Killed by US missile strike
Basra, April 2003

Bassam Al Bier (62)
Architect. Killed by US soldiers while
Driving his car. Baghdad, 2 July 2005

Baha Mousa
Beaten to death by British soldiers
whilst in detention, September 2003

Brothers and sisters. Husbands and wives. Mothers and Fathers. Sons and daughters. Sometimes entire families. And the dead would have had to have been buried within 48 hours - no question, anywhere and whatever the risks to the living.

“We buried many in the stadium for football until it became full. When you are burying you cannot stay long because [the marines] will just shoot you.” Said an Iraqi doctor working in Fallujah, April 2004

Dotted about the edge of the ceremony stood several activists wearing robes and huge face masks, representing the human face of Islam. Not the militant, hot head, terrorist face that our media fixates upon everyday, but the ordinary, the gentle, the silent majority which never ‘leads’ on our nightly news unless it ‘bleeds’, and even then, less and less so. And whenever two of the masked protestors gathered together for a chat, their blackened faces peeking out from beneath their robes, the faces of Islam would join with them. Nod when they nodded, look about when they looked about, and Western arms would become Iraqi arms gesturing as one, creating a powerful sense of family, community, solidarity.

Throughout the day we also learnt “WHO LIES?’

“Innocent civilians in (Fallujah) have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defence assured the world in 2004.

Apparently so.

I remember feeling so outraged that this slaughter had been carried out in my name, in the name of Britain, in the interests of installing ‘democracy’ over there, whilst dismantling our democratic rights to free speech over here. And I formulated a question for Tony Blair, and the twisted mindset he seems to represent – Can there be a greater democratic right than the right to life itself, especially if that life is a mere six years old?

Yes, it could be argued that it was a good idea to get rid of ‘God-damn’ Saddam. He was a nasty piece of work. He gassed children. His political opponents were dunked in acid. But like so many despots, that nasty piece of work had been largely built in the USA. Not for the first time had the US helped to create a monster to serve its own economic and political interests, effectively handed a chainsaw to a serial killer, and whispering, ‘They’re hiding under the stairs’. And not for the first time had the US then turned its creation into the Bogeyman, an international pariah, reduced an entire country to the size of a lawless frontier town, somewhere that needed to be ridden into, guns blazing.

Nazar al-Khalid
Adult civilian / musician
Killed by airstrikes

Mustafa Shereef
Doctor
Killed by US airstrike on Fallujah
9 November 2004

Mahmood Nasib Sa’id (50)
Shot dead in his bedroom by US troops
Baghdad April 2003

Suddenly two fighter planes roared passed overhead dissecting the circle, an obvious coincidence. Surely, no one could be that vindictive or insensitive to call up a fly past? But then again…

Hovering on the periphery was a couple of guys from the Forward Intelligence Team (FIT), which had been set up by the police in the mid 1990’s to snoop and build files on road and animal rights protestors, in fact any body of people dedicated to messing with the daily business of production, distribution and consumption, the building blocks of capitalism.

Intimidation was the name of the game, especially at an event like this involving all kinds of people. And even for seasoned activists the sight of a police officer focusing in on your every move, dictating every detail of your personal and political make-up into a Dictaphone, giving the impression that they are evidence gathering for some future McCarthy-style witch hunt, really unnerves you.

So I tried a little unnerving of my own. Shadowing their every move as they circled the ceremony like a pack of wolves, getting in the way of as many shots as I could.

Marifa Obeid
Civilian. Killed in the US massacre in Mukaradeeb
19 May 2004

Marwa (11)
Killed by US missile strike
Baghdad April 2003

Ahmad Salih Amir (25)
Killed by an airstrike in Qaim
November 2005

One life every thirty seconds...

Najla’a Najim (22)
Killed by an airstrike in Qaim
November 2005

Abid Hamed Mowhoush
Tortured to death in US custody
November 2003

For 5 hours...

little tramp has contributed a photo to this story.