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THE
ROVING EYE
Cluster
bombs liberate Iraqi children
By Pepe
Escobar
AMMAN - The horror. The horror. And
unlike Apocalypse Now, there are real, not
fictional images to prove it. But they won't be seen in
Western homes. The new heart of darkness has emerged in
the turbulent history of Mesopotamia via the Hilla
massacre. After uninterrupted, furious American bombing
on Monday night and Tuesday morning, as of Wednesday
night there were at least 61 dead Iraqi civilians and
more than 450 seriously injured in the region of Hilla,
80 kilometers south of Baghdad. Most are children: 60
percent of Iraq's population of roughly 24 million are
children.
Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a spokesman
for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
in Iraq, describes what happened in Hilla as "a horror,
dozens of severed bodies and scattered limbs".
Initially, Murtada Abbas, the director of Hilla
hospital, was questioned about the bombing only by Iraqi
journalists - and only Arab cameramen working for
Reuters and Associated Press were allowed on site. What
they filmed is horror itself - the first images shot by
Western news agencies of what is also happening on the
Iraqi frontlines: babies cut in half, amputated limbs,
kids with their faces a web of deep cuts caused by
American shellfire and cluster bombs. Nobody in the West
will ever see these images because they were censored by
editors in Baghdad: only a "soft" version made it to
worldwide TV distribution.
According to the Arab
cameramen, two trucks full of bodies - mostly children,
and women in flowered dresses - were parked outside the
Hilla hospital. Dr Nazem el-Adali, trained in Scotland,
said almost all the dead and wounded were victims of
cluster bombs dropped in the Hilla region and in the
neighboring village of Mazarak. Abbas initially said
that there were 33 dead and 310 wounded. Then the ICRC
went on site with a team of four, and they said that
there were "dozens of dead and 450 wounded". Contacted
by satphone on Thursday, Huguenin-Benjamin confirmed
there were at least 460 wounded, being treated in an
ill-equipped 280-bed hospital.
Journalists taken
to Hilla from Baghdad on an official tour on Wednesday
talked of at least 61 dead. The Independent's Robert
Fisk described the mortuary as "a butcher's shop of
chopped-up corpses". The ICRC is adamant: all victims
are "farmers, women and children". And Dr Hussein
Ghazay, also from Hilla hospital, confirmed that "all
the injuries were either from cluster bombing or from
bomblets that exploded afterwards when people stepped on
them or children picked them up by mistake".
Iraqi journalists on site and later an Agence
France Presse (AFP) photographer say that they have seen
debris equipped with small parachutes characteristic of
cluster bombs - which release up to 200 bomblets.
Mohamed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi Information Minister, has
not volunteered details yet on the Hilla massacre. US
Central Command in Qatar only admits it has used "six
cluster bombs in the center of Iraq" - and against a
tank column: these would be the CBU 105, the so-called
"intelligent" cluster bombs which compensate for wind.
The Pentagon line remains that there are "no
indications" that the US dropped cluster bombs in the
Hilla region.
Widely used in Afghanistan,
cluster bombs are vehemently denounced by human rights
organizations: they compare their deadly effects to
anti-personnel mines, which are outlawed by the Ottawa
Convention (not signed, incidentally, by either the US
or Iraq). Cluster bombs are far from being smart. Most
of its bomblets hit the ground without exploding. The
small yellow cylinders remain deadly weapons threatening
civilians - especially children. Human Rights Watch, in
vain, has tried to persuade the Pentagon not to use
cluster bombs, stressing that "Iraqi civilians will pay
the price with their lives". This is not the first
incident of mass civilian deaths. The Independent
newspaper of London claims that it has conclusively
proved that an American missile was responsible for the
devastation at the Shu'ale market in Baghdad last
Friday, with at least 62 civilians confirmed dead. The
missile - either a high speed anti-radiation missile
(Harm) or a Paveway laser-guided bomb - is manufactured
by Raytheon in Texas. Raytheon is the world's largest
manufacturer of so-called "smart" weapons - including
Patriots and Tomahawks.
A piece of fuselage
shown by a Shu'ale resident to the Independent's Robert
Fisk reads the number 30003-704ASB7492, followed by a
second code, MFR 96214 09. An investigation by the
Independent determined that "the reference MFR 96214 was
the identification or 'cage' number of a Raytheon plant
in the city of McKinney, Texas. The 30003 reference
refers to the Naval Air Systems Command, the procurement
agency responsible for furnishing the US Navy's air
force with its weaponry." Many defense analysts have
agreed that what happened at the Shu'ale market was
almost certainly due to a Harm - which carries a warhead
designed to explode into thousands of aluminum
fragments. The Bush administration, Downing Street and
the US Central Command continue to blame the civilian
massacre in Baghdad on misfired Iraqi missiles.
Al-Mustansariya University in Baghdad - the
oldest in the world - has been bombed. A Red Crescent
maternity hospital has been bombed. In al-Janabiy, in
the southeast of Baghdad, Patrick Baz, a veteran AFP
photographer who stared horror in the face in Beirut in
the 1980s, stumbled into a farm pulverized by missiles
with at least 20 dead inside, including 11 children.
Iraq may not be totally united behind the
renewed call of the Saddam Hussein regime, which is a
complex mix of Arab nationalism and jihad invoked to
rally every citizen to a war of liberation. But the
terrible images of the civilian massacre in Shu'ale and
the civilian massacre in Hilla, coupled with the
Pentagon's denials, have turned the Iraqi nationalist
struggle into a volcano. Iraqi exiles in Jordan confirm
that people who wouldn't dream of picking up a
Kalashnikov to defend Saddam are now committed to defend
their families, their houses, their cities and their
homeland. Anglo-American soldiers may barely disguise
their perplexity, but the fact on the ground is they are
now fighting the very people they were supposed to
"liberate".
Most, if not all, images of death
from above raining over Iraqi civilians are being shown
non-stop on al-Jazeera, Abu-Dhabi TV, al-Arabiya or the
Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. The anger over the
Arab world must surely be growing. Even "moderate"
regimes are being touched. The semi-official al-Ahram,
Egypt's premier newspaper, sums it up in an editorial,
"The 'clean war' has become the dirtiest of wars, the
bloodiest, the most destructive. Smart weapons have
become deliberately stupid, blindly killing people in
markets and popular neighborhoods." Jordan's King
Abdullah was forced to publicly denounce what he termed
the "invasion of Iraq" and vigorously register his "pain
and sorrow" with the "murder of women and children ...
as we see on our television screens the growing number
of martyrs among innocent Iraqi civilians. As a father,
I feel the pain of every Iraqi family, of every child,
and every father."
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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