[Reader-list] Iraqi euphoria: Robert Fisk etc

[Rana Dasgupta]

Response of much alternative/critical media today is that yesterday's
pictures heavily staged.  see fisk's article below and also:

Was the statue incident stage-managed?
It now appears that the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad was simply a
media circus, organized the the U.S. government to help promote its war. Two
wide-angle photos of the square in which the statue stood belie the message
of a large Iraqi crowd.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2838.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm

US says flag incident was a 'coincidence'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396043

R


Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after
Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery,
suspicion and a suicide bombing
11 April 2003
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396051

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 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.