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April 17-18: Blogging from Baghdad

Latest from Rahul Mahajan, author and antiwar activist currently in Iraq.
April 18, 1:35 pm EST: I'm working on a very important story about hospital closings and ongoing fighting. It's a big, complex story, and I'm trying to corroborate everything before writing it all up in an article, but readers of Empire Notes get to see it first.

There are several parts to this. First is that the Minister of Health (of the U.S. appointed Governing Council) is reporting that in the last two days 290 Iraqis are have been killed -- that' excluding Fallujah. That's a huge number. Second, the minister has confirmed that U.S. forces have been shooting at ambulances. Third, it was recently reported as a detail in some news stories that the bridge to the hospital to Fallujah was re-opened -- burying the real story that access to the hospital was blocked by U.S. forces in the first place and thus residents of Fallujah could not get to the hospital during the worst of the fighting. And last, but not least, we have reports that last week the Spanish garrison had shut down the main hospital in Najaf. Let me repeat: we have reports that they had ordered closing down of the main hospital in a major city.

I'll be working to corroborate as much of this as I can in the next few days. Now the details.

At a Ministry of Health press conference on Saturday that none of the Western media was at (al-Iraqiya, the U.S. TV station, was there for the statement but left during questioning, which was the more interesting part). Khudair Abbas, Minister of Health, delivered the statement and took questions. Dahr Jamail, Pratap Chatterjee and my translator from whom I have gotten this report attended the press conference

The Minister was concerned to dispute the numbers on Fallujah -- last I saw, over 700 dead. He said the "official" count based on the Ministry's own tally (using 3 dedicated phone lines to cover the whole country) was 155 dead and 350 injured. Nobody believes this is an accurate tally, including many Marine commanders. But what's interesting is that at the same time he said, between April 5 and 17, in the cities of Baghdad, Najaf, Kerbala, Hilla, and Nasiriyah (all the ones for which they had data), there had been 290 Iraqis killed and 1196 wounded. And this doesn't include known fighting in Basra, Kuta, Amara, Baqubah, and, of course, Fallujah. Of the dead, 11% are children.

During the questions, when asked about shooting at ambulances, Abbas confirmed that U.S. forces shot at ambulances, not only in Fallujah and the approaches to Fallujah, but also in Sadr City. He agreed that the acts were criminal and said he has asked the IGC (Governing Council) and Bremer for an explanation.

This is a sensational confirmation, but you won't see it reported in any newspaper back home. Remember, the Iraqi Ministry of Health is part of the government the United States created and rules through its handpicked Governing Council.

It's interesting that this came up just by the by in a conference whose primary intent, according to well-informed Iraqi sources was to slam the Sunni Islamist Hizb-il-Islami (Party of Islam). Hizb-il-Islami serves on the Governing Council, but has played an independent role over Fallujah, arranging negotiations between the mujaheddin and the Americans, winning permission to get some aid through, and generally behaving, in the words of this source, "heroically." The word is that Bremer wanted to cut them down to size.

But the main story goes well beyond this. It's a story about hospital closings. Again unreported in English-language media is what happened with the main hospital in Fallujah. Fallujah is almost entirely on the eastern bank of the Euphrates; the main hospital is on the western bank. From the beginning of the assault on Fallujah, the American forces closed down the bridge; sources we interviewed said that anything that tried to cross the bridge was destroyed. Nobody could make it to the hospital, so the hospital staff voluntarily left the hospital, taking whatever supplies they could, and started treating people at what had previously been a small three-room outpatient clinic across the river (on the same side as the town). For two weeks, doctors were doing surgery on the ground because there weren't enough beds, with only the supplies and equipment they could transport, and the main hospital stood closed. You can say the Americans didn't close it on purpose, but no doctor who believes in the Hippocratic oath is going to sit in a hospital that nobody can reach while across the river people die in droves. Call it another form of "collateral damage." I 'm told that yesterday the controls on the bridge were eased up (not eliminated) and perhaps the hospital can resume functioning shortly.

What's been done in Najaf is even worse. I have this at secondhand. Pratap Chatterjee, an award-winning journalist who works for CorpWatch and has done a lot of reporting on corporate crimes, interviewed a doctor who was posted to Najaf. The doctor was working at the al-Sadr Teaching Hospital in Najaf (formerly the Saddam Hussein Teaching Hospital). This is a major institution, with 200 doctors; often, doctors come from Baghdad for training. On April 5 or 6 soldiers from the Spanish-language garrison that was posted to Najaf came to the hospital and told doctors they were shutting it down. They gave doctors two hours to leave, allowing them only to take personal items, not medical equipment. The hospital is sort of between Najaf and Kufa, and near the military base where the garrison is posted; the reason given for the closing was "security." Imagine the havoc caused by closing the biggest hospital in a major city for a week. The death toll due to this will never be figured into the total equation of the "liberation."

There's more even than this. It's a commonplace claim that after there's been fighting American soldiers come around the hospitals asking about the wounded, for the purpose of taking and interrogating any that might be resistance. Like everything else described above, this is a clear violation of the laws of war, and doctors resist as best they can. We have confirmation from a doctor at Nomaan Hospital in Aadhamiyah and Yarmouk Hospital in Yarmouk that, a few days after the offensive on Fallujah started, American soldiers came around to both places trying to take and interrogate wounded. These were the two hospitals that took the lion's share of Fallujah casualties. One of the doctors actually told me that he has many times discharged people straight from the emergency room, with inadequate time to recuperate, just to keep them out of the Americans' custody. Of course, one you get into their custody, whether you have anything to do with resistance or not, you disappear at least for months, sometimes longer. You get no access to lawyers, to your family, no right of habeas corpus, nothing. Being taken can ruin someone's life. What I've reported here is only things that I feel confident about. There are other claims that I couldn't substantiate and am not reporting -- and some, like the closure of Fallujah's main hospital, are just common knowledge), and I'm working on getting more details.

More to come...

April 18, 12:57 am EST: Baghdad, Iraq -- You hear a lot about the thieves and bandits ever since the "liberation" -- and that's certainly true to an extent. But my experience has been that your average Iraqi has no petty dishonesty of this kind.

I wrote earlier about my time in Aadhamiyah, when people were so furious about Fallujah but still took trouble to point out to me that my money was falling out of my pockets. I often leave small bills lying around in my hotel room. The dirt-poor middle-aged women who clean the hotel room -- and look remarkably like their counterparts in the United States -- never touch anything. And the amount of money is not small to them -- a $20 bill is one third of what the CPA was paying an Iraqi policeman every month, even though the job is phenomenally risky (of course, the salary was so pitiful that every policeman complained about it).

I remember, the first time I rode a "minibus", a small van with 13 passengers, while in Turkey -- and what a shock I felt when a man sitting behind me tapped my shoulder, stuck a bundle of bills in my hand, and indicated that I should pass it up towards the driver. People pay at different times, needing different amounts of change, some of which has to wait until somebody else pays with small bills, and they pass their money to complete strangers with complete faith that the right amount of change will come back to them -- and it always does.

As an American, I was very edgy about handing my money, not to the driver himself, but to a fellow passenger. It just doesn't occur to a Turk that someone else will pocket part of the money, then claim that it's his -- although it certainly occurred to me. It took me several minibus rides before I lost my natural wariness.

I confess, I sometimes left bills around deliberately in my hotel just to see what would happen (not that I'd have done anything about it).

Contrary to common perception, the poor of the world are mostly quite honest, even though they have far more justification for stealing. So I'm not saying this is exceptional behavior. I still think it's remarkable, though.

April 17, 12:05 pm EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- My ankle is still healing slowly from the time in Fallujah when we were running away from predator drones and what we thought were cluster bombs. I know the best treatment -- lying around for a couple of days. Unfortunately, that's just not possible here -- too much to do.

I talked more with my friends who were taken by the mujaheddin and held for 24 hours. Brave people, but they just, most of them, don't think it makes sense to stay. They can't do the work they came to do without an unacceptably high risk of kidnapping. One of them said, "Actually, in a way, it's worse now, waiting around the apartment, wondering. I mean, when the mujaheddin had us, we weren't worried about being kidnapped." Another told me that several of the Iraqis who work with her have been threatened. So, anyway, very few people are staying.

As for me, I'm still trying to get as much useful reporting done as possible before leaving. I came in through the Western highway but now that's probably impossible to get out through -- it's likely that you won't get past Fallujah.

April 17, 11:40 am EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- Karrada. Ghazi Saleh is a businessman in this relatively (and I stress the word "relatively") quiet, mostly Shi'a commercial area of Baghdad. He is a moderately prosperous man, owning a furniture shop and a business impossible before the "liberation" -- a mobile phone and telecommunications store. He had a good job working as a manager for a Greek company before the war, but still, it's the occupation that has enabled him to go into business for himself. You would think his would be the face on CPA posters all over the city.

I met Ghazi when I walked into his shop with a broken phone. He explained to me in great detail what I needed to do and then invited me to sit and chat. Like every Iraqi I've met, he was very pleased to hear that I'm of Indian origin. His face lit up and he started to tell me about an Indian restaurant they used to have in the area and tried out a few words on me (at one time, Hindi movies were popular throughout the Middle East, and so many Iraqis know how to say, "How are you?" and "I'm fine.").

But this is Iraq, and any conversation quickly turns to politics. Saleh is a very pragmatic man and, like so many Iraqis I've met, makes it a matter of pride to disavow any political affiliation. But when I ask, he tells me what he thinks very candidly. To start, he's no Saddam supporter. He says, "Saddam was a very stupid man. With all this oil wealth, why could he not do more for Iraq? He deserved what he got."

But, although he is still hopeful that things will get better, he has no good word for the occupation. He says, "In the beginning, we thought great things would happen, that the Americans would keep some of their promises. Now, they're still here, they have fixed nothing, there are no jobs, and we're tired." I ask, "Isn't the electricity improving?" He says, "Look for yourself [the power was out just then]. We get only eight to ten hours a day of power."

He motions toward a shopkeeper across the street, says, "When the Americans came, that man used to offer them juice. Now, he spits when they pass."

Saleh says, "When they liberated Kuwait, they had electricity back on in 24 hours -- they brought in big generators on ships. Why can't they do it here after 1 year?" He talks about the lack of job prospects -- unemployment is generally estimated at 50% -- and the fact that senior citizens, once guaranteed a pension, now have to demonstrate at the CP to get anything at all.

I ask him about Fallujah. I haven't found an Iraqi with a good word for the attack on Fallujah -- and, of course, the Governing Council, U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and even British military commanders in Basra have condemned it. Saleh is no exception. And, although he is not a follower of anyone, including Moqtada al-Sadr, he says clearly, "If they try to take Moqtada, they will open the gates of hell." When I spoke to him later about the standoff in Najaf, he was very apprehensive, believing that the continuing American military buildup signalled a likely assault. I asked if at that point al-Sistani would call for jihad, and he said, "If he doesn't, nobody will listen to him anymore. He has already said that Najaf is a red line the Americans must not cross."
 
 

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