The human face of 'collateral damage'
This first-hand account of the war's impact on Iraqi civilians -- virtually ignored by the U.S. media -- paints a grim picture of death and destruction
EDITOR'S NOTE: In early February, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark traveled through towns and cities in Iraq to assess civilian casualties and damage from the U.S.-led air war. What Clark found defies the Pentagon's desciption of a clean, surgical bombing campaign with only "collateral" damage. The damage to homes, hospitals, markets, stores, water processing stations, mosques, schools and other nonmilitary sites "was staggering and an attack on the people and economy of Iraq," he said.
Clark's fact-finding tour was major, front-page news throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South and Central America, Bob Schwartz, an aide to Clark, told the Bay Guardian. But here at home, the mass media "effectively censored him," he added. The big three networks and CNN didn't even mention the tour, while a few newspapers, including the SF Chronicle, covered it with a sentence or two.
Here is Clark's report.
By Ramsey Clark
Febraury 20, 1991
"BABYLON IS NOTHING else than an infinite game of chance," Jorge Luis Borges wrote. Alexander the Great died there.
George Bush has risked regional stability, Arab and Muslim hostility, the alienation of all poor countries, Soviet relations and renewed Soviet militarism, the U.S. and world economies, ecological disaster, the integrity of the United Nations, hundreds of thousands of lives and his own presidency in the most senseless gamble of modern times. Did he really believe Iraq would be another easy feather in the U.S. military cap like Grenada, the Libyan bombing and Panama?
Traveling more than 2,000 miles through Iraq with a camera crew from Feb. 2-8 seeking to evaluate civilian casualties and damage to civilian property, I witnessed an assault on the civilian life and economy of a small country.
Among the cities and towns in which we examined civilian damage were Baghdad, Basra, Diwaniya, and through press corps representatives and our camera team, Nayaf, Hilla and Nasseriya. We observed damage in other smaller places along the way.
No city, town or roadside stop had any running water, electricity, telephone service, or adequate gasoline for transportation. The effect of this on the cities is a disaster. Minister of Health Mohammed Said called the pollution of public water systems the greatest health problem in the country. Tens of thousands are known to be sick, hundreds of thousands assumed to be and several thousand dead.
A small city like Diwaniya was bombed at the central square. On one side of the square three small hotels of 30 to 50 rooms were destroyed, along with many shops, cafes, offices and some apartments. The damage was comparable on the other side.
The post office and radio telephone office were also damaged. They may have been the targets, but we saw five or six undamaged radio telephone relay towers on the way in and out of town.
On the outskirts of Diwaniya we probed through four nearly contiguous residential areas in which scores of homes were damaged or destroyed. We were told 23 people were killed -- six in one family -- and 75 injured. Talking with neighbors in the area, they described losses that suggested casualties were higher.
Basra was the most heavily damaged place we visited. In five residential areas we examined hundreds of homes destroyed. Several hundred residents were killed, we were told, and many hundreds injured.
One upper-middle-class residential area bombed on Feb. 4 had 128 homes and apartments damaged or destroyed. We were told 14 people were killed and 46 injured, but survivors protecting whatever remained of their homes gave accounts that indicated greater casualties. At least 15 cars were visibly crushed or damaged in garages.
Bombs also hit a very large low-cost public housing development, destroying or severely damaging 18 units and killing 46 people and injuring more than 70. There was a direct hit on the corner of the high school and the elementary school across the street was severely damaged.
On the outskirts of Basra a mosque, Al Makat, lay in rubble, its minaret standing nearby. Ten bodies of the 12 family members believed to have been there when the bomb hit had been found.
The central market with more than 1,000 shops and vendors was bombed too. A huge crater marked the place where a supermarket had stood. Shops and sheds were damaged with eight persons killed and 40 injured. The bomb hit at 4 pm. When we were there several days later at about 11 am, hundreds of people were in the area.
A family night club was hit at about 8:30 pm while we were having dinner at our nearby hotel, the Sheraton Al Basrah. The blast shattered glass in the dining room. Civil Defense escorted us to the scene within an hour. Apparently no one was killed. If the club been open, scores would have died. About 150 yards away a teaching hospital, closed for a week from prior damage, was shaken, but apparently not damaged since the windows were already blown out.
In the cities and towns we visited, there was no "collateral" military damage; only civilian sites were destroyed. City bridges, telephone exchanges, electric generator plants, water processing and pumping stations, even government office buildings are essentially civilian and entirely noncombatant. We saw no evidence of a military presence, withdrawal, or damage in any of the bombed areas we examined.
The hospitals are haunting. Seven are closed, others damaged. At night there is no heat, no light except candles, lanterns, flashlights. Emergency rooms get electricity from gasoline generators. Medicine, including sedatives and painkillers, is inadequate. There are moans in wards. In the dim light you can see badly wounded children, women and men huddling in the cold. Surgeons have no water, alcohol, or antiseptic to wash their hands as they move from one wounded person to another.
Dr. Ibrahim Al Noore, head of the Red Crescent for 10 years and a pediatrician who interned in London, estimated as of Feb. 6 that civilian deaths from bombing were 6,000-7,000 with another 6,000 dead from contaminated water, lack of medicines and insufficient supplies of infant milk formula. His office delivers all Red Cross medicines from outside Iraq to civilian hospitals and is in at least weekly contact with every hospital by automobile.
Our annual military budget is more than four times Iraq's gross national product. Their per capita income with oil is 1/8 of ours. We are crippling society in that small and poor country by massive bombing.
The assault on civilian and noncombatant life is a war crime. As long ago as 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said "the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own country."
This article is adapted from one that will appear in the March 11 issue of The Nation.
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