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A cry for justice from a good man who expected us
to protect his son
A report from the man who broke the original story...
By Robert Fisk
05/17/07 "The
Independent" -- -
-From the moment I knocked on the front door of Daoud Mousa
al-Maliki's home in Basra, I knew something had gone terribly
wrong in the British Army in southern Iraq.
I had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland - I
had even been threatened by British officers in Belfast - but I
somehow thought that things had changed, that a new, more
disciplined army had emerged from the dark, sinister days of the
Irish conflict. But I was wrong. Baha Mousa, Daoud's son, had
died from the injuries he received in British custody, a young,
decent man whose father was a cop, who did nothing worse than
work as a receptionist in a Basra hotel.
Then I went to see Kifah Taha, who had been so badly beaten by
British troops in the presence of Baha Mousa that he had
terrible wounds in the groin. He told me how the soldiers would
call their Iraqi prisoners by the names of football stars -
Beckham was one name they used - before kicking them around the
detention headquarters in Basra. There were stories of Iraqi
prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked
and punched in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders,
forced to sit with their heads down lavatory holes.
All this is among the evidence which ex-prisoners - and Baha
Mousa's father - are taking to the High Court, now that the
courts martial which followed Mousa's death have produced just
one solitary conviction, a soldier jailed for a year and
dismissed from the Army for "mistreating" prisoners.
There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in
the field. If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there
were a hundred others that will never be revealed. New stories
of "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture in
British custody are emerging from Basra. US troops are still
being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in Iraq. If
one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a
US unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many
others have died in circumstances we shall never discover?
The My Lai atrocity in Vietnam was revealed relatively soon
after it occurred. But it was more than 40 years after the
Korean War that we learned US soldiers had fired into thousands
of unarmed Korean civilian refugees, because they feared troops
were hiding among them. How many air strikes in Afghanistan and
Iraq kill the innocent yet go unrecorded, because journalists
are no longer safe to travel in these remote, dangerous areas?
Looking back, I found out about Baha Mousa only because it was
still safe - just - to move around in Basra in 2004, to knock on
front doors, visit hospitals, interview grieving relatives
without the fear of being kidnapped or having my throat cut.
Baha Mousa's young wife had died only a few months before him -
from a tumour of the brain - and his two small children sat
devastated in their home, staring at me as if I were a war
criminal. His father, Daoud, said to me then, as he says in his
latest affidavit: "As for me, Baha was not just my son, he was
my friend."
His indignation at the failure of the British courts martial to
convict anyone for Baha's murder rings through his affidavit, a
moving cry for justice from a good man in Iraq who expected
British troops to protect his family, not kill his son. He even
believed an officer who promised to look after Baha, two days
before Daoud was invited to inspect and identify his broken
body.
How have we failed these people! What culture created these
young men who treated their civilian prisoners with such
contempt, cursing them and - if the documents are accurate -
calling them "shit" and treating them like animals? Did it come
from Glasgow or Cardiff or London or from some prison - yes,
quite a lot of British soldiers are ex-prisoners themselves,
former guests of Her Majesty who know all about prison rules and
prison abuse.
How come the Americans tortured men at Abu Ghraib - officially
permitted to do so, as we now know - without realising that they
were breaking the rules of ordinary humanity? Is this the
result, perhaps, of all those violent, virtual reality worlds so
shockingly documented by Tim Guest in his new book, Second
Lives, where pain no longer hurts, where lives are only
"virtual", where killing is easy?
Yes, I know the old saw, that our chaps are up against it,
risking their lives in the front line, occasionally running over
the traces amid the fear and drama of battle, a few rotten
apples, etc. That's what we said about the 1st Battalion, the
Parachute Regiment when they killed 14 innocent Catholic
civilians in Derry in 1972. First Para? Salt of the earth. Maybe
they just broke after so much abuse and danger - except that 1st
Para were a reserve battalion at the time, largely confined to
Palace Barracks outside Belfast.
And the soldiers in Basra? They were beating their prisoners in
the comfort of their barracks - "Chemical Ali's" old jail, of
course - in the comparative safety of Basra in the immediate
post-invasion months.
It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old
clichés about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the
desert floor. Maybe there are hearts and minds to be maintained
inside the Green Zone in Baghdad or any of the other "green
zones" around the Middle East where our Western forces shelter
from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader
castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high
ground - if ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and
George Bush's illegal invasion - has long ago been abandoned.
We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be
left to Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the
grief of his son's death with him for ever - to create a new
country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them.
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