Robert Fisk: Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon - What has the world done?
Robert Fisk: Welcome to Palestine
Published: 16 June 2007
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?
And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?
All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).
We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.
We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror".
Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?
It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).
If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?
Robert Fisk: 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...
Published: 17 June 2007
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.
Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder
Published: 15 June 2007
Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered.
A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car.
"Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority."
True.
The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle?
Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession.
It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies.
Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon.
No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way.
Published: 16 June 2007
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?
And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?
All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).
We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.
We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror".
Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?
It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).
If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?
Robert Fisk: 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...
Published: 17 June 2007
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.
Robert Fisk: Sinister strategy behind an MP's murder
Published: 15 June 2007
Everybody was obsessed by figures. True, the cortège was proceeding towards the Chatila martyrs' cemetery, true Saad Hariri - the son of the murdered ex-premier whose killers are now to be tried by the United Nations - walked in the vanguard. But it was the numbers that mattered.
A phone call came through on my mobile from a Lebanese MP - readers may debate his identity - when the carbonised skeleton of Walid Eido was still hot in his bombed car.
"Robert, they only need to kill three more and Siniora has no parliamentary majority."
True.
The first words of L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper's lead story yesterday began: "70...69...68." If the MPs supporting the government of Fouad Siniora fall to 65, there is no more "majority" to support in parliament. So no wonder they were claiming yesterday that the pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, must permit by-elections for the murdered assembly members, that such elections would be held even if Mr Lahoud declined to give his assent. MPs might be forgiven for losing their seats to popular dissatisfaction in Lebanon, but why should they lose their seats because of bombs or because of the accuracy - and here we speak of the ex-minister Pierre Gemayel - of an AK-47 rifle?
Eido's funeral yesterday - along with that of his son, Khaled (another eight died with them in the car-bombing in west Beirut on Wednesday), was a wearying, dismal, painful affair. "Omar, Omar," the crowds cried, clinging to their caliph, and "Hizbollah out of the southern suburbs," a demand flourished with a series of obscene references to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. This was a Sunni funeral and they buried their dead beside the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh al-Husseini, who tried to maintain the existence of Palestine (and frolicked with Adolf Hitler, to the disgust of Israel and the West). Saad Hariri - more noble in vision than he tends to be in words - walked at the top of the procession.
It marched past bullet-scarred buildings from the civil war - a ghostly reminder of everything we hope to avoid in the coming days -- and past the 1941 French war cemetery many of whose Free French "liberators" were Muslim Algerians and Indo-Chinese (as we would have called them then) whose Petainist French adversaries left for France under a truce that allowed them to fight again against the Allies.
Walid Eido was a respected judge, a Sunni opponent of Syria, a man who had called Hizbollah's "camp" down town an "occupation" and he was murdered, as so many of Syria's opponents have been in Lebanon.
No, of course there is no proof that Syria did the deed. Any more than there is proof that all the other opponents of Syria were murdered by Damascus (Hariri? Gibran? Kassir? Gemayel? Now Eido?). And as usual, there are no arrests. Martyr, martyr, martyr; that's what the press keep calling the Fallen of Lebanon. I guess it's easier that way.