Main | Reports
|
HUMAN RIGHTS, US STYLE
The pupil is gone, the master has replaced him
It was around 6 pm, this Sunday July 27th 2003, when the El-Birhana
family
left their home in their car, driving towards their neighbourhood
Church,
Al-Mansour, Hay Al-Andalous, right in the middle of Baghdad.
The El-Birhana family was comprised of the mother and her two sons,
Tamer et
Mazen, respectively 35 and 27 years old. Tamer was driving the family
vehicle and was proceeding normally towards the end of the alley,
when
suddently at the point of turning, the car was sprayed with US soldiers
gunfire. The entire Birhana family was killed instantly in a terrifying
bloodbath. The car that was following immediately behind, with two
passengers on board, experienced the same fate at the hand of US
soldiers.
Shock and consternation in the neighbourhood! In these (rather
durable)
times of heatwave, this is a really cold shower informing the world
on the
true nature of the mission of the United States in Iraq. Human rights?
Democracy? None of that for the Iraqis. The only thing in store
for them is
brutality, contempt, and humiliation, the most blatant form of which
is the
body search of women by men at the checkpoints established by the
US
military everywhere in the country. When the least respect for the
Iraqi
people would have required that the US invaders assign such duty
to women.
It is this same attitude of contempt which lead the soldiers to
fire on
Iraqi civilians without any warning on this Sunday July 27th. No
one could
understand the behaviour of the US military in this massacre of
5 persons.
How can they behave so savagely with people they claim to have liberated
from the savagery of Saddam?
No journalist was tolerated at the scene of this crime. With utmost
brutality, the soldiers grabbed the Al- Jazeera Arab Network journalist
and
took him away, before they closed the sector. Closing the sector
is what
they should have done when they invested the place, supposedly to
catch
Saddam's young son whom they did not find however. They could have
spared
innocent lives like those of the Birhana family.
Within minutes of the carnage, the soldiers took away the bodies
of the
mother, the youngest son, and other victims, leaving Tamer's corpse,
in a
pool of blood, on the side of the street for over one hour, under
still
overpowering heat.
Alerted by the gunfire, the neighbours faced this spectacle in
total dismay.
"Ya Haram!", whispers Laraba, a neighbour in her forties,
drying her tears
with the old scarf she was wearing on her head. "Why have these
damned
soldiers done this? These were good people, a Christian family held
in
esteem in all the neighbourhood. In 30 years, nobody ever held a
complaint
against them. Ya habibi ya Tamer! What have these criminals done
to you ? "
"He wouldn't have killed a fly", Larama continued in my
direction, "look how
they have smashed his head!" Difficult to withstand, the young
man's head
was completely crushed and part of his brain was coming out of his
skull.
Two hours later, only the dried blood of the Iraqi victims was
left, to be
met at some point in the future with an official "Sorry",
the umpteenth
criminal mistake which nobody will ever have to pay for. Not to
mention the
fact that Tamer's father left to work in the United States several
years
ago, and that Tamer himself worked as a translator for the occupying
forces... But for the latter, he remained the Arab, the Iraqi, the
enemy.
Baghdad, July 27th, 2003
Zehira Houfani (writer and journalist),
Member of the Montreal Iraq Solidarity Project
|
|