Saturday, December 13, 2003

The Anglo-American Invaders? Punishment of the Iraqis

By Abu Spinoza

The collective punishment that the United States and the United Kingdom are meting out against Iraqis is not new. It is the policy of the United States, contrary to a New York Times report that the standard “plan[s] to surround villages with barbed wire, demolish buildings used by insurgents or detain relatives of suspected guerrillas” are just part of “the get-tough tactics that have been used in recent weeks by Army units.”

The decade-long sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, were collective punishment par excellence with devastating consequences. Its effects have been well documented in various books, such as Anthony Arnove’s Iraq Under Occupation. The sanctions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children due to increased mortality, lack of access to clean water and medicine, and other factors.

At present the modes of collective punishment of the Iraqis continue to take new and horrific forms with Iraq under occupation. Consider a small but revealing example of what the occupation army is doing these days.

Ariana Eunjung Cha reports in her article, 2 Troops Killed in Attacks in Mosul, in the Washington Post:

“Military officials also said they detained other possible attackers and an intelligence officer, a financier and doctors linked to insurgents. The doctors allegedly treated guerrillas to help them avoid local hospitals.”

Rounding up doctors for merely treating injured resistance guerrillas is contrary to civilized norms. Arresting doctors for treating their fellow citizens engaged in militant resistance is a form of collective punishment. Indeed, arresting doctors for treating guerrillas may well force doctors to violate The Hippocratic Oath, which they are supposed to uphold. What do the Anglo-Americans occupiers want? Should the injured Iraqis guerrillas be left to die? And must all Iraqi doctors and medical workers be forced to become collaborators and complicit parties to the occupation? What would “we” think and say if Iraqi doctors treated U.S. soldiers the way that “we” want them to treat Iraqi guerrillas? Reflections on these matters ought to provoke thought, comparisons to the ugliest regimes of the past, outage and, above all, calls for an end to inhumane policies and practices.

Abu Spinoza is a columnist for Press Action.

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