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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
Endgame
in Baghdad
Human Shields
Go Home to Fight
by JOHN ROSS
AMMAN, JORDAN (March 11th). This past Friday (March 7th),
the day the fatal Blix report would be broadcast to an expectant
universe, my Turkish comrade, ex-Greenpeace Mediterranean campaigner
and Elvis Presley lookalike Tolga Temuge and I were perched upon
the rickety roof of the engine house at the Daura oil refinery
in west Baghdad, marking the site with industrial black paint,
when the Human Shield action finally fell irrevocably apart.
We had already filled in the six-meter-long H-U and were outlining
the M in the words that, when spelled out completely, would signal
George Bush's death-dealing missiles that the refinery was a
United Nations-certitified civilian site that provides fuel and
home heating oil to the residents of Baghdad and beyond, and
that by blasting the plant off the face of the earth, the U.S.
president would also be endangering the lives of his own citizens
and those of many other nations, when a delegation from the Organization
of Peace and Friendship, our hosts in Iraq, summoned us down
to the ground floor to read us the riot act.
Under a fatwa issued by Dr. Abdul Al-Hasimi,
the 'non-governmental' group's director, we were ordered to leave
Iraq immediately, banished from this beleaguered land because
we had usurped the function of an existing NGO by facilitating
the deployment of over 100 Shields to five key infrastructure
sites in and around Baghdad. Now the NGO and the government of
Saddam Hussein would take control of such deployments. Others
to be forcibly departed would be Gordon, a rangy, spike-haired
Australian who was now coordinating the site assignments; Eva,
an archly uppity woman lawyer from Slovenia who had led many
of the unprecedented anti-war demonstrations on the streets of
Baghdad that were an essential adjunct to our work; and the off-kilter
initiator of the Human Shield Action, ex-Desert Storm Marine
Ken Nichols O'Keefe, whose confrontational style and delusions
of personal aggrandizement had thoroughly disaffected the Iraqi
government during the weeks we spent in Baghdad.
The eviction order had actually been
called out by Dr. Hasimi at a disturbing meeting the previous
evening, during which he trained a fat finger upon the culprits
and accused us of, among other heinous crimes, 'forcing volunteers
to attend three-hour meetings against their will.' The expulsions
effectively decapitated an action whose autonomy had become a
thorn in the side of Saddam just as George Bush was revving up
his killing machine.
Even as Hans Blix was pronouncing his
weasil words to the U.N. Security Council on the east side of
Manhattan that evening, us villains gathered at the luxurious
Meridian Palestine Hotel for our ordered leave-taking. Previously,
Tolga and I had motored over to the International Press Center
to say our good-byes, but the media, mesmerized by the magnum
events on the CNN screens, did not even blink when we enunciated
our dilemma. Now my Turkish pal and I argued that we needed to
depart quietly into the night so as not to hand Bush new ammunition
for his crazed crusade to 'liberate' Iraq. Saddam was a problem,
as are all two-bit dictators installed by CIA fiat, but not the
primary enemy of world peace. Now it was time to go home and
deepen the larger movement, the one against Bush's reign of terror,
of which the Human Shields had always been just a sideshow.
But Ken was not to be swayed. His movement
had been 'rubbished,' he kept whining, and determined to force
a nose-to-nose with the minders, he resisted their efforts to
pack us off without a final tantrum, and eventually he and Eva
ran off into the Baghdad night reportedly to yet another swank
hotel, the Rashid, to which the police were soon dispatched to
round them up.
But by this late hour, three of us had
embraced dozens of the Shields we left behind, led a rousing
chorus of 'No War!,' and, accompanied by four drum-pounding Buddhist
monks who kept muttering about what a crazy world they had walked
into, were already on the road.
Out there in the dark of the desert only
marginally illuminated by the sliver of a new moon, with an uncertain
destination in our immediate future, my cohorts dozed while I
eyed the thick necks of our minders. Would our hosts veer suddenly
into the widerness, order us out, strip us naked, and riddle
our corpses with dum-dum bullets as payback for our gratuitous
disobedience? Would the iron gates of Saddam Prison ominously
yawn open to receive us?
None of the above.
Our hosts were genuinely embarrassed
by the prospect of expelling us from a country we had come to
protect with our lives from U.S. Murder Incorporated, and they
treated us with kindly kid gloves, shaking our hands at the border,
and inviting us back once the terrible deeds up ahead were done
with and the Iraqi people could finally live in peace. I reflected
on other deportees, on Mexican workers back home in my own country,
chained up and dragged back to their own border for the sin of
working a job so low on the ladder that no one else would do
it.
Ironically, we passed in that dark desert
night a carload of eight Mexican compas, one of them a nun from
the San Carlos Hospital down in the Zapatista zone of southeastern
Chiapas, on their way to Baghdad to relieve us as 'escudos humanos.'
The illuminated sign at the Iraqi border
featured the usual portaiture of Uncle Saddam and the unusual
inscription: 'Isn't it nice to come to the border of a country
where no one has impeded your mission?' The gods of irony were
working overtime in that frigid desert dawnlight.
The morning sandstorm blew furiously
as we swerved up towards Amman, dodging the endless train of
rusting tanker trucks that defy the unconscionable U.N. sanctions
by ferrying fuel to the oil-less kingdom of Jordan. The blinding
grit flew so thickly that our chauffeur was at times driving
blind. Such weather, as I have had occasion to note in these
erratic dispatches, will sabotage Bush's war from the ground
up. An AP dispatch found in Sunday's Saudi Gazette reports that
sandstorms around Camp New Jersey, on the Kuwaiti border, have
already caused the Yanqui troops to stray into the surrounding
desert as they feel their way from the mess tents back to their
own flattened quarters. Recruiting teenagers off ghetto streets
and country farms to come fight under such inhospitable conditions
is just as tantamount to premeditated homicide as was packing
them off to the jungles of Vietnam three decades and more back
down history's tunnel.
Iraq will not be the piece of cake the
Pentagon brass advertises it to be. I'm convinced that the new
Human Shields who replace us on sites like my oil refinery (never
in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I would wax nostalgic
over an oil refinery) have not gathered there to interpose their
bodies between the Bush bombs and the civilian infrastructure.
Many are hard-eyed, pro-active fighters who have come to Iraq
to take the heads of the hated invaders. Despite the 3,000-missile
blitzkreig of which Bush never tires of boasting, there will
be a lot of street-fighting in the very near future. 'We will
fight them block by block just as our grandfathers fought the
British colonialists,' warns Mr. Al-Karash, the general manager
of the Daura refinery, who himself survived a 42-day inferno
back in '91 to get this vital installation up and running again.
Up ahead in Amman, wanna-be Shields and
recent escapees from Baghdad have gathered at the Al Saraya hotel,
a cheesy fleabag hard by the bus station, with 24-hour-a-day
internet connections. Many have been there for weeks trying fruitlessly
to enter Iraq but will never get their visas together. Others
have recently evacuated from Baghdad, exasperated by government
manipulation, or propelled by their own fears of dying under
the gringo bombardment as the war crescendos out of control,
'Chicken Shields,' the New York Daily News recently slugged them.
Most are in terminal stasis, hanging on until the bitter end.
A sizable number who were living in Euro squats or on the streets
or who have deposited their meager possessions in cold storage,
have no home to go home to. They will watch the war unfold from
Amman as their diminishing grubstakes fade to zero.
The ambience at the Saraya is smarmy
with what could have been and never was. Now a mad Ken O'Keefe
has belatedly arrived to preside over this lost tribe.
It is time I suppose to take measure
of whatever happened to the Human Shields. In a very real sense,
we fulfilled our mission. Like the double-decker buses that have
long since returned home to London, the action was merely a vehicle
for inciting the massive movement against Bush's planned genocide
and honing the commitment of our own combatants. We succeeded
in making the bombing of civilian targets a frontline issue,
put hundreds on those targets, and raised the stakes by daring
George Bush to bomb us into oblivion. In this small light, we
may have indeed made the White House more cautious about leveling
the civilian population it lies that it is liberating. We even
opened a thin slice of democratic space with our spontaneous
street demonstrations, which may be remembered by civil society
whenever their time comes round again. But the war will be on
the world's doorstep very soon, perhaps as early as tonight,
and under such circumstances the window of opprtunity is closing
rapidly.
It is time now to go home and return
to our countries and communities, our loved ones and companeros,
and rejoin the bigger movement of millions and millions who have
marched month after month against the prospect of this evil war.
At least this is what I intend to do in the next weeks, and I
am the only one I can speak for. But before I go, I want to thank
the Iraqi people one more time for opening their arms to us,
for feeding and housing us and telling us time and again that
they love us. 'We love you,' they smiled when we walked the streets
of their cities, 'we love you.' In four decades on the road,
this has never happened to me anywhere before.
There is no questiion that I have left
a good chunk of my heart back in Baghdad under the roar and whistle
of the stacks at the Daura refinery. May it survive Bush and
his bombs in fighting style in the awful days to come. Inchilah.
John Ross
will be back on the streets of North America in the next week
to deal with George Bush's intended genocide of the Iraqi people.
He invites you to join him. He can be reached at: johnross@igc.org
Yesterday's
Features
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream (Interview)
Jason Leopold
Rumsfeld and Bush Sr. Opposed 1989 UN Investigation of Saddam
for Human Rights Violations
Josh Ruebner
An
Open Letter to My Former Dean, Paul Wolfowitz (and Other "Court"
Jews)
Mitchel Cohen
The
Gulf War 12 Years Later: Why Class Matters
Carlos Fuentes
The Insulting Insinuations of the Bush Regime
Fareed Marjaee
The Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Baghdad
Rick Giombetti
The Savagely Soft Underbelly
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Rove Memo: How to Launch a War
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