[News] Fisk: Brutality a symptom of Western view of Arabs

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Brutality a symptom of Western view of Arabs

By Robert Fisk
The Independent

Why are we surprised at their racism, their brutality, their sheer
callousness towards Arabs? Those American soldiers in Saddam's old
prison at Abu Ghraib, those young British squaddies in Basra came -
as soldiers often come - from towns and cities where race hatred has
a home: Tennessee and Lancashire.

How many of "our" lads are ex-jailbirds themselves? How many support
the British National Party? Muslims, Arabs, "cloth heads", "rag
heads", "terrorists", "evil". You can see how the semantics break
down.

Add to that the poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood
movies that depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and
violent people - and soldiers are addicted to movies - and it's not
difficult to see how some British scumbag will urinate into the face
of a hooded man, how some American sadist will stand a hooded Iraqi
on a box with wires tied to his hands.

The sexual sadism - the bobby-sox girl soldier who points at a man's
genitals, the mock orgy in Abu Ghraib prison, the British rifle in
the prisoner's mouth - might be a crazed attempt to balance all those
lies about the Arab world, about the desert warrior's potency, the
harem, polygamy.

Even today, we still show the revolting Ashanti on our television
stations, a feature film about the kidnapping of the wife of an
English doctor by Arab slave-traders, which depicts Arabs as almost
exclusively child-molesters, rapists, murderers, liars and thieves.
It stars - heaven spare us - Michael Caine, Omar Sharif and Peter
Ustinov and was made partly in Israel.

Indeed, we now depict Arabs in our films as the Nazis once depicted
Jews. But Arabs are fair game. Potential terrorists to a man - and a
woman - they must be softened up, "prepared", humiliated, beaten,
tortured. The Israelis use torture in the Russian Compound in
Jerusalem. Now we torture in Saddam's old jail outside Baghdad and -
for this is where British soldiers beat a young Iraqi to death last
summer - in the former office of Saddam's most murderous chemical
warfare fascist, the awful "Chemical" Ali.

And the officers? Didn't the British lieutenants and captains and
majors in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment know that their lads were
kicking to death a young Iraqi hotel worker last summer?

That man's fate - and the documentary evidence proving that he was
murdered - was first revealed by The Independent on Sunday in
January. Didn't the CIA boys at Abu Ghraib know that Ivan "Chip"
Frederick and Lynddie England, two of the American soldiers in the
photographs published last week, were obscenely humiliating their
prisoners?

Of course they did. The last time I saw Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq,
she told me she had visited Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and found
nothing wrong with it. I should have guessed then that something had
gone terribly wrong in Iraq.

I remember how in Basra, on the eve of a visit by Tony Blair, I
visited the British Army's press office in the city to ask about the
death of 26-year-old Baha Mousa. The dead man's family had given me
British documents proving that he had been beaten to death in
custody, that the British Army had itself tried to pay off the family
if they would give up any legal claim against the soldiers who so
cruelly killed their son.

I was met with yawns and a total inability to furnish information
about the event. I was told to call the Ministry of Defence in
London. The officer I spoke to appeared weary, even impatient about
my inquiry. There was not a single word of compassion for the dead
man.

Back in September last year, General Karpinski was with a small group
of journalists in Abu Ghraib - the same ghastly prison in which
thousands were put to death by Saddam, the same jail in which
Frederick and England and their American buddies were standing their
hooded Iraqi prisoner on a box with supposed electrodes on his hands
- and General Karpinski took some delight in escorting us to the old
Saddam execution chamber.

She led the way into the concrete room with its raised dais and
gallows, and - in front of us all - triumphantly pulled the gallows
lever so that the trap door clanged down. She urged us to read the
last messages scrawled on the walls of the neighbouring death row by
Iraqis awaiting Saddam's vengeance. But there was something wrong
about her prison tour.

There was no clear judicial process for the prisoners and there was
no mention - until I brought it up - of the mortar attack on the
American-held jail which killed six of the inmates in their tents in
August, when General Karpinski was already in command of Iraq's 8,000
prisoners. They had been given "counselling", she told us. "They
seemed to think we had been using them as some kind of sand-bag." Abu
Ghraib was then being attacked by insurgents four out of every seven
nights. Now it is attacked twice every night.

Oddly, she claimed in answer to a question of mine that there were
"six prisoners claiming to be American and two claiming to be from
the UK". But when General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior Iraqi officer
in Iraq, later denied this, no one asked how the confusion had
arisen. Was General Karpinski making it up? Or was General Sanchez
not telling us the truth?

Prisoners' names were often confused, Arabic script was
mis-transliterated, men went "missing" from the files. It spoke of a
whole culture in which Iraqis - especially Iraqi prisoners - were
somehow not worthy of the same rights as us Westerners; which is why,
I suppose, the occupying powers in Iraq always give us the statistics
of Westerners' deaths but care not the slightest to discover the
statistics of the deaths of Iraqis, the very people they are mandated
to protect and care for.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a young American soldier off
Saadoun Street in the centre of Baghdad. He was giving sweets to
street kids and mimicking the Arabic for "thank you": sukran. Did he
know Arabic, I innocently asked. He grinned at me. "I know how to
shout at them," he said.

And there you have it.

We are all victims of our high-flown morality. "They" - the Arabs,
Muslims, "cloth heads", "rag heads", "terrorists" - are of a lesser
breed, of lower moral standards. They are people to be shouted at.
They have to be "liberated" and given "democracy".

But we little band of brothers, we dress ourselves up in the uniforms
of righteousness. We are marines or military police or a Queen's
regiment and we are on the side of good. "They" are on the side of
"evil". So we can do no wrong.

Or so it appeared until those shameful pictures last week tore apart
the whole bandwagon and proved that race hatred and prejudice is an
old historical inheritance of ours. We used to call Saddam the Hitler
of Iraq.

But wasn't Hitler one of "us", a Westerner, a citizen of "our"
culture? If he could kill six million Jews, which he did, why should
we be surprised that "we" can treat Iraqis like animals? Last week
came the photographs to prove we can. - The Independent

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