by Robert Fisk
Saniya wanted the flags of every Arab nation on the coffins of those killed in the American raid—“because it was their fault, because they did not unite and because, for this reason, Raafat was killed by all the Arab world.” A year later, eight-year-old Kinda would write a letter to her dead sister:
Dear Fafo,
I will see you one day. I miss you very much. I wish I was with you all the time. I love you. When you died, everything changed it was ever [sic] worse. I shout at my Mom and Dad . . . Please come back one day or I go to you. You come and take me in the night and take me to see you. And then bring me back. I just wish. I love you. Your sister Kinda.
Bassam refused to visit his daughter’s grave. In 1994 he resigned from the nationalised Libyan oil company and returned to Beirut with his family, leaving Raafat’s remains behind in Tripoli. “Once the soul leaves the body, it doesn’t matter where the body is,” he remarked years later. “It says this in the Koran. I don’t believe in visiting graves. I am a strong believer. I believe that one day you’re going to meet that person again. Visiting a grave means that you’re attached to a body and that is wrong.” Saniya is not so strict. “Raafat always wanted to be with us. Sometimes I feel ‘at least let our bones be together.’ ” Nineteen years after her death, on a visit to Libya in 2005, Bassam did visit the cemetery where his daughter was buried and stood and wept before Raafat’s grave.
But Bassam’s anger never died, not least because Kinda suffered deeply from her sister’s death. Still feeling leg pains from injuries to her spinal cord, it was nine more years before she realised Raafat was dead, when she at last visited her sister’s grave in 1995. “I had to grow up without her, without having a big sister,” she says. “I have a lot of friends and they sometimes ask what it’s like to be an only child, sometimes I tell them how Fafo died in the air raid . . .” Today, Kinda, a remarkably pretty young woman of twenty-six, teaches in the educational studies department at the Deutsche Schule in Beirut. Bassam, who believes in the law as he believes in justice, wrote to ex-President Reagan’s daughter Patti, to ex-President Carter, to lawyers in Britain and America to seek redress. In the United States he was warned that any legal action for damages for Raafat’s death might be treated as a “frivolous suit” in the courts. “If you don’t follow up an injustice and let the world know what happened to you, then injustice wins,” he says. “I want the world to know what happened to our family . . . People say that it is a tragedy Kinda doesn’t have an elder sister. But she did have a sister—and she was taken from us.”
Among the family snapshots, Saniya treasures two crumpled sheets of paper that she found in the rubble of the villa. Both are covered in Raafat’s handwriting. Apparently written to herself only days before her death, the letter is an expression of Raafat’s fear and suspicion of the world but also of her hopes of a future happiness, a sombre and moving tribute to her own life:
People are only faces, images, masks worn by each one of them to deceive each other . . . Meanwhile, here I am watching, trying to survive, among a group of actors who try to show as if they understood it all but really have understood nothing, [the] hypocrites. Life is a game, a gamble, and people are its victims, its players . . . I hope that one day I shall find that stream of light, that breath of life which will open my soul up and let [me] go FREE, FREE, FREE to eternity.
At the bottom of the letter, Raafat has drawn the wings of four great white birds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Die Is Cast
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
—Walter Scott, Marmion, VI, introduction, st. 17
HOW SMALL HE LOOKED in the high-backed chair. You had to sit in the auditorium of the UN General Assembly to realise that George Bush Junior—threatening war in what was built as a house of peace—could appear such a little man. But then again Julius Caesar was a little man, and so was Napoleon Bonaparte. So were other more modern, less mentionable world leaders. Come to think of it so was General Douglas MacArthur, who had his own axis of evil, which took him all the way to the Yalu River. But on 12 September 2002, two-thirds of the way through George W. Bush’s virtual declaration of war against Iraq, there came a dangerous, tell-tale code which suggested that he really did intend to send his tanks across the Tigris River. “The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people,” he told us in the UN General Assembly. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled on for twenty minutes but the speechwriters must have known what this meant when they cobbled it together.
Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America “has no quarrel with the Libyan people.” Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States “has no quarrel with the Iraqi people.” In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he “has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan.” And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said—absolutely none—with the Iraqi people. So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it’s flak jackets on.
Perhaps it was the right place to understand just how far the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq might take us. The green marble fittings, the backcloth wall of burnished gold and the symbol of that dangerous world shielded by the UN’s olive branches gave Mr. Bush the furnishings of an emperor, albeit a diminutive one. Television flattens faces, gives false familiarity to expressions that ought to be studied. In the flesh, Bush had none of the idealised, polished integrity that he believed he showed on the screen. I watched the angry—pugnacious—way in which he spoke. “The people”—here he looked up to his right, eyes narrowed— “of the United States”—up to the left now, eyes still narrowed—“of America.” There are two prompters at the UN, on the left and on the right of the speaker. But now Bush looked straight ahead, eyes wider, challenging, almost desperate, a mixture of innocence and arrogance. Just a day earlier, he told us, America had commemorated an attack that had “brought grief to my country.” But he didn’t mention Osama bin Laden, not once. It was Saddam Hussein to whom we had to be reintroduced—he used Saddam’s name eight times in his address, with fifteen references to the “Iraqi regime.”
Surfing that veil of American tears which bin Laden’s killers had created, it was also clear that the Bush plans for the Middle East were on a far greater scale than the mere overthrow of the Iraqi leader who once regarded himself as America’s best friend in the Gulf. There must be a democratic Afghanistan—President Hamid Karzai vigorously nodded his approval down among the General Assembly dictators—and there must be democracy in Palestine; and this would lead to “reforms throughout the Muslim world.” Reforms? In Saudi Arabia? In Jordan? In Iran? We were not told. The Bush theme, of course, was an all too familiar one; of Saddamite evil, laced with the usual caveats, conditional clauses and historical distortions. We all knew Saddam Hussein was a vicious, cruel dictator—we knew that when he was our friend—but the president insisted on telling us again. Saddam had repeatedly flouted UN Security Council resolutions; no mention here, of course, of Israel’s flouting of resolutions 242 and 338 demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian land.
Bush spoke of the tens of thousands of opponents of Saddam Hussein who had been arrested and imprisoned and summarily executed and tortured—“all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state”—but there was no mention that these same beatings and burnings and electric shocks and mutilations and rapes were being readily perpetrated when America was on very good terms with Iraq before 1990, when the Pentagon was sending intelligence information to Saddam to help him kill more Iranians. Indeed, one of the most telling aspects of the Bush speech was that all the sins of which he specifically accused the Iraqis—a good many undoubtedly true—began in the crucial year of 1991. There was no reference to Saddam’s flouting of UN
resolutions when the Americans were helping him. There were a few reminders by Bush of the gas attacks against Iran—without mentioning that this very same Iran was now supposed to be part of the “axis of evil.”
Then there were the grammatical problems, the sleight of hand historians use when they cannot find the evidence to prove that Richard III really did kill the princes in the tower. If it wasn’t for the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq “would likely” have possessed a nuclear weapon by 1993. Iraq “retains the physical infrastructure needed to build” a nuclear weapon—which is not quite the same thing as actually building it. The phrase “should Iraq acquire fissile material” didn’t mean it had acquired it. And being told that Iraq’s enthusiasm for nuclear scientists “leaves little doubt” about its appetite for nuclear weapons wasn’t quite the same as having proved it had obtained these weapons. Was this the evidence upon which America would go to war?
The UN—for this was the emperor’s message to the delegates sitting before him—could take it or leave it, join America in war or end up like that old donkey, the League of Nations. Bush mentioned the League, dismissing it as a talking shop without adding that the United States had refused to join.191 But it was clear how he intended to sell the war on the back of 11 September 2001. “Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale,” he said. And there we had it. Osama bin Laden equalled Saddam Hussein and—who knows?—Iran or Syria or anyone else.
If al-Qaeda productions had outdone Hollywood on 11 September 2001, Bush productions were now the makeover artists, turning Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda’s Saudi hijacker-killers into Iraqis. The creative centre of America, as one columnist was to point out after the Iraqi invasion, was no longer New York or Los Angeles. For the moment, it was Washington, “where every day, more fiction is spun by the yard.” Who would have believed, a year ago, that it would be the shaven features of Saddam Hussein we’d have to hate rather than the unshaven features of Osama bin Laden? As usual, our newspaper and television journalists connived at it all. Wasn’t it the task of reporters to have asked why the picture suddenly changed? When did the transition take place? I asked during a lecture in New York. I owe it to Professor Robert Alford of the City University of New York Graduate Center to have enlightened me—it happened about the time of the Enron scandal.192
For months, I had not believed in this future war. Simon Kelner, my editor at The Independent, agreed with me. “I doubt if there’s going to be a war over Iraq,” he said. Leonard Doyle, my foreign editor was not so sure. But when Bush stopped speaking on 12 September 2002, I walked out of the General Assembly, picked up a pay phone and dialled London. “Leonard, I was wrong,” I said. “I’ve never seen a man of such arrogance before—and he means what he says. There’s going to be a war.”
Looking back on those extraordinary months, it is as if we lived in a dream— Bush, his earnest, obedient partner, the British prime minister Tony Blair, and all those of us who thought this future conflict a madness. We drifted towards the abyss, knowingly, awake yet asleep, aware that we could protest at this folly—we did, in words, in the streets—yet watching mesmerised as sleepwalkers led our countries to war. Hitler once remarked that he “walked the path that destiny dictates.” Saddam Hussein had always done this. So, presumably, did Osama bin Laden think of himself. But now Bush and Blair were walking the same omniscient, vain road.
We had seen the nature of the new America that Bush was growing on the ruins of the World Trade Center, the cruel, extrajudicial world that was to be nurtured with the blood and souls of all who died on 11 September 2001. Prisoners shackled, hooded, sedated. Taken to a remote corner of the world where they may be executed, where the laws of human rights are suspended. It took time to realise that Guantanamo was a mirror of the treatment that every Middle East dictatorship meted out to its opponents. Shackled, hooded, threatened with death by “courts” that would give no leeway to defence or innocence: this was how every Arab secret police force dealt with enemies of the regime. This was what the Western hostages of Beirut faced in the 1980s; this was the “justice” that Iran’s hanging judges bestowed upon their enemies, what Iraq’s insurgents would do with their captives. In this project, we journalists were complicit. Had not Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, personally advised Bush to take the “harshest measures possible” against those who had attacked America?
And in the coming months, all that we most feared about this new form of “justice” came to pass: torture, sexual humiliation, murder under interrogation, rape, extrajudicial killings—by American and British troops, by our vicious allies in the “war on terror,” by all who were convinced that our cause—democracy, freedom, liberty—should be defended with any means, even if those means destroyed the democracy, freedom and liberty that we claimed to be defending. As we prepared ourselves for the next stage of our “war on terror”—the invasion of Iraq—we let slip the collective memory of Afghanistan’s betrayal. Even more seriously, we ignored the lessons that post-Taliban Afghanistan might hold for us. We chose not to dwell too much on the way in which we—the victors, the liberators, the bringers of freedom—treated the Afghans with whom, of course, we had “no quarrel.”
THE “WAR ON TERROR” reached the Afghan village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May 2002. Haji Birgit Khan, the bearded, eighty-five-year-old Pashtun village leader and head of 12,000 local tribal families, was lying on a patch of grass outside his home. Faqir Mohamedin was sleeping among his sheep and goats in a patch of sand to the south when he heard “big planes moving in the sky.” Even at night, it is so hot that many villagers spend the hours of darkness outside their homes, although Mohamedin and his family were in their mud-walled house. There were 105 families in Hajibirgit, and all were woken by the thunder of helicopter engines and the thwack of rotor blades and the screaming voices of the Americans.
Haji Birgit Khan was seen running stiffly from his lawn towards the white-walled village mosque, a rectangular cement building with a single loudspeaker and a few threadbare carpets. Several armed men were seen running after him. Hakim, one of the animal-herders, saw the men from the helicopters chase the old man into the mosque and heard a burst of gunfire. “When our people found him, he had been killed with a bullet, in the head,” he says, pointing downwards. There is a single bullet hole in the concrete floor of the mosque and a dried bloodstain beside it. “We found bits of his brain on the wall.”
Across the village, sharp explosions were detonating in the courtyards and doorways. “The Americans were throwing stun grenades at us and smoke grenades,” Mohamedin recalls. “They were throwing dozens of them at us and they were shouting and screaming all the time. We didn’t understand their language, but there were Afghan gunmen with them, too, Afghans with blackened faces. Several began to tie up our women—our own women—and the Americans were lifting their burqas, their covering, to look at their faces. That’s when the little girl was seen running away.” Abdul Satar says that she was three years old, that she ran shrieking in fear from her home, that her name was Zarguna, the daughter of a man called Abdul-Shakour—many Afghans, as we have seen, have only one name—and that someone saw her topple into the village’s 18-metre well on the other side of the mosque. During the night, she was to drown there, alone, her back apparently broken by the fall. Other children would find her body in the morning. The Americans paid no attention. From the description of their clothes given by the villagers, they appeared to include Special Forces and also units of Afghan Special Forces, the brutish and ill-disciplined units run from Kabul’s former Khad secret police headquarters. There were also 150 soldiers from the U.S. 101st Airborne, whose home base is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. But Fort Campbell is a long way from Hajibirgit, which is 80 kilometres into the desert from the south-western city of Kandahar. And the Americans were obsessed with one idea: that the village contained leade
rs from the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement.
A former member of a Special Forces unit from one of America’s coalition partners supplied his own explanation for the American behaviour when I met him in Kandahar a few days later. “When we go into a village and see a farmer with a beard, we see an Afghan farmer with a beard,” he said. “But when the Americans go into a village and see a farmer with a beard, they see Osama bin Laden.”
The women and children were ordered to gather at one end of Hajibirgit. “They were pushing us and shoving us out of our homes,” Mohamedin says. “Some of the Afghan gunmen were shouting abuse at us. All the while, they were throwing grenades at our homes.” The few villagers who managed to run away collected the stun grenades next day with the help of children. There are dozens of them, small cylindrical green pots with names and codes stamped on the side. One says “7 BANG Delay: 1.5 secs NIC-01/06-07,” another “1 BANG, 170 dB Delay: 1.5s.” Another cylinder is marked: “DELAY Verzogerung ca. 1,5s.” These were the grenades that terrified Zarguna and ultimately caused her death. A regular part of U.S. Special Forces equipment, they are manufactured in Germany by the Hamburg firm of Nico-Pyrotechnik—hence the “NIC” on several of the cylinders; “dB” stands for decibels. Several date stamps show that the grenades were made as recently as March 2002. The German company refers to them officially as “40mm by 46mm sound and flash (stun) cartridges.” But the Americans were also firing bullets. Several peppered a wrecked car in which another villager, a taxi-driver called Abdullah, had been sleeping. He was badly wounded. So was Haji Birgit Khan’s son.