Let's Make Change
George Bush calls this "doing what is right"
Thu Apr 15, 2004 01:32
63.228.145.202

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [apfn-1] George Bush calls this "doing what is right"
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 00:26:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Let's Make Change nasf_reachout@yahoo.ca

Imagine what foreigners think: Bush represents his people in a democracy and so his people must think murdering innocents like themselves is the right thing to do. Nah, THEY're not that stupid. ? N:

http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=1577&blz=1

Iraq: Jo Wilding in Fallujah

2004-04-13 | US snipers in Falluja shoot unarmed man in the back, old
woman with white flag, children fleeing their homes and the ambulance that we
were going in to fetch a woman in premature labour.

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A
stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that's not burnt, stripping it
bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in
Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the
other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw
food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still
inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide
who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason
I'm on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at
night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he'd been bringing out
children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling
people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever
they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the
edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there
was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it
getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the american
checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control
the roads we'd travel on. We'd take in the medical supplies, see what else we
could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.

I'll spare you the whole decision making process, all the questions we all
asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness,
but what it came down to was this: if I don't do it, who will? Either way, we
arrive in one piece.

We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open
straightaway, the blankets most welcomed. It's not a hospital at all but a
clinic, a private doctor's surgery treating people free since air strikes
destroyed the town's main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage.
There's no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors
warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.

Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. Ummi,
my mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of
the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about ten is lying with a
bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury
in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their
home to flee Falluja.

The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up
the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by. The
electricity to the town has been cut off for days and when the generator runs
out of petrol they just have to manage till it comes back on. Dave quickly
donates his torch. The children are not going to live.

"Come," says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has
just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being
dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched
in her hand and the same story: I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I
was hit by a US sniper. Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by
the local fighters. Their homes are in the US controlled area and they are
adamant that the snipers were US marines.

Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the
ambulance and evacuation services. The biggest hospital after the main one was
bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance
has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the
streets because no one can go to collect them without being shot.

Some said we were mad to come to Iraq; quite a few said we were completely
insane to come to Falluja and now there are people telling me that getting in
the back of the pick up to go past the snipers and get sick and injured people
is the craziest thing they've ever seen. I know, though, that if we don't, no
one will.

He's holding a white flag with a red crescent on; I don't know his name.
The men we pass wave us on when the driver explains where we're going. The
silence is ferocious in the no man's land between the pick up at the edge of the
Mujahedin territory, which has just gone from our sight around the last corner
and the marines' line beyond the next wall; no birds, no music, no indication
that anyone is still living until a gate opens opposite and a woman comes out,
points.

We edge along to the hole in the wall where we can see the car, spent
mortar shells around it. The feet are visible, crossed, in the gutter. I think
he's dead already. The snipers are visible too, two of them on the corner of the
building. As yet I think they can't see us so we need to let them know we're
there.

"Hello," I bellow at the top of my voice. "Can you hear me?" They must.
They're about 30 metres from us, maybe less, and it's so still you could hear
the flies buzzing at fifty paces. I repeat myself a few times, still without
reply, so decide to explain myself a bit more.

"We are a medical team. We want to remove this wounded man. Is it OK for
us to come out and get him? Can you give us a signal that it's OK?"

I'm sure they can hear me but they're still not responding. Maybe they
didn't understand it all, so I say the same again. Dave yells too in his US
accent. I yell again. Finally I think I hear a shout back. Not sure, I call
again.

"Hello."

"Yeah."

"Can we come out and get him?"

"Yeah,"

Slowly, our hands up, we go out. The black cloud that rises to greet us
carries with it a hot, sour smell. Solidified, his legs are heavy. I leave them
to Rana and Dave, our guide lifting under his hips. The Kalashnikov is attached
by sticky blood to is hair and hand and we don't want it with us so I put my
foot on it as I pick up his shoulders and his blood falls out through the hole
in his back. We heave him into the pick up as best we can and try to outrun the
flies.

I suppose he was wearing flip flops because he's barefoot now, no more
than 20 years old, in imitation Nike pants and a blue and black striped football
shirt with a big 28 on the back. As the orderlies form the clinic pull the young
fighter off the pick up, yellow fluid pours from his mouth and they flip him
over, face up, the way into the clinic clearing in front of them, straight up
the ramp into the makeshift morgue.

We wash the blood off our hands and get in the ambulance. There are people
trapped in the other hospital who need to go to Baghdad. Siren screaming, lights
flashing, we huddle on the floor of the ambulance, passports and ID cards held
out the windows. We pack it with people, one with his chest taped together and a
drip, one on a stretcher, legs jerking violently so I have to hold them down as
we wheel him out, lifting him over steps.

The hospital is better able to treat them than the clinic but hasn't got
enough of anything to sort them out properly and the only way to get them to
Baghdad on our bus, which means they have to go to the clinic. We're crammed on
the floor of the ambulance in case it's shot at. Nisareen, a woman doctor about
my age, can't stop a few tears once we're out.

The doctor rushes out to meet me: "Can you go to fetch a lady, she is
pregnant and she is delivering the baby too soon?"

Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window,
the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand,
simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic
part dislodged, flying through the window.

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on
the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings.
Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red
lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it's hard to tell, are
hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone's
shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.


I'm outraged. We're trying to get to a woman who's giving birth without
any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly
marked ambulance, and you're shooting at us. How dare you?

How dare you?

Azzam grabs the gear stick and gets the ambulance into reverse, another
tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road , the sots still
coming as we flee around the corner. I carry on singing. The wheels are
scraping, burst rubber burning on the road.

The men run for a stretcher as we arrive and I shake my head. They spot
the new bullet holes and run to see if we're OK. Is there any other way to get
to her, I want to know. La, maaku tarieq. There is no other way. They say we did
the right thing. They say they've fixed the ambulance four times already and
they'll fix it again but the radiator's gone and the wheels are buckled and se's
still at home in the dark giving birth alone. I let her down.

We can't go out again. For one thing there's no ambulance and besides it's
dark now and that means our foreign faces can't protect the people who go out
with us or the people we pick up. Maki is the acting director of the place. He
says he hated Saddam but now he hates the Americans more.

We take off the blue gowns as the sky starts exploding somewhere beyond
the building opposite. Minutes later a car roars up to the clinic. I can hear
him screaming before I can see that there's no skin left on his body. He's burnt
from head to foot. For sure there's nothing they can do. He'll die of
dehydration within a few days.

Another man is pulled from the car onto a stretcher. Cluster bombs, they
say, although it's not clear whether they mean one or both of them. We set off
walking to Mr Yasser's house, waiting at each corner for someone to check the
street before we cross. A ball of fire falls from a plane, splits into smaller
balls of bright white lights. I think they're cluster bombs, because cluster
bombs are in the front of my mind, but they vanish, just magnesium flares,
incredibly bright but short-lived, giving a flash picture of the town from
above.

Yasser asks us all to introduce ourselves. I tell him I'm training to be a
lawyer. One of the other men asks whether I know about international law. They
want to know about the law on war crimes, what a war crime is. I tell them I
know some of the Geneva Conventions, that I'll bring some information next time
I come and we can get someone to explain it in Arabic.

We bring up the matter of Nayoko. This group of fighters has nothing to do
with the ones who are holding the Japanese hostages, but while they're thanking
us for what we did this evening, we talk about the things Nayoko did for the
street kids, how much they loved her. They can't promise anything but that
they'll try and find out where she is and try to persuade the group to let her
and the others go. I don't suppose it will make any difference. They're busy
fighting a war in Falluja. They're unconnected with the other group. But it
can't hurt to try.

The planes are above us all night so that as I doze I forget I'm not on a
long distance flight, the constant bass note of an unmanned reconnaissance drone
overlaid with the frantic thrash of jets and the dull beat of helicopters and
interrupted by the explosions.

In the morning I make balloon dogs, giraffes and elephants for the little
one, Abdullah, Aboudi, who's clearly distressed by the noise of the aircraft and
explosions. I blow bubbles which he follows with his eyes. Finally, finally, I
score a smile. The twins, thirteen years old, laugh too, one of them an
ambulance driver, both said to be handy with a Kalashnikov.

The doctors look haggard in the morning. None has slept more than a couple
of hours a night for a week. One as had only eight hours of sleep in the last
seven days, missing the funerals of his brother and aunt because he was needed
at the hospital.

"The dead we cannot help," Jassim said. "I must worry about the injured."

We go again, Dave, Rana and me, this time in a pick up. There are some
sick people close to the marines' line who need evacuating. No one dares come
out of their house because the marines are on top of the buildings shooting at
anything that moves. Saad fetches us a white flag and tells us not to worry,
he's checked and secured the road, no Mujahedin will fire at us, that peace is
upon us, this eleven year old child, his face covered with a keffiyeh, but for
is bright brown eyes, his AK47 almost as tall as he is.

We shout again to the soldiers, hold up the flag with a red crescent
sprayed onto it. Two come down from the building, cover this side and Rana
mutters, "Allahu akbar. Please nobody take a shot at them."

We jump down and tell them we need to get some sick people from the houses
and they want Rana to go and bring out the family from the house whose roof
they're on. Thirteen women and children are still inside, in one room, without
food and water for the last 24 hours.

"We're going to be going through soon clearing the houses," the senior one
says.

"What does that mean, clearing the houses?"

"Going into every one searching for weapons." He's checking his watch,
can't tell me what will start when, of course, but there's going to be air
strikes in support. "If you're going to do tis you gotta do it soon."

First we go down the street we were sent to. There's a man, face down, in
a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the
flies ave got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I'm by his knees and as we
reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave's hand goes through his chest, through
the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew
his heart out.

There's no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out,
crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out
the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had
dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the
traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn't have known we were
coming so it's inconceivable tat anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left
the body.

He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.

We cover his face, carry him to the pick up. There's nothing to cover his
body with. The sick woman is helped out of the house, the little girls around
her hugging cloth bags to their bodies, whispering, "Baba. Baba." Daddy.
Shaking, they let us go first, hands up, around the corner, then we usher them
to the cab of the pick up, shielding their heads so they can't see him, the
cuddly fat man stiff in the back.

The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort
them safely out of the line of fire, kids, women, men, anxiously asking us
whether they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young
marine tells us that men of fighting age can't leave. What's fighting age, I
want to know.