Americans accused of brutal 'punishment' tactics against villagers, while British are condemned as too soft
By Patrick Cockburn in Dhuluaya, 12 October 2003
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.
The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.
Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."
Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.
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The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."
Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.
Of all the idiocy and recklessness that have been a part of this fiasco in Iraq this is by far the worse. How can anybody possibly expect this to do anything but inflame the masses? This is evil on a grand scale. What is wrong with these people? Last week they say that they're stopping the distribution of food that many Iraqis rely on. And now they're also bulldozing their farms. Are they supposed to feel more grateful to the Americans when they're starving? UNSPEAKABLE
Destroying orchards -- thousand year old olive groves, in some cases -- is a standard form of collective punishment in the West Bank and Gaza. But the IDF always has a cover story ready, usually about attacks launched on passing vehicles from just that very orchard, making its demolition an urgent security necessity.
Actually telling the locals they're being punished for supporting (or at least not informing on) the guerrillas is bad form, since it runs headlong into the Geneva Convention's ban on all forms of collective punishment.
Clearly, the Americans still have a lot to learn about being war criminals.
