WHERE NEXT AFTER THE IRAQI GENOCIDE?
Anwar Darkazally, Electronic Iraq

Electronic Iraq
Dec 13 2006

Six men burned alive, an entire government ministry kidnapped, over
two hundred dead in a series of car bombs. Another week in Iraq.

Nothing new and headline news.

We have become anaesthetised to the pain of the conflict in
Iraq. The sheer scale of bloodshed has numbed our comprehension of
what the violence means in human terms. What would have been termed
"spectaculars" in the bad old days of the IRA are just day to day
events in Iraq. Our perspective is becoming distorted through a
kaleidoscope of laser-guided bombs and razor-sharp satellite images.

The cemeteries are filling up and human lives are becoming numbers,
or less.

So far in Iraq, America has nearly lost the same number of soldiers
as civilians murdered in the 9/11 atrocity. Although images of the
coffins of the American war dead are not allowed to be shown since the
Bush administration banned them in March 2003, at least the Americans
are granted the unseen dignity of being counted as individuals by
the Department of Defence and borne home in flag-draped coffins. But
Iraqi civilian deaths are not counted by the US government.

To armchair warriors in Washington ignoring Iraqi casualties is perhaps
an extension of the de-humanising concept of collateral damage. To
the Arab and Muslim world glued to their satellite TVs, the little
limp bodies being rushed to hospitals in the Mickey Mouse T-shirts
could be their children. That none of these Iraqi deaths will ever
be officially recorded makes it hard for the viewer not to conclude
that an American life is not equal to an Arab life.

John Hopkins School of Public Health has calculated Iraqi civilian
deaths and their estimates vary between a third of a million to 900,000
dead. The lower fatality estimate is almost the same as the total
number of British civilian and military fatalities in the Second World
War (388,000). The higher Iraqi fatality figure is almost identical
to the total number of British soldiers killed in the First World War
(908,000).

The US and Britain have disputed these figures and this is not
surprising. If these estimates are correct, or even in the right
region, these fatality figures will have far-reaching consequences for
a war started with questionable, at best, legitimacy. Fatality figures
this high could make the US and British governments culpable for
over-seeing the second genocide in the Middle East since the Armenian
holocaust in which over a million were killed between 1915 and 1917.

The definition of genocide from Article 2 of the Convention on
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is intent to wholly
or partially destroy any religious, ethnic or national group through
killing or causing bodily or mental harm. The wholesale sectarian
slaughter between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shia undoubtedly qualifies
as mutual attempts at genocide.

The first Middle Eastern genocide since 1917 was perpetrated by Saddam
Hussein and became one of the justifications of the war after the
Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found. In what Human Rights
Watch rightly termed a "genocide" in 1993, between 50,000 and 182,000
Kurds were killed by Saddam. But if the figures are correct, and
we have no other data to go on, then the current situation in Iraq
dwarfs even the evil done by the Saddam regime.

Wilful failure to record the victims of the US-led and British-backed
2003 war is perhaps an attempt to not create evidence which could be
used for war crimes and genocide prosecutions against the politicians
responsible. But there is no statute of limitations on war crimes
and the new generation of mass graves in the post-Saddam era can be
excavated for the evidence.

The United States and Britain should recognise the terrible gravity
of the situation they created and start recording the Iraqi victims
of this war. These records may become part of eventual prosecutions
for genocide, but the evidence is there anyway. What it will do is
allow some dignity in death to the victims and their families.

Few predicted that the situation in Iraq would ever amount to murder
on a genocidal scale. Every murdered soul makes it harder to see a
way out or where the killing will lead next. An all-out regional war
with millions of victims would have been unthinkable only three years
ago. But in a world where Arab casualties are not counted, perhaps
it is not such a distant possibility. As regional tensions rise,
regional solutions must be pursued.

The door to regional peace in the Middle East is in Jerusalem and
it can and must be pushed open – it is in everyone’s best interests,
including Israel. The US has pressured its allies before. Let us not
forget that George Bush senior was the President who forced Israeli
participation in the Madrid Process through threatening to withhold
loan guarantees. Peace for Palestine may not stop the bloodshed in
Iraq, but it will go a good way for the US and Britain to start
winning back the Arab people and perhaps prove to them that Arab
lives do count.

Anwar Al Darkazally is a political analyst an was the legal adviser
to the Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) of the PLO with responsibility
for the Jerusalem file in final status negotiations.

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