THE US WAR AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ-THE MURDER OF A SOCIETY
Part two
By Bill Van Auken

World Socialist Web Site, MI
May 21 2007

This is the second part of a three-part series. Part one was posted May
19. Its purpose is to examine a series of recent reports establishing
the immense scale of death, destruction and oppression that have been
wrought by the US occupation of Iraq, now in its fifth year. Taken
together, these reports confirm that US operations in Iraq have
amounted to sociocide-the deliberate and systematic murder of an
entire society. The third and concluding part will be posted May 22.

Desperate plight of Iraq’s children

Iraq’s Ministry of Health estimates that fully half of the country’s
children suffer from some form of malnutrition. According to a recent
study by UNICEF, 10 percent of Iraqi children under five are acutely
malnourished, while another 20 percent are chronically malnourished.

With the heat of Iraq’s summer coming on, medical authorities fear a
sharp rise in child deaths from dehydration, cholera and infections,
and they warn that the shattered Iraqi medical system is virtually
powerless to stop it.

The desperate plight of Iraqi children and their families was summed
up by one Iraqi mother. "Last year I lost my daughter and my mother
because of dehydration," Zahra Muhammad, 35, told the UN news agency
IRIN. She said that the family had been forced from their home
last May.

"We couldn’t afford cooling systems in our tent. My daughter was
only four years old and couldn’t stand the hard living conditions
in addition to the very hot weather," she continued. "I have two
more children and they are already sick because of malnutrition. The
doctors have told me that without proper cooling and drinkable water,
I should expect serious consequences in the coming months. If I lose
another child for lack of electricity and clean water, then I would
prefer to die with them."

As many as 260,000 children have died since the March 2003 invasion,
according to one estimate reported by the British daily The Independent
in January.

For those children who do live to see their fifth birthday, Iraq has
become a hostile and often deadly environment.

Less than a third of Iraq’s children now attend school, compared to
100 percent attendance before the March 2003 invasion. The principal
reason students are staying out of the classrooms is fear of the
endemic violence that makes a trip to school a deadly risk their
families are unwilling to take.

At the same time, the relentless killing has left countless thousands
of Iraqi children orphans, who have become a new and tragic fixture
of life in Baghdad and other major cities, sleeping and begging in
the streets. As the UN’s IRIN news agency reports: "Thousands of
homeless children throughout Iraq…survive by begging, stealing or
scavenging garbage for food. Only four years ago, the vast majority
of these children were living at home with their families."

The desperate conditions confronting Iraqi children led a group of
100 prominent British physicians to address an open letter to Prime
Minister Tony Blair in January expressing their extreme concern over
the impact of the occupation. "We are concerned that children are
dying in Iraq for want of medical treatment. Sick or injured children,
who could otherwise be treated by simple means, are left to die in
their hundreds because they do not have access to basic medications
or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are
left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress
are left untreated."

There are fears that this last issue-the wholesale traumatization
of an entire young generation-may have the most far-reaching and
devastating effect upon Iraqi society. "Children in Iraq are seriously
suffering psychologically with all the insecurity," the Association
of Psychologists of Iraq declared. Based on a survey of 1,000 school
children, it found that 92 percent had learning impediments caused
by the climate of violence and fear. "The only things they have on
their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation,"
Maruan Abdullah, spokesman for the association told reporters.

The hellish conditions that have been imposed upon Iraqi children
constitute a war crime. As the occupying power, the United States is
enjoined by the Geneva Conventions to ensure "preferential measures
in regards to food, medical care and protection" in favor of children
under 15 years, expectant mothers, and mothers of children under seven,
and to "maintain all institutions devoted to the care and education
of children."

A catastrophic decline in the status of women

The US war and occupation have driven Iraqi women back generations,
condemning millions to statutory second-class citizenship and
nightmarish conditions in which they are virtually prisoners in
their homes.

This development is closely bound up with the record rise in infant
mortality and is just as vital an indicator of social progress-or
retrogression. It was Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist,
who wrote 155 years ago, in a passage cited by Marx and Engels:
"Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the
progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social
system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women."

He concluded: "Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle
of all social progress."

A report released in April by the United Nations Assistance Mission
for Iraq (UNAMI) on human rights in the country recorded 40 cases of
"honor killings" of women over a three-month period in the governorates
of Erbit, Duhok, Sulaimaniya and Salahuddin. These women were murdered
by their own family members, in some cases burned alive, for alleged
"immoral" conduct.

A report by the Iraqi news agency Awena indicates that this hideous
practice is even more widespread. Basing itself on data obtained
from the Duhok criminal court and the Duchok Azadi Hospital, Awena
reported last January that in this governorate there were 289 burning
cases resulting in 46 deaths of women in 2005, and 366 burning cases
resulting in 66 deaths in 2006. Meanwhile, the Emergency Management
Center in Erbil cited 576 burning cases resulting in 358 deaths in
that governorate since 2003.

Also in Erbil, the UN report found that the number of reported rapes
quadrupled between 2003 and 2006.

The Iraqi constitution, drafted under US supervision, declares
Islam the official state religion and establishes that no law may
be enacted that "contradicts the immutable rulings of Islam." This
principal sets the stage for the overturning of Iraq’s more liberal
civil laws governing divorce, family property and child custody,
substituting in their place sharia law, which denies women most rights.

Already, these principles are being imposed in the streets by armed
militias of the Islamist parties, which have killed women for daring
to hold professional positions as professors or doctors or to play
a visible directing role in a business. Vigilantes have also forced
the use of Islamic dress, including the hijab, or veil, backed by the
threat of violence. Such groups in some areas have also demanded that
women not leave their houses after midday, not drive automobiles or
walk outside without a male relative.

A report issued by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq on the
fourth anniversary of the US invasion declared: "Women of Iraq have
gradually let go of most of their 20th century gains and privileges in
the last 4 years of occupation. Iraq turned from a modern country of
educated and working women into a divided land of Islamic and ethnic
warlords who compete in canceling women from the social realm.

Millions of women’s destinies are wasted between the destructive US
war machine and different kinds of Islamic rule which have turned
women into helpless black objects of no will or worth."

The report cited growing violence against women, including gang rapes
of female detainees and assaults on women by militias of other sects
as an instrument of sectarian warfare. Kidnappings of women have also
become rampant. A report issued by the group in March of last year
found that the crime, virtually unknown under the regime of Saddam
Hussein, claimed 2,000 female victims in the first three years after
the US invasion, many of whom were raped or tortured. Such incidents,
together with all other forms of violence, have escalated markedly
over the last year.

Four women are on Iraq’s death row, waiting to be hanged, two of them
imprisoned together with their young children.

The eradication of Iraq’s minorities

Also a telling sign of the social disintegration in Iraq is the
status of minorities. A report issued this month by Minority Rights
Group International warns that minority communities in Iraq are being
systematically eradicated. It ranks Iraq as the second-worst country
in the world in terms of the threat posed to minorities-better only
than Somalia and worse than Darfur.

The report, entitled "Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s
Minority Communities Since 2003," tracks the situation confronting
Iraq’s Armenian and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Bahais, Faili Kurds,
Jews, Mandaeans, Palestinians, Shabaks, Turkomans and Yazidis, who
together make up 10 percent of the country’s total population.

"Iraq continues to see targeted killings of people from minority
groups, including Christians, Yezidis and Mandaeans. Other minority
groups in Iraq face daily violence, torture and political assimilation,
which has led to an exodus of these communities from the country,"
the report states. Last year, Iraq ranked the worst in the world. Its
decline to the second worst is a reflection of the marked deterioration
of the situation in Somalia, where a US-engineered intervention has
unleashed rampant violence.

Some of Iraq’s minorities predate the Arabs in terms of their presence
in the country, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia.

Now, victims of violence and intimidation, they are disappearing from
Iraq, many killed and the rest fleeing into exile.

The report’s authors blame the US occupation for this disaster. They
write: "Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the coalition
authorities established an Iraqi Governing Council in which membership
was strictly apportioned along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Political patronage ensured that whole ministries became dominated
by officials from the minister’s own sect or group, and sectarian
politics quickly became the defining feature of the new Iraqi state."

As a result, minority populations were excluded and subsequently
repressed.

The decimation of Iraq’s medical professionals

The murderous violence in Iraq and the flight of millions of refugees
have decimated the ranks of key professions who are indispensable
for the maintenance of society.

The British non-governmental organization Medact, citing the official
figures of the Iraqi Medical Association, reported in March of last
year that 18,000 of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have left the country.

Another 2,000 have been murdered and at least 250 have been reported
kidnapped.

In his article on the exodus of refugees from Iraq in the May 13 New
York Times Magazine, Nir Rosen interviewed one such doctor, a family
medicine specialist, who had fled to Damascus with her five children.

She left after her husband, a thoracic surgeon and a medical school
professor, was dragged from his car by armed men, abducted and
later found murdered. She told Rosen that when she asked the Iraqi
police to investigate, they said, "He is a doctor, he has a degree
and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was
killed." Both the police and the Ministry of Health are controlled
by Shiite Islamist factions. She was subsequently ordered by letter
to leave her neighborhood.

The lack of trained medical staff, together with the shortage of
basic supplies and the overwhelming burden of mass casualties, has
left Iraq’s healthcare system in a shambles.

In an article published last October in the British Medical Journal,
three doctors from the Diwaniyah College of Medicine in Iraq estimated
that nearly half of the hundreds of thousands who have been killed
since the 2003 US invasion could have survived if they had received
adequate medical care.

"The reality is we cannot provide any treatment for many of the
victims," they wrote. "Emergency departments are staffed by doctors
who do not have the proper experience or skills to manage emergency
cases. Medical staff…admit that more than half of those killed
could have been saved if trained and experienced staff were available."

The article added: "Our experience has taught us that poor emergency
medicine services are more disastrous than the disaster itself. But
despite the daily violence that is crushing Iraq, the international
medical community is doing little more than looking on."

It is not just the international medical community. The state of the
Iraqi healthcare system constitutes a US war crime. The Fourth Geneva
Convention demands that an occupying power "[e]nsure the effective
operation of medical services, including hospitals and public health
programs, with special focus on preventing the spread of contagious
diseases and epidemics, and allow medical personnel to carry out
their duties."

The Geneva Conventions also require that an occupying power guarantee
the neutrality of hospitals, protecting them from attack and ensuring
that all are able to seek medical care. Yet US occupation troops have
repeatedly attacked hospitals. Moreover, militias have been given
free rein in the medical facilities, often dragging away patients of
other sects for execution.

The killing and kidnapping of doctors and their wholesale flight
from the country are phenomena common to virtually every profession
in Iraq. The Iraq Index, maintained by the Brookings Institution in
Washington, estimates that 40 percent of Iraq’s "professional class,"
including doctors, professors, pharmacists and other university-trained
personnel, have left the country since 2003.

To be continued

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