5. When will the injured see justice?

A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest, the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of the injured at the very heart of its strategy to “win hearts and minds”. Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception of a few recipients of ‘high-profile’ rescues (such as the air-lifting to Kuwait of Ali Abbas who lost all his family and both of his arms).1

MASH units, too, provided immediate help to some Iraqi civilians wounded in the fighting, although it would appear that this was dependent upon the goodwill and resources of commanding officers – and likely to be withdrawn when it conflicted with their primary function.2 (See Note.) Iraq’s own hospitals, run-down and neglected for years under the sanctions regime, have suffered looting, vandalism, loss of electrical power, the deaths of staff and even (in at least three of them) direct bombardment, all attributable to the war.3 But however heroic the efforts of their staff, there is no denying that the country’s health system is now in a desperate state.

To our knowledge, no US or UK government-directed programme is specifically targeted towards the injured civilians of Iraq: the men, women, children and old people maimed and traumatised by the brutality of military intervention, and no government-directed report is available on the progress, if any, that has been made to assess and address the serious humanitarian and health issues arising from war injuries. It has been left to a few charities and aid-agencies, which have struggled against US obstruction to gain a foothold for their work with the sick and injured. The United Nations has remained ineffectual, firmly kept in the background by US diktat.

After the ordeal of seeing their three other children killed when a US tank machine-gunned their car in Nasiriyah, Daham and Gufran Ibed Kassim and their wounded five-year-old daughter Mawra were taken for treatment at a US Army field hospital: 'For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. "Wait!" insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. "Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened." On the third night, that of 27 March, "there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order – 'put them out' – and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: 'Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold.' Then she went silent. Completely silent." Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. "What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die."' Iraq: the human toll Ed Vuillamy, Observer, 6 Jul 2003.

It is the most basic of principles that those who cause damage, harm and injury are responsible for repairing these and making amends if they have the power to do so. “But U.S officials,” the Washington Post reported in late May, “have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them.”4

Dina Sarhan, 21, who lost a leg to US shrapnel, sought no more than a prosthetic leg from the occupying power, only to be repeatedly turned down because it was “up to a higher authority.” One of “thousands who incarnate the collateral damage of [the] war,” she is unable to climb the stairs in her house and is “learning to make do” by sleeping in the dining room. She says she has forgiven the anonymous soldiers who injured her, but recognizes all too clearly the gap between the rhetoric and reality of modern warfare: “Mr. Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?”

Unfortunately the “higher authorities” have their minds on other matters. “While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them” (when material damages as well as physical injuries are included); they also fret over “the endemic fraud that would creep into this.”

But those, surely, are risks the US brought upon itself.

And instead of facing up to its responsibilities, the Pentagon is already ducking them - by restraining those of its more enlightened on-the-ground commanders who have acted in recognition of the strength of war of victims’ claims. In a recent briefing US military leaders explicitly ruled out any compensation for injuries (or deaths) sustained during the combat period prior to May 1st. Families will only be eligible for compensation if they can “prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by soldiers” in the “post-combat” phase of the occupation. This ruling will exclude the vast majority of injuries from potential compensation. For example, claims are ineligible in the case of soldiers mistaking civilians for combatants. However, some military commanders have been making ad-hoc discretionary payments to the victims or their families. When this was pointed out, a US official said he would investigate these payments and, if necessary, tell the commanders concerned to stop making them.5

So much for the “sympathetic” Pentagon – but exactly how justifiable is the USA’s fear of “millions” of claims against it?

Given that most Iraqis who are asking for damages “seek a few thousand dollars to get their lives running again”, it is possible to make an estimate of the cost of such reasonable compensation and then compare it to other expenditures in this war. Assuming the Pentagon’s “millions” of claims were a credible prediction, then perhaps two million Iraqis (including those seeking only compensation for financial losses) could be awarded $10,000 each. That would amount to $20 billion, or the cost of occupying the country for 5 months, which Sec. of State Rumsfeld has pegged at $4 billion a month.6

This is a large sum, to be sure, but not one that the US isn’t already countenancing in its open-ended occupation of Iraq. And arguably, the US occupation could be cut short by as many months and its soldiers sent home wreathed in roses if the US were to distribute its money in this way.

If however we restrict our calculations to more realistic scenarios and 20,000 injury claims at $10,000 each, the total amount awarded would be $200 million – less than the US spends every two days on the occupation. (And approximately the amount the UK spends monthly in its role.7

What excuse can the US possibly have for declining this opportunity to do some good for those who desperately need it (and for whose hurt it is responsible), and in the process, win back some of that “goodwill” it has lost in Iraq and much of the world? Even if the number of claims or of average awards is ultimately twice or ten times higher than this, it will still be trivial compared to the overall cost of the war and occupation.

Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda and Kay Williams - 7 Aug 2003