In 1956, the Guardian's editors backed military action during the Suez crisis:
"The
government is right to be prepared for military action at Suez", the
paper wrote, because Egyptian control of the canal would be
"commercially damaging for the West and perhaps part of a plan for
creating a new Arab Empire based on the Nile". (Leader, August 2, 1956;
cited, Murray Mcdonald, '
50,000 editions of the imperialist,
warmongering, hate-filled Guardian newspaper,' July 2007; )
In 1991, a Guardian leader hailed the righteousness of Operation Desert Storm in almost biblical terms:
"The
simple cause, at the end, is just. An evil regime in Iraq instituted an
evil and brutal invasion. Our soldiers and airmen are there, at UN
behest, to set that evil right. Their duties are clear ... let the
momentum and the resolution be swift." (Leader, January 17, 1991, ibid)
Eric
Hoskins, a Canadian doctor and coordinator of a Harvard study team,
later reported that the ensuing allied bombardment "effectively
terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq - electricity,
water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and health care". (Quoted,
Mark Curtis, 'The Ambiguities of Power - British Foreign Policy since
1945', Zed Books, 1995, pp.189-190)
The Guardian used the word
'evil' three times in a single paragraph in its leader. The same
emotive word has not been used once in any Guardian editorial to
describe the Bush-Blair-Brown invasion of Iraq - a war crime that has
cost the lives of one million people and forced 4 million more from
their homes.
In March 1999, the lack of United Nations approval did not deter the Guardian from again supporting war:
"The
only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force
to try to protect the people of Kosovo." (Leader, 'The sad need for
force,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999)
Guardian journalist Maggie
O'Kane later conceded of Kosovo: "this is a tale of how to tell lies
and win wars, and how we, the media, were harnessed like beach donkeys
and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted
us to see in this nice clean war". (O'Kane, The Guardian, December 16,
1995)
In December 2001, the Guardian celebrated a quick victory in Afghanistan:
"...
the US-led campaign in Afghanistan continues to be far more successful
than the pessimists, and even most optimists, ever thought possible. It
is always harder to act than not to act, but the action taken by the US
has been largely vindicated, at least in the short term... This is not
a reason for silly gloating; but it certainly ought to be a reason for
those who have consistently claimed to know that each stage of the
operation would create some new and worse catastrophe to confess that
they got it wrong. Their confidence turned out to be fear. Their
apparent knowledge was in fact ignorance. Their belief that history
would prove them right proved only the more useful lesson that history
repeats itself until it does not. The war was largely over by Christmas
after all." (Leader, 'They did it their way: George Bush, not Tony
Blair, is the victor,' The Guardian, December 8, 2001)
In
February 2003, just four years after Kosovo, the Guardian was once
again happy to lend credence to an obviously fraudulent pretext for war:
"It
is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr
Powell [at the Security Council], that it is simply all lies... Iraq
must disarm." (Leader, 'Powell shoots to kill,' The Guardian, February
6, 2003)
Four days after US tanks entered Baghdad in April
2003, leading Guardian commentator Hugo Young was quick to justify
Blair's war of aggression - the supreme war crime:
"For a
political leader, few therapies compare with military victory. For a
leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who
believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like a
vindication on an astounding scale... No one can deny that victory
happened. The existential fact sweeps aside the prior agonising."
(Young, 'So begins Blair's descent into powerless mediocrity,' The
Guardian, April 13, 2003)
A Time To Say Goodbye
Like
the Guardian's animation, columnist and Guardian assistant editor
Madeleine Bunting gives the impression that her newspaper is a
compassionate voice against violence. Bunting recently lamented how the
slaughter in Iraq had been "normalised into the background of our
lives". A "public revulsion" at the violence remains, but "the horror
gives way to exhaustion". (Bunting, 'The Iraq war has become a disaster
that we have chosen to forget,' The Guardian, November 5, 2007)
Part
of the problem, Bunting continued, was that the war has become almost
impossible to report, taking "either terrifying courage or
extraordinary ingenuity" to bring images to our screens of those caught
up in the disaster.
But something doesn't add up. As Bunting
noted in her own article, fully one in six Iraqis has been displaced
from the country, many escaping to Syria (1.4 million) and Jordan
(750,000). Are we really to believe that it takes "terrifying courage"
for journalists to fly to Damascus and Amman to cover their plight? And
yet coverage of the suffering of Iraqi refugees is almost completely
absent from the British media. In fact, there has been so little
in-depth reporting we may struggle to imagine what it looks like.
A
sublime example is provided by the courageous young Iraqi writer,
Riverbend, on her Baghdad Burning website:
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
In her September 7 entry,
'Leaving home,' she gave an insight into the tragedy that has engulfed
Iraq's 4 million refugees. The misery of lives uprooted by fear and
violence was communicated through the simple truth of the details
recorded. As she and her family prepared to leave Baghdad, their
life-long home, each family member was able to take just one suitcase
full of personal belongings. Riverbend wrote:
"Two months ago,
the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom
for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it
took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.... I packed
and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I'd
eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each
time I packed it again, I would add more 'stuff' than the time before."
"It
was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and
an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn
morning and I'd been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry.
You won't cry, I kept saying, because you're coming back. You won't cry
because it's just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul
or Basrah before the war...
"It was time to go and I went from
room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk -
the one I'd used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to
the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair
E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table
over which we'd gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye
to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls,
because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away -
but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board
games we inevitably fought over - the Arabic Monopoly with the missing
cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.
"I knew
then as I know now that these were all just items - people are so much
more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a
certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of
memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I
wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.
"I cried as
we left - in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried... the uncle
cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their
voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye
and wondering if you're ever going to see these people again. My uncle
tightened the shawl I'd thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to
'keep it on until you get to the border'. The aunt rushed out behind us
as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the
ground, which is a tradition - its to wish the travelers a safe
return... eventually."
How often have we been allowed to be
touched by this kind of truthfulness humanising Iraqi misery for the
reader? Where is the media focus on personal details with the power to
transform anonymous masses, mere numbers, into people? Where is the
depth of concern suggested by the Guardian in its website animation?
In
fact, the Guardian did set aside 625 words for Riverbend to publish a
curiously bland piece in May ('Goodbye Baghdad,' May 11, 2007;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2077244,00.html) - the only
time she has ever appeared in the paper in four years of searing
eyewitness commentary. Even we have published almost twice as many
words (1,155) in a single article in the Guardian over the same period.
The only other appearance Riverbend has made in the UK press
was in a much more substantial, 2,500-word piece in the Sunday Times
(April 2, 2006). The other 19 mentions she has received in national
quality newspapers have been mostly brief reviews of her book Baghdad
Burning.
Riverbend's words were written in a country that has
seen perhaps a million people killed since 2003, and 1.5 million more
killed as a result of sanctions since 1990. In his crucial book, A
Different Kind Of War - The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq (Barghahn
Books, 2006), former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Hans von
Sponeck, writes:
"At no time during the years of comprehensive
economic sanctions were there adequate resources to meet minimum needs
for human physical and mental survival either before, or during, the
Oil-for-Food Programme." (p.144)
The result:
"The [US-UK]
hard-line approach prevailed, with the result that practically an
entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its
physical and mental foundations." (p.161)
And this was the major
reason why, as von Sponeck notes, the number of excess deaths of
children under five during 1991-1998 was between 400,000 and 500,000.
(Ibid, p.165)
This was even before the even worse catastrophe
that has followed the 2003 invasion. We need to be clear, than, that
Riverbend's words describe experiences comparable to history's very
worst tragedies - she is a latter-day Anne Frank. And these events are
happening now, a few hours from London, as a result of our own
government's actions.
It is shocking to read Riverbend and to
realise just how alienated we are from the truth of Iraq. We know
because, in reading her words - of the 6 year-old neighbour helping to
heave the suitcase closed, of the beloved table where the homework was
done - the reality of the Iraqi people suddenly rushes into focus. We
can picture Riverbend doing her homework, we know her tears on leaving
her home, we can imagine her little neighbour, because we have known
all of these things in our own lives. She could be any articulate,
intelligent young woman writing from any city in Britain.
We are
reading the impressions of a soul sensitive to the pain of separation
from familiar objects, to empty spaces on walls, to the uncertainty of
separation from neighbours and relatives - and yet it is this same soul
that has endured 12 years of ferocious bombing, dictatorship and
sanctions, and four more years of cataclysmic violence. This
consciousness, this sensitivity, could so easily have been snuffed out
at any time, like so many others have been.
On February 20, the
normally restrained Riverbend wrote of the gang rape of an Iraqi woman,
Sabine, by Iraqi "security forces". She concluded her piece with these
words:
"As the situation continues to deteriorate both for
Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq,
Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and
occupation - are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.
"Let
me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It's worse. It's
over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the
cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every
single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane,
red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified
your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our
streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and
militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq's first democratic
government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest
accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You
lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the
oil, at least, made it worthwhile."
This honesty shamed just
about every last journalist writing in the UK media. Riverbend now
writes, far less often, as a refugee in Syria.
The Guardian Performance - Just Numbers
In
the last six months, the Guardian has focused in less than a dozen
articles specifically on the plight of Iraqi refugees. Mostly, these
have been short, dry news pieces documenting the latest statistics of
suffering from the latest aid agency reports. On July 31, Jonathan
Steele covered a report by Oxfam and a network of 80 aid agencies that
described "a nationwide catastrophe, with around 8 million Iraqis -
almost a third of the population - in need of emergency aid". (Steele,
'Children hardest hit by humanitarian crisis in Iraq,' The Guardian,
July 31, 2007)
On August 27, Ian Black's report was titled
"Displaced Iraqis double despite US military surge" (Black, The
Guardian, August 27, 2007). No irony was intended in Black's use of
"despite", although it would be unthinkable in coverage of any other
illegal Great Power occupation.
More statistics followed from
Suzanne Goldenberg on September 20: "2m Iraqis forced to flee their
homes: Many move several times in search of safety and jobs Ethnic map
redrawn, says Red Crescent report." (Goldenberg, 'Refugees in their own
land,' The Guardian, September 20, 2007)
There were no descriptions of spaces on walls, no little neighbours struggling with suitcases, no tears - just numbers.
Five
days later, Richard Norton-Taylor reported similar figures in a
326-word piece. On October 11, Julian Borger noted that Amnesty
International had criticised Britain over its forced returns of Iraqi
refugees. The usual aid agencies were quoted:
"'There are more
and more makeshift camps in abysmal conditions, with terrible
sanitation and water supply, very little or no healthcare, and no
schools,' Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN high commissioner for
refugees, said yesterday." (Borger, 'Iraqi provinces shut out internal
refugees,' The Guardian, October 11, 2007)
To be sure, the
details of British government indifference were disturbing enough. Out
of 740 rulings on the fate of Iraqi refugees last year Britain granted
asylum to 30, according to Home Office figures. The US allowed entry to
535 Iraqis last year, less than a fifth of the number it accepted in
2000, three years before the war began.
And we recall how Tony
Blair insisted, with quivering jaw, that compassion for the fate of
Iraqi civilian suffering was of course at the very heart of the US-UK
motivation for attacking that country:
"But the moral case
against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing
Saddam... Yes, there are consequences of war. If we remove Saddam by
force, people will die, and some will be innocent. And we must live
with the consequences of our actions, even the unintended ones. But
there are also consequences of 'stop the war'. There will be no march
for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children
that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over
the torture chambers which if he is left in power, will remain in
being..." (Blair, 'The price of my conviction', The Observer, February
16, 2003)
On October 20, the Guardian's Michael Howard finally
did supply a couple of paragraphs of personal testimony on the fate met
by Iraqis who had fled their homes in Baghdad as they faced bombardment
from Turkey in the North of Iraq. (Howard, 'Kurdistan: Iraqis who fled
homes in fear face new terror as Turkey targets PKK rebels,' The
Guardian, October 20, 2007)
And on December 5, Michael Howard
wrote of "thousands of refugees and internally displaced people who are
returning to their former homes following the recent lull in sectarian
violence". (Howard, 'UN promises aid as displaced Iraqis head home,'
The Guardian, December 5, 2007)
This is the propaganda version
of events being widely pushed throughout the media. A week earlier, the
Guardian's own Jonathan Steele had reported a UN survey of Iraqi
refugees which described their real reasons for returning to Iraq:
"only 14% felt security had improved. Forty-six per cent said they
could no longer afford to stay in Syria, and 25% said their visas had
expired and they were 'obliged to leave'." (Steele, 'Refugees celebrate
first bus back to Iraq,' The Guardian, November 28, 2007)
In the
last six months, the Guardian has published not a single in-depth
report based around eyewitness accounts of the suffering of Iraqi
refugees.
This is not an isolated phenomenon linked to
"compassion fatigue", as Bunting would have us believe. Analysis of the
media record shows that human beings are consistently divided into
"worthy" and "unworthy" victims.
On January 19, 100 eminent doctors backed by a group of international lawyers wrote to Tony Blair of Iraq:
"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 medicines or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet,
and limbs are left without prostheses." (The Letter: '
Sick or injured
children, who could be easily treated, are left to die in hundreds'; )
The doctors added:
"...
we call on the UK Government not to walk away from this problem, but to
fulfil its obligations that it entered into under Security Council
Resolution 1483 during the period 22 May 2003 to 28 June 2004".
But the government did walk away and the Guardian failed to report the story.
On
September 14, a report by the British polling organisation, Opinion
Research Business (ORB) revealed that 1.2 million Iraqi citizens "have
been murdered" since the March 2003 US-UK invasion.
(www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78)
The Guardian failed to report the poll.
In
2006, Hans von Sponeck published his forensic, damning account
detailing US-UK responsibility for the catastrophic impact of sanctions
on Iraq. The Guardian has not reviewed the book, nor even mentioned its
existence.
Abandoned by the British government and the British
media, the Guardian included, Iraq's refugees continue their struggle
for survival. Posting from Syria, one newly displaced refugee,
Riverbend, writes:
"As we crossed the border and saw the last of
the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for
the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he
had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting
beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing
to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn't want to seem like
a baby. I didn't want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the
chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and
a half years."
In the same endearing spirit of endlessly thoughtful observation and indomitable optimism, she adds:
"We
were all refugees - rich or poor. And refugees all look the same -
there's a unique expression you'll find on their faces - relief, mixed
with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the
same."
But for British journalism, their faces do not look the same - they do not even exist.
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Writings 
For several months now, non-UK visitors accessing the Guardian website have been shown an endlessly revolving animation in three segments that would not look out of place on FAIR, ZNet, or indeed Media Lens. 
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