Dulce Et Decorum Est

The Sadriya market was being rebuilt after an earlier attack in February which killed more than 130 people. –BBC

Nearly 200 people have been killed in a string of attacks in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad – the worst day of violence since a US security operation began.

In one of the deadliest attacks of the last four years, some 140 people were killed in a car bombing in a food market in Sadriya district.

A witness said the area had been turned into a swimming pool of blood.

The attacks came as PM Nouri Maliki said Iraqi forces would take control of security across Iraq by the year’s end.

As the number of people killed in the Sadriya market bombing continued to climb, Mr Maliki called the perpetrators infidels and ordered the detention of the Iraqi army commander responsible for security in that area.

This monstrous attack today did not distinguish between the old and young, between men and women, he said.

It targeted the population in a way that reminds us of the massacres and genocide committed by the former dictatorship.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said the attacks were a horrifying thing, but said insurgents would not derail the ongoing security drive in Baghdad.

Burned alive

The bomb in Shia-dominated Sadriya was reportedly left in a parked car and exploded at about 1600 (1200 GMT) in the middle of a crowd of workers and shoppers.

The market was being rebuilt after it was destroyed by a bombing in February which killed more than 130 people.

The powerful bomb started a fire which swept over cars and minibuses parked nearby, burning many people and sending a large plume of smoke over Baghdad.

Television pictures showed a blasted scene littered with blackened and twisted wreckage.

One witness told the Reuters news agency that many of the victims were women and children.

I saw dozens of dead bodies, the man said. Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion.

There were pieces of flesh all over the place.

Ahmed Hameed, a shopkeeper in the area said: The street was transformed into a swimming pool of blood.

About an hour earlier, a suicide car bomb attack on a police checkpoint in Sadr City killed 35 people.

Another parked car bomb killed at least 11 people near a hospital in the Karrada district of Baghdad, while in al-Shurja district at least two people were killed by a bomb left on a minibus.

Two other attacks in the capital killed and wounded about 11 more people.

Hospitals in Baghdad were inundated with more than 200 injured people, many of them with serious burns from the bomb at the Sadriya market.

Car and suicide bombings have occurred almost daily in Baghdad in recent months, despite a US-led security crackdown since February.

The bombers are proving that they can slip through the tightened security net and defy the clampdown, says the BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad.

Security handover

Most of the attacks have been in Shia areas, increasing pressure for the Shia militias to step up their campaign of reprisal killings against the Sunni community in which the insurgents are based, says our correspondent.

…

The attacks in Baghdad came as officials from more than 60 countries attended a UN conference in Geneva on the plight of Iraqi refugees.

The UN estimates up to 50,000 people flee the violence in Iraq each month.

BBC News (2007-04-18): Up to 200 killed in Baghdad bombs

It’s considered bad form to speak ill of the dead. But speaking truthfully is more important than speaking well.

I believe that the picture below tells us all we need to know about the lasting impact the presidency of Gerald R. Ford has had on the United States of America, the nation he so proudly led for a couple of years after pardoning the man who was at that time the biggest criminal ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Yes, it was Gerald R. Ford who took those famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, out of the lower quadrants of the twisted bowels of the Nixon White House and raised them to the highest levels of American government, where, in one form or another, overtly and covertly, they have inflicted their primitive ideology and violent psychodramas on the nation, and the world, for more than three decades.

But Ford’s enduring legacy is in no way exhausted by the glories of his bloodthirsty political progeny. For the sad occasion of the statesman’s death is certainly a most appropriate time to recall what is probably his greatest geopolitical masterstroke: the green-lighting of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor – an act of state-sponsored terrorism that killed more than 200,000 people. True, George W. Bush has now far surpassed that genocidal benchmark, setting new standards of pointless and barbaric mass murder in Iraq – but only with the help of Fordians Cheney and Rumsfeld!

I first wrote about the pivotal role that Ford, along with Henry Kissinger (currently the chief outside adviser to the White House, according to Cheney – hey, it’s like the Nixon-Ford era never ended!), back in 2001, just after the release of declassified documents which had been gathered and published by the invaluable National Security Archive (see their report East Timor Revisited for more). As I noted in a follow-up report in May 2006:

…The documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act – in June 2001, before George W. Bush gutted the law – but only reported in December of that year by the Washington Post. Kissinger and Ford had long denied any prior knowledge of the murderous assault, even though they’d been feasting with the genocidal Indonesian tyrant Suharto the day before the troops went in. However, in a secret State Department cable, Ford and Kissinger actually told Suharto before the attack that we understand the problem you have and the intentions you have and we will not press you on the issue.

Kissinger, ever mindful of the media angle, added in another love note: We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.

The murders were carried out with U.S. weaponry. Congress had restricted their use to defensive purposes only, but Kissinger blithely brushed this aside, assuring Suharto that America would construe the invasion as self-defense rather than a foreign operation.

Chris Floyd (2006-12-28): The Enduring Legacy of Gerald R. Ford

Two detainees who escaped after last-minute struggles with the Iraqi death squads told of stumbling into the night while a full moon shone down on a ghostly landscape dotted with mass graves and bullet-riddled corpses. Their testimony was the first eyewitness account of mass killings during Saddam’s 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurdish minority, during which prosecutors allege that 182,000 people were slaughtered.

Speaking anonymously from behind a screen, two Kurdish men described how they and their fellow camp inmates were driven to the desert in stinking trucks, stained with urine and faeces.

It was an unpaved road. Our vehicle got stuck in the sand … and we heard gunfire. It wasn’t that close, it was far from us, but we heard screaming and gunfire, one said.

Then it was dark, and they brought a group of people in front of a vehicle. The drivers got out of our vehicles and turned on the headlights, put three lines or four lines of people in front of our vehicle and opened fire.

–The News – International (2006-10-19): Kurds tell of mass murder by Saddam death squads

It was dark when they brought a group of people (prisoners) in front of the vehicle. The drivers got out of our vehicles and turned on the headlights, the man said. It was really unbelievable, the number of people being killed like this.

He said some prisoners tried to snatch an automatic rifle from one of their guards, but the prisoners failed to grab the gun because we were so weak.

He said soldiers opened fire, spraying the prisoners with bullets.

I ran and fell into a ditch. It was full of bodies. I fell on a body. It was still alive. It was his last breath, he said.

He was lightly wounded. He took off his clothes in the ditch, thinking he was more likely to blend into the color of the sand if he were naked. He then began running again.

As I was running, I saw many pits, I saw many mounds, and I saw lots of people who had been shot, he said. The desert was full of mounds that had people buried underneath.

–The Boston Herald (2006-10-18): Witness in Saddam Hussein trial recalls massacre of Kurdish detainees

Babi Yar is a ravine outside of Kiev, in the Ukraine. Sixty-five years ago yesterday, the German occupying forces in Kiev posted signs throughout the city reading:

All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot.

At the time, there were about 175,000 Jews living in Kiev and its suburbs. Sixty-five years ago today, on September 29, 1941, thousands of Jewish men, women, and children reported as ordered, expecting to be taken onto trains and deported. At the meeting-place they were surrounded by German soldiers and local collaborators from the Ukrainian auxiliary police, who drove them into small groups of ten, forced them to the edge of the gorge, and then opened fire with machine guns. The mobile killing unit Einsatzgruppe C, which kept records of the massacre, reported that they systematically killed 33,771 Jews from Kiev in two days, on September 29th and September 30th.

After the end of World War II, Stalin’s regime became increasingly anti-Semitic, and the Soviet government refused repeated demands to build a memorial to the dead. This is a poem that the Ukrainian poet Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko wrote twenty years after the massacre, in 1961. The poem became widely known through recitations and samizdat circulation, but could not be published through the State-controlled press until 1984.

BABI YAR

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander over the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The Union of the Russian People!

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed — very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

–They come!

–No, fear not — those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!

–They break the door!

–No, river ice is breaking…

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May Internationale thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

Y.A. Yevtushenko (1961), translated by Benjamin Okopnik (1996)

A memorial to the dead was finally placed at Babi Yar in 1991, fifty years after the massacre.