A REPORT released yesterday by the Iraq Fatality Investigations, led by former High Court judge George Newman, has condemned the actions of four British soldiers who forced an Iraqi boy at gunpoint into a canal and then watched him drown.
The report shows that 15-year-old Ahmed Jabbar Kareem Ali was detained for ‘looting’. Then he, along with others, were first forced to roll around in a pool of stagnant water; next they were forced into a Warrior army vehicle, and then forced, at gunpoint into the canal. Soldiers threw stones at Ahmed to force him into deeper water, even though he was floundering around, because he could not swim. They watched him go under and did nothing to save him.
For this, no action will be taken against any of the soldiers as they were granted anonymity in the report, and were acquitted of manslaughter at a court martial in 2006. In this one incident, we get a glimpse of the barbarity that took place in Iraq on a daily basis during the US and UK ‘shock and awe’ bombing blitz, invasion and occupation of Iraq. Imperialist wars breed butchers and criminals.
That similar incidents happened on a regular basis there can be no doubt. Since 2010, Public Interest Lawyers have called for a full public inquiry into allegations made by 142 Iraqi civilians that they were abused by British soldiers in southern Iraq. The law firm submitted multiple allegations of misconduct by British troops during the Iraq War.
The firm was at the centre of the Al-Sweady inquiry into a 2004 battle in southern Iraq amidst allegations that Iraqi detainees had been murdered, mutilated and tortured following the Battle of Danny Boy on 14 May 2004 near Al Amarah in southern Iraq. The Tory government shut Public Interest Lawyers down in early August of this year to stop the cases proceeding.
During the war in Iraq, personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations included physical and sexual abuse, systematic torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange revealed that in Iraq there was a ‘bloodbath on every corner’. WikiLeaks produced a leaked log recording more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009, including 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as ‘enemy’, 15,196 members of the puppet Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 US and UK troops occupying Iraq.
Even before the war on Iraq, UN sanctions on the country were responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the United Nations at the time, said it was a ‘price worth paying’. Those ultimately responsible for 1,033,000 deaths as a direct result of the war and a further 500,000 deaths as an indirect result of the war are US president of the time, George Bush, UK PM Tony Blair, along with his Foreign Secretary at the time, Jack Straw.
After a seven-year wait, the Chilcot report into the Iraq war was finally published in July. Damning as it was, Chilcot said that he would not rule on the legality of the Iraq war, a ruling which would implicate Bush, Blair and Straw as war criminals. The capitalist system will never indict its own. It was the British ruling class who developed torture techniques and invented the concentration camps emulated by Hitler. Between 1900 and 1902, the British Empire, led by Lord Kitchener, used concentration camps to incarcerate the Boer people in the Second Boer War in South Africa.
In Kenya, the British ruling class and its army, many of them conscripts, rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyan freedom fighters, the Mau Mau and their supporters, herded them into concentration camps and hung over 20,000 of them. At Hola camp, men and women were brutally tortured; castration was a common punishment. At the same time a generation of young British conscripts was brutalised.
The only way to put an end to imperialist war is to put an end to capitalism itself, the driving force to make wars for the sake of super-profits. However, the difference between the British rulers of the past and today is that they no longer control two thirds of the earth. They remain ruthless, but they are now on their knees. Now is the time for the working class to organise the socialist revolution to put an end to British capitalism, and to put its criminal ruling class and military behind bars!
