Who will speak out?

Ronan Bennett

Busy day today what with a well attended demonstration at Downing Street. In the wake of US massacres in Falluja, where, asks Ronan Bennett, are MPs of conscience?

What does it take to get a New Labour politician to speak out on Iraq? I'm not talking about the likes of Blair, Hoon and Straw - key players so deeply implicated in the cruel tragedy of conquest and occupation that they have no option but to stay the course, even as it spirals into slaughter and chaos. But there are ministers and backbenchers with a history of commitment to human rights. What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?
Not the 600 or 700 Iraqis killed over the last fortnight in Falluja, it seems. Perhaps they believe, like the prime minister, that those attacking coalition troops are Saddam loyalists, al-Qaida fighters or religious fanatics, and deserve everything they get. Perhaps they have been reassured by General John Abizaid, head of the US Army's central command, who spoke of the coalition's "judicious use of force". Maybe they accept the reassurance of the commander of the US marines besieging the city that his men are "trained to be precise in their firepower", and that "95% of those killed were legitimate targets".

Let's accept for the moment that the commander is right and accept that the AC-130 gunships and F16 fighter-bombers unleashed against the people of Falluja are precise, that the 500lb bombs falling on the city come under the definition of judicious. Let's look at just a handful of the 5% of civilian casualties the Americans concede they have inflicted.

These include the mother of six-year-old Haider Abdel-Wahab, shot and killed while hanging out laundry; his father, shot in the head; Haider himself, and his brothers, crushed but dug out alive after a US missile struck their house. They include children who died of head wounds. They include an old woman with a bullet wound - still clutching a white flag when aid workers found her. They include an elderly man lying face down at the gate to his house - while inside terrified girls screamed "Baba! Baba!" They include ambulance crews fired on by US troops - and four-year-old Ali Nasser Fadil, wounded during an air strike. The New York Times reporter who found the infant in a Baghdad hospital described him lying in bed, "his eyes wide and fixed on a spot in the ceiling". His left leg had been crudely amputated. The same reporter found 10-year-old Waed Joda by the bedside of his gravely wounded father. "American snipers shot at us as we were trying to flee Falluja," said Waed.

Every one of these incidents has been documented by journalists, aid workers or medical staff. And there are plenty more. Even allowing for casualties caused by the Iraqi resistance, the dread catalogue of American-inflicted suffering and death is long and undeniable. At this point it's worth reminding ourselves that 5% of 600 is 30. But the evidence of the bodies alone gives the lie to the American account: at least 350 of the dead in Falluja have been women and children.

The Americans say they are engaged in a mission to bring to justice the perpetrators of the four security contractors - or mercenaries - killed and mutilated in the city on March 31. Locals see it differently. They describe their occupation, initially by troops of the US 82nd Airborne, as oppressive from the start. Almost as soon as they arrived, in April 2003, US soldiers killed 18 protesters during a demonstration. After six months of occupation, the 82nd Airborne had killed at least 40 civilians and police in the city.


In March, the 82nd Airborne were replaced by a Marine Expeditionary Force and, shortly afterwards, an American soldier was killed. On March 27, marines undertook a "sweep" through the city, described as "revenge" by Mohammed Albalwa, president of the city council. At least six Iraqi civilians, including an 11-year-old boy, were killed. It was in this heightened atmosphere that the mercenaries met their grisly deaths. No one can pretend that the assault on Falluja is anything other than retribution for the mercenaries - even members of the hand-picked Iraqi governing council accept it as such.

On all of this - a shameful and deafening silence. Politicians are not usually so tongue-tied. Remember Peter Hain, leader of the House, after bands of landless black poor invaded white-owned farms in Zimbabwe? The number of white farmers killed was a fraction of the toll of civilians who die every week in Iraq at the hands of coalition forces. Hain was swift to denounce Zimbabwe's government as "uncivilised". He spoke of his "horror" at the killings. Tyranny, he said, was "running riot in Zimbabwe" and "disfiguring the whole of the southern African sub-continent". So far, Hain has been silent about the horror wreaked by US firepower in Falluja and the disfigurement of Iraq by what has by any reckoning been a massacre.

And what about Chris Mullin, a former Tribune editor and now junior minister at the Foreign Office? Best remembered for his campaign to free the Birmingham Six, Mullin is frequently described as a friend of the underdog, with a commitment to human rights. Sadly, these qualities have not been much in evidence recently. Last summer Mullin defended to me the kangaroo courts held in Belmarsh prison, at which anonymous witnesses testify against men imprisoned by the home secretary without charge ("Better than sending them back to their countries of origin where they would be killed," he said). And though he was outraged by the denial of justice to the Birmingham Six, Guantánamo does not disturb him ("September 11 changed everything"). The underdogs of Falluja have yet to move Mullin.

Then there's Hilary Benn, international development secretary, who has spoken of Britain's responsibility to get Iraqi schools and hospitals up and running, to ensure a future for Iraqi children. But it isn't easy to square the rhetoric of international development with that of military occupation: the promise of a good education doesn't mean much to parents dodging US snipers to dig a hole in a sports field in order to bury their child.

The list of the shameful silent could go on: Angela Eagle, a longstanding leftwinger? Silent. Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, former stalwarts of the old National Council for Civil Liberties? Silent. Oona King, who in her maiden speech cited the 1880 Match Girls' strike, has spoken passionately about the 35,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases and denounced the "slaughter and oppression" of the Palestinians in Jenin. Silent. Joan Ruddock, former chair of CND. Silent. Ann Clwyd, defender of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, who wrote: "Some will continue to argue that internal repression is not a matter of legitimate concern for other countries. I disagree. There are basic human rights that must be defended." Are we to take it, then, that external repression is acceptable? That the human rights of the inhabitants of Falluja are not worth defending? What has happened to these people? Many of them don't even have ministerial jobs to protect. I have yet to hear any of them acknowledge that what is going on in Falluja is wrong. That killing children is wrong, blasting their houses is wrong, blowing up mosques is wrong, burying a family under a ton of rubble is wrong.

Today the siege of Falluja continues. US troops are massing outside the holy city of Najaf. In the south, the situation has been further inflamed by the British Army shooting 15 people dead in Amara on April 6 (silence there, too). In Baghdad's Sadr City, camouflaged Humvees tour the streets with loudspeakers warning people not to leave their homes. No one seriously believes things are improving in Iraq under occupation. How long before our MPs speak out?