‘The soldiers answered his screams with laughter and then shot more bullets’

As Palestinian Child Day is celebrated on 5 April, Omsiyat Kamal ‘Awaja (15) is one of many Palestinian children for whom the day, like every other, will be marked by unbearable loss and suffering.

It is impossible to count the number of children in the Gaza Strip who have been directly affected by loss. Since the outbreak of al-Aqsa Intifada on 28 September 2000, PCHR has documented the killing of 958 Palestinian children and injury of 6,355 others in the Gaza Strip. 313 children were killed during ‘Operation Cast Lead’ (2008-9), and a further 35 children were killed during ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’ in November 2012. PCHR has also documented the tragic consequences on thousands of children of the destruction of their homes, denying them the right to shelter.

A small, mud house with a small yard in the front, piles of pots and kitchen utensils scattered here and there, a number of books leaning against the wall of the house, which barely shelters its residents. That is what the house in which Omsiyat currently lives looks like. The house was built by UNRWA as a temporary alternative for the ‘Awaja family home, which was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2009 during ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

“Before moving to the house that you are seeing now, we lived in a tent for around two years. During that time, we realised exactly what it feels like to be a displaced person with no home. We did not get used to living in a tent. It took us a long time to adjust, as we used to live in a big house with most of the things we needed.”

On 4 January 2009, Israeli forces destroyed the ‘Awaja building in Beit Lahia without any prior warning. The residents fled to a neighbouring tract of land when Israeli bulldozers began to destroy their home. After the house had been destroyed, the children’s mother, Wafaa’ (36), went back to collect what could be salvaged from under the rubble. She was accompanied by three of her children, Diaa, Sobhi, and Ibrahim, each of whom was younger than 13 years of age.

Omsiyat recalls: “My brother, Ibrahim, was the first to be injured, sustaining injuries in his waist. Mom screamed out, so Dad went to check on her, and picked up my brother. They left the house, or what remained of it, and Dad was screaming, ‘My son is injured. We need an ambulance.’ The Israeli soldiers were still in the area. They answered his screams with laughter and then shot more bullets, so that Dad was injured, as well as my mother. My father was left lying on the street and Ibrahim was lying next to him. My mother crawled until she reached my siblings and me where we were hiding behind a wall. We saw the Israeli soldiers approaching and shooting at Ibrahim, and Dad told us later that he had died.”

More than four years later, Omsiyat is still torn apart by regret. Though very young, she feels guilty about the death of her brother because she failed to help him. “When my Dad, Mom, and Ibrahim were injured, I stood there, unable to do anything, though I am the oldest of my siblings. I cannot forget what happened and I feel so much pain whenever I remember that I did not try to help. The idea that my help might have done something, in some way or another, to rescue my brother never leaves my mind, and it causes my stomach to ache. Maybe if I had tried to pull Ibrahim away from the Israeli crossfire, he would still be alive.”

Omsiyat was severely affected by the suffering that she and her family went through. Her father, Kamal (51), says, “Omsiyat suffered so much after the death of her brother and the destruction of our house. It took us a long time to settle into our new life in the tent, and then in the mud house, as neither could compare to the house we used to live in and what I used to provide for my children. My child was executed, my house was destroyed, and I turned from being a father who provided the best he could for his family to a father who is incapable even of providing a suitable house for his family. Days pass by meaninglessly. This how we all feel. Even psychotherapy sessions could not help us to get over this. My wife, children, and I share an indescribable feeling of oppression.”

Omsiyat describes how her father, Kamal (51), tried his best to create a nice environment for his children to live in: “Dad installed an internet line in the tent and bought us a computer. He also replaced most of the electronic devices we used to have in our house, but unfortunately he could not build a new house because he did not have enough money. UNRWA built us this temporary house and told my Dad recently that they are planning to demolish it to build a new permanent house. We are preparing to go back to living in a tent.”

The family will live in a tent again until UNRWA finishes building the permanent house. “Although I know from experience how harsh it is to live in tents, the idea of going back to the tent does not worry me. In comparison to what we have been through, tents seem luxurious.”

Omsiyat used to love drawing landscapes, but today she only draws scenes of death and destruction. “I can see no beauty around me and I am no good at drawing anything but warplanes, tanks, and funerals. I used to love drawing landscapes. All I drew in my paintings were flowers, butterflies, and trees. Now, when I intend to draw a flower, I automatically draw a tank, a tent, or a destroyed house.”

Omsiyat’s story is included in a report that PCHR has recently published, ‘The Best is Yet to Come’, along with the accounts of 14 more children in the Gaza Strip who have experienced bereavement, injury, the injury of a loved one, the destruction of a home, or long-term separation from a father who is in prison. The report was funded by UNICEF.

Palestinian children are a particularly vulnerable group and are among those most affected by Israeli forces' violations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which have been ongoing since 1967. International humanitarian law (IHL) grants children two forms of protection: first, the general protection granted to them as non-combatant individuals; second, special protection as they are considered to be a particularly vulnerable group in times of war and armed conflict.[1]

Under the principle of distinction, parties to a conflict must, at all times, distinguish between civilians and combatants, and civilian objects and military targets. Violations of this principle constitute war crimes, as defined in, inter alia, Articles 8(2)(b)(i), and (ii) of the Statute of the International Criminal Court.[2] Depending on the scale of such attacks, and whether they form part of a plan or policy, such attacks may also constitute the crime of wilful killing and be a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.[3]

In addition, IHL requires that any attack must be proportionate. An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.[4] Furthermore, under the principle of precaution, customary IHL requires that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, or at least to minimise, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.[5] More

 

Mission Unaccomplished - By Peter Van Buren

Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time.

The Madness of King George

It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.

By then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts -- at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned -- we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.

In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.

Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or... um... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.

In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn't a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.

In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the PotemkinChicken Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford, then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow ambassador to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that “teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing to rely on Americans,” is still online (including this charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine).

We weren’t stupid, mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough to learn to look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at first, a kind of insider’s joke you all think you know the punch line to. Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a war whose costs will someday be toted up in the trillions. Really, at the end of the day, what was the harm?

The harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power.” How could we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”

By 2009, of course, it should all have been so obvious. We were no longer inside the neocon dream of unrivaled global superpowerdom, just mired in what happened to it. We were a chicken factory in the desert that no one wanted.

Time Travel to 2003

Anniversaries are times for reflection, in part because it’s often only with hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our lives. On the other hand, on anniversaries it’s often hard to remember what it was really like back when it all began. Amid the chaos of the Middle East today, it’s easy, for instance, to forget what things looked like as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had been invaded and occupied quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets (the British, the ancient Greeks…) could never have dreamed of. Iran was frightened, seeing the mighty American military on its eastern border and soon to be on the western one as well, and was ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S. was rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for torture.

Most of the rest of the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with dictators reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception, though predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make some sort of deal. (He did.) All that was needed was a quick slash into Iraq to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart of Mesopotamia. Our future garrisons there could obviously oversee things, providing the necessary muscle to swat down any future destabilizing elements. It all made so much sense to the neocon visionaries of the early Bush years. The only thing that Washington couldn’t imagine was this: that the primary destabilizing element would be us.

Indeed, its mighty plan was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their lust for everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team missed a diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today’s saber rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq imploded. As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by history, turned up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret gulags, rendition, drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at home. The sleaziest of deals were cut to try to salvage something, including ignoring the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi Rice-Qaddafiphoto-op rapprochement in Libya.

Inside Iraq, the forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by the U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a proxy warbetween the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war between Israel and Iran inside Lebanon (where another destabilizing event, the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli invasion of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended. Today, in fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host, Syria, with multiple powers using “humanitarian aid” to push and shove their Sunni and Shia avatars around.

Staggering neocon expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically more powerful, with sanctions-busting trade between the two neighbors now valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that decade, the U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran’s strategic counterbalances, Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run by Nouri al-Malaki, who had once found asylum in Tehran.

Meanwhile, Turkey is now engaged in an open war with the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey is, of course, part of NATO, so imagine the U.S. government sitting by silently while Germany bombed Poland. To complete the circle, Iraq’s prime minister recently warned that a victory for Syria's rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda which would further destabilize the region.

Meanwhile, militarily burnt out, economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lacking any moral standing in the Middle East post-Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring flickered out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region. And even that hasn’t stopped Washington from pursuing the latest version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.

Having noted the ease with which a numbed American public patriotically looked the other way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell, our leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American drones and special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever deeper intoAfrica, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier version of the state ofperpetual war George Orwell once imagined for his dystopian novel 1984. And don’t doubt for a second that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes for our American world.

Happy Anniversary

On this 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any measure, a dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny Department of Stateadvises American travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens “remain at risk for kidnapping... [as] numerous insurgent groups, including Al Qaida, remain active...” and notes that “State Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq advises the use of Protective Security Details.”

In the bigger picture, the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in 2003. Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In 2003, at that infamous “mission accomplished” moment, only Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were considered “extreme danger posts.” Soon enough, however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya, once boring but secure outposts for State’s officials, now fall into the same category.

Other places once considered safe for diplomats and their families such asSyria and Mali have been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at all. Even sleepy Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department had its Arabic language school there, is now on reduced staff with no diplomatic family members resident. Egypt teeters.

The Iranian leadership watched carefully as the American imperial version of Iraq collapsed, concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed away from initial offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at least for a while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity, aided by the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network. North Korea, another A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther from Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor China pursued its own path ofeconomic dominance, while helping to “pay” for the Iraq War by becoming the number-one holder of U.S. debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S. debt held overseas.

And don’t put away the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief for an absent George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration on this 10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recentlyreminded us that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he had “long since given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the right decision,” Blair added that new crises are looming. “You’ve got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come,” he said. “We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult. But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle.”

Think of his comment as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe, Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that it stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was not an aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of thinking that is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline is slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however, even the drones will have to land.

And so, happy 10th anniversary, Iraq War! A decade after the invasion, a chaotic and unstable Middle East is the unfinished legacy of our invasion. I guess the joke is on us after all, though no one is laughing.

Peter Van Buren, a retired 24-year veteran of the State Department, served in Iraq. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. diplomacy at his blog, We Meant Well. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He is currently working on a new book, The People on the Bus: A Story of the 99%.

Copyright 2013 Peter Van Buren