Racism, human rights and Ann Clwyd's psyche. posted by Richard Seymour

There are always good reasons to suspect anyone who says "you couldn't make it up" - either because it betrays an astonishing lack of imagination, or because they have made it up. As in "did you know welfare claimants are receiving free swimming pools if they say they were killed in Afghanistan? True. It's bureacracy. Mate of mine works down the council, told me all about it. You couldn't make it up." The imagination does reel, though, when you hear this:

We have been trying to train the Iraqis in human rights. We’ve set up conferences for the Iraqis on human rights with all the NGOs. We’ve been trying our very best to get human rights into the Iraqi psyche. We want to help them I think. [via]

The "Iraqis" require, or the "Iraqi psyche" is in need of, 'our' assistance on human rights! Things have come to a pretty pass indeed when the UK's "human rights envoy" disgraces herself and her party by exhibiting such naked racism toward the subjects of colonial rule. Clwyd has shown contemptuous disregard for the fate of Iraqis, as in her support for the massacre in Fallujah. She also wrote to The Guardian to claim, when the issue was first raised, that "Coalition forces have not used [a modern form of napalm] – either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time". Clwyd's attitude to the Abu Ghraib scandal was peculiar. Having reported one incident of abuse, an elderly Iraqi woman who was held without charge for six weeks while being ridden like a donkey by US troops, she said she was happy to call the incident "resolved" because the women was going to get her jewellery and papers back - no soldier was charged over this abuse, and Clwyd refused to name the unit involved. She did, to her credit, raise the issue of abuse at Abu Ghraib with Blair back in late 2003, long before the public revelations: but this also means she kept the scandal hidden from the public until such time as it could no longer be hidden. She also went to great lengths to minimise the damage, telling John Humphreys on BBC Radio Four's Today programme on Thursday 13th May that "I took an Iraqi to Abu Ghraib who had been tortured there under Saddam and he said people must keep the US prisoner scandal in perspective." Forgive me if I say that you easily could make that up.

Clwyd now calls for a "human rights minister". But there was a human rights minister, a Sunni politician named Hashem Ashibli, until he resigned over the US's practise of torture in Abu Ghraib and also over the massacre in Fallujah in April 2004. It would seem, then, that one certain way to have a human rights minister would be to withdraw the troops and make his/her job meaningful.

Listen to Jeremy Paxman on that clip by the way: "surely this makes a nonsense of the idea that troops can leave next year, doesn't it?" Further, "British, and indeed, American influence is decidedly limited isn't it?". This is an outlandish thing to say - as if the occupiers had not selected and trained the security forces from day one. When the invasion happened, the entire Iraqi security apparatus was dismantled, as was the army. The US immediately began to rebuild the secret police force in Iraq, particularly recruiting from former Mukhabarat operatives. The Interior Ministry, which is behind the latest scandals, had its staff selected and put in place by the occupying authorities and no one else. The security forces, who have been torturing and murdering people across Iraq, were trained by the CIA. The US planned the Salvador Option, and no one else. It is they who are discharging death squads to operate across Iraq. It is they who are behind the drilled bodies appearing in dumpsters and street corners in Baghdad.

We can and should go further. Strange to relate, before Ann Clwyd became an apologist for mass murder, her imprimatur appeared on the back of a book by some Iraqi scholars, both Arab and Kurdish, which assailed the US's assault on Iraq in 1991 as well as arguing for Saddam's overthrow. In this book, Abbas Alnasrawi - who was a staunch critic of the 2003 invasion - wrote of how the US had deliberately targetted the civilian infrastructure, including "transport and telecommunications networks, fertilizer plants, power stations, oil facilities, iron and steel plants, bridges, hospitals, storage facilities, industrial plants and civilian buildings". This moved the UN to describe the results as "near apocalyptic". Some targets were deliberately chosen in order to increase Iraq's dependency on the West after the war. (Abbas Alnasrawi 'Economic devastation, underdevelopment and outlook', in Fran Hazleton (ed), Iraqi Since the Gulf War: Prospects for Democracy, Z Books, 1994). Other civilian targets included the fleeing convoy of cars, trucks and carts on the 60 miles of highway from Mutlaa to Basra, who were subject to 'turkey shoots'. To these crimes, we ought to add sanctions applied with foreknowledge of the effects they would have on the civilian population, repeated bombardment usually on spurious pretexts etc etc. And now that the US and UK are in Iraq, using death squads, torture, bombings both chemical and incendiary - the "Iraqi psyche" needs their help on human rights? Troops mustn't leave in case Iraqis forget the valuable lessons of the occupation? You could make it up, and I swear I wish it were fiction - but what is happening in plain sight, in front of your nose as it were, is the revival not merely of colonialism but also of the most pernicious racism and astounding hypocrisy that was the hallmark of that era. If you're an Iraqi, you'd really have to have a heart of gold not to want to see Ann Clwyd spend some time in the Interior Ministry's bunker.