By Andrew Bolt

NINE years ago, I drove into Rwanda just after Hutu gangs, armed by the Government, slashed and shot dead 800,000 Tutsis. I saw a church, in which a hundred Tutsi Catholics had been machinegunned and blown up with grenades. The dried blood was centimetres thick around the altar. I found among the refugees on the roads a deeply-shocked girl, Marigisi, barely five but alone. For three months she’d hidden from the militia, which had slaughtered her parents. She was still in her school uniform and cried only when I asked who had looked after her.

So what did the United Nations do to stop Rwanda’s genocide?

Nothing. A tiny UN peacekeeping force just looked on, while its pleas for reinforcements to stop the killing went unanswered.

More…

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-What stopped the mass murder in the end was not the UN, but an invasion of rebels backed by Uganda. You know, one of those “illegal” unilateral attacks that the US and brave allies like Australia are threatening against Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime.

-And where were the French in Rwanda? Oh, France sent troops, all right — but they protected the Hutu killers as they fled the rebels. Just as France now protects Saddam by vowing to veto any move by the Americans to enforce the UN’s ultimatum that Iraq disarm — or else.

-I HAVE also visited Cambodia, where Pol Pot annihilated 2 million men, women and children, some for “crimes” as trivial as the wearing of spectacles. In Pol Pot’s torture chamber in Phnom Penh, I’ve seen the countless photographs his executioners took before they finished off their victims. There were pictures of wide-staring women, clutching their soon-to-die babies. Of men seeing their own death.

-A mad woman later showed me old photographs of her own children, all murdered in that time. “Dead, dead, dead,” she cried with each soft slap of a picture.

-What did the UN do to stop this genocide?

-Again, nothing. See, China, armed with its veto in the UN Security Council, was Pol Pot’s chief ally and protected him. As it today protects Saddam from war.

-What ended this nightmare was yet another of those “illegal” unilateral attacks the UN hates, this time by Vietnam, which drove out Pol Pot in 1979. Yet now millions of “peace” protesters demand we leave Iraq alone — that we not attack Saddam’s regime, because “too many innocent Iraqis will die”.

-Leave it to the UN, they say. And I feel sick, because I know what that really means. And I remember Srebrenica. Bosnia. Kosovo. Where was the UN then?

-But what revolts me still more is how little respect the protesters pay to the million Iraqis who have died under Saddam’s great terror. The 4 million who have fled their country. And the Iraqis who die or suffer each day that we delay the liberation of their country.

-WHY do the protesters not see their “peace”, too, has “innocent victims”? “Collateral damage”? Is it because Saddam’s dead die anonymously, without faces or names?

-If so, let me try to fix that.

-Among Saddam’s victims are not just his own brother-in-law and two sons-in-law, but at least 100,000 Kurds.

-Five of those dead Kurds are brothers and sisters of Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad, who was just 16 when Saddam’s killers gassed their town in 1988. Here’s what one of Saddam’s gas attacks looks like from inside as described by Nasreen last year to a New Yorker reporter who talked to her in northern Iraq.

-“At first it smelled bad, like garbage. And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples,” she said.

-“My sister came close to my face and said, `Your eyes are very red.’ Then the children started throwing up. They kept throwing up.”

-Nasreen and her relatives tried to outrun the fumes.

-“The children were crying, `We can’t see! My eyes are bleeding!’ . . .

-There was a small baby on the ground, away from her mother. I thought they were both sleeping. But she had dropped the baby and then died. And I think the baby tried to crawl away, but it died, too.”

-Saddam’s army used such gas hundreds of times and his scientists have worked on still deadlier weapons. Judge from this: US soldiers and Israeli emergency workers have been inoculated against smallpox.

-Also among Saddam’s 1 million dead are many thousands of southern Shiites who have been gassed, shot, hanged and drowned. Human Rights Watch interviewed scores of survivors of the atrocities, several of whom told of seeing soldiers even tie children to their tanks as human shields when fighting rebels.

-A businessman described to Human Rights Watch his return to Basra after one such crackdown: “We went into a house, near al-Watani St. I was looking for my own family. In the living room, there were the bodies of two young girls, completely naked, hung from the fan.”

-I’m sorry if this distresses you, but anyone who says Iraq should be left in peace should at least know what that “peace” looks like.

-Three years ago, for instance, obstetrician Najat Mohammed Haydar was accused of prostitution and beheaded, says Amnesty International. Like other Iraqi women, she was so shamed and killed because she had criticised the regime.

-Last year BBC reporter John Swain interviewed an Iraqi refugee, Ali, who showed him his little girl’s feet — crushed and crippled by police to make her mother reveal where Ali was.

-Leading Iraqi opposition figures are shocked that so many activists still refuse to support a war to free their country from such horrors.

-Dr Barham Salih is Prime Minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a largely democratic government newly created in the north of Iraq, where British and US war planes protect a Kurdish “safe haven”.

-SALIH last month went to Rome to beg the Socialist International, which includes our Labor Party, to back a war in Iraq.

-“In my office in Suleimani, I meet almost every day some traveller who has come from Baghdad, and other parts of Iraq,” he said.

-“Without exception, they tell me of the continued suffering inflicted by the Iraqi regime, of the fearful hope secretly nurtured by so many enslaved Iraqis for a free life, for a country where they can think without fear . . . “So to those who say `No War’, I say, of course, yes, but we can only have `No War’ if there is `No Dictatorship’ and `No Genocide’.”

-And he concluded — as I will — with a plea: “Friends, there will be no war on Iraq. There will be, and must be, a liberation of Iraq.”

(Reproduced with Andrew’s permission)

Dr Salih’s plea is at http://www.puk.org

Herald Sun, Edition 1 – FIRST MON 24 FEB 2003, Page 019

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