Coastal
Post Online
December,
2003
US Soldiers Bulldoze Iraqi Farmers' Crops
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
Dhuluaya: US soldiers driving bulldozers,
with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms
as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of
collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas
attacking US troops.
The stumps
of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the
bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad.
Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the
uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for
firewood.
Nusayef Jassim, one of
32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that
the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't
capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."
Other farmers said that US troops had told
them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed
to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active
in this Sunni Muslim district.
"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while
they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops
have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a
member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation
for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had
happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the
resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of
collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein
added.
The destruction of the
fruit trees took place in the second half of
last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what
occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road
just after it passes over a bridge.
Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition
addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for
compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor
families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they
became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death."
The children of one woman who owned some
fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according
to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one
American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter
from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers
at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper
quotes Lt. Col. Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We
asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was
responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."
Informing US troops about the identity of
their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most
people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their
fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give
information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US
troops.
Asked how much his lost
orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if
someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=452375