A report from the man who broke the original story...
By Robert Fisk
"From the moment I knocked on the front door of Daoud Mousa al-Maliki's home in Basra, I knew something had gone terribly wrong in the British Army in southern Iraq.
I had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland - I had even been threatened by British officers in Belfast - but I somehow thought that things had changed, that a new, more disciplined army had emerged from the dark, sinister days of the Irish conflict. But I was wrong. Baha Mousa, Daoud's son, had died from the injuries he received in British custody, a young, decent man whose father was a cop, who did nothing worse than work as a receptionist in a Basra hotel......
It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old clichés about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. Maybe there are hearts and minds to be maintained inside the Green Zone in Baghdad or any of the other "green zones" around the Middle East where our Western forces shelter from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high ground - if ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and George Bush's illegal invasion - has long ago been abandoned.
We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's death with him for ever - to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them. "
No comments:
Post a Comment