[Mb-civic] Secrets of the morgue: Baghdad's body count

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article306436.ece
Secrets of the morgue: Baghdad's body count 

Bodies of 1,100 civilians brought to mortuary in July
Pre-invasion, July figure was typically less than 200
Last Sunday alone, the mortuary received 36 bodies
Up to 20 per cent of the bodies are never identified
Many of the dead have been tortured or disfigured 

By Robert Fisk 
Published: 17 August 2005 
The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the
cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the
pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their
computerised records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary
that human remains are stacked on top of each other. Unidentified bodies
must be buried within days for lack of space - but the municipality is so
overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the
vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries. 

July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad's modern history - in all, 1,100
bodies were brought to the city's mortuary; executed for the most part,
eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret.

We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capital's death toll last month
was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of
2003. Of the dead, 963 were men - many with their hands bound, their eyes
taped and bullets in their heads - and 137 women. The statistics are as
shameful as they are horrifying. For these are the men and women we
supposedly came to "liberate" - and about whose fate we do not care.

The figures for this month cannot, of course, yet be calculated. But last
Sunday, the mortuary received the bodies of 36 men and women, all killed
by violence. By 8am on Monday, nine more human remains had been 
received.
By midday, the figure had reached 25.

"I consider this a quiet day," one of the mortuary officials said to me as
we stood close to the dead. So in just 36 hours - from dawn on Sunday to
midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad civilians had been killed. No Western
official, no Iraqi government minister, no civil servant, no press release
from the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible statistic. The
dead of Iraq - as they have from the beginning of our illegal invasion -
were simply written out of the script. Officially they do not exist.

Thus there has been no disclosure of the fact that in July 2003 - three
months after the invasion - 700 corpses were brought to the mortuary in
Baghdad. In July of 2004, this rose to around 800. The mortuary records
the violent death toll for June of this year as 879 - 764 of them male,
115 female. Of the men, 480 had been killed by firearms, along with 25 of
the women. By comparison, equivalent figures for July 1997, 1998 and 1999
were all below 200.

Between 10 and 20 per cent of all bodies are never identified - the
medical authorities have had to bury 500 of them since January of this
year, unidentified and unclaimed. In many cases, the remains have been
shattered by explosions - possibly by suicide bombers - or by deliberate
disfigurement by their killers.

Mortuary officials have been appalled at the sadism visited on the
victims. "We have many who have obviously been tortured - mostly men," 
one
said. "They have terrible burn marks on hands and feet and other parts of
their bodies. Many have their hands fastened behind their backs with
handcuffs and their eyes have been bound with Sellotape. Then they have
been shot in the head - in the back of the head, the face, the eyes. These
are executions."

While Saddam's regime visited death by official execution upon its
opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and
other cities is unprecedented. "The July figures are the largest ever
recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute," a senior member
of the management told The Independent.

It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is
supposed to be under the control of the US military and the
American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in
recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this
city - yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in
disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution - or the
failure to complete it - now occupies the time of Western diplomats and
journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count.

But they should. Most are between 15 and 44 - the youth of Iraq - and, if
extrapolated across the country, Baghdad's 1,100 dead of last month must
bring Iraq's minimum monthly casualty toll in July alone to 3,000 -
perhaps 4,000. Over a year, this must reach a minimum of 36,000, a figure
which puts the supposedly controversial statistic of 100,000 dead since
the invasion into a much more realistic perspective.

There is no way of distinguishing the reasons for these thousands of
violent deaths. Some men and women were shot at US checkpoints, others
murdered, no doubt, by insurgents or thieves. A few listed as killed by
"blunt instruments" might have been the dead of traffic accidents. Some of
the women were probably the victims of "honour" killings - because male
relatives suspected them of having illicit relations with the wrong man.
Still others may have been murdered as collaborators. Doctors have been
told that bodies brought to the mortuary by US forces should not be given
post-mortem examinations (on the odd ground that the Americans will have
already performed this function).

So many civilians are dying that the morgue has had to rely on volunteers
from the holy city of Najaf to transport unidentified Shia Muslim dead to
the central city's large graveyard for burial, their plots donated by
religious institutions. "In some of the bodies, we find American bullets,"
a mortuary attendant told me. "But these could be American bullets fired
by Iraqis. We don't know who's killing who - it's not our job to find out,
but civilians are killing each other.

"We had a body here the other day and the relatives said he had been
murdered because he had been a Baathist in the old regime. Then they said
that his brother had been killed three or four weeks back because he was a
member of the religious Shia Dawa party which was the enemy of Saddam. 
But
this is the real story - the killing of the people. I don't want to die
under a new constitution. I want security."

One of the problems in cataloguing the daily death toll is that the
official radio often declines to report explosions. On Monday, the thump
of a bomb in the Karada district was never officially explained. Only
yesterday was it discovered that a suicide bomber had walked into a
popular café, the Emir, and blown himself up, killing two
policemen. Another explosion, officially said to be caused by a mortar,
turned out to be a mine set off beneath a pile of watermelons as a US
patrol was passing. A civilian died.

Again, there was no official account of these deaths. They were not
recorded by the government nor by the occupying armies nor, of course, by
the Western press. Like the bodies in the Baghdad city mortuary, they did
not exist.

Debate rages over number of civilians killed in conflict

The number of Iraqis killed since March 2003 has long been a matter of
fierce debate, in the absence of any figures from American and British
military or civilian officials on the spot.

"We don't do body counts," was the terse comment of General Tommy 
Franks,
commander of the US-led invasion - though it has been claimed that the
Pentagon does in fact keep a running total, which it refuses to make
public, for fear of increasing public doubts about the war. Undoubtedly
however the figure for Iraqi civilians dwarfs the toll of US and British
troops, which is meticulously recorded. Some 1,850 American and almost 100
British soldiers have been killed. In addition at least 12,000 US soldiers
have been wounded. But according to the Iraq Body Count (IBC), a
non-profit project regarded as the most authoritative independent source
on Iraqi casualties, the civilian toll as of yesterday was a minimum of
23,589, and a maximum of 26,705. But even IBC admits that its data is
incomplete. Nor is it clear how many insurgents are included.

In October 2004, a report in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that
at least 100,000 civilians had lost their lives in the first 18 months
after the invasion - more than half of them women and children killed in
air strikes. The figures were based on a survey of 1,000 households across
Iraq.

In November 2004, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, supported an estimate
from Iraq's ministry of health that 3,853 civilians were killed and 15,517
injured between April and October. This gives an annual death rate of
7,700, a third of the IBC estimate.

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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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