Organizing Looters in a Collapsing Society
We've seen pictures of young Ali with no arms, an older child with burns covering her face and body, and the ministrations by the 'coalition' to their wounds. But what of the people whose faces and pain haven't been splashed across the television screens? What of their treatment when hospitals are stripped of medicine, water, and electricity?
Iain Simpson of the World Health Organization, who noted that health data and records were burned and looted, says :
"They turned up with a truck and with equipment, which enabled them to get into a safe. This clearly was not simply an outpouring of popular feeling. We have no idea who they were. And, they came with the intention of taking what they could see, and loading it up into a truck, getting into the safe, taking vehicles as well, which were parked in the WHO compound. This was more an organized looting than anything else."
Wouldn't looters find it a waste of time to hang around burning material that had no monetary value? And, what's this bit about "organized" looting?
Were organized looters the reason that the Save the Children organization's plane full of medical supplies was told by US authorities that they couldn't land in Iraq yesterday?
As the occupying forces, the 'coalition' becomes responsible for the safety and welfare of the people. But as ministry offices and hospitals continue to be looted and burned, while the ministry of oil remains heavily guarded and untouched, one wonders if Robert Fiske's observations are insight into a new evil:
Because there is also something very dangerous - and deeply disturbing - about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives.
For they are not the looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up afterwards, often in blue and white single-decker buses.
I actually followed one of them after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.
Now the official American line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature in the Marines' curfew orders to the people of Baghdad.
But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I.
So, what's going on? Why can't supplies get in? Why are some things saved and others ignored?
permalink posted by: jgh 10:52:44 AM
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