Iraqis Suffer Effects of Bombs

There was just a pile of crushed Marlboro boxes and a lot of blood that had poured from his half-severed arm when the bomb went off in the middle of Karada. It was aimed at the Americans of course, and, as so often happens, the Iraqis paid the price.

None more so than the man in black trousers and white shirt who was torn apart by the explosion and whose crushed body was dragged off on a wooden cart. Another day in the life and death of Baghdad.

As always, there were the odd little ironies of violence. The dead man — and nobody in Karada knew him because he had arrived in a taxi — was on his way to the local bank to change currencies, from the old dinar notes with Saddam’s face on the bill to the new dinars with the ancient Iraqi mathematician Al-Hassan Ibn Al-Haitham in place of the captured dictator. In one sense, therefore, the dead man had been making his way from “Old Iraq” to “New Iraq” when he died. A cafe-owner called Anwar Al-Shaaban thought the man might have been called Ahmed.

Then there was Yassir Adel. He was only a 12-year old primary schoolboy and he was taking his two brothers to school when the bomb exploded in the center of the crowded highway. “The American patrol had just gone past and one of their vehicles was blasted over the road,” he told me with a maturity beyond his years. “It’s like that here these days — every day. Someone put a street banner over the man’s body before he was taken away.”

I recognized the grocery store on the corner. In the last days of the Anglo-American invasion last April, I had bought my eggs and water here and I remember hiding with the owner behind his counter when an American jet flew low down the street and bombed a building at the far end. Now — eight months later — his eggs were a grey-yellow sludge, the plastic water bottles flooding the shop, the owner muttering to himself as he knocked the splinters of glass from his window frame.

A group of US troops and members of the new, hooded “Iraqi Civil Defense Force” — a militia in all but name — turned up afterward in those all too vulnerable humvees. Their comrades had been the target and within an hour they were handing out colored pamphlets which some of the shopkeepers, sweeping their shattered glass into the street, threw into the gutters in anger. One showed a group of children with the following legend: “The terrorists and troublemakers are putting bombs on both sides of the roads and highways and they don’t care about who gets hurt…You, the citizens of Iraq, hold the key to stopping this violence against your people.”

But to people blasted by just such a bomb, this was a heavy sell. “The terrorists wish to make anyone a victim — women, children, mothers, fathers,” the leaflet continued. “These terrorists care about nothing except fear and darkness. Their aim is to destroy your new freedom and your self-government (sic)…Tell the police and Coalition Forces about any information you have.”

It was a bad time to ask the people of Karada to be collaborators. The insurgents who are cutting down young American lives every day clearly do not care if Iraqis die in the attacks, but everyone knows that the Americans are the target of these bombs — which the leaflets failed to mention. And indeed, the explosives were cleverly hidden in the very center of the highway. There had been a gap in the concrete central reservation for cars to turn left onto the street from a side road. Someone had re-sealed the gap with stones and placed the bomb beneath them. When the first American patrol passed, that same someone had set off the bomb — and missed the soldiers.

Did he see the man with the dinars crossing the highway in his black trousers and white shirt? Did he see Fouad, the cigarette salesman with his Marlboros? No doubt he did. But one young man walked up to me and immediately blamed the Americans. “At least under Saddam there was security — now we are afraid to go to work,” he shouted. “At least under Saddam, the innocent didn’t suffer.” I disputed this. He knew this was a lie. But another, older educated man arrived. “We were better off under Saddam,” he said. “No, we were not free, but you have brought us anarchy.”

Even the old Shiite lady in black, buying lemons from the vegetable stall on the other side of the street cursed the Americans. It was the same old story of every foreign occupier: damned if you do and damned if you don’t —especially when the innocent die.

Serbia May Again Cause Balkan Strife

Marcus Tanner, The Independent

LONDON, 31 January 2003 — The electoral triumph of Serbia’s ultra-nationalists led by Vojislav Seselj leaves Western strategy in the Balkans in ruins. Bang go any hopes of integrating the former Yugoslav republics into the European Union. Ditto The Hague tribunal’s hopes of getting hold of the two most wanted war criminals of the 1990s, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

Not only does Seselj’s victorious Serbian Radical Party not apologize for the carnage in Bosnia in the 1990s — it would do the same again. If we don’t get another war in the Balkans it won’t be for lack of enthusiasm for a military project, but because the Serbia they (may) inherit is too feeble to contemplate revanchism by force of arms. A nationalist-run Serbia would not be the roaring lion Yugoslavia was under Slobodan Milosevic. The nationalists, in any case, are not yet in the driving seat.

With under 30 percent of ballots cast, they control only one third of the deputies in the new Parliament. Even in alliance with Slobodan Milosevic’s supporters, they will marshal only about 100 of the 250 votes. But no one should underestimate the significance of this political earthquake.

In Serbia, and throughout the region, everyone now knows that a messy combination of reformist and not-so reformist parties is clinging to power in Belgrade by a thread. Meanwhile Serbia’s nationalists will enjoy the fruits of victory without any of the responsibility. They will claim, with some justice, that Western pressure is all that is keeping them from office.

Vojislav “Vojvode” (duke) Seselj first wowed Serbs in 1992 with a pledge to gouge out secessionist Croat eyes with rusty spoons. Promises to expel all the Albanians from Kosovo, absorb most of Croatia into Serbia and drop bombs on Austria followed. But this was no harmless ranting. Seselj, a Bosnian Serb who had developed his pathological loathing for Tito’s federal Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, became a key ally of Milosevic during the wars of the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Until the two men fell out in 1993, Milosevic deputed much of his dirty work to Seselj, who set up a network of paramilitary groups, some known as White Eagles. They carried out some of the foulest atrocities of the war, mainly against civilians in eastern Croatia, which is why Seselj is now in The Hague awaiting trial.

Nearer to home, his thugs roamed the streets under Milosevic’s license, terrorizing ethnic Albanians, Croats and Bosnians out of their homes. Seselj notoriously emptied a whole village called Hrtkovci in northern Serbia in May 1992. He rolled up in person and ordered all the inhabitants of this Catholic enclave in Orthodox Serbia to get out.

Many will wonder how such a man has risen so far so fast, even in the toxic climate of the Balkans. But the answer also boils down to the fact that Serbia in 1995 — even after Milosevic’s fall in 2000 — resembled Germany in 1918 more than Germany in 1945.

The harsh Ohio peace deal —Serbia’s own Versailles — was forced on a nation that remained largely in denial about the crimes in which Serbs were implicated. As in Berlin in 1918, the incoming reformists were unwilling or unable to shake up old networks of power.

Many important but unsavory figures in the police, the secret police and army had defected from Milosevic just before he fell and demanded payback in the form of being left undisturbed.

The result was that although Milosevic was gone, his system remained substantially intact, awaiting resurrection. As in Croatia, the reformists were additionally saddled with a traitor’s reputation, for “giving in” to The Hague tribunal’s constant demands for more arrests and the surrender of indictees.

We can now expect the chancelleries of Europe to press the smaller parties into forming a coalition to keep Seselj out. Even if they succeed, this will be a government composed of many whose instincts are closer to Seselj than to his opponents.

From his Hague cell, Seselj will use his control over votes in Parliament to block every useful reform, ensuring that Serbia staggers into a fresh election within months in a worse state.

By then the reformists will be even more discredited, Seselj’s Radicals may win outright and the Balkans could be in for turbulence. A Seselj-run Serbia could find plenty to occupy itself in Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia.