Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir

The Raid on the Osirak /
Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre, Sunday 7th June, 1981

The story of the bombed
Nuclear Site in Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre (South Baghdad)



“Operation Opera
(sometimes referred to as Operation Babylon)”

by Salah Yacoub*

On the 7th of June 1981, during the
Iraq-Iran war, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear site. Many
tried to justify this act. (For example, one commentator wrote, “America
and the coalition forces might have faced a nuclear-armed Iraq during the

Persian Gulf War
in 1991, and again during the U.S. invasion
of
Iraq
in 2003, had Israel not destroyed Iraq’s nuclear
reactor in 1981.”) But the majority of Iraqis judged that it was a crime
and a terrorist act sponsored by state of Israel.

The attack raised a number of questions of interpretation
regarding international legal concepts. Was it an act of legitimate self-defense
justifiable under international law under
Article 51
of the charter of the United Nations (UN)?
I wonder what the reactions would be if Israel’s neighbours used the same
argument, claiming that Israeli nuclear power represented a threat to them
also!

Let’s start with the Iraqi defence and military
arrangements for The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre in 1981.

The site was protected by 50 meter
high earth ramparts all around it. This was this to force any planes to fly higher
before approaching the site so that the Iraqi air-defense radar stations
would detect them.

The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre had its own air
defense station, combined of anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles.
On the top of earth ramparts there were many AA guns set to open fire in
event of any warning so they would make a ring of fire around the site. Also
there was a radar station to detect planes if it approached the site.

All around the site there were also balloons
filled with gas connected with cords to the ground so they kept over the
site at an altitude higher than the earth ramparts.

The city of Baghdad was protected by
Russian type SAM-2 and SAM-3 Air Defence missile networks with two different
killing zones (technology of the late 1950s).

Also around Baghdad on top of most high building
there were AAA guns: all had orders to open fire to protect the sky over
Baghdad city in any event of warning.

On the borders there was early warning radar
stations. Ttheir mission was to give early warning if any plane pass the
border or approached it. But at the time
the Iran war was going on on the Eastern
borders, so most of the attention was toward the East Borders.

During that time all SAM sites were working from
dawn till sunset. During the night-time the crews were on alert.

The Iraqi Air force also kept a daily patrol
flying over Baghdad, on the edge of the city from dawn till sunset. All
fighters would land by sunset time, but the crews remained on alert at all
the times.

On Jun 7 shortly after the time when all the
batteries of SAM2&3 had just been turned off, and the Iraqi fighter air
patrol had just landed at the end of the day-long mission, there came the
sound of explosions and shortly after that the sky was filled with the
flashes of exploding rounds from all the guns set up around…

Continue reading “Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir”

6-power overture to Iran working?

Iran’s positive response to the international negotiators’ overture is really exciting. Long may this progress towards de-escalation in the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the broader region continue!
Wednesday is the 25th anniversary of Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant at Tuwaitha (Osirak). I’m planning something special here on JWN to mark the occasion.
Oh, and look who‘s sending out a fundraising letter urging a tough US position against Iran. That would be AIPAC… Well, I guess after the Bush administration started thinking a bit harder about the 2,480 US body-bags that resulted from the last successful piece of warmongering by AIPAC and its allies, they decided that maybe there was a better way of doing things…

More on Darfur death tolls

A few readers have challenged what I wrote here recently, when I challenged Ruth Messinger’s claim that “Half a million people are dead and 3.5 million are displaced” as a direct result of the genocidal violence in Darfur. In that post I noted that the WaPo’s Emily Waxreported from the Chad-Darfur border at the end of April that “tens of thousands” had been killed during the genocide, and said my judgment would be to prefer Wax’s figure over Messinger’s.
I’ve done a little more online research on the issue. A WaPo editorial noted on April 24 that, “On his recent visit to Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick… said that the State Department’s estimate of deaths in Darfur was 60,000 to 160,000.”
The editorial claimed that range was far too low, and continued: “Other authorities suggest that mortality is likely to be closer to 400,000.” The sources they used for that included various extrapolations from limited samples taken by NGOs.
In this report from Khartoum yesterday, Evelyn Leopold of Reuters wrote,

    Since 2003, at least 200,000 people in Darfur have died from bullets, hunger or disease, 2.5 million have been thrown out of their homes, many burned to the ground, and hundreds of women have been raped, mainly by Arab militia after a rebellion broke out. The Sudan military had armed militia although it is no longer certain if they control their allies.

And in this June 4 report, also from Khartoum, AFP’s Charles Onians wrote:

    In 2003, the SLM alongside the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched a rebellion in the western region of Darfur, prompting a heavy-handed crackdown by the Khartoum government and its proxy militia called the Janjaweed.
    Since then, the conflict has left around 300,000 people dead and 2.4 million homeless.

Since Leopold and Onians are currently on the ground in Sudan, and presumably in good contact with the many aid workers and international diplomats there, I would be inclined to go with their estimates at this point.
I really liked the way Onians framed his little casualty report– putting the casualties clearly in the context of the armed political conflict of which they are such a tragic result, without trying to claim that they were “all” the victims of either one side or the other.
So maybe I would go with his casualty total, or say something like “somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths.” This is considerably more than “tens of thousands.” But I also think it’s important not to convey the false impression (as Messinger did) that all the deaths have been inflicted by one side in the conflict.
Each one of these deaths is a tragedy. How many unrecognized Mother Theresas, how many Yo-Yo Ma’s had their lives snuffed out in those brutal circumstances?
Let’s all do whatever we can to help end the conflict that made such brutality possible.

Somalia: a sadly familiar scenario

Hey, does any of this story-line sound familiar? Some years ago, the US military was engaged in a conflict in Country X that US leaders described as being of great “geopolitical” significance… Then, inexplicably, the US shrugged off its interest and concern for X. (And since, during the 1990s, the US was widely judged by other governments to be the global hegemon, no other world power showed much concern for Country X, either.)
For many years, the various communities of Country X fell into ever greater political chaos, warlordism, impoverishment, social disorder, and de-development…
Then one day, along comes what seems like a fairly dedicated Islamist movement. It wins popular support by promising to rescue people from the ills of the warlordism that besets them. Propelled by this popular support, it seizes power in the capital…
Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1996– or Mogadishu, Somalia, today?
I watched some intriguing footage from Mogadishu on the BBC t.v. news tonight. It showed what looked like a mass rally being held by the the Islamist movement, which is called the Union of Islamic Courts, which looked very large indeed.
That piece I linked to from the BBC website says that officials with the UIC say that talks are taking place with fighters still loyal to the warlords.
Somalia’s shell of a national government has its hesadquarters not in the capital but in Baidoa, some 200 miles (I think) to the south. The BBC reports– presumably from Baidoa– that Interim Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi says his government wants to begin dialogue with the UIC. It adds:

    Earlier, Mr Ghedi sacked four powerful Mogadishu-based warlords who had been serving as ministers.
    Nine of the 11 Mogadishu-based warlords have now left the city, reports the BBC’s Mohammed Olad Hassan.
    The four sacked ministers include Security Minister Mohammed Qanyare Afrah and Trade Minister Muse Sudi Yalahow who over the weekend lost control of their Mogadishu strongholds.
    Most of Mr Qanyare Afrah’s fighters have joined the Islamic militia, but Mr Sudi Yalahow and his commanders remain in the capital and are locked in talks over their next move.
    This year’s clashes in the capital have been the most serious for more than a decade, with some 330 people killed and about 1,500 injured in the past month.
    In a statement read over local radio stations, the Union of Islamic Courts leader Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said the control of Mogadishu by warlords was over and he urged residents to accept the new leadership.
    “The Union of Islamic Courts are not interested in a continuation of hostilities and will fully implement peace and security after the change has been made by the victory of the people with the support of Allah,” he said.
    “This is a new era for Mogadishu,” he told AFP news agency, adding that the Islamic Courts were ready for dialogue.
    Local people in Mogadishu gave a cautious welcome to the news.
    “They said they would work with residents to improve security in the capital,” city resident Ali Abdikadir told Reuters news agency.
    “This is good news for us because the warlords were always engaged in battles. We are looking forward to a life without fighting.”
    But some seemed unconvinced that the weeks of bloodshed were really over.
    “It’s good to see conflict resolved but I don’t want to celebrate a temporary victory,” housewife Hawa Ismail Qorey told AFP. “Mogadishu is witnessing political history but it may be good or it may be bad.”
    And others expressed concern about what the future might hold with Islamists who want to introduce Sharia law in control.
    “What I am afraid of is if they interfere with the education system and bring religion by force to the schools,” Asha Idris, a mother of five, told AFP…
    The violence began earlier this year when warlords who had divided Mogadishu into fiefdoms united to form the Anti-Terrorism Alliance to tackle the Islamic Courts, who they accused of sheltering foreign al-Qaeda militants.
    The Islamic Courts deny this. They were originally set up in Mogadishu as a grassroots movement by businessmen to establish some law and order in a city without any judicial system.
    The head of the BBC’s Somali service described the rise of the Islamic Courts as a popular uprising.
    The Islamic Courts have long said the warlords in the Anti-Terror Alliance were being backed by the US.
    Washington merely says it will support those trying to stop people it considers terrorists setting up in Somalia but stresses its commitment to the country’s transitional government, which functions from Baidoa, 250km (155 miles) north-west of the capital.
    President Abdullahi Yusuf had urged the US to channel its campaign against Somalia’s Islamists through his government, rather than the warlords.

Reuters, meanwhile, is reporting from Washington that:

    Warlords were getting cash payments of more than $100,000 a month from the
    Central Intelligence Agency, according to Somalia expert John Prendergast of the think-tank International Crisis Group. He said he learned about the support during meetings with members of the warlords’ alliance.

Well, now we need to see what the international community (with or without the US) is prepared to do, to help Somalia’s seven million people get out of this long-festering mess…
Meanwhile, both Afghanistan and Iraq now show many signs of being threatened by an imminent collapse (or for Afghanistan, relapse) into outright warlordism. The militarism and arrogant hegemonism that have characterized the United States’ engagement with the world over recent decades have a lot to answer for.
US militarism has indeed been a powerful force for social collapse and human suffering in many countries around the world. At this point, the US military machine needs to be trimmed radically– back to the rock-bottom level that is needed for absolutely immediate national defense. US citizens need to turn our back quite decisively on all these feverish dreams of world domination that have gripped the Bush administration (and before it, the Clinton administration), and find out how to re-engage with the other peoples of the world as the human equals that we all are…
Then, think how many freed-up national resources we would have that we could pour into starting to repair some of the harm we have caused around the world, and to build up productive and self-confident communities everywhere.
Meantime, though, let’s wish the very best for all the people of Somalia.

The Khamenei text

Huge kudos, once again, to Juan Cole for having made available to the public a key publicly funded product of the US government’s “Open Source Center”– namely, the OSC’s English translation of substantial excerpts from the speech that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave yesterday at Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum.
The speech contained significant and very well-argued responses to the principle accusations the US government has been making against the Iranian government. Khamenei lists these accusations thus:

    First, that there is an international consensus against Iran.
    Second, that Iran is a threat to the world.
    Third, that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb and nuclear weapons.
    Fourth, that Iran is a violator of human rights…

And then, as I say, he responds to those…
The whole of the text that Juan publishes there is incredibly important, especially in these days when the Bushites’ fear- and hate-mongering campaign against Iran has assumed a front-and-center position in their’ engagement (such as it is) with the rest of the world.
Juan makes two excellent points about the limitations on the availability of the Khamenei text:

    (1) The US media presented only a snippet from the speech of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran on Sunday, in which he threatened to damage oil supplies to the West if the US militarily attacked Iran. He did say that, but he also announced that Iran had no intention of striking first, had not attacked and would not attack another country, and that it has no nuclear weapons program and does not want a nuclear bomb. I didn’t hear any of those statements reported on television.
    For some strange reason, a relatively full text of important speeches given by world leaders is almost never provided to the public by any US media in English. I doubt there are even a handful of speeches easily accessible in English by Spanish President Zapatero, e.g. I cannot entirely explain this strange phenomenon, of the coccooned and almost deliberately ignorant approach to the world of the US corporate media and their audience.

And,

    (2) the American public pays tax dollars so that the Open Source Center of the USG can translate such primary texts. They are, however, not made freely available, though you can get them via university and maybe other good libraries.

Well, yes, Juan, you can get them easily via university libraries if you have a nice tenured professorship at such a university. As for the rest of us taxpayers here…
Which is why it is great that Juan, who is one of the privileged few in this regard, takes the trouble to publish an important text such as this on his freely accessible blog.
I have a suggestion. Either the US government should make the products of the publicly funded OSC freely available via the (also publicly funded) world-wide-web. Or it should change the institution’s name to the Closed Source Center.
There is just one thing that Juan writes in his post there that I disagree with. That is this: “I should think it is obvious that I loathe Khamenei and his regime, but I suppose I have to say so yet again in today’s wretched intellectual environment.”
For my part, I am deeply concerned by some (but not all) of what I know about the human-rights record and other practices of the Iranian regime. But that doesn’t lead me to “loathe” anyone. Moreover, I don’t see that the sentiments of any one private individual like Juan Cole toward someone else (even a public figure like Khamenei) have any particular broader relevance; and more importantly, I don’t see that bringing his own private feelings into his discussion of the Khamenei text adds anything of value to the discussion. Far from it, it detracts from the value of the discussion, for two reasons: (1) It indicates there may be an emotional and not totally rational dimension to his analysis, and (2) By saying, “I suppose I have to say so yet again in today’s wretched intellectual environment” Juan seems to me to be giving the authors of that wretched intellectual environment a quite unnecessary victory…
Far better, surely, if he had written something like, “Think what you may of the track-record of the mullahs’ regime, Khamenei’s speech at least deserves wide dissemination and a fair hearing.”
(At another level, too, I strive to not to let my strong disapproval of the acts of some individuals or groups of individuals become generalized into any “hatred” or “loathing” for those individuals. This is a Gandhian– and also, a Christian– thing to do. Loving the sinner while hating the sin… I think it is really important.)
So anyway, at this point, let me join Juan in disseminating the Khamenei text. Here (without Juan’s marking-up in “bold”) it is:

Continue reading “The Khamenei text”

Henri Nouwen on atrocity and violence

What a gift today was.
This morning in Quaker meeting I found myself reading a little book called “Peacework” by Henri Nouwen. I don’t usually read during worship, but today I just really felt led to do so. The book had been sitting on my shelf for a while, but today I took it to meeting with me and read the first of the three essays in it: “Prayer”.
Nouwen was a Catholic priest who was a theologian and peace activist before he passed away in 1996. He is the author of the theory of “The Wounded Healer“, which I think is a very powerful way of understanding the possibility (and limitations) of being a peacemaker in the world. I find him not quite as engaging a writer as Thomas Merton, but I think his understanding and explication of the roots and nature of of violence are extremely powerful.
Today in meeting for worship, I was riveted by this (Peacework, pp.28-29):

    When I listen to the sounds of greed, violence, rape, torture, murder, and indiscriminate destruction, I hear a long, sustained cry coming from all the corners of the world. It is the cry of a deeply wounded humanity that no longer knows a safe dwelling place but wanders around the planet in a desperate search for love and comfort.
    Needs that are anchored in wounds cannot be explained simply … This is the pervasive tragedy of humanity, the tragedy of the experience of homelessness that winds through history and is passed by each generation to the next in a seemingly unending sequence of human conflicts with even more destructive tools of rage in our hands. The vicious repetition of wounds and needs creates the milieu of “those who hate peace.” It is the dwelling place of demons. And it is a place that lures us precisely because we are all wounded and needy.

Anyway, he continues by arguing that to escape from these destructive (and multi-generational) cycles of wounds and needs we need to find our own sanctuary in prayer.
I also found this part very powerful (pp.34-35):

    It is not hard to see that the house of those who are fighting is a house ruled by fear. One of the most impressive characteristics of Jesus’ description of the end-time is the paralyzing fear that will make people senseless, causing them to run in all directions, so disoriented that they are swallowed up by the chaos that surrounds them. (Quote from Luke 21:25-26) … The advice that Jesus gives his followers for these times of turmoil is to remain quiet, confident, peaceful, and trusting in God. He tells them not to follow those who sow panic, nor to join those who claim to be saviors, nor to be frightened by rumors of wars and revolution, but “to stand erect and hold your heads high.” (Luke 21:28)…

This is, of course, very similar to the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh that I wrote about here, back in December 2003.
(It was interesting to go back to that earlier JWN post and read that description of the experience of being in an 11 a.m. worship seession here in Charlottesville Friends Meeting. Today’s was very similar in size and spirit. Today there was a new baby, Theodore Staengl, gurgling and cooing in his baby-carrier on the floor. My friend Linda Goldstein’s dog started barking outside at one point. But the meeting felt extremely gathered to me– to the extent that when the kids came in at 11:45 I was amazed that so much time had passed already… )

Yet more US intervention in Iraqi politics

I’ll say this for Condi Rice and Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad: They sure are tenacious… The kind of tenacious that causes our dog to hang onto an old piece of aluminum foil long after she’s licked the last trace of chicken-grease off it… The kind of tenacious that is quite useless and indeed often very counter-productive. (Chewed-up shards of aluminum foil all over the garden…)
I say this because honestly, I’d have thought that once Khalilzad lost his big tussle of wills with Iraq’s United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) bloc back on April 21, he would then step back and let the UIA– which did, after all, win easily the largest number of seats during Dec. 15’s free and fair parliamentary election– form the coalition that it wanted, and through which it might hope to govern.
But no.
I guess I should have started to understand Khalilzad’s(and Rice’s) extraordinarily pointless tenacity back on May 21, when Zal was reported to be intervening in the workings of the Iraqi parliament like “the elephant in the chamber.”
And now, here we are, two weeks after Nuri al-Maliki was designated as the head of the new “Iraqi government”, and he still hasn’t been able to name the key security ministers in it…
And the US bureaucrats are still butting majorly into Iraq’s internal political affairs….
In that report I linked to there AFP’s Kamal Taha wrote

    Maliki had originally chosen an independent military figure [for Interior Minister], but according to Shiite politicians, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the most powerful Shiite parties, wanted one of its own in the post.
    US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Sunday that Iraqi politicians will settle the issue in the “next few days.”
    “The important thing is that they get it right. And when they get it right, and they will get it right, everybody will forget how long it took them,” she said.
    A US official in Baghdad, however, said Washington was quite “disappointed” with the postponement and called for the political parties to support Maliki’s efforts to name a new government.
    “We’re quite disappointed at the lack of results in today’s parliament,” said the official, adding that the US believes strongly in the prime minister’s efforts to find qualified independent candidates.
    “We support him in these efforts and it is time for all leaders in the national unity government to get behind the prime minister,” the official added, singling out SCIRI for not supporting the prime minister

Well, that official is probably someone who works quite high up in Khalilzad’s office. Intriguingly enough, it now looks as though– in contrast to the position they took in the run-up to the choosing of the PM– this time, the US viceregal palace (a.k.a. the embassy) is campaigning against rather than for SCIRI. (Can anyone explain that more for me?)
But to me, that doesn’t make much difference. How come they have a view on this matter at all? Isn’t Iraq supposed to be independent?
And then, another question: What on earth difference will any of this make to the ignominious ending the Bush project in Iraq is headed for anyway? Aren’t they just seeking to prolong the agony there?
Oh, just bring the troops home, guys… Please! Their continued presence in Iraq is only continuing to sow horrendous violence among the Iraqi people. And for absolutely zero reason.
What was it the Vietnam vets used to say: Just how terrible is it to be the last person to die in a completely pointless war?

    Comments are back! And they’re back here, on this blog! With our very own new visual-verification anti-spam measure. Big thanks to the tech adviser… I’ll keep the ‘JWN Comments’ blog open, more or less as it is, in case we need to revert to that at some point. But for now, let the discussions resume here.

Peace and justice in Northern Uganda

Jonathan Edelstein has an excellent new post over at Transitional Justice Forum on the (apparently dysfunctional?) effect of the ICC prosecutor’s recent actions on the peace talks for Northern Uganda.

That post follows up on this May 19 one from him, on the same subject. I am so glad Jonathan’s keeping his eye on the northern Uganda issue so closely because it really is one of the important early tests of the infant International Criminal Court.
Also, if you go to TJF, you will find you can now post comments there. Hurrah! My son and tech adviser is in the process of fixing the glitches in comments-posting both there and here. But at JWN, for now, I’m going to keep the comments flow on the parallel comments blog, while we see if we can install a visual comment-verification filter here.
Please, if you have an interest in the issues Jonathan or others are writing about over at TJF– or, if you have any further questions about the subjects covered there– do send in some comments there!
Again, my general apologies for glitches in comment-submission service both here and there. We do what we can. I realise it ain’t perfect.

Kimberly Dozier: A Tribute

Those of us who knew Kimberly Dozier as a University of Virginia graduate student gasped when we learned that she was critically wounded, on Memorial Day while working as a CBS correspondent in Iraq. For the past 12 years, the last three in Iraq, Kimberly was doing exactly what she had counseled fellow journalists to do in her Virginia Master’s Thesis – to report Middle East news professionally, with objectivity, courage, steeled independence, breadth of perspective, and an unflinching empathy for her subjects.
Kimberly Dozier is one of the best, and we join in keeping a candle lit for her full recovery. In this small tribute, I offer a few glimpses into Kimberly Dozier’s Virginia studies and suggest how she became one of our finest, if not widely appreciated, journalists covering the Middle East.
UVA Background
Hailing from Hawaii, Kimberly Garrington Dozier came to the University of Virginia in January 1992 to study Foreign Affairs and the Middle East in particular. A high honors graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in Human Rights and Spanish, Kimberly already had several years of Washington journalism experience. To help pay her UVA freight, Kimberly tended bar long hours at a local hot spot on Charlottesville’s famed “corner,” the St. Marteen Café. Think Marion Ravenwood of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
At the time, I was continuing graduate studies and beginning my own travels to Iran. As such, Kimberly and I shared several extraordinary mentors, including R.K. Ramazani and Abdulaziz Sachedina. As she told the Virginia Arts & Sciences magazine last April, she remains grateful to both professors, praising their insights into the Middle East turmoil then brewing as “like an anatomy of 9/11 years before it happened.”
One fellow classmate, Scott Waalkes, a recent Fulbright Scholar and now on faculty at Malone College, remembers Kimberly as “thoughtful” and “engaging,” always asking “probing questions.” Another classmate, Beth Doughtery, now holding an endowed chair at Beloit College, fondly recalls “hanging out” with Kimberly, as a fellow free spirit and member of the “women’s college mafia” at UVA: Kimberly was “smart, articulate, fun, driven, and obviously headed for success.”

Continue reading “Kimberly Dozier: A Tribute”

Darfur: the casualties

Estimating the casualties in a situation of inter-group conflict and mass mayhem is always difficult. But in a letter in today’s NYT, Ruth Messinger, the Executive Director of American Jewish World Service writes about Darfur that, “Half a million people are dead and 3.5 million are displaced, the victims of a genocide that uses rape, murder, assault, displacement, hunger and illness to claim its victims.”
I note that in an article at the end of April, the WaPo’s generally excellent and very careful Africa correspondent Emily Wax, reporting from the Chad-Darfur border, wrote only of “tens of thousands” dead from the genocidal violence in Darfur. Since then, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of additional (mainly civilian) deaths– many of them having been caused by inter-necine fighting amongst the anti-Khartoum rebels. (As I noted here and here.)
Whom should we trust? Emily Wax, writing from the borderlands there, and based on her lengthy field reporting, knowledge of the situation, and contact with aid workers and community leaders of all persuasions– or Ruth Messinger, sitting in her office in New York City?
I have never previously seen any estimate as high as “half a million dead.” I have earlier seen estimates of 200,00, and 400,00 dead, that I already thought were very high. But they, at least, were described as “estimates.” Ruth Messinger now states as bald fact that “half a million” are dead because of the genocidaires there.
This matters. It is a basic principle of reporting of human rights abuses not to exaggerate, and where there is uncertainty always to err on the side of caution in one’s estimates. Exaggeration of casualty figures or of any other dimension of the abuses does not help anyone. Indeed, by making the person who exaggerates far less credible in general, it weakens the fabric of responsible human rights reporting and ends up doing a disservice to those people whose rights have been abused.
I see no possible basis in any reports that I have seen for any estimate anywhere near as high as “half a million deaths.”
Messinger wrote her letter in response to this op-ed by Alan Kuperman, that the NYT ran May 31 and that I commented on here.
This part of her letter seems a little confusing to me: “We do not tout the rebels as freedom fighters, nor have our actions fueled the genocide. That has been done by the Sudanese government…” (What? The Sudanese government has been touting the rebels as freedom fighters? H’mmm.)
I applaud her call that, “all armed actors … lay down their weapons, end the conflict and provide safe space for both civilians and humanitarian aid agencies that are saving lives.” But I really fear that by (a) exaggerating the number of those killed by the pro-government side beyond any reasonable estimates, and (b) making no mention whatsoever in her letter of the suffering caused by the rebels, she is being quite unfair and also further stoking the sentiments and energies of those who still want to act militarily against the Sudanese government and its allies.
Also, though Messinger’s letter was in response to the Alan Kuperman op-ed, she did nothing to challenge any of the very specific points he made about the dynamics of the situation inside Darfur.