Excellent opportunity for Israel to send some Medics over, just as they did during the Turkish earthquake. It will start normalizing of relations between the two nations. I hope it happens.
Iraqi medical staff are too busy protecting their own homes to go to work in hospitals according to reports from ITN news this afternoon so Israeli doctors should hurry on up.
Judge, if the news is true, then that's very selfish of the Iraqi doctors who value their homes more than human lives. Shame on them. Oh, I mean it is all America's fault.
While they are it please tell them to bring some (actually, make that lots of) medical equipment with them. Contrary to Geneva Conventions, US/UK forces can’t be bothered to stop the looting (maybe they are too busy securing oil fields?), hence Baghdad hospitals are being turned inside out, and hospitals are desperately short in supplies. Israeli medics are welcome if they bring medicines and blood bags with them.
Nadia, how can you possibly refer to Geneva Conventions while you have no qualms calling it an Illegal War? I am confused. (Are you saying that it is a Legal War now?)
I say, give it some time. You can be sure that Israelis will extend helping hand. I have faith in them, unlike Iraq's other neighbors.
i'm not the one who first brought up the Geneva Conventions - that was done by Dubya when he saw pictures of American POWs. His immediate interest in international laws was kind of rich, considering how the US bypassed more than 2/3 of the world - not to mention the lil UN Charter - by undertaking this invasion.
>>You can be sure that Israelis will extend helping hand. <<
oh. That's so sweet :( i hope those helping hands carry with them lots of dialysis machines, aspirins, electrical generators, blood bags, chlorine tablets, IV machines, insulin, ... you get the drift. Do let me know when Israeli medics & their equipment arrive in Baghdad hospitals; i shall be waiting in anticipation.
i'm not the one who first brought up the Geneva Conventions <<<
Honestly, I thought you did. With all the other stuff that you bring. My apology.
But you know that Geneva Coventions only apply to Legal Wars. So I think we shouldnt bring that into discussion.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by NYAhmadi: *
But you know that Geneva Coventions only apply to Legal Wars. So I think we shouldnt bring that into discussion.
[/QUOTE]
ah, i understand it now. If North Korea conducts an illegal invasion of the US tomorrow and cluster bombs large American cities, you and other Americans will have no right to bring up the UN Charter or the Geneva Conventions - because of course North Korea will have started an illegal war and everything is fair and just in illegal wars. Reciting the Geneva Conventions against North Korea's illegal tactics would be unfair and foolish.
Love the logic.
I am glad you do. I love your logic even better.
Iraqi oilfields are, for the most part, well and secured by US/UK forces. Can we say the same for Iraq’s hospitals - where civilians are dying each hour for lack of British/American protection from looters?
Iraqi doctors use whistles to call for help, CBC, 11 April 2003
The U.S. has begun to protect hospitals. ICRC is requested more help I would expect that to happen.
Mounties might go to Iraq: PM, CBC, 11 April 2003
With concern about lawlessness growing in Iraq, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien says Canada would consider sending RCMP officers to help restore order.
But the federal government says it would have to be asked first.
“We’ve sent RCMP officers to Haiti and elsewhere,” Chrétien told reporters Friday. "If it is a contribution that we can make, we will do it.
The prime minister said any role Canada may have in Iraq is still not clear. He said discussions will be held with the U.S., Britain and other members of the United Nations.
Here is the official attitude of the Anglo-American occupiers of Iraq on the looting…
Looting is a sign of freedom, allies insist](Latest news & breaking headlines | The Times and The Sunday Times)
Of course it is freedom. This is a country whose hospitals were the jewel of the Arab world, whose doctors and engineers were sent abroad to the UK and US on governmental subsidies to further their training, a country whose mortality rates were declining rapidly. Yes, if your definition of freedom includes massive civilian loss of life, then i am sure the country right now is bathed in freedom.
The hell that once was a hospital, Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian, 12 April 2003
A young man, naked to the waist, ran in screaming, waving his bloodied hands in the air. A sedan with two flat tyres pulled up, with an entire wounded family, and the corpse of a baby girl. Her name was Rawand, and she was nine months old.
When her family returned to their home for the first time since the war yesterday, she crawled over to a small dark oval - a cluster bomblet - which detonated, killing her outright, and injuring her mother, and two of her boy cousins.
Only one doctor was on duty at Yarmouk yesterday - it shut down at the beginning of the week - and he left the grave diggers and went to try to save the family. Rawand’s father, Mohammed Suleiman, was inconsolable. “I am going to kill America - not today, after 10 years,” he swore.
No bouquets or garlands of flowers for Mr. Chalabi.
Resentment on streets of Baghdad, Owen Bennett Jones
BBC, 14 April 2003
One week after American troops entered Baghdad, the people of the city are still waiting to hear what form of government the Americans are planning for them. “We need a government. The last week was a disaster. The Americans should have made arrangements for what they planned to do now,” said a civil servant who didn’t want to be named. He rejected the American plan to have a transitional military government run by a retired general, Jay Garner. “Why should an American general come here? Iraqis should govern themselves.”
On the streets of Baghdad, many Iraqis agree with him. “Why should the Americans rule us?” asked one man, a teacher. “They say they came here to liberate us. We have paid a heavy price for the removal of Saddam Hussein, so the Americans should go now.”
The growing anti-American sentiment is a result not only of the military campaign and the casualties that it caused, there is also acute resentment that the Americans have allowed a situation to develop in which there is looting and continued insecurity in the Iraqi capital. The US marines have secured a limited area, just a few blocks of buildings, in the centre of the city, but elsewhere there is great insecurity.
US marines are still coming under fire from Saddam Hussein loyalists and some residents of Baghdad are wondering whether the fighting could go on for weeks or even months. Some are trying to organise security for themselves. Doctors armed with Kalashnikovs are guarding their hospitals. Elsewhere armed civilians have set up road blocks to deter looting. But those manning the check points say they fear the Americans will see their weapons, mistake them for Saddam Hussein loyalists, and shoot them dead.
The sense of uncertainty is not helped by the fact that throughout Baghdad families are coming to terms with the casualties caused by the war. In a middle class district in the north of the city, I witnessed a professor of politics, Moyed al-Windawi, tell his two daughters that one of their friends who lived on the same street, a 16-year-old boy called Fayed, had died as the result of injuries sustained when the Americans came in. “Fayed is dead,” he said. “He is dead.” His daughters at first did not believe him. “He was gorgeous,” said one. “I played football with him, and Playstation. What will his brothers think?”
While many Iraqis grieve, the Americans are still working on their plans for the governance of Iraq. Many believe that there will be a prominent role for the Iraqi National Congress, an organisation made up of Iraqi exiles, many of whom opposed Saddam Hussein from abroad. But on the streets of Baghdad there is little support for the INC.
“Why should we be governed by people who have got rich in London and New York?" said one. "We must have someone who comes from Iraq and who has suffered with us.”
Looters Ransack Iraq’s National Library
Looters Ransack Iraq’s National Library
1 hour, 18 minutes ago
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted Iraq (news - web sites)'s National Library, leaving a smoldering shell Tuesday of precious books turned to ash and a nation’s intellectual legacy gone up in smoke.
They also looted and burned Iraq’s principal Islamic library nearby, home to priceless old Qurans; last week, thieves swept through the National Museum and stole or smashed treasures that chronicled this region’s role as the “cradle of civilization.”
“Our national heritage is lost,” an angry high school teacher, Haithem Aziz, said as he stood outside the National Library’s blackened hulk. “The modern Mongols, the new Mongols did that. The Americans did that. Their agents did that,” he said as an explosion boomed in the distance as the war winds down.
The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu, sacked Baghdad in the 13th century. Today, the rumors on the lips of almost all Baghdadis is that the looting that has torn this city apart is led by U.S.-inspired Kuwaitis or other non-Iraqis bent on stripping the city of everything of value.
But outside the gutted Islamic library on the grounds of the Religious Affairs Ministry, the lone looter scampering away was undeniably Iraqi, a grizzled man named Mohamed Salman.
“It was left there, so why leave it?” he asked a reporter as he clung to a thick, red-covered book, a catalog of the library’s religious collection. The scene inside was total devastation. Not a recognizable book or manuscript could be seen among the dark ash.
The destruction has drawn condemnation worldwide, with many criticizing U.S.-led coalition forces for failing to prevent or stop the looting, sometimes carried out by whole Iraqi families.
The United Nation’s cultural agency and the British Museum announced Tuesday they will send in teams to help restore ransacked museums and artifacts.
Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, called on customs officials, police, art dealers and neighboring countries to block the trading of stolen antiquities.
Among the National Museum’s treasures were the tablets with Hammurabi’s Code — one of mankind’s earliest codes of law. It could not be immediately determined whether the tablets were at the museum when war broke out.
Thieves smashed or pried open row upon row of glass cases at the museum and pilfered or destroyed their contents. Missing were the four millennia-old copper head of an Akkadian king, golden bowls and colossal statues, ancient manuscripts and bejeweled lyres.
The looting and burning — the museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged — has dealt a terrible blow to a society that prides itself on its universities, literature and educated elite.
“I can’t express the sorrow I feel. This is not real liberation,” said an artist in a wing of the National Library that had been looted but not burned.
The thin, bearded, 41-year-old man, who would not give his name, was going through old bound newspapers and tearing out pages whose artistic drawings appealed to him. “I came yesterday to see the chaos, and when I saw it, I decided to take what I could,” he said.
The three-story, tan brick National Library building, dating to 1977, housed all books published in Iraq, including copies of all doctoral theses. It preserved rare old books on Baghdad and the region, historically important books on Arabic linguistics, and antique manuscripts in Arabic that teacher Aziz said were gradually being transformed into printed versions.
“They had manuscripts from the Ottoman and Abbasid periods,” Aziz said, referring to dynasties dating back a millennium. “All of them were precious, famous. I feel such grief.”
No library officials could be located to detail the loss. Haroun Mohammed, an Iraqi writer based in London, told The Associated Press some old manuscripts had been transferred from the library to a Manuscript House across the Tigris River.
Except for wooden card catalog drawers and a carved-wood service counter which somehow escaped the flames, nothing was left in the National Library’s main wing but its charred walls and ceilings, and mounds of ash. The floor on the ground level was still warm from the flames. Long rolls of microfilm littered the courtyard.
“This was the best library in Iraq,” said music student Raad Muzahim, 27, standing among piles of paper in the periodical room. "I remember coming as a student. They were hospitable, letting students do their research, write their papers.
Armored vehicles were positioned on the nearby street, manned by U.S. Marines. They did nothing to stop Tuesday’s continuing trickle of looters.
=============================================
American Style Liberation 
This morning on CNN, I read that the oldest manuscript of the Quran was in this Library and has been destroyed. Oh well...
i believe that hawkish group in america had it all planned. for them this is all about power and might. i think all tthis happening in iraq is somehow dictated by they group. i could be wrong but only time will tell. :-)
“Under the laws of war, the United States is obligated to ensure public order in territories that it occupies, and to prevent looting and other forms of lawlessness. More specifically, it is required to protect museums and other cultural property against damage. The primary international treaty on this point is the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, drafted in 1954.”
Liberation and Looting in Iraq](http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20030414.html) Find Laws Legal Community 14 Apr 03
While Baghdad burned, Donald Rumsfeld fiddled. Questioned about the orgy of looting and pillaging taking place under the gaze of U.S. forces, Rumsfeld criticized the media for exaggerating the extent of the damage. “The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over,” he complained. “It’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it twenty times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?”
After pausing for laughter, Rumsfeld delivered the punch line: “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” Well, yes, as it turns out, it is possible. And the loss of such artifacts is no laughing matter, at least to people who care about these things. Many of the irreplaceable objects lost in Baghdad’s days of anarchy and turmoil were thousands of years old, material evidence of humanity’s earliest strivings. They came from places like Babylon, Kalkhu, Nineveh and Ur, ancient cities dating back to the dawn of history.
Last week, after two days of unhindered pillage, the Baghdad museum that housed these treasures was emptied. By Friday afternoon, when Rumsfeld made his dismissive remarks, looters were carting away the last spoils. According to the museum’s deputy director, who blamed U.S. forces for refusing to prevent the plunder, at least 170,000 items were taken or destroyed. The pillage of the National Museum of Iraq should have come as no surprise. And if the risks were obvious, the legal responsibilities were equally clear.
The Lessons of Gulf War I
In 1991, at the close of the first Gulf War, nine of Iraq’s regional museums were looted by rampaging mobs opposed to Saddam Hussein’s government. While the national museum did not come under attack at that time, because the government retained firm control over Baghdad, it lost a number of artifacts that had been transferred to the regional museums for safekeeping.
In all, about 4,000 items were stolen or destroyed during the 1991 looting spree, including some that were thousands of years old. Some of the pieces were later smuggled out of Iraq, and were, by the following year, turning up at art auctions and in the hands of dealers in London and New York. The lessons of this close precedent were not lost on archaeologists and scholars of antiquity. Well prior to the outbreak of the current war, they warned the Pentagon of the dangers to Iraq’s cultural heritage posed by postwar pillage and destruction.
The Legal Responsibility to Protect Cultural Property
Under the laws of war, the United States is obligated to ensure public order in territories that it occupies, and to prevent looting and other forms of lawlessness. More specifically, it is required to protect museums and other cultural property against damage. The primary international treaty on this point is the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, drafted in 1954. The convention specifies that an occupying power must take necessary measures to safeguard and preserve the cultural property of the occupied country.
Because this rule codifies customary international law, it is binding even on countries such as the United States that have signed but not ratified the convention. (Iraq, in contrast, is a party to the convention, as are 102 other countries.) Interestingly, international rules to protect cultural property from looting and damage are an American innovation, dating back to the Civil War. Revulsion at widespread destruction during that war led to the drafting of the Lieber Code, which gave protected status to libraries, scientific collections and works of art. The Lieber Code’s protections had a significant influence on the development on international law in this area, culminating in the drafting of the 1954 convention and its subsequent protocols.
Of course, the U.S. responsibility to protect Iraq’s cultural property is not absolute. Legitimate battlefield demands might well take priority over the duty to protect. But even if an investigation is necessary to clarify whether U.S. forces failed in their duties, the evidence of negligence available so far is compelling. Not only did the Pentagon have prior notice of the likelihood of looting, museum officials reportedly called on troops to stop the plunder just after it began. At the urging of an Iraqi archaeologist, a group of marines with a tank opened fire above looters’ heads and drove them away. But instead of staying to protect the building, the marines left, and the looters returned. The museum’s deputy director decried the American refusal to help: “If they had [provided] just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened.”
Rumsfeld’s Response
“Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news briefing on April 11, when asked about widespread looting in Baghdad. “But,” he continued, “it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a plan.’ That’s nonsense.”
Two days later, faced with overwhelming proof of mayhem in Baghdad, Rumsfeld again disavowed responsibility for the looters’ rampage. When the interviewer pointed out that Iraqi museum officials claimed that they had asked the U.S. military to protect the museum, and that the military had refused, Rumsfeld responded: “Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea.” Looting, he concluded “isn’t something that someone allows or doesn’t allow. It’s something that happens.”
An Avoidable Disaster
Looting most definitely happens when the authorities take no steps to prevent it. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that this was the case with Iraq’s National Museum and its priceless collection of artifacts. The New York Times, in an article published yesterday, said that the ransacking of the National Museum will probably be remembered as “one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.” What is worse, it is likely to be remembered as a disaster that was avoidable.
Joanne Mariner is a FindLaw columnist and human rights attorney. Her previous pieces on the laws of war can be found in the FindLaw archive.
Looks like the US invasion force is now allowing wholesale looting in Tikrit ..
Looting begins in Tikrit](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/24by7panews/page.cfm?objectid=12852428&method=full&siteid=50143) Mirror News 16 Apr 03
The looting has begun in Tikrit, a day after US marines took control of Saddam Hussein’s hometown with barely a fight. Elsewhere, from Basra to Baghdad, Iraqis pleaded for water and power as their leaders – Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites – converged on the ancient city of Ur to begin plotting the nation’s future. In Tikrit, looters ransacked the agricultural building. Tanks were parked outside Saddam’s palace and helicopters roared over the River Tigris. A key bridge that American forces seized a day earlier was hit and heavily damaged, and US troops refused to let people cross.
“We have sick people,” one man shouted. “These Americans are not letting them go to the hospital. We have been on this side of the bridge for five days and they are not letting us cross.” In Baghdad, hundreds of Iraqis swarmed the Palestine Hotel this morning, appealing for law and order in the capital. One held up a sign in English reading: “Bloody liberation movie is started. Bad director.”
A group calling itself the Gathering for Democracy issued statements urging Iraqis to stop looting public facilities. Looters have pillaged everything from government offices to national museums, even making off with archaeological treasures. US Secretary of State Colin Powell has promised Washington would help the Iraqis recover stolen antiquities. Major combat operations are over in Iraq, US officials said yesterday after announcing that US marines had seized Tikrit. Saddam’s “regime is in disarray and no longer in control of Iraq,” Brig Gen Vincent Brooks said at US Central Command headquarters in Qatar.