Casualties of war
February 26th, 2003
If truth is the first casualty in war, noncombatants must be a close second.
Here in the archipelago of our despair, 40,000 people have fled their homes in Pikit, Cotabato, since last week, when the Armed Forces attacked a supposed Moro Islamic Liberation Front camp in that town.
There are 40,000 more refugees in 10 other towns. As the AFP continues to pound the MILF with artillery and to advance, and as the latter retaliate through guerrilla attacks, the numbers of the internal refugees—men, women and the elderly—are growing, crammed into evacuation centers with whatever they could carry, including their babies and children.
Six have so far died, most of them children. A seventh casualty was a six-year-old who died of dehydration on the way to an evacuation center. As the refugees’ numbers grow, so will the deaths, Philippine evacuation centers being make-shift affairs with limited sanitation and other facilities. Government relief food—instant noodles and tinned sardines in most cases—isn’t particularly nutritious either, especially for children. Like most things in our lost Eden, Philippine evacuation centers are improvised at the last minute, which is odd for a disaster-prone country whose leaders like to make war.
The arithmetic doesn’t make sense. More than 80,000 people have been displaced from their miserable homes into the even more miserable evacuation centers because the AFP is supposedly pursuing members of the kidnap-for-ransom Pentagon gang, who must number—what? A hundred? Two hundred? The military says the MILF is coddling gang members, but admits to killing more than 150 MILF guerrillas. It’s a number the MILF disputes. But it suggests that indeed it’s the MILF and not gang members who are dying, and even the AFP knows it.
The AFP’s spokesmen can’t seem to get their lines right. Some of them say they’re not after the MILF but the Pentagon gang. But others say the objective is to capture MILF chairman Hashim Salamat. Anyone can read the subtext of Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes’s fire-breathing statements, however. What they amount to is that the AFP is out to either smash the MILF or else weaken it enough to force it to accept a “peace package” it would then be unable to refuse.
That’s the only conclusion one can draw, unless the AFP is throwing cannon fodder into battle for the exercise.
The August 7, 2001, agreement signed by the MILF and the Philippine government in Malaysia mandates joint efforts in fighting criminal elements, and requires the MILF to police its ranks.
Under the same agreement the MILF will apprehend criminals who may have taken refuge within its ranks, and turn them over to the government. Presumably a breach in the agreement could justify the military’s taking action. Far from first presenting any proof that the MILF is in material breach of the agreement, however, the AFP attacked in force last week without a by-your-leave, thus the inescapable conclusion that, in the manner of the US determination to wage war in Iraq, nothing could have deterred it from attacking the MILF.
That means not even the cost in noncombatant lives—obviously the last thing military planners consider, if at all it’s even on their list. Obviously it wasn’t on the AFP’s.
Half a world away, in Washington and the Persian Gulf, neither is the cost to noncombatants on the cost-accountancy list of the US generals now poised to attack Iraq with 200,000 troops and with all the firepower and technological wizardry at their command.
Only the international NGOs are fretting. The Nobel laureate human rights group Amnesty International, for example, has written to the Security Council urging it to confront the human—primarily noncombatant—cost of a war on Iraq, and to prepare for a humanitarian disaster that could be worse than during the first Iraq war of 1991.
“What we want to do is to shine a light on the situation of the people of Iraq,” said AI. “At the moment the discussion has been all about missiles and not about people.”
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, however, will brief the Security Council on the UN’s humanitarian contingency plans for Iraq. An international conference on the same subject will be taking place in Geneva this weekend. Conspicuously absent from the Geneva meeting, however, will be the United States, which said on Monday it would not attend.
It figures. The US doesn’t want to hear about those costs, which among others, said a UN report last week, could run into 3,000,000 Iraqis turning into refugees in a version of Pikit and neighboring towns multiplied 36 times. Of these, a million are likely to flee to neighboring Iran for refuge, while another 2 million would be displaced within Iraqi territory.
The war itself and after could injure more than 500,000 people—100,000 in direct casualties and 400,000 in indirect casualties. Some 3 million people would go hungry.
The UN has been appealing for humanitarian aid from member states since December, when war appeared imminent. Few countries have responded. The US has promised $15 million—roughly one-third the cost of one of its less sophisticated fighter jets, which it is deploying by the thousands around Iraq.
The consensus among observers is that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, with most Iraqis worse off than in 1991. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, for example, says that because of the destruction of Iraq power plants and the breakdown of water purification and sanitation facilities during the 1991 war, there were also outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, malaria, polio and hepatitis in the aftermath.
During that war, when the US and Britain dropped 80,000 tons of explosives on Iraq, about 3,000 civilians were killed and 9,000 homes destroyed. After the 43-day bombing campaign that initiated the war, the civilian death toll climbed to 111,000. Seventy thousand of those deaths were children under 15. Since then, under UN sanctions that are still going on 500,000 children have died of diarrhea, malnutrition and other diseases that could have been otherwise prevented and/or cured.
The possibility that these noncombatant casualties could be even more in the event of a war is not remote. The US war plan, for example, calls not only for the use of massive airpower so as to inflict heavy casualties on the Iraqis and to reduce American casualties. The use of illegal biochemical weapons, euphemistically described as “riot-control agents,” has also been authorized against civilians by the US Department of Defense, as is the use of nuclear weapons in case Iraqi resistance turns out to be fiercer than expected.
Thus AI’s and other organizations’ appeal to the UN Security Council to consider the situation of the Iraqi people.
The appeal has found legions of partisans all over the globe, as the forces of and for war begin their march, not only in the Middle East but also in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Here in the land of our lost hopes, in a faint but unmistakable echo of their (US) masters’ voice, our own warmongers are displacing thousands in one more futile attempt at a military “solution” to a problem rooted in the very character of Philippine society and governance.
The Filipinos displaced in Mindanao by the mindless tactic that has never ever worked need the same light AI wants to shine on the Iraqi people shone on their own situation.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 22, 2003)