Ken
Bigley: A barbaric killing?
On 8 October, the day Ken Bigley
was beheaded, the US Air Force killed 10 or more members of an Iraqi wedding
party in Fallujah. As usual, the
precise number of Iraqis killed was not known.
Needless to say, the slaughter of the wedding party barely got a mention
on our evening news or in the papers next day.
That evening, Prime Minister Blair
stood before the cameras and declared:
“I
feel utter revulsion at the people who did this, not just at the barbaric
nature of the killing but the way frankly they played with the situation over
the past few weeks.”
He
was talking about the beheading of Ken Bigley.
He expressed no revulsion whatsoever at the slaughter of the wedding
party, for which he was responsible as part of the coalition occupying
Iraq.
Nor
did he mention his own responsibility for the death of Ken Bigley, in the sense
that the coalition that invaded and occupied Iraq in March 2003 is responsible
for every death that has occurred there since.
He
and his friend George Bush give the impression these days that Iraq is crawling
with foreign Islamic militants led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and that they are doing most of the killing, including
that of Ken Bigley. There may be a
small amount of truth in this, but not very much. However, it can be said without fear of contradiction that before
March 2003 there were no foreign militants in Iraq, at least not in the area
controlled by Saddam Hussein. Blair and
Bush brought about the situation, in which al-Zarqawi has flourished.
To the
best of my knowledge, only one politician, Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP,
had the courage to say that in the context of the hostage taking in Iraq. In a speech to his party conference in
September after Ken Bigley had been captured, he said that “the hostages in
Iraq are paying the blood price for Tony Blair’s policy” (this is a reference
to Blair’s acknowledgement to Michael Cockerell in September 2002 that a blood
price would have to be paid for the “special relationship” with the US).
On the day
after Ken Bigley was killed, he was asked to defend himself on Today on
Radio 4. He said:
“Murderers are responsible for
murders, and terrorists are responsible for terrorism. And the direct responsibility for the death
of Ken Bigley lies with the people who killed him, and our thoughts go out to
Ken Bigley’s family today in the horror they have suffered over the last three
weeks. The point I was making about the
Prime Minister and where I think he has responsibility, as does George Bush, is
that they have created the circumstances in which terrorism and barbarism and
gangsterism are thriving in Iraq.”
Blair
less responsible
It
is true that Blair is less responsible for Ken Bigley’s death than he is for
the deaths of British servicemen or Iraqis – because Ken Bigley volunteered to
work in Iraq and was presumably paid handsomely for doing so.
(A
caller to Radio 4’s Any Answers on 9 October said that her engineer
husband had been offered £1,000 a day to work in Iraq, but had refused on the
grounds that it was too dangerous).
By
contrast, once British servicemen have joined up they have very little option
but to go to Iraq if ordered – and they get paid very much less. Yet when they get killed their next of kin
don’t get called up by the Prime Minister and visited by the Foreign Secretary.
Working
for the US military
What
work was Ken Bigley doing at the time he was taken hostage? After he was killed, Blair and Straw both
gave the impression that he was engaged in making life better for Iraqis by
doing some sort of reconstruction work.
According to a statement
issued in Straw’s name on 8 October:
“He
was in Iraq for no other purpose than to earn his living by working was [sic]
for the benefit of the Iraqi people”
To
all intents and purposes, that is a lie: Ken Bigley was in fact doing work for
the US military. According to a Press
Association report in the Scotsman on 24 September:
“He was
working at an American military base at Taji, 15 miles north of the Iraqi
capital, for Gulf Supplies and Construction Services, his employers since 1997. The UAE-based firm
protects equipment and camps for the US military and Mr Bigley was part of a
team fulfilling a £50million US army contract to provide ‘base camp life
support’.”
And
he had been in Baghdad since shortly after it was captured by the US military.
He
didn’t carry a gun, but in effect he was part of the occupation forces, and had
been for 18 months. Inevitably, he was
as much a target as other members of the occupation forces, and it is
extraordinary that he didn’t live with them in the relative safety of the base
where he worked, instead of living in Baghdad and travelling every day to work.
Blair
and Straw did their best to keep this from us on the day of his death. Beverly Hughes resigned for less.
The
purpose of their little deceit was to try to portray his killers as evil
barbarians, who even behead humanitarian workers. The conclusion we are meant to draw from this is that it is
Britain’s duty to stay in Iraq to save the Iraqi people from this evil, and
prevent it spreading like a rash around the world.
Women
prisoners
Straw’s
statement was also misleading about the hostage-takers’ demands. Describing the contact that allegedly went
on with them, it said:
“Messages were
exchanged with the hostage-takers in an attempt to dissuade them from carrying
out their threat to kill Mr Bigley. But at no stage did they abandon their
demands relating to the release of women prisoners, even though they were aware
that there are no women prisoners in our custody in Iraq.”
There
were then, and are now, two women prisoners in the custody of the coalition in
Iraq: biologists Rihab Rashid Taha and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, who have been
interned without trial because, many years ago, they worked on Iraq’s
biological weapons programmes.
Physically, they were in US military custody. However, like Saddam Hussein, they were supposed to have been
transferred into the legal custody of the Iraqi Interim Government at the end
of June. And now it was up the Iraqis,
not the US military, to decide what should be done with them.
On 22
September, the BBC reported
that one of these two women, Ms Taha, was going to be released the next
day. A spokesman for the Iraqi justice
ministry was quoted as saying that she was no longer considered a threat to
national security, and that the Iraqi authorities had agreed with coalition
forces to release her on bail. He added
that Ms Ammash “may be released soon”.
No sooner
had that been announced than the US military authorities stated bluntly that Ms
Taha was in the physical and legal custody of the US, and that she wasn’t going
to be released. Somebody in the US
military had forgotten the fiction that the occupation ended in June, and that
the US was not supposed to say things like that any more. By the next morning, however, the story had
been straightened out: Iraqi minister, Kassem Daoud, told Today that
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had made the decision not to release Ms Taha, and
had not bowed to US pressure in doing so.
Obviously not.
Had Ms Taha been released on bail
as the Iraqi justice ministry had decided, with the prospect of her colleague
following in the near future, it is possible that Ken Bigley would be alive today. But the US stymied that, and Blair and Straw
stood idly by and let it happen. The
two women were obviously no threat to anybody, and should never have been
interned in the first place.
So was Jack Straw lying when he
said “there are no women prisoners in our custody in
Iraq”? No, Jack was playing a childish
game: by “our custody” he meant “British custody”, as if there were two
independent occupying authorities in Iraq.
The purpose of the childish game must have been to absolve himself of
any responsibility for blocking the release of the two women, which made Ken
Bigley’s death a near certainty.
Barbaric?
Politicians competed to find words
to condemn Ken Bigley’s beheading. The
Prime Minister felt “utter revulsion” at the killers and described their act as
“barbaric”. The Irish Prime Minister,
Bertie Aherne, was “shocked and outraged” by the “callous murder”; “the
perpetrators have shown a total lack of mercy and humanity and in doing so have
reached new depths of barbarism”, he said.
Clearly, in this competition Bertie Aherne won.
But by what criterion can
beheading with a knife be described as any more barbaric than killing by F16,
for which Blair is responsible? There
are, it is true, important differences between the killing methods. First, the F16 is a vastly more effective,
and more indiscriminate, killing machine. Second, killing by F16 is a
much more impersonal business for the killer – he can go on killing
indefinitely without a conscience, as if playing a video game, and never get real
blood on his hands. Obviously, that’s
not barbaric.
War on terrorism?
The Government’s handling of the
Ken Bigley affair was guided by two principles – to avoid any blame for his
death and to use his death to justify the continued military occupation of
Iraq. On the day of his death, Blair
said:
“I
feel a strong sense, as I hope others do, that the actions of these people
whether in Iraq or elsewhere should not prevail over people like Ken Bigley.”
The message there is
that the “terrorists” who killed Ken Bigley are part of a worldwide Islamic
terrorist conspiracy, and Britain must stay in Iraq to combat them. It doesn’t go as far as saying that Iraq is
the “main battleground” in the “war on terrorism”, as both he and his friend
George Bush have said in the past. The
fact that Iraq was a “terrorist” free zone before March 2003 is, of
course, an irrelevant detail.
Perhaps, the grand plan was for
US/UK forces to invade Iraq to act as a kind of flypaper to attract
“terrorists” into Iraq in order to destroy them. Certainly, from time to time words have come out of George Bush’s
mouth implying that. In his address to
the nation on 19 March 2003, after military action had started, he said:
“We meet that threat now,
with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have
to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the
streets of our cities.”
It seems a long time
ago since the Prime Minister told us that we must invade Iraq to disarm it of
its “weapons of mass destruction”.
Labour & Trade
Union Review