'The war of liberation has only started . . . and we are behind it'



THE Americans followed a grand Iraqi Ba'ath party tradition yesterday by
showing their dead enemies on television. Back in 1963, when Abdul Karim
Qassem's corpse was shown on the screen, there was no colour television and
the executed prime minister - Ba'athists and army officers had jointly
condemned him to death - appeared in black and white, propped up in a chair
but very, very dead.

Yesterday, needless to say, it was all in living colour. The faces of Uday
and Qusay Hussein had been carefully reconstructed by US army morticians and
lay on trolleys, stitched up and with the colour of false life injected into
their newly-shaved faces - but also very, very dead.

The Iraqis showed off the corpse of Qassem so that the Iraqi people would
believe he was dead. The Americans showed off the corpses of Uday and Qusay
Hussein so that the Iraqi people would believe they were dead. And ghoulish
wasn't the word for it. Apparently realising that the original untouched
faces of Uday and Qusay did not convince Iraqis, they were neatly shaved by
the Americans, and looked - minus the two bullet wounds just behind Qusai's
right ear and the blow to Uday's head - much more like Saddam's children.
Mercifully, the Americans spared us the corpse of Qusay's 14-year-old son
Mustafa who was also gunned down by the Americans - a fact which is,
needless to say, not making any headlines in the United States, even though
the American army commander made an oblique reference this week to the
"youngest individual" being the last to die.

It had anyway been a bad start to the mortuary show. Only an occupation
army, perhaps, could have produced the original photographs of Uday and
Qusay just in time for the one day - Friday, the Muslim sabbath - when there
are no newspapers in Iraq to publish them. But after yesterday's visit to
the morgue by the world's press, the corpses were, so to speak, re-heated
for public consumption. Today's Iraqi front pages, so the Americans hope,
will be covered in these latest macabre photographs.

But what are Iraqis supposed to make of all this? The US authorities
creepily announced that they had treated the bodies at their mortuary at
Baghdad Airport with "the same respect" they would accord any corpse - as if
it was the most normal thing in the world to parade dead bodies on
television. Is Saddam going to receive the same treatment, one wonders? Or
Osama? Or Mullah Omar?

Then the US authorities announced that they were waiting for "a family
member" to come forward to claim the brothers for burial - as if Saddam was
going to turn up at the airport in a Mercedes to sign the release papers.

Sixty per cent of the 50 or so Iraqis I spoke to yesterday believed that the
original photograph was indeed Uday, but almost all of the 60pc demanded to
know why the Americans didn't bother to capture them so they could be put on
trial for their monstrous crimes.

"Why did the Americans deprive us of a trial?" one asked. "They could easily
have surrounded that house with just four people inside and waited till they
surrendered. There are many, many Iraqis who have been waiting for real
justice - the justice of a democracy not of the military kind. And instead
of a trial, they give us a photograph."

The fruit-seller in Upper Karada Street came out with the inevitable: that
the Americans had so many computers, they could digitalise Uday's face onto
a real body. Again, yesterday's television show will help to kill that idea.

But the really bad news is that every one of the Iraqis I spoke to said that
the guerrillas attacking the Americans were not just Saddam 'remnants', but
a 'mukawama shaabia' - a "popular resistance" - and therein, lies the rub.

Mr Bush may say the contrary, Mr Blair may say the contrary and the host of
occupation officials here may desperately want to believe them; but in
Baghdad, there is now widespread sympathy, not for the killers and torturers
of Saddam's regime who are indeed attacking Americans, but for the much more
serious Sunni Islamist movement which is principally responsible for
opposing the occupation.

One of the Mansour men put it like this: "You are living on false hopes if
you think these pictures will change anything. The war of liberation has
started and we are behind it."

And if this is true, there are going to be a lot more corpses. (©
Independent News Service)