Long ago, in the story where Western armies were noble liberators and Iraqi citizens their grateful hosts, British soldiers were warned of the unthinkable. In an eve-of-battle address, Lt. Col. Tim Collins, of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, told his troops of the fate that would befall anyone who took a life in vain. He had known such men, he said, and they lived with the mark of Cain upon them.
Collins, hailed as Henry V in aviator sunglasses, was only doing what all co-minglers of blood and oratory attempt at the outset of conflict. Just as Siegfried Sassoon called warriors a “happy legion” and Rupert Brooke thanked the God “who has matched us with his hour”, Collins evoked the vision of a weary civilization soon to be made whole by war. In Basra, as in Flanders, things never looked that perfectible again.
Against the blood-soaked backdrop of Iraq, three soldiers of the 1st Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are before a court martial at Osnabruck in Germany, facing charges of mistreating Iraqi looters at a humanitarian base, Camp Breadbasket. On Thursday, the presiding judge advocate, Michael Hunter, urged an end to public statements about the case.
He was right. Whether the armed forces should regulate themselves according to the current rules is another question. Military law has been separate from the civil sort since armies settled their differences with molten lead, and courts-martial have not varied greatly from the 17th century, when soldiers were personal retainers of the sovereign and disciplining them was judged a matter for the king, not Parliament. There was no Geneva Convention, no alleged war crimes and none of the carry-on-in-khaki sexual farces that bedevil modern officers’ messes and the forces’ in-house courts.
Today, the tradition that the military regulates its own looks increasingly flawed, in the wake of the deaths and claims of abuse at Deepcut Barracks. The system raised more anxieties in the case of Lance Corporal David Atkinson, the sexual predator who murdered student Sally Geeson seven years after the army put him on trial for indecent assault. At Osnabruck, the weight of scrutiny could have undermined the court martial, had the judge advocate not intervened. If quasi-privatized justice can be a hit-and-miss affair, so can public fury. Ask Daoud Mousa. Col. Mousa, a retired Basra police officer, told the High Court last month that he had arrived to collect his son, Baha, from his job as a hotel receptionist, only to find British soldiers taking money from the safe and seven employees, his son included, lying on the lobby floor before being taken into army custody.
On the third night of their captivity, after alleged group beatings, a friend heard Baha moaning: “I am dying ... blood, blood” through his cell walls. Col. Mousa testified that he was later shown his son’s bleeding and flayed body. “I literally could not bear to look at him,” his witness statement reads.
More than a year after Baha’s death, no one has been arrested or charged. As Col. Mousa told the British court, he wanted an independent judicial inquiry and compensation, chiefly for his grandsons, aged five and three, whose mother died of cancer two years before her husband was killed. He had, he testified, been offered “$5,000 without an admission of responsibility”, an offer his family considered an insult to their dignity.
In a landmark decision, the High Court threw out the MoD’s claim that a Basra prison was outside the jurisdiction of the Human Rights Act. The media and the public did not seem much interested, though, in the Mousa case. The government has not set up the inquiry Col. Mousa seeks. Instead, a number of test cases remain mired in the civil courts’ appeal process, while other stories of torture unrelated to Camp Breadbasket seep into the public domain.
Last week, the US concluded the first phase of punishment for the soldiers responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture. Charles Graner was jailed for 10 years as a result of the pictures showing him with a stack of the Iraqi prisoners he was accused of brutalizing for “sport” and “laughs”. Asked if he was sorry, he said: “There’s a war on. Bad things happen.” He was, he asserted to the end, merely following orders. That explanation suits those who always claimed the responsibility for Abu Ghraib rested chiefly with the poor white trash who carried out the crimes. Such a view saves recognizing that individual actions are part of a contagion of inhumanity stretching from Fallujah to the White House. In all bad wars, the cruelty leeches down from the top. Punishing lowly perpetrators, as the US is doing now, is proper, of course. But though justice is done and public horror appeased, individual scandals always bear a heavier tariff. Shameful behavior by serving soldiers, wherever proven, makes a mockery of a mission to implant the rule of law. In the case of Abu Ghraib, it has rendered Iraqi democracy more elusive and those of Western interventionists more tainted.
Nor does punishing the guilty, such as Graner, offer justice to the victims. Quite the opposite. The heap of bodies is as anonymous and forgettable as Iraq’s uncounted dead.
As the Abu Ghraib trials proceed and important consciences are salved, who in Britain will speak for Baha Mousa? Which minister will champion his orphaned children, whose lives and country this government pledged to make fair and free?
The answer depends on whether the myth persists that bad actions are always the province of perpetrators alone. Learning the lessons of Abu Ghraib will require people of power to stare into the mirror and study their reflections for any shadow of the mark of Cain.
