Kidnappers have beheaded another foreign captive in Iraq. For Ken Bigley, there was hope that he would avoid the fate of more than 30 other non-Iraqi hostages murdered by insurgents and criminals.
The British government had entered into discussions via an intermediary to save Bigley’s life. The Irish government had offered him a passport, based on his ancestry, to make him a neutral in the conflict. Prominent Muslims from the British Muslim Council, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Muammar Gadaffi and Yasser Arafat appealed to his kidnappers to free him.
His captors did no honour to the cause of Iraqi independence or to their faith in God by killing an innocent man. But the sabotage, sniping, suicide bombings, convoy attacks and kidnappings will all continue until US forces and their allies leave.
Jack Straw, conceding that the government had gone back on its ‘no negotiation’ policy, said that ‘messages were exchanged’. He claimed, however, that the kidnappers did not ‘abandon their demands relating to the release of women prisoners, even though they were fully aware there are no women prisoners in our custody in Iraq’.
No one said Britain was holding them, but Britain’s American allies and the Iraqi interim government do. When the Iraqis moved to release one of the women, the US prevented it. An American officer, explaining why two women scientists had not been released with 240 men last week, said they remained ‘high value’ detainees.
The British could have made it clear that this was an error. A principle of hostage negotiations has been that kidnappers cannot be granted anything they would not have been entitled to had there been no kidnapping. In other words, the Iraqi women detainees could have been released on the merits of their case without anyone ‘giving in’.
But to hold them as a way of proving that kidnapping does not pay was perverse. Britain refuses to confront America with any of its shortcomings – no matter how many British soldiers and civilians die or how many Iraqi civilians the occupation forces kill.
Washington and London were astounded that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (or so they said). They were astonished the Iraqis did not welcome them as liberators. They stood amazed when the supposed links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden did not materialise out of the mountains of documents seized from Saddam’s ministries in Iraq and al-Qaeda computer hard drives in Afghanistan. Is the situation in Iraq worse than you expected, someone asked Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon on Question Time 10 days ago. ‘Yes, it is.’ What’s more, Hoon said, the government ‘did not anticipate’ the kidnappings in Iraq.
Why not? Insurgency in the Middle East, particularly since the US Marines tried to impose democracy in Lebanon in 1983, has included all the tactics the US and British forces are facing in Iraq: suicide bombings, assassinations of locals suspected of collaborating with the foreigners, attacks on embassies and foreign-owned businesses and, yes, kidnapping.
This was not only predictable, it was predicted. Many who opposed the war said that Iraqis, however much they despised Saddam, did not want to be governed by foreigners. They believed that many would shoot and bomb and kidnap to drive the occupiers out.
The suicide bombing of the US Marine HQ at Beirut airport in October 1983 led to the departure of American forces from Lebanon. The kidnappings of western civilians continued, driving most westerners out of the country. It was a terrible time for the Lebanese, who were enduring anarchy of the kind Iraqis today would find familiar, and for foreign hostages.
I cannot compare my captivity in Lebanon to that of hostages in Iraq, because Hizbollah never threatened us with decapitation. The isolation and worry about family, however, must be the same.
Interestingly, the guerrillas who held me hostage hated Saddam and wanted his overthrow – out of sympathy with fellow Shia Muslims in Iraq – as much as Bush and Blair would later. One of their charges against America at the time was that it supported him.
Finally, after thousands of attacks and the capture of young soldiers, Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon in 2000. Lebanon has since welcomed foreigners back as businessmen, teachers, journalists and tourists. The hatred was not innate xenophobia, but the outcome of occupation and its cruelties.
Foreign workers are not escaping Iraq. The numbers of them applying for jobs is actually increasing. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton says it has 30,000 foreigners working there and another 100,000 applicants waiting to go.
Unemployment at home and big money in Iraq attract not only Americans, but Nepalese, Turks, Armenians and Pakistanis. Some have died in attacks on foreign installations, others – including Muslims from Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan – have been murdered in captivity.
As a tactic, kidnappings are less effective than suicide bombings or roadside attacks. But that so many Muslims have been murdered must mean that even an Irish passport would have been no shield for anyone working under a US contract in Iraq. It is about occupation, not nationality.
