US soldiers bulldoze farmers’ crops

Americans accused of brutal ’punishment’ tactics against villagers

By Patrick Cockburn

The Independent (UK)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=452375

Dhuluaya, Iraq — US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from
loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as
orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of
collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about
guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown
earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small
town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily
bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees
and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed,
said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but
this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t find any
weapons."

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in
Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers
for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni
Muslim district.

"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they
were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have
taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a
member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for
compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers
described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because
’you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us.’"

What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of
Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last
month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred
has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along
a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge.

Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition
addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic
English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens
of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these
orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for
hunger and death."

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front
of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did
not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke
down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper
"Iraq Today" attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work, a
soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes
Lt. Col. Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked
the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was
responsible, but the farmers didn’t tell us."

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be
extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and
everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all
belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about
fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a
distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me
how much my hands were worth."