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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. Yesterday local women were 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."
Read the March Of the Bulldozers
Meanwhile the bulldozing continues in Palestine and Afghanistan. Why bulldoze the farms? Why destroy the food supply? Because it is a common characteristic of conquering empires to destroy the food source of the conquered. This is the 21st century and it is time for this practice to stop. All of the citizens of the United States and Israel are responsible for such acts just as the world held the citizens of Germany repsonsible for the brutal sins against humanity during WWII.
Meanwhile the US is shipping more Caterpiller bulldozers around the world. Property development is full speed ahead. This year the Israelis will be using the new remote control bulldozers to protect the lives of Israeli soldiers.
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Bulldozed homes in Kabul, Sept. 16, 2003. The police claim they are making way for a new housing development for the new government. This does not explain why the homes were bulldozed unannounced with the peoples' belongings still in the house. Here a man and son salvage what they can of their partly bulldozed home.