Fisk on Iraq and Arafat (repost)

[AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk on the line us with, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. You wrote a piece on Saturday, Robert, the title, “The Truth is that Yasser Arafat died years ago. He married the revolution. And in the end, he became a little dictator, falsely promising democracy.” Your response to the latest news of Yasser Arafat and his health?

ROBERT FISK: Well, he has been -- he's died so many times, hasn't he? We were told originally, he died in one of the air raids in Beirut in 1982, and he didn't. Then he had a crash in the Libyan desert in his plane and he was okay, but the pilot was killed. Then he had a blood clot in the brain on the way to Baghdad from Amman and Jordanian doctors saved him. This time, of course, it clearly is serious. Although, I mean in a way, when you look at it symbolically, this old man like an elderly owl who has been trapped inside this rubble for three years, still talking about going to Jerusalem and leading his people to a new state, and so on, peace of the brave, and then eventually, he's hauled out on a stretcher looking like a skeleton and taken off to a foreign country from which he may never return alive. It's not the way in which leaders should go, but the problem is, you see, all along, he never allowed a new leadership to take shape around him. He was a corrupt man. He is a corrupt man. He won't be doing much corruption for a while now, but all this time, and this is the great tragedy of the Palestinians, apart from the fact their living under occupation, which is a greater tragedy for them, is that this is a man who didn't allow young and educated Palestinians to take their place in a new political entity. If you look at the pictures or look at any of the pictures that you see of Arafat outside the Mukada building in Ramallah, you look at the pictures of him coming out when he was led out of the building and put in the helicopter, all the men around him are paunchy, 50-60 year olds from the days of fighting the Israelis in Lebanon in the 80’s. Whenever a bright young spokesman has popped up on television from the Palestinian side, they are being slapped out and the old men are being brought back. Like, for example, the Palestinian representative of the United Nations, who is almost incomprehensible on television or radio. Especially when the Israelis put up extremely eloquent and well educated young people to represent their country. So he's -- you know, I have said many times, even Arafat as a physical existence, that's not a face that you would see on a student dorm window along with Che Guevara or even Castro. In a sense, he represents by his continuity, by his desire to represent the revolution, to be married to the revolution, as he put it, which is wife found out what that meant. It has a consistency and a kind of courage to it, but he had everything wrong with the Arabs in the sense that he turned into just another Arab dictator, which is exactly what I think the Israelis wanted. They want an obedient dictator to manage the occupation for them. It was interesting that when the second Intifada broke out, the Israelis asked the question, can Arafat control his own people, which of course was dutifully taken up, the Israelis set the agenda for CNN and the BBC, who said, can care Arafat control his people, having forgotten that the principle behind the Oslo agreement was not that Arafat would control his people but that he would represent them. And in a sense he does represent them, because in the streets there are people who say we need control, you see? One of the great sicknesses I think, the cancers of the Arab world is the desire for people to put a form of authoritarian regime over the freedoms of the kind of democracy that we think we live in. I would have to say, however, that if he was an Iraqi, living in the hell of Iraq at the moment, I might well look back wishfully on the terrible days of Saddam compared to the infinitely more violent and dangerous days today.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of which, your latest question, what's happening in Iraq right now, as well as the capture, the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan, and the threatened, what will happen to her, the killing of the U.S. soldiers, and the 100,000 report, which we're going to talk about in a minute, of casualties in Iraq--Iraqi civilians.

ROBERT FISK: Well, you know, the problem is that although some of us, when we go to Iraq are still moving around, most of my colleagues, and I don't blame them at all, scarcely leave their hotels tells because it's too dangerous. We still have the two French journalists missing. Although mostly, I understand they're still alive. We have had journalists murdered; quite a few of them. So, when you talk like this, for example, I just listened to your questions. Excuse me. We are constantly faced by this kind of theatrical facade. Who has Margaret Hassan? We don't know. I know Margaret very well, but there's no claim from a particular group. There are no armed men standing in the background with the Islamic banners. Who took her? Why? We hear eight marines were killed. On operational duties. What does that mean? Were they ambushed? Were they in a tank that blew up? Were they in a helicopter that crashed? What does it mean? We hear 100,000 casualties. Well, there are two ways of getting a casualty rate, an Iraq casualty rate in Iraq. One is to go around all of the scholarly notebooks of doctors and morticians who wrote down five more bodies at 2:17 p.m. this afternoon. To go to all of the hospitals, to go the ministry of health and when we've done that, and of course, the associated press had a pretty good go at this before most of Iraq went outside of government control, we came up with a figure that got to around 20,000 or 30,000 Iraqis. The figure of 100,000 has been extrapolated from a series of interviews in specific locations based upon percentages. In other words, if they went to five houses in a street and found that 20 more people had died of violence in the previous year, then they would extrapolate out from that increase in violence and what it meant. But the 100,000 is not a record of actual deaths. It's an extrapolation of percentages put forward in what is in effect a kind of opinion poll. It may be less than 100,000. It may be considerably less, but I think when you get to the point where you are sort of saying, "my god it wasn't 30,000 but 100,000," you are beginning to forget the individual and it's the individual Iraqi who is suffering every day, every day, and there are many, many deaths will never be recorded simply because in a small village out in the desert, they will bury the person quickly and the authorities essentially have no control there anymore. There's no one to take down deaths and no one to notify. In Baghdad you still have to notify deaths. So you can go down to the Baghdad city mortuary, and I actually go there and meet the doctors and morticians. I actually stand there among the corpses and we can count them each day. Now that I can do. I can tell you, on a certain day 27 people were brought with gunshot wounds into this hospital. And I can do all the hospitals in Baghdad. But I can't travel to Najaf and Samara and Fallujah and count there, too. So there is and there will be no precise statistic. That of course is precisely the way the United States and Britain and the American military and America's appointed Iyad Allawi, so-called interim prime minister, that's the way they want it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well Robert Fisk, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Middle east correspondent for The Independent, interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times.]