‘US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one’

By Rory McCarthy

May 22 — The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10:30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
“I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Shibab’s description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.

She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Shihab and her surviving child to the hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.

As Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.

Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.

Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. “I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village,” he said by telephone. “These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?”

Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Alusi, and other wedding guests, the US military, faced with apparent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.

The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on Wednesday but said it had targeted a “suspected foreign fighter safe house.”

“During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided,” it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately £800), foreign passports and a “Satcom radio,” presumably a satellite telephone.

“We took ground fire and we returned fire,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. “We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement.”

Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who said a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”

When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologize for the conduct of my men.”

The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.
Haji Rakat’s second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad’s female cousins, Sharifa, would marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.
A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.

He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi’s own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer’s brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.

The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the late evening. “We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing and making speeches,” said Ma’athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbors.

Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.
The party ended at around 10:30pm and the neighbors left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. “The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony,” said Nawaf. “We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area.”
Armored military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. “They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house,” he said.
Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.

“I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world,” said Nawaf. “There were children’s bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces.”

Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma’athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. “I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head,” he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. “The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying.”

Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.

From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.

There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of explanations: “The American bombing.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

Canada’s top court backs Monsanto against farmer

By Stephen Leahy

Brooklin, Canada, May 21 (IPS) — Canada’s top court ruled against farmer Percy Schmeiser on May 21, upholding agri-business giant Monsanto’s patent on genetically modified (GM) canola, a decision observers say will have implications for agriculture worldwide.

However, the Supreme Court of Canada also ruled Schmeiser does not have to pay Monsanto’s court costs of more than $146,000 and can keep $14,500 in profits from his 1997 crop that sparked the six-year legal battle.

“I can save my home and my farm,” Schmeiser said.

“My battle is over but not the battle in my heart. A farmer should never lose his right to use [his] seeds from year to year,” the 73-year-old added in a press conference.

By upholding Monsanto’s patent over the process that created the plant the court, in a tight 5-4 decision, essentally granted the company control over the plant. At the same time the majority decision said plants are higher life forms and therefore cannot be patented, explained Schmeiser’s lawyer, Terry Zakreski.

Ann Clark, a crop scientist at the University of Guelph who has written extensively on this issue calls the decision “bizarre.”

“These are the same set of judges who said in 2002 that higher life forms can’t be patented,” she said.

That decision concerned a laboratory mouse used in cancer research, known as the Harvard Mouse.

The very unusual fact that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto’s court costs and that it was a 5-4 decision means there will be more litigation in future, Clark predicted.

“It’s about as weak a victory for Monsanto as you could get.”

Nonetheless it is a serious loss, because not only did the court not recognize the fundamental right of farmers to save seeds, “ `it’s allowing seeds to become a tool of oppression,” said Terry Boehm of Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU).

Schmeiser has steadfastly maintained that his fields were contaminated by pollen from a neighbor’s GM canola (oilseed rape) fields and by seeds that blew off trucks on their way to a nearby processing plant.

Monsanto maintains that Schmeiser knowingly infringed on their patents.

Lower courts and now Canada’s highest court have ruled that no matter how the plants got there, Schmeiser infringed on Monsanto’s legal rights when he harvested and sold his crop.

“We conclude that the trial judge and Court of Appeal were correct in concluding that the appellants ‘used’ Monsanto’s patented gene and cell and hence infringed the Patent Act,” said the May 21 judgment.

All crop seeds are the result of thousands of years of seed saving and selection by farmers around the world, said Boehm. Allowing a de facto patent “usurps the entire history of that seed.”

One positive outcome of the decision, he added, is the court recognized that Monsanto has to take responsibility for any genetic pollution.

With much of the five million canola acres in Canada planted with GM varieties from Monsanto and other companies, canola plants with patented genetics can be found growing wild in farmers’ fields, along roadsides, and in schoolyards and parks.

A Monsanto official was predictably happy with the decision.

“The Supreme Court has set a world standard in intellectual property protection, and this ruling maintains Canada as an attractive investment opportunity,” Executive Vice-President Carl Casale said in a statement.

The ruling will affect farmers worldwide, says one expert.

“This will come as shocking news to indigenous farmers in Mexico, whose maize fields have been contaminated with DNA from genetically modified plants, and to farmers everywhere who are fighting to prevent genetically modified organisms from trespassing in their fields,” said Silvia Ribeiro, from the Mexico office of ETC Group, an international civil society organization based in Canada.

According to Ribeiro, advertisements in Chiapas, Mexico are already warning farmers that if they are found using GM seed illegally, they risk fines and even prison.

“In Monsanto’s world, we’re all criminals unless a court rules otherwise,” she added in a statement.

“It’s a bit strange that if your land is contaminated that the legal onus is on you to report it,” agrees Clark.

In order to not infringe on Monsanto’s patent, according to ETC Group, farmers who suspect that GM canola is on their property must notify the company in writing.

Accordingly, ETC Group and partner organizations around the world are organizing a campaign to have people send Monsanto Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant a letter advising him the company’s seeds may be squatting on their property.

According to Clark, every farm in western Canada probably contains GM canola. But of the three agri-business companies selling canola in Canada, Monsanto is the only one that protects its patents this way, she added.

It is well past time for the Canadian government to deal with the issue, said Nadège Adam of the Council of Canadians, a non-governmental organization that has supported Schmeiser.

The patent laws need to be amended to ban patents of life forms because there will be further abuses, Adam said.

At the very least, Canada should amend laws to allow a “farmers exemption” for the re-use of seed and an “innocent bystander” provision so that you cannot be charged with infringing on a patent unless you use or benefit from it, said Zakreski.

“Monsanto’s victory will be short-lived,” predicts Adam. “The backlash against GM crops is getting stronger.”

“This ruling will unite farmers and others opposed to corporate control of food and life, and galvanize civil society to take the issue out of the courts and back to politicians,” agreed ETC Group’s Executive Director Pat Mooney in a statement.

Although there is much hype about the success and potential of the biotech industry, all is not well. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, publicly traded biotechnology companies in the United States lost $41 billion from 1990 to 2003.

Last week, Monsanto said it would stop development of its Roundup Ready GM wheat, citing lack of a market for the crop.

“By not caving into the extraordinary pressure from Monsanto on this issue, Percy Schmeiser and his wife Louise have changed the course of history,” says Clark.