US soldiers bulldoze Iraqi farmers' crops as "collective punishment"

[Juan Fajardo <fajardos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops
Americans accused of brutal 'punishment' tactics against villagers,
while British are condemned as too soft

By Patrick Cockburn in Dhuluaya

12 October 2003

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. [...]

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



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