--- Stephen E Philion <philion at hawaii.edu> wrote:
>
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=452375
>
>
> 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. 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.
>
>
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