Interview with Dr. Geert van Moorter, Bagdad, 26 march 2003, 20.30 (Italian time)

Interview with Dr. Geert van Moorter, Baghdad, 26 march 2003, 20.30 (Italian time)

Dr Geert van Moorter is at present in Baghdad for a mission of the Belgian NGO ‚Medical Aid for the Third World’. Radio K Centrale was fortunate enough to have an interview with him, unfortunately during the middle of a bombardment. Every two minutes Dr van Moorter made the involuntary comment ‘wow, that one was close!’, or “Agh! That one was really close! Could you please repeat your question, I couldn’t hear you’.

However, we were able to talk to dr. van Moorter, and he gave us a special inside view of the life and feelings inside Iraq these days, a view largely ignored by the mainstream media. Dr. van Moorter visited Iraq already last year on a similar mission, so he’s in a perfect position to compare the feelings of the Iraqi people then and now. His observation is that the allied ‘hope’ for a population that would welcome the allied forces as liberators is plainly wrong. There was already a lot of resentment towards the US for slowly strangling the country under the 10 year embargo, and that resentment has only grown with the recent attack on Iraq. “There is not one city, not one village that has welcomed the allied forces,” van Moorter told us, “otherwise you would have already seen the pictures of the cheering crowd all over CNN”. Instead, he tells us the ordinary Iraqi’s are a very proud people, and they are waiting for the soldiers to arrive in the cities, so that they can defend those cities against the aggressor. “Let them come here, let them fight like a man, instead of dropping bombs like cowards, unreachable for us. That is no honorary way to fight!” van Moorter quotes the Iraqi people. He stresses that he, unlike the journalists, can walk around freely and is not escorted by officials of the Iraqi government. “Therefore, those who wish to discard my observations as propaganda are simply wrong, I’m bringing you the comments of Iraqi people who speak freely.” Even the people who oppose Saddam are calling to fight and resist the Americans. He quotes the leader of the biggest opposition organisation in Basra, who called for a ‘Jihad’ against the Americans. According to dr. van Moorter: “if the Americans really believe that the Iraqi people were going to welcome them as liberators, it is just because they started to believe their own lies.”

The other story dr. van Moorter told us, is a sad and horrifying one about the suffering of the civilian population. “There have been 350 civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The allied forces are targeting water processing installations, electricity plants and television stations. All these installations have nothing to do with warfare, and are manned by civilians. They are essential to the survival of the civilian population, and their bombing is a flagrant violation of numerous international treaties, including the convention of Geneva. “Bombs do get astray as well.Yesterday we went to visit a crater of a Tomahawk cruise missile. That thing makes an impact crater of 15 metres wide and 10 metres deep. It destroys everything in a 30-metre radius, and does a lot of damage outside those thirty metres. We are talking about installations which are in the middle of civilian territories, so one can’t believe that no civilians get hurt.” Dr. van Moorter testifies about the damage this does to people. “I’ve seen numerous wounded, new ones every hour. In the hospitals, cleaning crews have to mop the blood from the floors every half hour, otherwise one just couldn’t walk there anymore.” Confronted with a news article that stated that most of the civilian wounded would come from Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, he answers: “Even if that were so, we can’t forget that these people are under attack, and the only reason those anti-aircraft guns are firing is because the allied planes are bombing them.” In the same manner, van Moorter asks also for a consideration of the Iraqi soldiers that get killed. “These are soldiers defending their country, defending it against an attack of a foreign nation, and they get killed in great numbers.”

But according to dr. van Moorter, this isn’t the damage that is most significant. “The real violence done to these people is psychological, they are being mentally destroyed.” His attention then turns especially to the children. “How are they supposed to grow up?”, he asks “Their future is shattered from the beginning, their life destroyed, mentally and physically.” Dr. van Moorter describes how the people were already mentally and physically exhausted after a 10 year embargo, which had put them under an unimaginable amount of strain and hardship. “These people have no reserves anymore, they are exhausted”. Not that they have lost their spine. Van Moorter reports a strengthening will to defend the country, their land. “The ground is sacred here, it is not about a regime, or a country. It is about the land, a land that is holy to these people and that is now being threatened by an alien, and for these people, brutal force.”

Confronted with the mainstream media reports, van Moorter speaks of propaganda. “They told us that they conquered Basra 6 days ago, but people are still fighting there. Where are the images of the troops marching into cities? Where are the images of the massively surrendering troops? And don’t let them tell you there are no civilians who get hurt. I see civilian wounded and casualties everyday in the hospitals I visit. Yesterday, an allied airplane was shot down, I saw people looking for the pilots of the plane under my window, at the banks of the river, and mind you, these people weren’t staging the search, they didn’t even know I was looking.” Commenting on the images of the American prisoners of war: “I felt very powerful emotions then, finally the Americans are shown that they are not untouchable. And these images they can’t deny, they can’t tell you that it is only Iraqi propaganda. I had to laugh when Rumsfeld (US Secretary of Defense - SD) called this an act against the Geneva Conventions. America violates conventions every day in this war, they don’t even have a mandate from the UN, and now the first time they get hurt, they are crying like little babies, ‘you can’t do that, it’s not fair’”.

For the moment, life in Baghdad is as normal as it can be under the bombardments. “Bakeries are still baking bread, we still have water and electricity, although there are sometimes interruptions of power and water.” Dr. van Moorter is afraid though that once the allied troops move into Baghdad, the real massacre will begin. “They will not want to suffer great losses, so they’ll bomb every building from which there is resistance with helicopters, they will shoot at anything that moves. I’m afraid a lot of people will get killed in the battle for Baghdad.”

“The only thing we can do to help these people,” dr van Moorter says, “is to stop this war. And I don’t only mean demonstrations and protest actions. I call for all the people out there to actively take part in a resistance against this war. I call upon all the governments to not allow weapon transports, and to deny the Americans the use of their airspace. I ask for all the people to boycott American products. To form a circle around American embassies and enclose them, block them and cut them of from the outside world, to write letters to their government, to do everything in their power to stop this war.”

In an overview of the interview so far –dr. van Moorter was repeating the sad numbers of victims he saw, the shrapnel wounds, the destroyed limbs and scarred spirits of men, women and children- our connection with Bagdad was cut of. Attempts to reconnect failed. In his online diaries, Dr. van Moorter mentions the fact that he may be sounding a bit sloganesk, and militant in his writings and his interviews. He says that he always has despised such language before, but now he finds himself talking like that, but “under these circumstances, and confronted with these facts, and this much suffering, it is impossible not to talk like that!” Unfortunately we were cut of, but we feel confident that dr. van Moorter would have wished to end the interview exactly with his call for action in the paragraph above, and we can only support him in that. We hereby would like to thank dr. van Moorter for the interview, and we hope he can bring his work in Baghdad to a good end.

Stijn Demeulenaere

Radio K Centrale