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| Sunday, 11 January 2004 |
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US callous in hearing Iraqi claims - rights group BAGHDAD, Saturday (Reuters) The U.S. military is negligent and callous in dealing with Iraqis seeking compensation for relatives accidentally killed or maimed by U.S. troops, a human rights group said on Saturday. Occupation Watch, an international group of peace and justice organisations set up to monitor the conduct of occupying forces in Iraq, said the process for Iraqis to make claims was purposely opaque and U.S. treatment of families pursuing claims was often offhand and bordering on the cruel. "There is a culture of impunity," Occupation Watch's researcher Paola Gasparoli told a news conference in Baghdad, where many Iraqi families came to push their cases to the media. "Many of the most important cases cannot be presented or are being rejected for entirely illogical reasons," she said. After major combat was declared over in Iraq on May 1, the U.S. military said it would hear claims from Iraqis whose family members were killed or wounded in incidents involving U.S. troops as long they took place in non-combat circumstances. To be successful, claims also have to refer to incidents that have occurred since May 1 and have to clearly demonstrate that U.S. forces took wrongful action or behaved negligently. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. military had received nearly 5,400 claims as of mid-September, 4,148 of which had been adjudicated and 1,874 denied. The military says it has paid out several million dollars in compensation. There are no clear figures on how many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the end of major hostilities, but Iraq Body Count, a U.S.-British research group, estimates between 7,900 and 9,800 have died of war-related causes since the invasion. In a 30-page report covering three months of research, Occupation Watch lists several of the most serious cases among the 77 claims it has followed. None of those claims has so far been successful. The U.S. military was not immediately available to respond to Occupation Watch's allegations on Saturday. In one case, Mazen, a 32-year-old pharmaceutical salesman, was shot seven times and killed while standing by the side of the road waiting for a taxi. U.S. forces were firing on insurgents nearby and Mazen was mistaken for an "enemy fighter". His father, 72, went to claim the body, which had been taken to Baghdad airport for forensic examination. The corpse was eventually released and he was told to take it home in a taxi. When he complained, U.S. forces agreed to take the man and the corpse back to his home. But fearing they may come under attack, soldiers made the man run in front of their truck as a shield, the report says. They finally left him by the road to carry the corpse several hundred metres to his house. The family's claim for compensation was rejected because the son was killed in something other than a non-combat situation, Occupation Watch said. An appeal was also refused, although the family did receive $2,500 in so-called sympathy money. "In short, the unfortunate death of your son came as a result of lawful combat activities conducted by coalition forces acting in defence of their own lives," a U.S. Army judge wrote in an October 8 letter refusing the claim. Gasparoli said the biggest problem with the claims process was its lack of clarity. There is no clear definition of a non-combat situation, she said, and because the U.S. military's rules of engagement are a secret, it is impossible to make a strong claim that a soldier acted negligently when he fired. "Sometimes soldiers know they have killed someone wrongly, so they do everything to make sure they get away with it," said Gasparoli. "There have been cases in which bodies were stripped of identification and delivered to hospitals as unknowns. "We need to work to put pressure on the U.S. Army to change the claims process and to start to take some of these claims seriously, instead of just dismissing them." |
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