Fisk is not one of my favourite reporters. He allows his prejudice against the West to colour everything he writes. When he wrote about the Jenin "massacre" I went on the internet and found photographs and even documents which proved there was no massacre.
However, he is also very intelligent and energetic and gets around. If he hasn't made this up it's worth following up on:
The looters
come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had
set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.
The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge ? an explanation that is growing very thin ? and that
the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature
in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting
these fires. And neither do I.
The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be paid. The passengers in those
buses are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires.
The moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project.
So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in a
red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of?
Who was he working for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, with
its cultural heritage?
He follows this with
Why didn't the Americans stop this?
This is a good question which should be followed up on general principle but I'm a lot more interested in the previous paragraphs. Who are these people who come in expeditions to set the fires?
The caveat remains: Fisk may have made it up.
Personally, I suspect both former Saddam supporters and folk who hate the old regime are setting the fires for their own different reasons. |
