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Bulldozing
sofia
10/13/03 at 12:50:22
US SOLDIERS BULLDOZE FARMERS' CROPS
[i]Patrick Cockburn, Independent, 10/12/03 [/i]
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=452375

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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NS
10/13/03 at 12:54:38
sofia
Re: Bulldozing
sofia
10/13/03 at 12:51:52
UNRWA Update: Picking Up the Pieces in Gaza
[i]By Peter Hansen[/i]

There is a daily grind in Gaza. A grinding of bulldozer gears. The churning of heavy machinery and the crash of concrete on concrete accompany it. Together this is a soundtrack of misery and despair. It is the sound of another family home being demolished.

It is the unfortunate lot of many Palestinians that the loss of their homes to the maws of Israeli military bulldozers or powerful explosive charges is now so commonplace that it fails to make the grade as news. After all, something that happens every day, usually more than once a day, eventually stops being news. But it doesn’t stop being terrifying.

At the end of May 2003 a total of 1,134 homes had been demolished by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip, making almost 10,000 individuals homeless. Unfortunately this is not a policy on the wane. During the first two years of the intifada the average number of homes demolished in Gaza—a statistical category both depressing and surreal—was 32 per month. Since the start of 2003 that average has risen to 72. Disturbingly, the publication of the “road map” to peace has so far had no impact.

Very few of the demolitions target the families of suicide bombers or of those wanted by Israel. Instead the victims are simply people living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those living near the Egyptian border in Rafah in the south of Gaza have the misfortune of being in a place where Israel feels the need to widen its security zone at the border. Hundreds of homes, dozens of small shops, mosques and communities that once huddled there against the border have been churned into rubble.

In Khan Younis the residents of a refugee camp who have the bad luck to overlook the Gush Qatif settlement block have similarly had their homes razed. Tanks and bulldozers come in the night. Instructions to evacuate are shouted through loudspeakers and families grab what meager possessions they can before their world comes crashing down. This is repeated over and over again, night after night, with an appalling regularity.

The United Nations, in the form of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), tries to pick up the pieces after these demolitions. As the agency responsible for the humanitarian needs of more than 75 percent of Gazans, it immediately supplies tents, blankets, food and drinking water to the newly homeless. If it has the funds, it helps out with rental costs for those refugees—the majority—without the income to cover their new accommodation costs.

And UNRWA picks up the pieces in other ways, too. Its schools in Gaza are facing a tidal wave of traumatized children, many of whom have been roused from their beds by the bulldozers or lie awake, fearful that their home will be next. UNRWA now provides trauma counseling in each of its 169 schools for these innocent victims of the intifada.

In the longer term, UNRWA has pledged to provide a new shelter for all of those whose homes have been lost. The costs of such a pledge are staggering—upward of $21 million is needed just to assist those who have already been affected, and more come every day. Furthermore, Gaza is already one of the world’s most crowded spots. There is precious little available building space—and finding plots that will be safe from any future demolition is proving difficult. So far the agency has been able to erect just 120 new homes—with another 185 under construction.

UNRWA this month issued an appeal to the international community for funds to support its emergency operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Included in that appeal is a request for $21 million to allow for the repair and reconstruction of damaged and destroyed refugee shelters in the Gaza camps. Another $1.1 million is needed in the West Bank.

Necessary as funding for new shelters is, money is not the answer. Israel has legitimate security concerns, and much suffering of its own, but its security is poorly served by a policy that creates fresh anger and despair every day. What is needed is a just and durable peace that will allow the children of Gaza to again sleep soundly at night.

[i]Peter Hansen is the commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East <www.unrwa.org>. This article first appeared in the June 23, 2003 International Herald Tribune. ©2003.[/i]
NS


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