Many Struggles Are the Same Struggle

In these hard years since the murder of my brother in Iraq by the American invaders who entered Baghdad with blood and fire, I have had to reflect on many aspects surrounding this painful fact.

My way of looking at life and how to try to improve it has changed and has become enriched. I’ve noticed a number of core points about the ethics, morality, history and actuality of my country and the world that are intertwined when one digs a little below the surface of the facts.

In the struggle that began nine long years ago, we had to deal with defending life, not like the Pharisees who claim to have control over women’s bodies and their decisions on becoming a mother. I am talking about defending life against the powerful ones, about fighting against the very concept of might makes right, which is repeated by death propagandists and other know-it-alls.

According to them, life can be removed if the master is the one doing the removing. If Israel bombs Gaza and kills civilians, that’s okay. If the U.S. illegally invaded another country to kill Bin Laden, that’s okay. If a mob of mercenaries lynches Gadhafi, that’s okay. They take care of their friends.

I will fight this concept forever. Even in war, there are laws. Laws that have taken humanity years of progress to create. The provisions began by the impulse of Henry Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross, with the intent to protect prisoners and the wounded in wars. This same impulse promoted the Geneva Convention, the basis of international humanitarian law.

Clearly, the Convention is not perfect, and almost no one complies with it. But it is the grounding that separates a murder from a combat death in war. It is a legal document signed by 194 countries that, in theory, should defend those who suffer most in war: civilians.

All one has to do is see the rise in numbers and differentiation in fatalities since World War I, when 5 percent of the deaths were civilian. Compare this to the present wars, where the best thing you can be is a soldier, now that 3 percent of the deaths are from the military side, compared to the horror of 97 percent being civilian deaths.

In the struggle that began nine long years ago, we had to deal with: the defense of the freedom of information against those who deceive us with the concentration of media ownership – with an alleged plurality, but actual minority of owners – or by justifying the elimination of journalists as an accident of war. A war correspondent can die in crossfire. That would be an accident. But it is no accident to be killed to prevent one from engaging in the work of reporting.

On 8 Apr. 2003, the U.S. Army ended the freedom of information in three hours when it attacked the headquarters of all the independent press in Baghdad. Since then, some 400 journalists have been killed in Iraq, mostly Arabs. These extermination figures have not created undue alarm in the mainstream media.

We have to deal with memory and the defense against those who want us to forget the crimes. In forgetting our murdered, they die twice. If they are not remembered, they can never stand in evidence against those who kill. Forgetting leads to the theft of justice and accountability to the families or society. It is the horrible stain of impunity, where criminals, those who cause these terrible crimes, emerge immaculate.

And these immaculate immortals are the same, the same ones who send my family to mourn in the privacy of our homes, on the path to oblivion, the same ones who tell the families of the over-one-hundred-thousand countrymen killed in the ditches to forget.

Do not look for them. Do not dig them up. The accomplices want us blind.

The defense of national sovereignty: to see how the members of the two major parties alternating in the two-party regime behave as the subordinates of a foreign power. They are able to go to the U.S. embassy to pay homage and receive instructions while at the same time wearing the banner of patriotism, red and yellow (the Spanish flag), a flag dyed with colors that tend to fade into the “Stars and Stripes” (the U.S. flag) in the light rain of research or in the evidence of the submissions uncovered by Wikileaks cables.

Curious are the patriots who work for other homelands.

In the end, life is connected by thin threads, and a murder can take us on the trail of an imperial power that, with its minions, threatens life, constrains information, defends impunity and sells their homeland.

There are many struggles that are the same struggle.

*Editor’s note: The author’s brother, José Couso Permuy (5 Oct. 1965 – 8 Apr. 2003) was a Spanish cameraman. He was one of the journalists that died from U.S. fire on 8 Apr. 2003 after an American tank fired at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq invasion.