Hostage’s death puts Iraq spotlight back on Blair

LONDON: Prime Minister Tony Blair faces fresh pressure over Iraq this week as legislators return to parliament with the beheading of British hostage Kenneth Bigley overshadowing the political agenda. Coming days after a report from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which failed to find banned weapons and so undermined Blair’s main argument for war, Bigley’s killing looks sure to keep Iraq an explosive issue seven months before an expected election. “You don’t appear to have done anything to help me,” Bigley told Blair in a video tape made by his captors soon before his death and posted on the Internet yesterday. Blair, expected to win the next election but with a reduced majority for his Labour party, has seen his personal trust ratings slide over the controversy surrounding the war. He may draw some comfort from a poll victory in Australia this weekend for his war ally John Howard, but Blair’s political opponents have vowed to make the war and the issue of trust major planks of their election campaigns.

“When credibility is an issue, as it will be in the next election, Iraq will continue to be very corrosive,” Liberal Democrat Menzies Campbell told BBC TV’s Breakfast with Frost. The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third-biggest party, were the only mainstream party to oppose the Iraq war and have called on the government to make a statement to parliament on the ISG report this week which may be hard to avoid. As Democratic challenger John Kerry turns the heat up on President George W Bush over Iraq in the US election race, an opinion poll yesterday showed more than one in three Britons think Blair should resign over the war. A clear majority, however, do not blame him for Bigley’s death and opposition parties have backed Blair’s stance of doing no deals with kidnappers. In the first comprehensive sounding taken since the death of the 62-year-old engineer, the YouGov poll in The Mail on Sunday showed 36 percent of voters wanted Blair to step down. The prime minister, who Downing Street said spoke to the Bigley family late on Saturday to express his sympathy, has pledged to serve a full third term if elected, which would take him through to about 2009.

He will try this week to steer the political agenda onto domestic issues where he and his advisers think he is strongest.  “An awful lot of people say they trust Tony Blair because he said he’d sort out the economy and he’s done it,” said the prime minister’s former media aide Alastair Campbell on BBC TV. Blair will hope that a major speech by him on welfare reform, the release of a long-awaited report on pensions and a debate in the upper chamber, the House of Lords, on a plan to ban fox hunting can draw some attention away from Iraq. Writing in Britain’s Independent on Sunday newspaper, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix accused Blair and President George W Bush of “clinging to straws” to justify their decision to go to war in Iraq. Both leaders seized on the suggestion by Charles Duelfer, leader of the ISG which hunted in vain for evidence of banned weapons in Iraq after the US invasion, that Saddam Hussein might have started producing weapons of mass destruction again if UN sanctions had been lifted.  “This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling,” Blix wrote.

“Even if economic sanctions were to have been lifted, any breakout by Saddam would have caused loud alarm bells to ring,” he said. “While George Bush has been maintaining that Saddam was a growing threat he was a diminishing danger to his neighbours and the world.” Meanwhile, the beheading of British hostage Ken Bigley horrified the world. It sickened Iraq’s top pathologist too, but he is getting used to seeing severed heads. “It was barbaric, but we see all kinds of things here in forensic pathology and beheadings are on the rise. It is the biggest trend by far. Iraq is totally out of control,” Faik Bakr told Reuters at his morgue in Baghdad. Bigley, a 62-year-old engineer, was beheaded with a knife on Thursday after his televised pleas for help riveted attention on foreign hostages in Iraq, where several have been decapitated. Masked Islamic militants and guerrillas seeking to drive US and other foreign troops out of Iraq may see themselves as warriors in a just cause. But after seeing more and more severed heads arrive at his morgue, Bakr has drawn other conclusions.

“They think they are heroes. But the only thing I can say is that they are abnormal, they are inhumane,” said Bakr.  The militants usually make their blindfolded victims kneel before them as a statement is read justifying what is to come. The hostage is pushed to the floor for the final indignity. “If the victim does not resist at all it would take about two or three minutes for them to cut the head off,” said Bakr. Many of the victims of Saddam Hussein were never brought to hospital.  In those long years of oppression, executions, wars and sanctions, the deaths Bakr dealt with were usually the more mundane results of heart attacks, disease and only the occasional shooting.  “I began my work 25 years ago. I saw maybe three beheadings (in the past). It is a rare way of killing in Iraq,” said Bakr. “But now we get up to six beheading cases a month in our morgue alone.” Bakr, 54, has not dealt with the high-profile beheadings of foreigners that have grabbed the headlines.

He quietly goes to work at a medical complex where he examines the bodies of the many Iraqis who have been murdered after being kidnapped by criminals on the street. More than 300 shooting victims are delivered to his morgue every month, compared to about 16 under Saddam’s iron grip. “We don’t get to understand what happened or to investigate. We just see the bodies and the heads and we tag them if we can identify them,” said Bakr. Some bereaved families are left with no clue as the motive for a killing. A pharmacist was recently beheaded after being kidnapped on his way to work along with a colleague who was shot dead. No ransom was demanded and no political cause apparent. But when Bakr teaches medical students forensic pathology these days, there are usually few doubts about the immediate physical cause of death. Victims have often been beheaded, shot dead or blown apart in a country plagued by suicide bombings, kidnappings and crime. “The lesson is very simple. Death is definitely increasing every day in Iraq,” said Bakr.