Tearful relatives gathered at Johannesburg International airport in the third week of March to bid goodbye to loved ones they may never see again as they headed for Iraq to act as human shields.
The 35 human shields are men and women driven by faith and the belief that they will return home. If they do not return, inshallah [that is as it should be]. They boarded a flight to Cairo. They will fly on to Jordan and will finally land in Baghdad.
Nazeerl Collins, a 35-year-old technical engineer, hopes to make a difference. ”It’s about time that somebody stood up to George Bush.”
Television and computer technician Ahmed Rashede said he was responding to a call from his creator. ”If I don’t go, it will be like turning my back against God.”
Mduduzi Manana (19) is the youngest human shield from South Africa. A law student who runs an events management company, he said he was going to represent the country in response to an invitation from a youth forum in Iraq.
Human shield Abu Bakr Dawjee, who is the director of the Iraq Action Campaign that was launched in 1990, said he was deeply troubled by the possibility of war in Iraq.
”This shouldn’t even be called a war, it is an attack on an already devastated country. Iraq used to be one of the most advanced countries in the world with great infrastructure, but now their economy is devastated.
”Sanctions have caused abject poverty, the nation has lost 1,5-million people … because of the United States-led United Nations embargo.”
Dawjee said the idea of going to Iraq as a human shield came when he and others from the committee were visiting Iraq earlier this year.
”Human shields were arriving from all over the world and the Iraqi people asked us how many people would South Africa be sending. We are going there to position ourselves at civilian structures such as dams, bridges, schools and hospitals, because they have been main targets.”
If the group is not admitted to Iraq as human shields, they will ask to be let in as aid workers.
Sapa reports that MPs were told on Wednesday March 19 that South Africans who became human shields in Iraq could be regarded as war criminals in terms of international humanitarian law or as accessories to war crimes.
This emerged during a presentation by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. ICRC legal representative Leonard Blazeby said it was a war crime for combatants to use human shields, but the difficulty arose when civilians volunteered. ”They are not there at the instigation of the state, but are there on a voluntary basis. It makes this particular area of the law even more complicated.”
He believed it would be the responsibility ”of the people whose military objectives the human shields are before, to try and remove them from there as a starting point”.
”As far as it being a military objective, it’s a debatable point. The ICRC certainly does not have a statement to make in relation to what the law is. Do the people therefore become part of the active hostilities, and therefore a legitimate military target?”