Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Robert Fisk: Remember the civilian victims of past 'Allied' bombing campaigns

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-remember-the-civilian-victims-of-past-allied-bombing-campaigns-2247757.html
People such as Raafat al-Ghosain are often tragically forgotten in the fog of air attacks.
How life past catches up with life present. The Americans killed Raafat al-Ghosain, puctured above, just after 2am on 15 April 1986. In the days that followed her death, United States officials claimed that Libyan anti-aircraft fire might have hit her home – watch out for similar American claims in the coming hours – not far from the French embassy in suburban Tripoli.
But three weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that three bombs dropped from an F-111 aircraft as part of the US attack on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in reprisal for an attack by Libyan agents on a Berlin nightclub, had "impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy" and had caused – to use the usual callous euphemism – "collateral damage".
Ms Ghosain was aged 18, a graduate from an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her a quarter of a century ago. Her mother was Lebanese and her father Palestinian, working for a Libyan oil company. She is forgotten today.