While reporting this story for the BBC/PRI in Sana'a I was overwhelmed with a mix of emotions upon seeing, for the first time, the real effects of the so-called "sterile" drone war the US is covertly waging in countries around the world. Here are my impressions from Yemen, where I question what it will take to explode this concept of sanitary war in order to transform the language we use to describe drone warfare...
Sanaa, Yemen --- At the end of a dark hallway in the only burn-trauma hospital in Yemen, is a dark and dank room where three men lie. The air above them is stale and heavy, flies swarm around lazily. Below their splayed limbs, once white sheets are tucked severely into a thin hospital mattress, bits of flesh and bodily fluids color the tucked canvas. The bodies lay quiet, furtive breaths and the cringing mouths of men in agony. I’d never seen burn victims before, no one warned me about the flesh bubbles where a cheek and a nose once hung, body parts so badly burned raw meaty innards and charred flesh have replaced what was once skin and hair.
No one warned me that these bodies, mangled and melted, would be the consequence of our pristine, precise and sanitary drone war. That these remote-controlled, pilot-less planes carrying missiles in Yemen would be as indiscriminate, as deadly, as their pilot-full aerial-bombardment predecessors in Afghanistan… Iraq… Vietnam. That these three men stagnating in the heat of an un-air-conditioned burn hospital in Sanaa, would be just the latest of hundreds of people whose only guilt was to be born into a particular region of the world where post-pubescent males are fair game, smeared with the crimson paint of association, legitimate targets as far as the US drone war is concerned.
Nacer Al-Sabooly, a Yemeni civilian who survived a drone strike on September 2nd 2012, which killed 14 civillians.
A cousin of one of the mangled men tells me that 14 men, women and children clambered into, and onto, a mini-bus on its way from the small village of Wild Rabiaa into the city of Hadramut. He says the three men hanging onto the roof of the van, could see the plane before it struck, this cousin of the mangled man tells me that after the missile that tore the mini-bus asunder - exploding limbs and guts wide and far across the dessert - his cousin proclaimed aloud to the medics, that if only there was a pilot in that plane he would have seen the two young kids hanging out of the windows of the bus, their mom sitting nearby, that this tragedy would have been avoided. That if only there was a pilot in that plane, he would have seen and known there were no menacing militants, no AlQaeda, in this van. How do I explain to the cousin, that the multiple HD cameras fitted onto that drone plane had a better view than the gaze of a hundred pilots? That the eyes of many men gazed upon that van before a button was pushed. Before the missiles whizzed down. How do I explain that this was no mistake, no accident that the plane was without pilot?
The drone war that is described as “sterile” in DC, is in Yemen as dirty as those flesh and blood stained hospital sheets. This “killing from a distance” that we laud here, is just a new spin on an old idea over there: killing is killing is killing. In places like Yemen, if you’re not blown up in an AQAP operation targeting this or that government or military symbol (as 45 young new Yemeni military recruits found out, when they were blown to bits last June in a military parade in Sanaa)... you are killed by a drone. Stuck between an American drone strike, and an Al-Qaeda suicide operation, Yemeni’s have no safe place to turn. No explanations for why their government blindly turns its head when the American pilot-less planes head south, why there is no legal or humanitarian recourse when your cousin or your mother or your son becomes a non-pilot’s new target. Why the rest of the world never gets to see what happens to the body of a man who is blasted by, and survives, one of these pilot-less missiles. Why you can’t ask any questions, why you will never get any answers in this clandestine war that we Americans have dubbed “hygienic”.
I wonder what all of this killing will do to these people, how my idealistic 21 year-old fixer, Haitham, studying engineering at the University of Sanaa will fare in this place? What will happen to the cousins and brothers of those people killed by the pilot-less planes? How will this trauma and injustice transform them? What will happen to those three men languishing away in those stifling hospital rooms in Sanaa when they heal?
An Arabic saying comes to mind… “Blood dosen’t evaporate. It sinks into the earth.” (Talal Salman)
