Pour quelques milliers de morts de plus, “plus ou moins”…

Lundi dernier, dans un discours à Philadelphie, Bush a parlé des pertes en Irak : « 30,000 have died, more or less ». C’est la première fois qu’un chiffre est avancé officiellement à Washington. Jusqu’ici, la consigne renvoyait à la phrase célèbre du général Tommy Franks : « We don’t do body counting. »

Le chiffre de 100.000 morts est aujourd’hui reconnu, d’après les estimations de la revue scientifique très respectée The Lancet. Un groupe indépendant, Iraq Body Count, travaillant d’après les seules informations des médias, estime les pertes civiles à 30,892 personnes.

Fataliste et sans espoir, Luke Harding écrit dans le Guardian aujourd’hui: « ...In reality, though, only a fool would attach much credibility to any definite statistic. Iraq is currently the most lawless place on earth. There are so many dead people — blown up by car bombs, killed in sectarian feuds, or shot by the coalition — that any daily figure is categorically unknowable.

» In September last year, I arrived at Baghdad's Al-Karkh police station, soon after a car bomb had gone off. It had exploded next to a queue of police recruits. There was a large hole in the road. I asked Allah Hamas, a falafel-stall owner who survived, how many people were dead. “I saw 30 bodies,” he said. This was, we agreed, a bit of a guess. Flesh hung from the trees; on the roof of an adjacent shopping arcade an Iraqi policeman noticed the top of someone's head. He lowered it gingerly with a stick. Under these circumstances, the methodology of conventional death no longer applies.

» Even Baghdad's morgue provides few clues. Every few minutes a police pick-up truck rolls up with the latest bloodied victim; not all of the dead, though, make it this far. Perhaps Bush would do better simply to admit that “many many thousands” have been killed, and leave it at that.

Mis en ligne le 14 décembre 2005 à 14H13