17 |
Civilian casualties
239.
The Inquiry
asked Mr Ingram, Minister for the Armed Forces from June 2001
to
June 2007,
why the UK Government had been unable to produce an estimate of
civilian
casualties
when other organisations including NGOs and academic organisations
had
done so, in
particular given the public interest on the issue.153
240.
Mr Ingram
told the Inquiry:
“The idea
that somehow or other an NGO is the fount of all wisdom and
knowledge
and
accuracy I don’t think stands up.
“So if we
were going to take the figures from external sources, then we would
have
had to put
effort and verification into that. Should we have done so? Perhaps,
yes,
and I’m not
so sure it wasn’t being done …”
241.
Mr Ingram
added that establishing the number of civilian casualties would not
have
changed the
reality on the ground:
“… the
concept of ground truth is absolutely vital in this and, by
establishing that
fact,
wouldn’t have altered where we were. Because we couldn’t, in one
sense,
easily have
stopped the civilian casualties because it wasn’t being carried out
by us
on the
civilians, it was being carried out by the tribal wars, the family
feuds, by the
Sunni/Shia
factionalism that was taking place, by the Shia on Shia
factionalism that
was taking
place, but we … were being vilified, attacked and criticised that
we had
precipitated
all of this.
“I have to
say I believe that to be a false logic, because that may have
happened
at any time
under Saddam Hussein and, therefore, the establishment of the
facts
perhaps
should have been carried out by – elsewhere in Government. I don’t
really
think it
was an MOD function in that sense.”
242.
The Inquiry
asked Mr Ingram whether the Government would not have been
better
placed than
external organisations to develop credible estimates of civilian
casualties,
and asked
which department within government should have been responsible
for
producing
such estimates. Mr Ingram told the Inquiry:
“You [the
responsible department] have then to go to the hospitals. You then
have
to put
civilians or a military person at that hospital counting the bodies
in and the
bodies out.
So you need force protection to do that. You put people at risk to
do that.
Is that
what people wanted, soldiers or civilians being killed at
hospitals? Because
they would
have been at risk.
“… the UN
may have been the mechanism by which we’d establish true facts,
but
they were
withdrawn.
153
Public
hearing, 16 July 2010, pages 30‑34.
213