Berg calls handover a 'sham'

2004-06-29 16:10

London - The father of a US civilian beheaded in Iraq dismissed as an illusion trick the handover of power to an Iraqi interim administration as he joined anti-war campaigners on a visit to London to Tuesday.

"This transfer of power is nothing more than another nut and shell game of the Bush and Blair coalition" Michael Berg, 59, said of Monday's surprise handover two days earlier than planned.

"We know that the Iraqi people have not had an election yet and so we do not have a democracy over there, we just have a dictatorship of Bush and Blair," he said at a press conference for the Stop The War Coalition, in London.

Berg's son, Nick, 26, who ran his own communications business, was murdered by Iraqi insurgents last month, after being kidnapped in Baghdad.

Three days after his headless body was discovered, a video tape of the execution was posted on a website linked to al-Qaeda, leading to worldwide condemnation.

Berg, wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the name of an anti-war website (VoteNoWar.org), will join British anti-war demonstrators outside the Houses of Parliament later on Tuesday to demand coalition troops come home.

"Bush told us we had to go to war because Iraq played a part in the destruction of the twin towers, because Saddam Hussein had WMD (weapons of mass destruction), because there were connections between him and al-Qaeda", he said.

All that was false, "it was just greed," he said.

The removal of Saddam's regime had not brought stability to Iraq and "11 000 plus Iraqi citizens have been killed," Berg said. "Each one of them is as affected as I was."

- AFP