Chi vuole traduca e diffonda.
Ciao
Elisabetta
Da Raed (Jenin - Palestine)
The below is available in an edited version on the Red Pepper website
www.redpepper.org.uk and was written about a month ago and it already
feels totally ancient and incomplete!!I dont think the chaos right now is
necessasrily deliberate its just a fall-out of the fact that the owners
and funders of the Occupation apparatus are focused on economic
reconstruction and not civilian infrastructure or social security; the
occupation admin. US et al just doesnt give a shit about ordinary Iraqi
people and thats disorganising and depressing and malicious in itself,
but as I said, Im not so sure if its anything so deliberate to divide and
disorganise potential anymore
yalla bye
x
The Fire Sometime
Baghdad is choking: on a 57 degree and rising, slow-roast heat;
carbon-monoxide; 152,000 irate Occupation troops; and a daily, swelling,
sense of collective fear. Since the fall of the Ba'ath regime and the
onslaught of the occupation 4 months ago, electricity services have still
not been restored, water shortages and water pollution (due to the lack
of power available to pump water, taken from the raw-sewage infested
Tigris and Euphrates rivers, through filtering plants) mean dehydration
and waterborne diseases such as diphtheria, hepatitis and typhoid are
rife. Kidnapping and rape, previously practically unheard of in Iraq, are
widespread. No official figures are available due to the absence of any
central monitoring body or force to monitor crime and gather evidence but
everybody knows someone who has been a victim of violent crime in the
past 4 months. Carjackings, robberies, rapes and murders are an everyday
reality, particularly in Baghdad. Women are virtually imprisoned in their
homes, fearful and forbidden from going out by their parents, husbands
and a personal sense of threat. Blackouts plunge entire neighborhoods
into darkness regularly - electricity being a 6-hour daily luxury for all
those without their own generators; raw green bubbling sewage stagnates
in the streets; gunshots and explosions fill the night, every night, and
the only cops out on the beat are car-crammed daytime traffic cops, armed
with nothing but whistles.
Violent crime in Iraq has increased 47-fold (Occupation Watch stats based
on comparative July 2002 statistics). Al Kindi Hospital in Baghdad has
reported a 150-fold increase in admissions of patients with injuries
inflicted through violent crime. Ask anyone how they feel about the
'newly stabilised Iraq' and they'll reel off the exasperated mantra heard
up and down streets and estates all over Iraq: 'There's no water, no
electricity, no safety, no work, and no freedom'. How is it that the
worlds only superpower, with an annual military budget of $400bn and the
most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction and social distraction on
the planet, can't even get the electricity turned back on? 4 months after
wading into a country debased from a first world to a third world,
emiserated, economically levelled, slave-state, pliant and primed-perfect
over a 13-year social spiral of genocidal sanctions, all for a swift
free-market and military take-over, Iraq is a dangerous place for
everybody. The Iraqi Governing Council, the US Administration selected -
not elected - group of 25 Iraqi and Kurdish figures, over half of which
are expats, decided, via 'Ambassador' Paul Bremer, Occupation
Administrator and former head of US Counter-insurgency programs during
the 1980s contra wars in Latin America, to classify April 11 - the first
day of occupation - as 'Liberation day' and a national holiday. Much to
the disgust of many.
The Occupation troops, comprising mainly US, Polish, British, and Italian
(including Carabinieri) have no accountability. Stories of agitated,
unnerved soldiers, particularly on night patrol, opening fire on cars
which dont stop at 'checkpoints' - invisible darkness-cloaked patrols,
and killing their occupants, are common. Any attacks or even perceived
attacks on Occupation Forces are met with indiscriminate return fire,
wounding and killing anyone in the immediate area. August 7 saw 6
civilians killed after soldiers in Sulleikh, North Baghdad opened fire on
3 cars driving down the street injuring at least five civilians and two
of their own in the process. Curfew breakers (tanks and hummers rule the
streets between 11pm and 5am) have been known to be stripped naked and
their backs painted with 'Ali Baba'. Protesters have been killed, in
Basra, Falluga, Baghdad, Al-Ramadi, Mosul, live ammunition being the
preferred method of crowd control. Five Iraqi newspapers have been shut
down by the US Occupation Administration in the past 4 months. The editor
of Al Mustakylle (The Independent) was jailed for 5 weeks. 3000 Iraqi
teachers have been expelled from schools, kindergartens, and universities
as part of the US de-Baathification drive. However, very few people could
hold a position of authority in any institution without being a Baath
party member membership was virtually compulsory under the regime.
Apaches and Blackhawks patrol the skies; attacks, raids, house to house
searches, and theft of personal belongings by soldiers continue; 6000
Iraqis are still being held without charge in Baghdad Airport; all UN
staff are on the highest state of alert; NGOs are targets for the
resistance; add this all up and you have a country seething with
frustration, confusion and a deep running, regime-fuelled and new US
collaborations/uneasy alliances consolidated sense of social mistrust.
Not the ideal conditions for an autonomous social liberation movement to
flourish, or is it?
The Organisation of Womens' Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) was started by 5ft,
41-year-old, black-belt karate don, trained architect and mother Yanar
Mohammad, four months ago. The organisation's paper, 'Equality', has a
circulation of 3000 (although readership is much higher due to copies
being secretly passed round), and is distributed throughout Iraq and
Kurdistan. OWFI challenges to Political Islam, the increase in honour
killings (legalised by the Baath regime in 1990) and forced veiling, have
seen Yanar's name mentioned in Mosques in Thaowra City, Kirkuk and
Nasseryeh. A Fatwah may be months away. The increasing brutality of the
regime reversed many of the freedoms and rights women had won through
struggle during the 60s and 70s in Iraq. The Baath Party signed the UN
Convention against the discrimination against women in 1970. Women
worked, moved freely unveiled and in the early 80s made up 40% of the
public sector workforce. By the late 80s, the Baath-cultivated rise of
the religious Right and economic depression following the Iran-Iraq war
saw womens rights degenerated. The General Union of Women in Iraq, the
only womens group allowed to function in Iraq, was affiliated to the
Baath, and in 2000, the GUWI contributed to its 'Faithfulness Campaign'
by providing the regime with names and addresses of women assumed to be
prostitutes. As a result, over 200 women were beheaded and strung up
outside their homes naked, in a campaign of government sanctioned honour
killings.
The aims of OWFI are, in Yanar's words, 'to organise women so as to
forward their demands to the highest levels of authority in order to ask
for better security measures; to stop abductions and at the same time
lobby political protest that asks for a secular movement where civil laws
are not based on Islamic Sharia but on full equality between men and
women'. OWFI has asked American forces repeatedly for support and
protection of women, but have simply been told to look to NGOs for help.
Yanar sees the potential for a women's rights movement in 'the strength
of the broad base masses of women hat are resisting the dark forces
imposed on them in this society, and also in the groups which believe
profoundly in the equality of men and women'. So far, the only ally of
OWFI is the Worker Communist Party Iraq.
The WCP-Iraq was founded in 1993, originally as a secret organisation.
The party takes its political lead from the writings and analysis of
'Iranian Marx' Mansoor Hekmat and is also in the process of laying the
foundations for independent worker controlled trade unions through the
The Preparatory Committee for Forming Workers Councils and Trade Unions
in Iraq. Issham Shukri, a wild-haired, bright eyed and bearded
intellectual dynamo, was organising with the party's Canadian branch
after having left Iraq in despair five years ago. He returned recently to
re-boost the party's spirit and potential in Iraq, following the fall of
the regime. Asked what organising openly for the first time in Iraq is
like, he replies, 'it seems more genuine, more human, more normal. Under
the previous regime we didnt have the luxury of organising openly due to
extreme brutality.' Shukri describes the levels of political
consciousness of workers realising their own power and potential for
directing social change as 'very low'. 'The ruling classes in Iraq have
done so much damage to the people in Iraq, whether through Saddam or
through the Americans and their support of the Iraqi bourgeoisie through
sanctions, wars, destruction and dragging the society into political
Islam and tribalism and all forms of political backwardness. These
conditions have paralysed the working class in Iraq and corrupted their
awareness of their class orientation'. Where the WCP-Iraq comes in now,
is 'to start mobilising working people, women, the unemployed and all
those who have no interest in the maintenance of the capitalist system in
Iraq'. The party's rejection of Political Islam, seen as a reactionary,
repressive social force, has earned it some enemies to be reckoned with.
The party's headquarters in Nasriyeh were attacked, set alight, and 4
members kidnapped and tortured by members of Al-hawza Al-elmyia, a Shiia
party with widespread support all over Iraq, a month ago. Italian
Carabenieri stood by as WCP members were dragged down the street before
arresting other remaining WCP members still left in the office.
But how do workers organise without any labour power (work) to bargain
with? Unemployment in Iraq stands at a hungry 60% This is where the Union
of the Unemployed Iraq, membership standing at 150,000 and rising, steps
in. Founded after the fall of the regime, the Unions central demands are
for: an emergency social security benefit of $100 per month for all its
members; the securing of jobs for the unemployed as soon as possible; and
responsibility for the distribution of food-aid, currently ending up on
market stalls rather than in peoples homes due to mafia gang corruption
in the by turns bureauocratised and haphazard distribution chains of aid
delivery. So far the UUI has succeed in securing responsibility for aid
distribution in Nasriyeh and has been holding a continous sit-in protest
opposite the US Occupation HQ (former Baath party secret police and elite
armed forces headquarters) for the past 2 weeks. The protests, attended
by up to 500 people every day, have been met with repression form US
Forces. 2 days into the protest, a total of 77 UUI members, 19 and then
54, including General Secretary Qasim Hadi were arrested in 24-hours.
Protestors were held in a crammed cell ringed with barbed wire, deprived
of sleep, water and food, and beaten and humiliated in some cases.
Apaches were sent in to fly low around the site of the permanent protest
'camp' as well as tanks, in order to intimidate the UUI. Foreign
solidarity activists supporting the UUI were slandered in private
negotiations between Occupation Authorities and the UUI, and referred to
as 'agitators', 'spies' and 'saboteurs'.
Qasim Hadi, a former garment factory worker and the Unions General
Secretary, describes the motivations behind forming the UUI: 'the wars,
Iran, Kuwait, 13-years of sanctions, and now, this last war, left
millions of Iraqis unemployed. We realised we had to move to defend our
rights. After months of no food (activists have been passing out from
hunger and dehydration at UUI demos), and no work, we needed a solution.'
And it seems that solution is to be won in the streets. 'Its important
for people to get out and protest, speak the truth, demand our rights,
whether its from the Americans or Iraqis, any government. We must make
them pay. It's not America's money, its ours and they must give it to
us'.
A group which sees the American Occupation forces as a liberation force
and is destined to have a strong influence on the forging of the new
civil society in Iraq is the Free Iraqi Prisoners Society. The FPS was
launched post-regime, with the mandate of searching for the whereabouts
of Iraqi prisoners of Saddam, the disappeared, and supporting their
families. They were the first group to search for mass grave sites and
have uncovered 65 so far. 6-8 million Iraqis were slaughtered by the
Baath dictatorship over a period of 35 years. Shiaa, Kurds, Iranians,
Sunni's, Ashuri Christians, Communists and Kuwaitis, in that order, make
up the largest groups of victims, tells me Ibrahim Al-Idressi, the Head
of the FIPS. The Society, in co-operation with the US Forces, has devised
a form, to be filled out by family members of prisoners, then researched
by the society to make sure they are not Baathists, and then handed over
to the US Administration to locate the whereabouts and confirm charges
against prisoners. The information will then be used to secure legal
representation. It's a seemingly small but significant step towards
locating and accounting for the faceless, nameless Iraqis being held in
military prison camps throughout Iraq. 'We are lobbying for former
Political prisoners to enter the new government and new ministries and
become more politically involved, and we eventually want to create a
national court system', asserts Al-Idressi. Asked where FIPs fits into
emergent social movements in Iraqi society, the response is one of
suspicion and confusion. The concept of civil society or even a social
movement is literally foreign. There was no society, only the regime, in
the reality of the occupation of Iraqi society by the Baath dictatorship.
Ideas like social movements, grassroots popular organising, reclaiming
power and solidarity activsm too, are in the process of being interpreted
by new groups and unaligned ordinary people all over Iraq.
Under the dictatorship, one in three Iraqis was employed by the security
forces. This not only made effective social organising impossible but
generated decades of suspicion and falsification of ones own personal
desires and beliefs, to the point that people distrusted their
neighbours, workmates and even families. The language of dissent and
self-liberation was forced underground or internalised. Possession of a
mobile phone, satellite dish or typewriter, any tool of effective
communication or organisation between potential dissident groups in Iraq,
was punishable by a minimum 10 years imprisonment or death. Iraqi society
is still reeling from the divisions, deaths and deceptions imposed upon
it by 35 years of dictatorship.
Any social movement capable of challenging authoritarianism and securing
power for a critical mass needs to be open, democratic, inclusive, and as
unheirarchical as possible. It will take time and increased interacting;
people dialoguing for the first time, breaking the towering racist myths
that succeeded in dividing them (Sunni against Shiia, Palestinians
against Iraqis, Kurds vs everybody), and organising out loud, for the
first time, for desires and social needs. Many people are still
indoctrinated by the mentality of the dictatorship - many people turn
their hand into a fist and extol the virtues of a 'strong government'
'Iraqi people need to be controlled' they say. This form of political
Stockholm Syndrome is thought by many to be purposefully perpetuated by
the current Occupation. The past 4 months' chaos is being seen by many
to be preventable and a deliberate strategy geared towards preventing any
serious social organisation from taking place, perpetuating the hang-over
sense of insecurity and distrust from the regime, and justifying the
continued presence of Occupation troops.
The secular left is split between the position and politics of the
Communist Party of Iraq, now renamed the 'Collaboration Party of Iraq' by
its critics due to its inclusion within the Governing Council, and that
of the WCP-I; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic
Party are viewed by turns as authoritarian and nationalist and only
concerned with Kurdish self-determination to the exclusion of any
unified, generalised, international struggle by communists and of
collaboration and selling out to the US Forces by Islamists. The Shiia
parties are at odds with the secular left due to their visions of an
Islamic state, and as everybody struggles to find their political voices,
the result is inchoate. The expression of social organising, a culture of
protest and street demonstrations self-organised for the first time
(demonstrations were all theatrically orchestrated by the regime before)
and people uniting around their own interests has been ignited, but the
securing of basic civil rights and social needs has up until now demanded
negotiation and implicit recognition of, the Occupation Authority. The
refusal of the Occupation full-stop is undefined and largely has its
expression in armed cell-orchestrated attacks on troops which could be
anybody from ideologically astute students, to pissed off Joe-Public, to
ex-Baathists. Anyone can have their own NGO or secret militia, so it
seems. Iraq has a highly militarized society; everybody has a gun or
other weapons in their homes.
Those in the minority world hoping for the dictatorship of the market in
Iraq to fail and the military and colonial ambitions of the US and co to
find their defeat at the hands of a popular intifada in Iraq will be
waiting for some time. Immediate needs for basic survival: food, clean
water, electricity, fuel, security and the means to afford the bare
essentials (work), are occupying the agendas of (uneven) social currents
at the moment and forcing them to recognise, negotiate with, and
capitulate to, The Occupation. And thats just how the Occupation forces
need and like it. A social movement in Iraq capable of both fighting for
genuine social liberation and autonomous forms of social organisation or
elected government, as well as kicking out the Occupation, is still
unformed and undecided.
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