far=F2 traduzione domani.
ciao
giovanna caviglione
Il giorno 11-09-2003 15:34, Elisabetta Filippi,
elisabettafilippi1@??? ha scritto:
> Chi vuole traduca e diffonda.
> Ciao
> Elisabetta
>=20
> Da Raed (Jenin - Palestine)
>=20
> 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
>=20
> yalla bye
> x
>=20
>=20
> The Fire Sometime
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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
> world=92s 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.
>=20
> 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 don=92t 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 =96 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?
>=20
> The Organisation of Women=92s' 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 women=92s rights degenerated. The General Union of Women in Iraq, the
> only women=92s 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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 didn=92t 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.
>=20
> 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 Union=92s 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'.
>=20
> Qasim Hadi, a former garment factory worker and the Union=92s 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. 'It=92s important
> for people to get out and protest, speak the truth, demand our rights,
> whether it=92s from the Americans or Iraqis, any government. We must make
> them pay. It's not America's money, it=92s ours and they must give it to
> us'.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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 that=92s 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.
>=20
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>=20
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