Iraq: resistance and occupation
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 22 April
ON April 9, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein, more than a million demonstrators took to the streets of Najaf, Kut and other cities of the Iraqi south, chanting, “Yes! Yes! Iraq, No! No! America.” Amid an ocean swell of green, white and red Iraqi flags, one placard read, “We were liberated from Saddam, now we need to be liberated again,” and another, simply, “Stop the suffering, Americans leave now.”
That the demonstrators were overwhelmingly Shia, supposedly the beneficiaries of the occupation, blew a gaping hole in several prevalent assumptions about Iraq, not least that Iraqi nationalism had been wiped out by religious sectarianism. It rendered even more tenuous than before the claim that foreign military occupation is the only way to prevent the country descending into all-out civil war.
Sunni clerics marched with their Shia counterparts at the head of the massive and peaceful processions. Pictures and slogans with sectarian implications were notable by their absence. “Four years of patience and what do we get?” Ali Hashim, a Basra merchant, explained to a journalist, “The United States failed us and sold us cheap to those who would have no mercy on us.”
Salman Yaseen, a Basra city councillor, admitted, “We were late to realise that we were wrong about U.S. intentions. We waited four years while U.S. and Iraqi authorities kept us busy fighting each other while they were setting the plan of stealing our oil.”
He was referring to the Iraqi government’s proposed Oil and Gas Bill, under which foreign companies will be allowed to secure exclusive rights to exploit the country’s natural resources. There will be no limits on the transfer of profits outside Iraq, no minimum level for State participation, no requirement to deal with Iraqi contractors or suppliers or employ Iraqi labour. Contracts with multi-national oil companies will be awarded, without public or parliamentary scrutiny, by a newly created Federal Oil and Gas Council, whose composition is likely to embody the sectarian and regional share-out of the spoils through which the occupiers have sought to govern. Hassan Juma’a Awad, leader of the rigorously anti-sectarian Iraqi oil workers union, warned that the Bill “threatens to set governorate against governorate and region against region… history will not forgive those who play recklessly with the wealth and destiny of a people.”
If the Bill is passed, Washington and London will have achieved one of their key war aims – but if the law is to be made to stick, their armies will have to stay on indefinitely. The reclaiming of the country’s oil from foreign powers was one of the major achievements of the Iraqi national struggle, one that long pre-dates Saddam Hussein. Iraqis across religious and regional divides rightly regard control of their oil resources as the key to the country’s economic and social development. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the fate of the occupation will be determined by the political evolution of the resistance to it, and in particular the extent to which it acquires a national and democratic character.
In a recent report, the normally circumspect International Red Cross paints a picture of terror and suffering across Iraq. Poverty, unemployment, malnutrition are all on the rise. Power and water supplies continue to deteriorate, as does health care provision. UNICEF reports that Iraq’s mortality rate for children under five, which was 50 per 1000 live births in 1990, rose to 125 per 1000 in 2005 and to 130 last year. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled the country since 2003 and another 1.9 million have been internally displaced, a total of 16 per cent of the Iraqi population. Add to that the more than 655,000 killed since the invasion, at least 30 per cent directly by occupying forces. (These figures were rejected by the British government when published last year in the medical journal, The Lancet, but have since been described by the Ministry of Defence’s own chief scientist as “robust” and “reliable”.)
On the same day that anti-occupation crowds surged through the cities of southern Iraq, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, nemesis of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, demanded that politicians implicated in the Iraq nightmare be placed on trial for war crimes. “Those who joined the U.S. President in the war against Iraq have as much or more responsibility than him because, despite having doubts, they put themselves in the hands of the aggressor to carry out an ignoble act of death and destruction that continues to this day.”
To the global majority who made quite clear their views on the inadvisability of this war well before it started, the idea that those responsible for Iraq’s agony should be held to account will seem self-evident. Sadly, it appears to be entirely beyond the ken of even the liberal wing of the British media.
In a lengthy interview with Gordon Brown, still Tony Blair’s most likely successor, The Guardian did not permit the word “Iraq” to intrude once. The occasion of the interview was the publication of Brown’s new book, entitled Courage, in which he sings the praises of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other icons of moral purpose.
Throughout the past decade, Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been the second most powerful individual in the British government. His latest budget provides an additional ?400 million for the war in Iraq, to which he has already allocated some ?5 billion of public funds. The questions he should have been asked, which a healthy political culture should have made it unavoidable to ask, went something like this: “Mr. Brown, can you explain to us how any intelligent, presumably well-informed person with a sense of responsibility about the use of power could manage to utter not so much as a squeak of protest as this disastrous policy unfolded? If you admire Nelson Mandela so much why did you ignore his public warning that the Iraq invasion would create a ‘holocaust’? When Mandela charged that ‘the powerful countries, all of them so-called democracies, manipulate multilateral bodies to the great disadvantage and suffering of the poorer developing nations’, wasn’t he talking about people like you? In short, can you tell us why you and Tony Blair should not be tried for war crimes?”
