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Report-54:
First Report / message from Baghdad |
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First report from OCCUPIED Iraq
by Andréa
Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project
February 29 - March 4 2004
Baghdad
I have been in occupied Iraq for just over a
week. Long enough to understand
that the political situation in Iraq is
profoundly complicated in a way that
would have been impossible to understand had
I not come here.
Thus, you should receive this first report,
members of the anti-occupation
and anti-'war on terror' movements in
Montreal, Quebec and Canada, with
healthy skepticism, because it doesn't begin
to do justice to that
complexity... What can I possibly say after
being here, in this profoundly
complicated place, after only a week and a
half?
Still, I will share my first impressions of
Baghdad, and a couple of
stories that perhaps give a sense of some
aspects of life under
occupation.
I discovered Baghdad much as it had been
described to me.
Almost a year after the US-led invasion of
the country, crumbling shells
of buildings -- old government buildings,
theaters and communications
stations -- stand testament to the bombing
campaign, a bombing campaign
that Iraqis hasten to remind me was much less
severe than the one the US
launched in 1991. This war, this occupation
cannot be isolated from that
earlier war, or for that matter, from the 12
years of UN sanctions that
ensued.
There are mundane ways in which the
occupation holds sway over Baghdad.
The traffic is heavy and chaotic, and makes
navigating the city quite a
challenge. There seem to be a surplus of
cars, and so many roads have been
blocked off and rerouted by heavy concrete
blast walls and barbed wire
erected around various ministry, hotel and
NGO compounds that there don't
seem to be direct routes to anywhere. Traffic
lights are nonfunctional,
and even on the rare occasions when there are
traffic cops directing
traffic, no one pays attention to them. What
should be a fifteen minute
drive often takes over an hour. Remarkably, I
have seen no collisions.
The lineups for gasoline that stretched for
kilometers suddenly abated a
couple of weeks before I arrived. A
regulation was put in place in Baghdad
that assigns drivers specific weekdays on
which they can buy gas according
to their license plate numbers, and this has
made the lineups much
shorter. One Iraqi acquaintance wondered at
how quickly and simply the
problem was solved after so many months of
people spending literally days
waiting for gas, as though the authorities
wanted to distract Baghdadis
from the real political and social issues,
and the interminable waits and
frustration over the gasoline shortage was a
welcome means of doing so.
The black-market sale of gasoline sales is
still going strong; anyone who
drives for a living has to keep their car
filled up at all times and can't
be limited to buying gas on specific days of
the week.
Electricity is sporadic. It comes in cycles:
several hours on, several
hours off. Most office buildings and hotels
have hefty generators up and
running within seconds each time the power
goes off, but families living
in regular flats are not usually so
fortunate.
12 million people are unemployed in this
country with a population of 26
million, according to Falah Alwan, President
of the Federation of Workers'
Counsels and Trade Unions of Iraq. And poverty is very evident on the
streets of Baghdad. Women beg in the streets
with their children, people
are squatting half-destroyed houses, and I
haven't even been to the poor
areas of town yet.
US helicopters circle low overhead all the
time, and particularly at
night.
For the first week I was here, US troops seemed to be keeping a
low profile in Baghdad, increasingly putting
Iraqi policemen on guard in
front of hotels known to be frequented by
contractors and Western
journalists and buildings in which CPA and
Interim Governing Council
conferences are held.
There are no shortage of horror stories of
crimes perpetrated against
Iraqis by occupation forces either. They
swirl through the city like dry
autumn leaves, followed by a steady stream of
journalists, some
well-intentioned, others cynical and some
maybe both.
Like the story I heard told by a young Iraqi
translator about his friend.
Both of them had been working as translators
for the Coalition Provisional
Authority.
His friend had an ear infection and traded his morning shift
for a friend's evening shift. That morning,
explosions were detonated in
Kirkuk. When he returned to work, CPA
authorities demanded to why he had
needed to change his schedule, implying that
he had been involved in the
mornings' bombings. He was arrested, and has been detained without charge
for the past month and a half at Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad. The human
rights activists working here estimate that
there are about 10,000
security detainees held at Abu Ghraib prison
alone and 18,000 in Iraq as a
whole, where they are denied anything akin to
due process and are subject
to harrowing conditions. (For more
information about security detainees,
check out the Christian Peacemaker Team in
Iraq's site:
http://www.cpt.org/iraq/iraq.php).
Or the story, heard third-hand, of
approximately 25 families in Hilla, a
town south of Baghdad, under the control of
Polish occupation forces. The
families, displaced during the bombing last
year, were squatting houses
built during Saddam's regime for the officers
of the Iraqi army near the
base located in the area. The Polish troops have been using the old
Iraqi
army base as their own, and decided they
wanted to expand it. So they went
to the families and told them to leave. The
families agreed, on condition
that Coalition Authorities find them other
housing to move to. Three days
later, the area was bombed by US planes, the
houses destroyed and many
members of the families killed in the
bombing. The Polish forces have
moved the walls of their base to enclose the
rased area.
Today brought its own story, heavily reported
in the international news as
I write the first draft of this report. Today is Ashura, a major day of
celebration and mourning for Shia muslims. It commemorates the
martyrdom
of Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala,
that falls on the tenth day of
the month of Muharram (the first month of the
Islamic calendar). The death
of
Imam Hussein essentially marks the point in history at which the main
branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, parted
ways. Traditionally, Ashura has
been celebrated by Shia people performing
pageants recreating the battle
and the death of Hussein and performing
self-flagellation rituals in
mourning. Under Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship, Shia were oppressed in a
number of ways; one was that were not allowed
to celebrate Ashura, and so
today is the first time in thirty years that
the pageants and the
pilgrimages to the principle Shiite shrines
in Karbala and in Kadhimiya, a
Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, were going to
be performed.
Shia communities have been preparing for
today since the beginning of
Muharram. And it feels like everyone had been
holding their breath to see
what would happen. Would the day be allowed
to come and go in relative
tranquility? Or would the occasion, with its
celebrations and large crowds
of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, be targeted to
foment political and religious tensions
between Shiite and Sunni?
I have visited Kadhimiya several times since
I arrived here. The first
time was last Monday. There were US tanks and
soldiers blocking major roads
leading to the Al-Khadim mosque in the middle
of the neighborhood. On
Thursday, a rocket hit the exterior wall of
the shrine. No one was
injured, but the people of Kadhimiya were
furious and demonstrated against
occupying troops. Sheikh Majid of the
Al-Khalisia madrasa recounted how
people had approached US tanks shouting
"Death to the occupation" and
refused to disperse when US soldiers aimed
the tanks' fire arms at the
crowd. On Friday, when we returned for
Muharram celebrations, the
occupying forces had left. Young boys were
everywhere, preparing for
Ashura.
This morning, 6 explosions hit shrines in Karbala. At least two
explosions hit the Al-Kadhim shrine in
Kadhimya. News agencies are
reporting that there were 185 people killed,
and several hundred injured,
and the death toll seems likely to rise. (As
I edit this, Sheikhs in
Kadhimiya are saying that 285 people have
died as a result of the attacks
in both cities).
Three days of national mourning have been
declared, funerals are being
held, and Shiite and Sunni leaders are
calling for unity in the face of
what I think is widely perceived as an
attempt to fuel tensions between
Shia and Sunni and provoke a civil war in occupied
Iraq.
No group has claimed responsibility for the
attacks, and people are left
to speculate and develop their own
theories. And if the religious leaders
and members of the Interim Governing Council
are accusing US authorities
of being unable to ensure Iraqis' security,
the majority of Iraqis I have
spoken with accuse the US of actually being
behind the attacks, whether
directly or indirectly. The obvious argument is that by exacerbating
the
social divisions and prejudice that Saddam's
regime nurtured between the
two groups, and fostering the out-break of a
civil conflict, the US can
try to justify its continued military
presence here -- not in the name of
freedom for Iraqis this time, but in the name
of peace and security.
On the streets of Baghdad today, sorrow and
tension are palpable as people
mourn the dead, and the state of this
occupied and terrorized country, and
wonder what comes next.
---
This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for
the Iraq Solidarity Project.
The Iraq Solidarity Project is a
Montreal-based grassroots initiative to
provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis
struggling against the
occupation; strengthen the mobilization
against economic and military
domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada;
and build links of
solidarity between struggles against the
occupation of Iraq and struggles
against oppression in Canada and Quebec.
While in Iraq, Andréa can be reached by email
at andrea@tao.ca or
andreaschmidt2004@yahoo.ca or by cell phone:
+011 964 079 01 379 573.
To join the Iraq Solidarity Project listserv,
send an email to
psi-news-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
Iraq Solidarity Project
1 514 521 5252
psi@riseup.net