Sixth report from Andréa
Schmidt,
Iraq Solidarity Project delegate in Baghdad
Our Borders Are Blast Walls
Andréa Schmidt
Iraq Solidarity Project delegate in Baghdad
April 19 2004 Occupied Baghdad
As the US pursues its War of Terror in Iraq, the kidnappings
of foreigners by the muqawama (resistance fighters) has grabbed
the media spotlight. In response to the kidnappings, many international
NGOs and humanitarian aid organizations have moved their foreign
staff to Amman. Foreign journalists who haven’t already
left the country are nearly paralyzed, reporting from their
seats in front of TV sets in hotel compounds ‘secured’
by blast walls, armed guards and the right connections. This
isn’t a huge change for the staffs of some news channels
– for security reasons, CNN hasn’t let its foreign
journalists out on the streets of Baghdad after 4 PM for the
past year of occupation. But for many reporters, both independent
and mainstream, the current immobility is insanely frustrating.
Those of us who came here as anti-war or anti-occupation activists
intent on bearing witness to the injustices perpetrated by occupation
authorities aren't managing a whole lot better. I haven't even
really been out walking on the streets of Baghdad for a week
now, and have submitted, in spite of my better sense of moral
judgment, to being driven between 'safe' houses where sympathetic
Iraqi and international friends have extended their hospitality.
The concrete blast walls that surround NGO, humanitarian aid
organizations, ministry buildings, political party headquarters,
the CPA and hotels frequented by foreigners in Iraq have always
struck me as obscene. They are obscene because of the way in
which they demarcate the lives that are considered worthy of
'protection' from those which are not, in the context of this
occupation in which one of the most common complaints heard
from ordinary Iraqis is the almost total lack of security that
for themselves and their families.
The blast walls are also obscene because of the hypocrisy of
NGOs and humanitarian organizations that they make manifest
in concrete. They are barriers that prevent Iraq’s ‘multitudes’
-- the poorest people, the unemployed families whose women and
children panhandle in the streets, people without the mandatory
identification or the right contacts – from entering the
very organizations and institutions that purport to be present
to ‘help’ them. The blast walls send a message:
“We will help you, but only at a distance, and only at
a level of risk that WE choose and can control.”
At the same time as the fear of being kidnapped has paralyzed
foreigners in Iraq, US Occupation Forces have massacred hundreds
of people in the town of Falluja, a hundred people in Sadr City,
bombed practically every one of Moqtada Al-Sadr’s offices
in Baghdad and have announced that they will capture him dead
or alive (essentially threatening to martyr him as Saddam martyred
Moqtada’s father before him). Explosions resound across
Baghdad at intervals throughout the day and night. The helicopters
fly so low that the windows rattle.
This crossroads of terror has made me think constantly about
the blast walls. I remember an observation made several weeks
ago by a perceptive friend. For those of us who are ‘first-class’
citizens of North American or European countries in a global
system best characterized as one of apartheid, our borders are
blast walls. They shield us from the conflict and the poverty
that our governments and our corporations create and profit
from in the rest of the world.
Iraqis didn’t choose their country to be the battleground
for George W. Bush’s War on Terror. And I don’t
think that most of them would even have chosen it as the battleground
for a righteous stand against US imperialism. That doesn’t
mean that various sections of Iraqi society aren’t fighting
and won’t continue to fight to resist the occupiers. They
are and they will – and if the US forces that surround
holy town of Najaf at this moment actually invade the town,
Shiite resistance will begin in earnest and “it won’t
ever stop.” At least that is the prediction of an acquaintance
of mine, a Shiite man and an ex-officer in the Iraqi army who
participated in the 1991 uprising against Saddam. But he also
added, referring to the current Intifada, “we are not
fighting for an anti-war or an anti-imperialist movement. We
are fighting for the people of Iraq.”
If our borders are blast walls, then they are what many of
us -- as anti-war and anti-imperialist activists living in Western
countries -- rely on to keep a safe distance between ourselves
and the danger-filled reality that Iraqis, peoples of other
occupied and colonized nations, and people displaced by war,
poverty and occupation have no choice but to survive on a day-to-day
basis. Maybe solidarity and justice demand that we stop playing
it so safe. Maybe it is time to put our own bodies at risk in
the sort of direct actions that confront the empire within its
own fortress. Maybe it is time to move the battleground within
our own borders, and to become the resistance inside the blast
walls – the sort of resistance which would effectively
take them down.
------ 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.
To get in touch with the Iraq Solidarity Project in Montreal,
email psi@riseup.net or call (514) 521-5252. To join our listserv,
send an email to psi-news-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.
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