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Friday,
January 18, 2013. Chaos and violence continue, protests continue,
Nouri's forces attack Mosul protesters again, Nouri's groupies outside
of Iraq will need to figure out how to stop Toby Dodge's truth-telling,
and more.
The Iraqi people grow ever more
disenchanted with the government the United States imposed upon it
(Nouri was installed in 2006 by the Bush administration, in 2010 the
Obama administration insisted Nouri get a second term as prime
minister). Freedom House
is a think tank that studies human rights around the world. Each year,
Freedom House publishes a look at journalism around the world and they
publish a look at freedom around the world. It's time for the latter,
[PDF format warning] " Freedom in the World 2013." The report notes:
Iraq's
political rights rating declined due to the concentration of power in
the hands of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and growing pressure on the
opposition, as exemplified by the arrest and death sentence in absentia
of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the country's most senior Sunni Arab
politician.
Iraq is ranked "not
free" in the report. It has declined from last year's report (when its
political rights rating was 5 to the new rating of 6).
Protests continued in Iraq and, the Journal of Turkish Weekly points out,
they "show no sign of stopping. For three weeks, tens of thousands of
people have taken to the streets in prominently Sunni provinces to shout
against the government led by Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki."
. Alsumaria reports
thousands (check out the photo with the article) turned out today in
Salah al-Din to demand that Article IV ('terrorism' law) be abolished
and that an amnesty law be adopted. A sizeable turnout showed up in
Hawija as well, Alsumaria notes,
and they were out in full force in solidarity with demonstrators in
Nineveh, Salahuddin and Anbar. They demanded that the protesters be
listened to, that prisoners and detainees be released. The prisoners. Over 18,000 -- and possibly over 30,000 -- prisoners in Iraq were arrested on 'terrorism' under Article IV. Al Mada reports
that Wednesday members of Parliament called for a real release and not
the for-show stunt Nouri executed earlier this week (which the press
lapped up like well-trained dogs). The for-show stunt was an attempt to
defuse the protests. As turnout today is proving, that didn't work on
anyone except some elements of the press. AFP's Prashant Rao Tweets this morning:
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AAP notes
that protesters turned out in Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul. In Baghdad
they shouted "We don't want committees, we want our rights!" and
"Release the prisoners!" while in Samarra they chanted, "They have made
promises before, and they made promises yesterday, but let them hear --
we will stay, protesting, until we get our rights." Next Friday is the
day to watch for the protests in Iraq. Sameer N. Yacoub (AP) observes
that this was the fourth consecutive Friday of protests and that,
though they were primarily on Anbar Province in the past, "on Friday,
they spread to the central city of Samarra and other Sunni
strongholds."
The Voice of Russia notes security forces kicked protesters out of the central square in Mosul. Despite this assualt, Alsumaria notes that Iraqis continued protesting elsewhere in Mosul. Nouri's forces attacked the Mosul protesters earlier this month. From the January 7th snapshot:
The
Parliamentary committee entrusted to investigate the aggression against
Mosul demonstrators expressed conviction that aggressive actions were
committed against them by the security force.
Member
of the committee MP Hassan Khala Alou, in a press conference, attended
by Aswat al-Iraq, said that the committee met a number of demonstrators
who were attacked by the security forces on 7 January instant and saw
films that proved these actions.
He
added that the security force entrusted for the protection of Ahrar
square did not respond for the investigation under the pretext of
waiting permission from Baghdad.
In related news, Kitabat notes
Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistanti favors limiting the three
presidencies to two terms. The Constitution limits the President of
Iraq to two terms. The other two of the three presidencies are Speaker
of Parliament and Prime Minister. The Parliament is currently
discussing a proposed bill.
Why
the protests now? For narrative reasons, some want their to be a
single incident that kicked them off. That's rarely the case with any
protest and it's not the case with the ones going on in Iraq. There are
mulitple reasons for the protests. Wadah Khanfar (Guardian) captures recent events very well:
Iraq
is much more polarised now than it was under Saddam Hussein. The
bitterness and retribution of the civil war that followed the US
occupation are still etched on people's minds. The regional and
international rivalry for its rich oil resources is now greater than
ever. Corruption is rife: today, Iraq is classified by Transparency International as being among the most corrupt countries in the world. In this oil-producing country already basic services and poor infrastructure are continuing to decline.
At a time when democratic leadership is needed to heal sectarian wounds and entrench national reconciliation, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
has instead established an autocratic single-sect powerbase. By so
doing, he has plunged Baghdad into a deep crisis, which has escalated in
recent weeks with thousands taking to the streets in Sunni areas to protest against his Shia-led government.
A power-sharing
agreement followed but, two years on, Maliki has failed to stick to it.
He now holds all the power in Baghdad: he is prime minister, defence
minister, acting interior minister, acting head of intelligence, and
chief of the armed forces. Moreover, his partners accuse him of using
the judiciary to eliminate political rivals. That has prompted Interpol
to issue a memorandum of non-co-operation with Iraq's judiciary (citing
its partiality, politicisation and the use of its office to pressure
political rivals).
Under Iraq's anti-terrorism law, the authorities can detain and prosecute a suspect on the basis of secret evidence. The most prominent case is that of Tariq al-Hashemi,
the vice-president, who was sentenced to death by a court in absentia.
Many people regard the charge of terrorism against him as fabricated.
Then, last December, security forces arrested several guards and
advisers of the minister of finance and leader of the Iraqi National
Movement, Rafi al-Issawi. Issawi accused the police of torturing
detainees to extract confessions against him. This caused anger among
the Sunnis in Anbar province and was in fact the spark that lit the
current protests.
Along with protests, this week also saw the assassination of Sahwa leader, Iraqiya member and Sunni Aifan al-Issawi Jaber Ali (Middle East Confidential) offers,
"The assassination arrived in a really critical moment since the
country has been in political turmoil because of a long lasting protest
mostly led by Sunnis that have been going on for weeks. In addition,
Iraqiya, the country's largely Sunni bloc of lawmakers have decided to
boycott Parliament sessions until the government agrees to organize
proper security. Their main demand that is also backed up by senior
opposition politicians is that Mr. Maliki resigns from his actual
position."
Toby
Dodge: And I've identified three drivers of the violence that killed
so many innocent Iraqis. The first is undoubtedly the sectarian
politics and those Iraqis among us will remember -- fondly or otherwise
-- the huge debates that Iraqis had and Iraqi analysts had about the
role of sectarian politics. I'd certainly identify what we could call a
series of ethinic entrapenuers, formerly exiled politicans who came
back to Iraq after 2003 and specifically and overtly used religious and
sectarian identity, religious ethnic identity to mobilize the population
-- especially in those two elections in 2005. Now the second driver of
Iraq's descent into civil war was the collapse of the Iraqi state in
the aftermath of the invasion Now this isn't only the
infamous disbanding of the Iraqi army and its intelligence services,
this isn't only the driving out of the senior ranks of the if tge Ba'ath
Party members, the dismembering of the state, 18 of the central
government buildings were stripped when I was there in 2003 in Baghdad.
So much scrap metal was stolen from government buildings that the scrap
metal price in Turkey Iraq and Iran, it's neighbors dropped as a result
of the ill-gotten gain of the looters was shipped out of the country.
But thirdly, the big issue that drove Iraq into civil war was the
political system set up after 2003. I've gone into that in quite a lot
of detail and I've labeled it -- much to the horror of my editor -- an
exclusive elite pact -- which basically meant that those former Iraqi
exiles empowered by the United States then set up a political system
that deliberately excluded a great deal of the indigeanous politicians
-- but anyone associated, thought to be associated with the previous
regime, in a kind of blanket attempt to remake Iraqi politics. Now the
conclusions of the book are broadly sobering and pessimistic. That
certainly the elite pact has not been reformed in spite of Iraqiya's
electoral victory in the 2010 elections, that sectarian politics and
sectarian rhetoric that mobilized Iraqi politics from 2003 to 2010 has
come back into fashion with the prime minister himself using coded
sectarian language to seek to solidify his electoral base among Iraqis.
And basically the only thing that has been rebuilt since 2003 are
Iraq's military and they now employ 933,000 people which is equal to 8%
of the country's entire workforce or 12% of the population of adutl
males. However, running parallel to that, the civilian capacity of the
Iraqi state is still woefully inadequate. In 2011, the United Nations
estimated that there only 16% of the population were covered by the
public sewers network, that leaves 83% of the country's waste water
untreated, 25% of the population has no access to clean, running water
and the Iraqi Knowledge Network in 2011 estimated that an average Iraqi
household only gets 7 and a half hours of electricity a day. Now in the
middle of the winter, that might not seem like a big issue. But in the
burning hot heat of Basra in the summer or, indeed, in Baghdad, Iraq
has suffered a series of heatwaves over the last few years. Not
getting enough elecriticy to make your fan or air conditioning work
means that you're in a living hell. This is in spite of the fact that
the Iraqi and US governments have collectively spent $200 billion
seeking to rebuild the Iraqi state. So I think the conclusions of the
Adelphi are rather pessimistic. The Iraqi state, it's coercive arm, has
been rebuilt but precious little beside that has. But what I want to
do is look, this afternoon, is look at the ramifications of that rather
slude rebuilding -- a large powerful army and a weak civil
institutions of the state. And I thought I might exemplify this by
examining a single signficant event that occurred on the afternoon of
Thursday the 20th of December 2012. That afternoon, government security
forces raided the house of Iraq's Minister of Finance, Dr. Rafaa
al-Issawi. Issawi is a leading member of the Iraqiya coalition that in
2010 won a slim majority of seats in the Iraqi Parliament -- 91 to
[State of Law's] 89 on a 62% turnout. Now the ramifications of
attempting to arrest Issawi and indeed arresting a number of his
bodyguards and prosecuting his chief bodyguard for alleged
terrorist offenses cannot be overstated. In the aftermath of the
elections, there were a series of tortured, fractured, very bad
tempered negotiations which finally resulted in the creation of another
government of national unity and, much more importantly, let Nouri
al-Maliki, the prime minister since 2006, to retain the office of the
prime ministership. Issawi as MInister of Finance is probably the most
important, most powerful Iraqiya politician to gain office in the
country. He won plaudits in his professional handling of the Ministry
of Finance and attempted to push himself above the political fray not to
engage in the rather aggressive, knockabout political rhetoric that has
come to identify Iraqi politics. So in arresting or seeking the arrest
of Issawi and charging him with offenses of terrorism, clearly what
Prime Minister al-Maliki is doing is throwing down a gauntlet,
attempting to seize further power and bring it into the office of the
prime minister. Issawi, when his house was raided, rang the prime
minister to ask him who had authorized it -- a call the prime minister
refused to take. He [Issawi] then fled seeking sanctuary in the house
of the Speaker of Parliament, a fellow Iraqiya politician, Osama
al-Nujaifi. He then held a press conference where he said -- and this
is a politician not prone to wild rhetoric, not prone to political
populism -- he said, "Maliki now wants to just get rid of his partners,
to build a dictatorship. He wants to consolidate power more and more."
Now if this wasn't so disturbing, the attack on Issawi's house triggers
memories of a very similar event almost 12 months before, on the same
day that the final American troops left Iraq in December 2011, Iraqi
security forces led by the prime minister's son laid seige to Vice
President Tareq al-Hashemi's house. Hashemi was subsequently allowed to
leave to the Kurdish Regional Government's capital of Erbil but a
number of his bodyguards were arrested, two of them were tortured to
death and the rest of them were paraded on television where they
'confessed' to activities of terrorism. So basically now let me turn to
explain what the raid on Issawi's house in December 2012 is
representative of -- what I've called in the book, the rise of the new
authoritarianism. And this authoritarianism has been driven forward by
Nouri al-Maliki who was first appointed prime minister in the early
months of 2006. Now quite fascinatingly why Nouri al-Maliki was
appointed was at the time he was seen as a grey politician. He was the
second in command of the Islamic Dawa Party -- a party that was seeking
to maximize the vote of Iraq's Shia popluation but a party that had no
internal militia, that had no military force of its own. So it was seen
by the competing, fractured ruling elite of Iraq as not posing a
threat. Now upon taking office in April 2006, Maliki was confronted by
the very issue that had given rise to his appointment, his inability to
govern. Under the Iraqi system in 2006, the office of the prime
minister was seen as a consensus vehicle. Maliki was sought to
negotiate between the US Ambassador, the American head of the Multi
National Coalition and other Iraqi politicians. He wasn't seen as a
first among equals. What Maliki has done since 2006, is successfully
consolidate power in his own hands. He first seized control of the
Islamic Dawa Party, his own party, and then he built up a small and
cohesive group of functionaries, known in Iraq as the Malikiyoun -- a
group of people, friends, followers, but also his family, his son, his
nephew and his son-in-law and he's placed them in key points across the
Iraqi state, seeking to circumvent the Cabinet -- the official vestibule
of power in the Iraqi state -- and seize control of Iraq's
institutions.
If you're not
frightened for the Iraqi people, you're not paying attention. If you're
an American, you're being strongly encouraged not to pay attention by
the US government that screwed up and destroyed the country of Iraq and
by a guilty US press that sold the illegal war, has blood on its hands
and doesn't have any desire to get honest about the realities in Iraq
today.
Turning to the US where Bradley Manning has spent his 970th day behind bars, still waiting for a trial. Monday April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released US military video of a July 12, 2007 assault in Iraq. 12 people were killed in the assault including two Reuters journalists Namie Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Monday June 7, 2010, the US military announced that they had arrested Bradley Manning and he stood accused of being the leaker of the video. Leila Fadel (Washington Post) reported
in August 2010 that Manning had been charged -- "two charges under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice. The first encompasses four counts of
violating Army regulations by transferring classified information to his
personal computer between November and May and adding unauthorized
software to a classified computer system. The second comprises eight
counts of violating federal laws governing the handling of classified
information." In March, 2011, David S. Cloud (Los Angeles Times) reported
that the military has added 22 additional counts to the charges
including one that could be seen as "aiding the enemy" which could
result in the death penalty if convicted. The Article 32 hearing took
place in December. At the start of this year, there was an Article 32
hearing and, February 3rd, it was announced that the government would be
moving forward with a court-martial. Bradley has yet to enter a plea
and has neither affirmed that he is the leaker nor denied it. The
court-martial was supposed to begin before the election but it was
postponed until after the election so that Barack wouldn't have to run
on a record of his actual actions.
HARI
SREENIVASAN: And joining me now to talk about it is Arun Rath of PBS'
"Frontline" and PRI's "The World." He has been covering the Manning
case from the beginning.
So, Arun, this is sort of what sets the ground rules for what will happen in the trial, right?
ARUN RATH, "Frontline": Yes.
Basically,
in these hearings, these pretrial hearings, they're basically arguing
about the kind of arguments they can make in court, the parameters of
the sort of arguments that Bradley Manning and his defense can make in
terms of defending themselves against these charges.
What's a
little bit unusual about the hearings that we have been seeing so far is
that they have turned into more of a bit of a dress rehearsal for the
trial itself and for what might be his sentencing, actually, because his
attorneys have already essentially admitted in their court -- in their
pleadings so far that Bradley Manning is responsible for the leaks.
So
it's changed from a situation of the trial being did he really do it
to, yes, he did, but here are the reasons why we think it doesn't rise
to the level of being a crime.
[. . .]
HARI
SREENIVASAN: OK. You have been in court. You have had the chance to
see Bradley Manning a few weeks ago. What does he look like? And what
impresses you about him?
ARUN RATH: I have say, of all the
people that have been called to the stand, Bradley Manning came across
as the most appealing witness.
He was, I wouldn't say charming --
it's not sort of a traditional charisma, but there's something about the
fact that he's a young, kind of geeky kid. He's a little bit awkward.
And he comes across as a sympathetic character. He was talking about
the ways in which he was held in Quantico in solitary confinement for 23
hours a day.
And he talked about this peculiar kind of a classic
catch-22 situation, where he would do these things during the day to
keep himself scene, like talking to himself in a mirror or dancing in
his cell, as a way to break the tedium to keep himself sane, and at
the same time these things were used as evidence against him as evidence
that he was actually mentally unstable.
Finally,
let's switch over to England where certain sections of the Socialist
Workers Party is in the midst of a major panic as they attempt to deny
violence against women. ( Elaine wrote of this earlier this week and did a great job.)
What has happened in England has happened a lot and to happen at all
is too much. For example, I will not be promoting any damn thing Eve
Ensler and her talking vagina does. Friends keep asking. Not
interested. She stayed silent as one woman after another was attacked.
Now the woman wants to use 'girl power' again to promote herself. You
want to stop rape? Stop the attacks on women who come forward to report
rape. Eve Ensler couldn't go against her radical buddies and speak out
so she's of no use to anyone. In England, Laurie Penny's taking on a very important issue. From her ZNet piece:
The
British Socialist Worker's Party is hardly atypical among political
parties, among left-wing groups, among organisations of committed people
or, indeed, among groups of friends and colleagues in having structures
in place that might allow sexual abuse and misogyny by men in positions
of power to continue unchecked. One could point, in the past 12 months
alone, to the BBC's handling of the Jimmy Savile case, or to those
Wikileaks supporters who believe that Julian Assange should not be
compelled to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.
I
could point, personally, to at least two instances involving respected
men that have sundered painfully and forever friendship groups which
lacked the courage to acknowledge the incidents. The only difference is
that the SWP actually talk openly about the unspoken rules by which this
sort of intimidation usually goes on. Other groups are not so brazen as
to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than
piffling issues of feminism, even if that's what they really mean, nor
to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above
the law. The SWP's leadership seem to have written it into their rules.
To
say that the left has a problem with handling sexual violence is not to
imply that everyone else doesn't. There is, however, a stubborn refusal
to accept and deal with rape culture that is unique to the left and to
progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by
virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and
social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow above being
held personally accountable when it comes to issues of race, gender and
sexual violence.
That
unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma.
The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the
good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little
women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't
expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for
speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our
pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom
from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the
upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?
Because
if we're not, then we have no business calling ourselves progressive.
Because if we don't acknowledge issues of assault, abuse and gender
hierarchy within our own institutions we have no business speaking of
justice, much less fighting for it.
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Prashant Rao 
