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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryIraq: terror and new freedom voicesAs the U.S. occupation grinds on, several spectacular terrorist attacks have unnerved even the triumphalist Bush administration. Gone are the illusions of April that the occupation would be as easy as the war. There are almost daily attacks on U.S. soldiers and U.S. killings of innocent Iraqi civilians. On Sept. 22, a suicide bomber killed a guard outside Iraq’s United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. On Aug. 19, a truck bomb had demolished the building, killing 23, including top UN official Sergio Vieira de Mello. This attack was condemned throughout the Arab world, where the UN is often regarded as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. On Sept. 20, a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, Akila al-Hashimi, was hospitalized in critical condition and later died, after being shot on her way to work. On Aug. 29, a car bomb outside the world’s most sacred Shi’ite religious site, the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, killed 95 people, among them Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, who seemed to be the target. The Shi’ite community’s most important political leader, al-Hakim had been working with the U.S. The sources of these attacks remain a mystery. They seem to aim at sowing fear, confusion, and ethno-religious tension, rather than gaining popular support. As widely predicted beforehand, Bush’s reckless invasion has served only to strengthen the very type of religious fundamentalism out of which the horrors of September 11 emerged. These dramatic events completely crowded off the stage a truly historic one: the capture of “Chemical Ali,” the Ba’athist official who ordered the genocidal poison gas attacks on the Kurds in 1988. In that period, the Ba’athists killed 100,000 Kurds, at a time when Iraq was a quasi-ally of the U.S. The sudden collapse of the Iraqi army this spring has allowed Shi’ite clerics to assume various degrees of power in much of Baghdad and southern Iraq. Shi’ite Islamists have pressured women into wearing the veil and have attacked liquor and movie rental stores. Clerics have been permitted to set up informal religious court. The U.S. also allowed them to block what was to have been the appointment of Iraq’s first woman judge, Nidal Nasser Hussein, in Najaf. At the same time, however, Iraq’s secular Left, long repressed by the Ba’athist regime, has been trying to assert itself in the face of the occupation, the Shi’ite Islamists, and the terrorist attacks. One of these groups is the Workers Communist Party (WCP), which has set up a headquarters in downtown Baghdad. In a back room, protected from religious fanatics by armed WCP guards, the Organization for Women’s Freedom maintains an office. It publishes the newspaper, EQUALITY, whose banner headlines proclaim, “No to the compulsory veil.” It demands complete legal equality for women, separation of state and religion, and full participation of women in all spheres of public life. (See "Challenge from Iraqi feminists," p. 2.) The WCP has also helped to organize a Union of the Unemployed. After repeated demonstrations for aid to the unemployed that met no response, they set up a tent city outside U.S. occupation headquarters. Instead of negotiating, however, U.S. troops arrested them. Rather than aiding the unemployed, the current U.S. economic plan for Iraq would set up a ruthless “free market” economy, allowing international capital to take over banking and other major sectors. |
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