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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2004Lead ArticleCapture of Hussein fails to secure a frayed occupationby Kevin Michaels Violence, unemployment, and uncertainty grip the lives of the people of Iraq under U.S. occupation. Despite the general relief at the fact that the now-captured Saddam Hussein has no chance of returning to rule over the country, Iraqis face a present and future defined by the authoritarian U.S. occupation and the bloody campaign carried out by surviving elements and sympathizers of the old regime. Taken together with the upsurge of confidence on the part of conservative Islamic leaders, these features of Iraq’s reality chart a perilous course for freedom for the country’s wage workers, ethnic minorities, women and young people. The people of Iraq greeted the news of the Dec. 15 arrest of Hussein with elation. The capture of the dictator brought to an end a long and fear-ridden period of Iraq’s history. Since his rise from the ranks of the security apparatus of the Ba'ath Party to absolute power over the country in 1979, Hussein constructed an efficiently centralized and fiercely repressive police state based on a narrow and elite section of Iraqi society. SADDAM AT FRONT OF SORDID LINE The list of crimes amassed by Hussein and his regime is prodigious. Setting aside the inner-party rivals murdered in his rise to power, he violently oppressed the huge Shia community of Baghdad and the country’s south, carried out a genocidal campaign of extinction against the Kurdish minority of the north and launched two wars: one against Iran involving bloodshed on a gargantuan scale--perhaps as many as one million dead--and another against Kuwait that eventually led to his downfall. While it is not clear under what arrangements Hussein will be charged and tried, any thoroughgoing effort to delve into the facts of his regime will not only expose his guilt, but also the culpability of numerous governments who aided and abetted his regime in order to further their own interests. The U.S., Britain, France and Germany will no doubt all work to minimize the revelations about their substantial state and private involvement in the maintenance and support of the Ba'ath regime. Indeed, former Secretary of State James Baker, recently appointed by George W. Bush to lobby European governments to forgive the large debts Iraq owes them, once urged those same governments to extend the credits in the first place. The Bush government may be comfortable with the limited national scope of the proceedings to come. Indeed, the U.S. has become virulently hostile to international criminal tribunals and is pressuring the UN court trying war crimes of the Balkan conflicts to wrap up its work despite the fact that at least two leading perpetrators of Serbian chauvinist violence remain free. That makes it imperative to press for a full accounting of the crimes of both the Ba'ath regime and its supporters abroad. U.S. GROPING FOR CONTROL Iraq is an occupied country. The highest civilian political authority in the land is a U.S.-led political body, the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer, is responsible for economic and security matters, physical reconstruction and the reconstitution of the country’s political structure. The Authority has appointed a body called the Iraqi Governing Council that is composed of political and religious figures willing to work with the U.S. and is supposed to represent the foundations of a post-occupation government. The members of the Governing Council have degrees of support among the population raging from substantial to little or none at all. Almost all the members are male, and many of them are conservative religious leaders. The only thing that unites them is each one’s belief that he or she deserves to be running the country. In practice, the U.S. military’s powers far exceed that of the civilian Authority. Bremer and his staff are isolated inside one of Hussein's old palaces in the capital, while most interactions between Iraqis and Americans involve soldiers. The U.S. plans for the immediate political future of Iraq have been announced, but not in great detail. The original scheme called for the drafting of a national constitution before political power was handed over. This plan was revised, however, due to the influence of prominent Shia ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, who pressured for nationwide elections to put a government in place before the writing of a constitution takes place. The extent of the cleric's influential opposition threatens to derail the entire U.S. plan to hand over formal political power to an Iraqi provisional government in July. The U.S. wants a government chosen by some form of caucuses to take place on a national scale later this year. Ayatollah al-Sistani continues to press for direct elections and has mobilized large numbers of his followers to demonstrate in his support in Basra and elsewhere. As we go to press, the unrest has prompted the Bush administration to call Bremer to Washington for consultation. Whatever comes of the U.S. political schemes, it is certain that military forces of the U.S. and its allies will remain in the country to buttress the new government once it is in place. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced after Tony Blair's brief visit with British forces stationed in the southern city of Basra that he expects his troops to be there for at least three years. The U.S. has been more circumspect in making such estimates, but it is clear that there will be a foreign military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Other substantial problems the U.S. faces include convincing the UN to give its blessing to the plan for the handover of power and keeping the two Kurdish nationalist parties committed to the project. The parties, rivals since the 1970s, are now acting as a powerful united political force to press for a federal structure for the new Iraq that would preserve the autonomy enjoyed in the Kurdish region since 1991. Lastly the U.S. faces a serious and persistent effort to harass its forces with snipers, mortar shells and improvised bombs. While the number of fatalities of U.S. soldiers remains relatively low, the steady pace of wounded and demoralized troops may develop into a grievous political and logistical challenge. A whopping 9,000 or more wounded have been evacuated, a statistic the Pentagon so far kept out of the headlines. And to staunch growing disaffection among soldiers and their families, upwards of 175,000 troops are to be relieved by fresh forces. WORKERS, WOMEN STILL IRREPRESSIBLE The Iraqi people as a whole were relieved to see Hussein’s grip over the country broken. From the day that the U.S. army reached Baghdad, however, the forces that had marketed themselves as liberators began to accumulate a growing store of antipathy and mistrust among all sectors of the population. Despite the U.S. claim that its efforts were aimed at bringing democracy to Iraq, the occupation has in reality frozen into place authoritarian elements of Hussein’s regime, as well as emboldened conservative religious forces that had been repressed by the strong anti-Shia bias of the old order. Among the most flagrant of the occupation moves was to decree that a 1987 law forbidding unions and collective bargaining in state enterprises was still in force. This restriction, meant to expedite plans to privatize as much as possible of Iraq’s oil-driven, state-heavy economy, prevented those workers lucky enough to still be on a payroll from officially combining in their own interests. Worker organizing is taking place regardless, and a number of unions and workplace committees exist throughout the country. Both managers and the occupation authorities refuse to recognize these organizations, and U.S. soldiers have arrested and otherwise harassed worker leaders. Large-scale organizing for relief and jobs has taken place among the ranks of the unemployed, but these efforts too have met with opposition from the U.S. Many of these working class organizations were among the large crowds that demonstrated in Baghdad and other cities on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, in opposition to the suicide bombings and other forms of terror perpetrated by remnants of the deposed regime. In addition to the anti-worker content of the occupation, the U.S. reliance on tribal chiefs and conservative religious leaders to provide support for and ensure order in the new political arrangement has legitimized anti-woman attitudes and practices. The post-1991 era of the Ba'ath regime was characterized by legalization of tribal traditions that permitted so-called honor killings of women. The indifference of the U.S. towards the rights of women has ensured that these practices persist in post-Hussein Iraq. In response, large protests took place in Baghdad on Jan. 13 to protest the increasing degree to which Iraq’s communal and religious schisms and the anti-woman prejudices within each community are being codified into law. The deterioration of everyday security in the capital and elsewhere has further added to a situation in which pressure for the veil and other religious restrictions on women and girls have increased. These concrete social forces--workers, women, and young people--are struggling to shape a society in which they are able to determine their own futures. Long stifled by the police state of Saddam, the people of Iraq are now finding themselves increasingly opposed to both the violent campaign of the sympathizers of the old regime and the occupation that is oppressing them in new ways. The trial of the dictator responsible for countless crimes has the potential to open a new era of freedom for the Iraqi people. Those who opposed both the pretext for and execution of the U.S.’s war and who wish to express solidarity with the people of Iraq have a responsibility to do what they can to see that it doesn’t simply mark the close of one repressive era and the dawning of a new one. At stake is ultimately the freedom of both the people of Iraq and the U.S. |
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