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nicky g
05-07-2004, 06:49 AM
This is from UK site Open Democracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net) , which I've recommended before; it consistently publishes in depth interesting articles and discussions on a range of political issues. It probably leans to what people in the states would describe as liberal views, can sometimes be a bit dry, and is written largely from a UK perspective, but it's really worth checking out.

Anyway this article (actually an interview) contains a lot for both traditionally "anti-war" and "pro-war" people to think about. I disagree with some of what the guy says but he provides an interesting view of how Iraqis view the current situation. There are lots of links to other related articles if you go to the site itself (I've removed them from teh copied version). If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, this paragraph sums a lot of it up:

"People need to appreciate that Iraqis are really tired of violence and instability, and that there’s a huge will to get on with a normal life. And Iraqis are prepared to make some compromises along the way to achieve that.

But especially amongst progressive left circles, there’s a feeling that all Iraqis are going to rise up against occupation, make sacrifices and jump to freedom. Despite all the anger, that is far from being the best-case scenario. Instead, Iraqis would just like things to settle down, but they believe the coalition is no longer part of that equation because of all the broken promises . "



http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1886.jsp


An Iraqi’s impressions: interview with Yahia Said
openDemocracy
6 - 5 - 2004


What is happening in Iraq? After the Fallujah siege, as insurgency continues and the June deadline for transfer of sovereignty approaches, Caspar Henderson of openDemocracy interviews the civil society researcher Yahia Said over a line between London and Baghdad.




openDemocracy: It’s a good phone line…

Yahia Said: Yes, this is the new Iraqi mobile phone, part of the new Iraq, run by a colourful Egyptian proprietor.

openDemocracy: So long as it catches mice…? Let’s start with the basics. Why are you in Iraq? What are you doing?

Yahia Said: I’m in Baghdad on a mission for the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics. We have a project to try to build a network of academics, activists, and politicians in Iraq and Europe. Part of what we do is organise debates and discussion with Iraqis about issues that are of most concern to them. This time we’re having discussions about security, violence, terror, and the war against terror.

We’re organising a number of meetings, one with a think-tank that was the main Ba’ath party think-tank under Saddam Hussein. It’s called the House of Wisdom…the title was coined to describe whatever was left of the ideology that the regime was using.

openDemocracy: Why would you meet with a group with Ba’athist connections?

Yahia Said: This is the same group of people who were active under Saddam. They are trying to acclimatise themselves to the new situation. They haven’t done a mea culpa or anything like that, and now they’re riding a wave of popular anger with the occupation.

They are very happy with themselves. But I think that’s quite representative of what a lot of people here feel – those who were not necessarily implicated in crimes against humanity, but a part of the majority among the Iraqi elites who were silent and helped Saddam remain in power for so long, either with tacit consent, support or just indifference.

openDemocracy: Are you also meeting with people from labour unions, women’s groups, youth groups?

Yahia Said: We’re meeting with intellectuals, nationalists, liberals, religious leaders. We’re having one workshop with a newly-established network of Iraqi women’s groups – the Network of Iraq Women – which is quite an exciting group of organisations. There are about twenty or thirty women activists at the core of it who represent various groups in turn. They’re being quite active not only in defeating the notorious ruling of the Iraqi governing council of several months ago that was meant to abolish the civil code and refer all family matters to sharia courts. They’ve also been lobbying the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and now the United Nations to fulfil the promise that they will be included in the interim Iraqi constitution, and that 25% of all government sector positions will be given to women. We have discussions with students at the university as well.

openDemocracy: How easy is it to do things like this at this time in a place like Baghdad? How is it for getting around and talking to people? What does it feel like?

Yahia Said: I’ve been here for four or five days now. When I came it was at the tail-end of the Fallujah standoff. There was already a ceasefire. It wasn’t clear how it would turn. The situation was incredibly tense, the worst I’ve ever seen in Baghdad. It has got worse every time I came here. Not so much physically – there has been incremental improvement over the past year in terms of electricity supply, cleaning, buildings and things like that – but in terms of political atmosphere, it’s much worse.


openDemocracy: The people from different groups. What, in general, are the common themes?

Yahia Said: People are furious. There has been quite a pivotal point sometime between the last time I was here in January and now. A lot of it has to do with Fallujah, the al-Sadr insurgency, the so-called uprising. Fallujah was like the last straw. It was the last act of recklessness by the coalition that Iraqis could handle. And now all this anger is bursting out. Every Iraqi starts the discussion with how fed up they are, and how they feel. The word that everybody uses is an Iraqi word that means predicament, entanglement, quagmire.

openDemocracy: What’s the word in Arabic?

Yahia Said: Wurta. It’s an Iraqi slang word. This is the word everybody uses. People feel stuck with the coalition. They came in and they can’t get out and we can’t get rid of them. Everybody’s really upset about that.

openDemocracy: What do you then do? It’s fine to be angry…

Yahia Said: Part of the reason why everybody is angry is because they feel stuck. There doesn’t seem to be a good option. Because there’s still fear – although much less now – that it will be worse if the Americans leave. Six months ago, there was almost a consensus that if the Americans leave it would be worse. There were disagreements over whether they were doing the right thing, whether they were good or bad, liberators or occupiers. Now, things are so bad in terms of the Americans failing to meet some basic expectations that Iraqis had – some of them obviously unrealistic – but also their blunderings and their violations, what people describe as war crimes in the course of fighting the violence. That has reached a level where people are just not ready to put up with it any more.

What gets underestimated about the situation in Iraq, is how tired people are. People in Iraq were ready to put up with a lot of things and part of the anger with coalition troops is not against occupation as such but because of their failure to reduce the violence. And if their presence is causing the violence to escalate as many people believe then what’s the point, why should they put up with an occupation?

The security trap

openDemocracy: Do you get a sense from the people you talk to that the American troop presence is not going to be enough – that maybe there’s a period of quietness now after Fallujah, but that things are going to get worse?

Yahia Said: This is part of the emotional turning-point I talked about earlier, and the anger with Americans. There is a realisation that the number of American troops is actually quite small to keep a grip on Iraq.

But it’s not a question of it getting worse. There’s a feeling that Americans have to tread very carefully from now on. If there’s another blow-up like Fallujah, if the Americans again come in heavy-handedly on some Iraqi city and try to pacify it and crush the resistance in a way that hurts the civilian population, I think there will be an explosion that American troops here will not be able to control. I think there’s a vision of that on both sides, that there’s a truce, an understanding that the Americans will accelerate plans for the transfer of power. That would reduce friction.

openDemocracy: That’s quite an optimistic-sounding…

Yahia Said: The alternative is too horrendous to contemplate.

openDemocracy: Right. What’s the view of the US’s appointment in Fallujah of, first, one general from the old regime Iraqi army and then another from the free officers’ movement?

Yahia Said: The first was from the Republican Guard. The decision was taken by the US marine commander on the ground in Fallujah. It was a very traditional indirect rule decision. He found a local strongman whom he could deal with, and he couldn’t care less what the background to that guy was. Then you have the Iraqi defence minister saying, wait a second, we are the defence ministry, we appoint military commanders, you cannot set up a military unit that is independent of the national army. That is clearly a very important issue for the CPA in Baghdad, to retain a monopoly on the use of violence. So they have appointed someone above him to run the Fallujah operation. It is a situation of disarray.

Handing security to the Iraqi armed forces even if they were drawn from the former Iraqi army but assuming that they were not implicated in war crimes would be the preferred solution for most Iraqis.

openDemocracy: I’m surprised to hear you say that, especially if the people you talked to define themselves as part of civil society. I would have thought the last thing they want is the return of a military regime even if it is ostensibly under some sort of civil control. The very idea of even former Ba’athists running the military must be horrendous to people. Or am I wrong?

Yahia Said: You must be kidding. What is horrendous to people is the mess they are in, and this is an attempt to restore some order. The military is not running Fallujah – but organising controls of the city to make sure there is nobody running around with guns and shooting whoever they like. If you had a situation where the city had been taken over by a bunch of paramilitaries what do you want to do? What’s the alternative? If that was happening in the United States you’d bring in the National Guard. You don’t bring Amnesty International to solve the problem.

openDemocracy: I appreciate what you’re saying about the immediate crisis, but don’t people fear it could be the start of a more sinister process? Some Iraqis have said that Saddam was a CIA creation, and they could conclude that we’re just going to go back to another kind of American-backed military regime.

Yahia Said: There’s a lot of that. Many people said that the first guy in Fallujah was a Saddam favourite. They say that the new one is an ex-dissident. But at the same time, a majority of Iraqis feel that the dissolution of the whole army was a big mistake and that had they kept the old army it would have been the best to deal with the violent situation.

I think there is a misperception by some parties looking at Iraq from the outside who view only the occupying forces as a problem. Iraq’s huge terrorist problem is not being appreciated. The nationalist, resistance part of the violence in Iraq is still minute. A big part of the violence is a terrorist problem, a security problem that is as much a headache for, you know, an Iraqi doctor or engineer as it is for the coalition troops.

openDemocracy: Is this what people are telling you – these people are criminals or terrorists? I’m a doctor and I can’t go to my surgery because people are pointing guns and taking my car or money…

Yahia Said: The main problem is security, whether you’re being killed by a carjacker or you’re being killed by a looter at gunpoint, or whether you get killed by a bomb. Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed by terrorist bombs.

openDemocracy: I appreciate that’s terrible but don’t people make a distinction between random violence and criminal gangs on the one hand and terrorists on the other? You made the distinction between resistance and what you call terrorists.

Yahia Said: You can call terrorists people who kill civilians. Nobody calls them resistance. Nobody in Iraq would call the guys who bombed Karbala and Irbil, or Basra recently, nobody calls these guys resistance. Well, maybe some Arabic news channels would call them resistance. Al-Jazeera would call them resistance.

But there are some people who have huge sympathy with those who are bombing the Americans. Or let me put it the other way round. Two or three months ago, people were sort of indifferent towards these guys – the people who were ambushing American troops and so on. They were not sure. Are they causing trouble, should we wait for the situation to calm down or should we support these guys? Now, there is growing sympathy with the people attacking American troops.

openDemocracy: Does this go amongst the people in civil society networks you’re talking to, or does it go across Iraqi society?

Yahia Said: This is the major issue. This is what I was trying to tell you about the major change here over the last two months. There is increasing overt support for resisting the occupying forces one way or another. That said, every Iraqi has a large perception of violence that is not only political but criminal, of people who are putting a bomb next to a school and killing schoolchildren. This is also something Iraqis want to get rid of. Tomorrow the Americans will leave and we will have all these resistance fighters running around with guns and bombs. Who will they turn on next? Will they demand a share of power because they killed so many Americans?

A problem of trust

openDemocracy: Presumably informed Iraqis recognise that there’s going to be a large American military presence even after the 30 June transfer of sovereignty. But what is their preferred option? Are they happy with the plan of the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to help create an interim Iraqi administration?

Yahia Said: Iraqis support most elements of the Brahimi package. But there’s a backlash against it by the exiles. Many of the exiles associated with the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) believed they had a right to power and to government jobs because of their opposition to Saddam Hussein. Now, Brahimi has said: well, you need to have professional Iraqis even if they were Ba’athist, but those who have committed war crimes or human rights violations shouldn’t be employed in the state service. Most Iraqis who were not part of the exile community would just totally agree with that. So for them, the Brahimi package is definitely something preferable. He was also the first to call for the release of the 10,000 security detainees even before the recent abuse scandal.

openDemocracy: Do people express the hope for a UN-led force even in a symbolic sense, with troops from some other nations? Do people say: if only the Egyptians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, or whoever?

Yahia Said: It’s not so much about preferring Egyptians or Germans but rather about wanting to have someone to watch over the Americans to make sure they don’t break rules. UN supervision will provide such a check. The biggest desire is for this whole thing to be over as soon as possible. But people are saying the Americans should pull out of cities, stay in their bases and we need a force to get us by to the elections.

There’s a total breakdown of trust. This is the biggest problem the coalition is now facing in Iraq. People don’t believe anything they say anymore.

openDemocracy: Did the recent photographs of abuse by coalition troops, both American and (allegedly) British, make any real difference or did they seem to confirm what people already felt?

Yahia Said: The reception was surprisingly low-key in Iraq. Part of the reason was that rumours and tall stories, as well as true stories, about abuse, mass rape, and torture in the jails and in coalition custody have been going round for a long time. So compared to what people have been talking about here the pictures are quite benign. There’s nothing unexpected. In fact what most people are asking is: why did they come up now? People in Iraq are always suspecting that there’s some scheming going on, some agenda in releasing the pictures at this particular point.

At the same time Jalal Talabani of the governing council came out saying this is nothing compared to Saddam Hussein. There was immediate, you know, everybody was quite upset about that.

openDemocracy: You said people don’t trust the CPA and the IGC anymore. There are some people on the governing council – correct me if you don’t agree – who many people in Iraq might accept playing a significant role in the future of Iraq. But are the people on the council in general so damaged by association with the coalition that they won’t be able to play any role in future?

Yahia Said: The governing council, the institution itself, is quite discredited, and some individuals are badly damaged. But some of its individuals as you rightly said enjoy quite a reputation and will do well even though they were associated with the council. Adnan Pachachi, for example.

openDemocracy: So Pachachi is not seen as a creature of the Americans?

Yahia Said: Not at all. He came out with a very firm statement immediately as Fallujah started and described it as a war crime. Many people on the governing council were quite hesitant to criticise American action, but not Pachachi. I think he came out well from that. People can imagine him as president or Mehdi al-Hafidh from his party as prime minister of the post-July 2004 interim administration. These are people Iraqis could live with, at least for seven months, at least many I spoke to. Very few others on the governing council enjoy such trust.

Iraqi divisions, Iraqi unities

openDemocracy: I’d like to ask you about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army. What’s your feeling from what people have been telling you in Baghdad?

Yahia Said: You get two or three stories about Muqtada al-Sadr. Some people, even amongst intellectuals and activists, have warm feelings towards him because he has come up with a nationalist position they agree with. The coincidence of the southern uprising and the Fallujah uprising has made people feel very warm and fuzzy about the fact that there’s a solidarity between Sunni and Shi’a – debunking the myth about sectarian divisions in Iraq. These are some of the positive notes you hear about al-Sadr.

Then, even amongst those who say these things there’s an acknowledgement that he is a wild card. His troops are an undisciplined group of thugs really, and he has allegedly been authorising them to loot as long as they give 20% – according to Shi’a tradition you give 20% of your income to the mosque. So there’s a great apprehension, he’s not considered mature. The average of it all is that people would like him to go away.

openDemocracy: I’ve been reading the ex-US ambassador Peter Galbraith in a recent New York Review of Books article. He is very pessimistic about the future and sees the possibility of civil war as a real one unless the country is divided. I’ve also recently talked to Gareth Stansfield, a specialist in Kurdish affairs from Exeter University in the UK, who’s recently returned from Kirkuk. He emphatically didn’t use the term ethnic cleansing, but he thinks preparations are in hand for transference of the Arab population from there – or at the least the relatively recently-settled Arabs, some 200,000 in all. These guys are painting a pessimistic picture verging on civil war. What’s your view?

Yahia Said: I don’t see an ethnically-based, Yugoslav-style civil war. I don’t think we are there yet or are heading in that direction at the moment. I was just talking about the feeling of solidarity between Sunni and Shi’a in the face of American occupation, a very conscious effort to work together. Many Iraqis suspect all this talk about Sunni and Shi’a and this “ethnic quota”-driven system endorsed by the governing council. People believe this is an imperialist attempt to divide and conquer and they consciously try to resist that.

Tensions in Kirkuk and Mosul are more real, but even they are not civil war material because these are very localised conflicts. But there has been a quiet ethnic cleansing going on there. A year down the road anything could happen. The situation in Kirkuk is quite dangerous. I think the number of Arabs who have been moved forcibly is in the low thousands. The coalition is trying to put the lid on these transfers, but there are hundreds of thousands of Kurds waiting to return to their homes. And there are about a million refugees in Iran who were deported by Saddam Hussein and are now trickling back, most to Sh’ia areas, living in camps, taking over public buildings. This creates a huge tension with other Shi’a in the south even though there are no ethnic or sectarian differences.

There are other tensions of various sorts. There is not much progress on rehabilitating the Saddam regime’s victims and on prosecuting people for crimes over the last thirty years. There is a lot of vigilante justice going on.

But talking of civil war at this point is misleading, especially when there is a growing consensus among Iraqis in their desire to end occupation as soon as possible. In fact, there are two tensions that point in the opposite direction to civil war; people’s desire for an end to violence, and the desire to see an end to occupation. These are two uniting principles that almost every Iraqi would agree on at present.



openDemocracy: I guess there are some people who would like to increase the chaos in the hope that would drive the Americans out, although in practice that might have exactly the opposite effect?

Yahia Said: Definitely. This has been part of this so-called armed resistance. The masterminds of that, maybe not the rank and file, are consciously seeking to disrupt construction work. There is a huge damage to the whole reconstruction effort. The kidnapping of foreigners is part of it. 800 Russians who are critical for fixing a lot of the Russian imported power stations have left the country, and now the CPA is scrambling to find Iraqi engineers to replace them to do the job and to restore electricity.

And then everyone turns around and accuses the Americans of failing to restore the electricity. There’s a circular situation there. Who do you blame, the resistance or the Americans? The easiest is to blame the Americans.

Two or three months ago people were saying if the American leave either Saddam Hussein will come back or there will be chaos and civil war. Now very few people I’ve met would say that. People are so fed up with the Americans and feeling they are only causing trouble. This is not something I would agree with, but that’s how people feel.

I think the most recent Gallup poll found that 57% of Iraqis want the Americans to leave immediately. So there’s a perceptible shift from people believing the American troops are a necessary evil to people believing, well it’s not working – they might as well leave.

What the world needs to know about Iraq

openDemocracy: What is the hardest thing for people who haven’t been to Iraq and don’t know the country to understand? And what do they most need to understand?

Yahia Said: People need to appreciate that Iraqis are really tired of violence and instability, and that there’s a huge will to get on with a normal life. And Iraqis are prepared to make some compromises along the way to achieve that.

But especially amongst progressive left circles, there’s a feeling that all Iraqis are going to rise up against occupation, make sacrifices and jump to freedom. Despite all the anger, that is far from being the best-case scenario. Instead, Iraqis would just like things to settle down, but they believe the coalition is no longer part of that equation because of all the broken promises.

What is also being under-appreciated is how much effort the coalition and ordinary Iraqi engineers, doctors, and policemen have put into rebuilding, and how much they’ve done to restore electricity, to restore the economy. A lot of the good news gets buried and forgotten because the next atrocity comes up or because of what they’ve done with the detainees. But it’s not all in the same direction.

It’s a very complex situation. It’s not good versus evil.