[Mb-civic] Iraq is splitting

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This overview of the misery in Iraq is prefaced by Ed Pearl.    We American 
taxpayers ("citizens of the empire") are paying for this disaster so it's 
incumbent on us to face the facts and share them....


This very depressing report comes from a reliable source and is 
critical.  Today's NY Times lead story begins "Rising sectarian 
violence is spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed 
Shiite-Sunni areas."  The situation results directly from the Bush -
US occupation and that's what we can and must deal with.  It's
killing them and us, as a nation and human beings.  We must
end this monster.   
Ed


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/cock01_.html

LRB | Vol. 28 No. 7 dated 
April 6, 2006 

Diary 

Patrick Cockburn

Iraq is splitting into three different parts.
Everywhere there are fault lines opening up between
Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In the days immediately following
the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22
February, some 1300 bodies, mostly Sunni, were found in
and around Baghdad. The Shia-controlled Interior
Ministry, whose police commandos operate as death
squads, asked the Health Ministry to release lower
figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man
living in a middle-class Sunni district in west
Baghdad, rang me. 'I am not leaving my home,' he
said. 'The police commandos arrested 15 people from
here last night including the local baker. I am sitting
here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and
if they come for me I am going to open fire.'

It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny
that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies
- all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their
religious allegiance - are being discovered every day.
Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia
slum of Sadr City in early March. Several days later a
group of children playing football in a field noticed a
powerful stench. Police opened up a pit which contained
the bodies of 27 men, probably all Sunni, stripped to
their underpants; they had all been tortured and then
shot in the head. Two and a half years ago, when the
first suicide bomb targeting the Shias killed 85 people
outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, there was no
Shia retaliation. They were held back by Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the hope of gaining power
through legal elections. Since the Samarra bomb this
restraint has definitively ended: the Shia militias and
death squads slaughter Sunnis in tit-for-tat killings
every time a Shia is killed.

Iraqis often deceive themselves about the depth of the
sectarian divisions in their country. They say,
rightly, that there are many intermarriages between
Sunni and Shia and claim the sectarian divide is less
extreme than it is in Belfast, where Roman Catholic and
Protestant seldom marry. But such marriages are most
common among the educated middle class in Baghdad and,
in any case, they have become less common since 2003,
when sectarian differences widened after Sunnis
rebelled against the occupation and the Shia community
did not. My Shia and Kurdish friends, who see
themselves as wholly non-sectarian, sincerely believe
that the three-year-old Sunni rebellion is the work of
a few jobless Baathist officials making common cause
with Islamic fanatics imported from Saudi Arabia.
'They are not real Iraqis,' they say. They refuse to
accept that the guerrillas are supported by most of the
five-million-strong Sunni community, despite the
evidence of opinion polls. The Sunnis and the Kurds,
for their part, see the Shia leaders as puppets
manipulated by Iranian intelligence. They will not take
on board that the 15 or 16 million Shias, who make up
60 per cent of the population, will not give up their
bid for power after centuries of marginalisation.
Kurdish hostility to Arabs is equally underestimated by
both Shia and Sunni. While I was in Arbil, the Kurdish
capital, two Sunni friends emailed to say they planned
to drive from Baghdad to see me. They didn't realise
that they were as likely to spend the night in jail as
in a hotel, because Kurds regard all Arabs visiting
from the rest of Iraq with deep suspicion.

The differences between Shia and Kurd explain why Iraq
still doesn't have a new government three months after
last December's elections. The current government is
the one that took office in January 2005; based on a
Kurdish-Shia alliance, it's headed by Ibrahim al-
Jaafari of the Shia Dawa Party. Over the past year,
Kurdish leaders have come to detest him and are
refusing to agree to a new government with him at its
head. They were enraged when he made a surprise visit
to Turkey in early March in order (they feared) to
enlist Turkish support in his bid to rob them of their
quasi-independence within Iraq. Above all, the Kurdish
leaders fear that Jaafari is manoeuvring to avoid
implementing an agreement under which they would gain
permanent control of the oil province of Kirkuk, which
they captured at the start of the war.

Kirkuk, beneath which lie ten billion barrels of oil
reserves, is a prize well worth fighting for. It is
also, even by Iraqi standards, a depressing and
dangerous city. It sits on the plain 150 miles north of
Baghdad, overlooked by a citadel whose ancient houses
were wrecked by Saddam Hussein after the failed Kurdish
uprising of 1991. There are heaps of rubbish
everywhere. Despite the oil reserves, there are mile-
long queues of vehicles waiting to get petrol. Shops
are small and mean. In the centre of the city a cluster
of dilapidated market stalls sell fruit and bread.
'Kirkuk is a ruin, it is the most ruined city in
Iraq,' a Kurdish official said, with bitter pride, as
we drove through the city. Over the past fifty years
the Kurds have been systematically expelled from
Kirkuk. After 1991, a full-scale programme of ethnic
cleansing began: between 120,000 and 200,000 Kurds and
Turkomans were forced from their homes by Saddam.
Almost all the small towns and villages in the province
were bulldozed to reduce the Kurdish population and to
prevent the buildings being used by guerrillas. The
Iraqi constitution, along with the Shia-Kurdish
agreement, promised to remove Arab settlers and return
Kurds to Kirkuk. Grim place though it is, undisputed
possession of the province and its oilfields is vital
to the Kurds if they are to get close to self-
determination.

Under the new constitution, the fate of Kirkuk will be
decided by 31 December 2007. If Kirkuk joins the
Kurdish region, the Kurds will have first rights to new
oil discoveries. Saddam had not only denied them a
share in oil revenues: any Kurd found working in the
oil industry was sacked. 'Of the 9000 employees
working for the Northern Oil Company in 2003, only 18
were Kurds, and they were mostly servants,' said Rezgar
Ali Hamajan, the chief of Kirkuk's provincial council.
Now the Kurds are intent on having their own oil. Given
that the need to share oil income is almost the only
thing holding Iraq together, the secession of Kirkuk to
join the Kurdish Regional Government could be the
decisive moment in the dissolution of the country.

Inhabited by Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs, Kirkuk is a
good if unnerving place in which to observe the growing
hatred between Iraq's ethnic communities. The Kurds won
five out of nine parliamentary seats in the
parliamentary election in December. 'Security is not
as bad as in Baghdad,' said Rezgar Ali, a chain-smoking
former land surveyor who was for years a Peshmerga
commander in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),
while admitting that this is not saying a great deal.
He complained that the media exaggerate the violence in
the city. 'One day a rich Kurdish lady was
kidnapped,' he said. 'They claimed she was a female
Kurdish leader. In fact it was just an ordinary
kidnapping.' He conceded that many Arab police officers
were probably collaborating with the insurgents and
that several Arab police chiefs had been arrested. Like
many Kurdish officials in Kirkuk, he wears a pistol in
his belt and has a submachine-gun always close to hand.
Whatever happens, he said, the Kurds 'won't leave
Kirkuk. Even if we had only two thousand Peshmerga we
would not leave here.'

But one recent development has shocked even Rezgar Ali.
In the centre of Kirkuk there is a building that seems
quite imposing compared to the ramshackle houses all
around: this is the Republican Hospital. It is here
that most of the casualties from gun battles, bombings
and assassinations are taken. In 2005, some 1500 people
were killed or injured in Kirkuk province. Large
numbers of those taken to the hospital died, and there
turned out to be an extraordinary reason for this. Some
time earlier, the hospital had recruited an
enthusiastic young doctor called Louay, who was always
willing to help. What the other doctors didn't know was
that Louay, an Arab, was a member of an insurgent cell
of the Ansar al-Sunna group. He used his position to
make sure that soldiers, policemen and government
officials died of their injuries. A police inquiry
found Dr Louay guilty of killing 43 patients. He
doesn't seem to have found this very difficult. Many of
the injured were bleeding when they reached the
hospital and, according to Colonel Yadgar Shukir
Abdullah Jaff, a senior policeman, 'Louay would
inject patients he wanted to kill with a high dose of a
medicine that made them bleed more.'

Given that Iraqi hospitals are invariably short-staffed
and there is little time for autopsies, Dr Louay might
have been able to carry on his killings indefinitely.
But earlier this year Kurdish security in Sulaimaniyah
arrested the leader of his cell. Abu Muhijiz, whose
real name is Malla Yassin, confessed that Louay was a
member of his group and detailed the grisly work that
he had carried out.

In Kirkuk, the most effective military and police units
are Kurdish. The same is true in Mosul, the mainly
Sunni city on the Tigris further to the west.
Nominally, there are 12,000 police in Mosul province,
drawn mainly from the Jabour tribe. But according to
Saadi Pire, the former PUK leader in Mosul, 'they are
policemen only by day and terrorists at night.' The
Sunni in Mosul, for their part, see what the US claims
is a war against insurgents as an American-Kurdish
attack on their community.

Across Iraq, the community-based allegiances of members
of army and police units are sapping the power of the
state. As sectarian and ethnic war escalates, people
want militiamen from their own community defending
their street, regardless of whether or not they belong
in theory to the army or the police. In Sunni areas,
the only people well enough armed to organise a defence
are the resistance fighters, and the fear of Shia death
squads swells their ranks. In Shia areas, sectarian
bombings and shootings lead to greater reliance on the
Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Meanwhile, the number of American casualties has
decreased to about one a day, compared to two or three
a day last year. The insurgents believe that the
Americans are going to leave whatever happens, as
support for the war diminishes in the US, and that
attacks against US troops are therefore less urgent.
But in the Sunni heartlands north of Baghdad,
resistance is as strong as it has ever been. On 21
March, a hundred fighters armed with automatic rifles,
rocket-propelled grenade-launchers and mortars captured
a police headquarters and stormed a jail in Muqdadiyah,
sixty miles north of Baghdad. By the time they withdrew
they had killed 19 policemen, freed 33 prisoners and
captured enough radio equipment to make the rest of the
police network insecure. Provincial authorities claim
the Muqdadiyah police chief was a resistance double-
agent.

Solidarity within each community - Kurdish, Shia and
Sunni - is strong. But none is monolithic. Iraqis in
general are highly cynical about the honesty and
competence of their own leaders. The four to five
million Kurds have a strong sense of national identity
and are well organised. Nevertheless, on 16 March
thousands of Kurds marching in Halabja to commemorate
the deaths of the 5000 people killed in the 1988 poison
gas attack on the town burned down their own brand-new
monument. It was a curious, circular building outside
the city boundaries which housed a museum; from the
distance it looked like a strange mosque. Opened by
Colin Powell in 2003, it contained lifesize wax models
intended to represent the dead and dying, and
photographs of the dead. For two years, Kurdish
officials had taken foreign officials to the monument
as a symbol of Kurdish suffering under Saddam. People
in Halabja, however, had watched the visitors with
growing rage. Few of them travelled one mile further,
into the town itself, to see the sufferings of the
present-day inhabitants - for whom little had been done
since 1988. Funds sent from abroad to help the
survivors of Saddam Hussein's most famous atrocity
never seemed to arrive.

I reached Halabja after the riot had subsided. The
guards at the monument were still looking shaken. The
building itself had been gutted by fire: long strips of
plastic hung from one of the ceilings and several small
fires were still burning. Kana Tewfiq, one of the
Peshmerga guards, who'd been hit in the spine by a
stone thrown from the crowd, said that protesters had
taken 'gasoline and oil from the museum generator to
get the fire going'. A second group of Peshmerga had
arrived and fired into the crowd, killing a 17-year-old
demonstrator and wounding half a dozen others. Shako
Mohammed, the PUK leader and government representative
in the Halabja region, came with a couple of carloads
of bodyguards to survey the damage. He said he had
begged people not to demonstrate while he took their
demands to the PUK government in Sulaimaniyah. He
suspected that the crowd had been infiltrated by
members of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, which
once controlled the region.

In the local hospital, a 29-year-old man called Othman
Ali Gaffur was lying in a bed with a bullet through his
leg. His injuries looked serious: he was missing part
of his left hand and had only one eye. But these turned
out to be the result of ordnance detonating when he was
playing with it as a child. Othman worked as a
journalist on the magazine put out by the handicapped
people's association in Halabja, to which five thousand
people belong. He said the first aim of the
demonstration had been to keep government officials
away. 'They were always promising us help but the
help never came. There are no roads, no streets here,
only mud. They only took people to see the monument to
the dead and never to see the living. That's why it
became a target.' Another man, Omar Ali, said he was
against violence, but 'if we don't do something they
won't listen.'

At this point several Peshmerga entered the ward and
told me to leave. I refused to go, and they seemed
divided on what to do. When I did leave they surrounded
the car and said I should stay where I was while they
rang their headquarters. When they finally got through,
they were told to let me go. Later the PUK claimed that
Islamic fundamentalists and shadowy pro-Iranian groups
had fomented the riots. The next day in Kirkuk, a
senior PUK official admitted that this was nonsense.
'What happened in Halabja could happen anywhere in
Iraq because people look at what has happened to them
and don't think their leaders are any good.'

Iraq is divided and the insurgency is strong, but the
real reason for the collapse of Iraq is the weakness of
the state. Ali Allawi, the finance minister, told me
that corruption had reached Nigerian levels and that
the government is just a parasitic entity living on oil
revenues. It's not merely that a percentage of spending
disappears into official pockets: entire budgets
vanish. The US and Britain are trying to push Iyad
Allawi forward as a sort of super-minister in charge of
security. But while he was prime minister in 2004-5,
the whole $1.3 billion defence procurement budget
disappeared. Millions more were spent on a contract to
protect the vital Kirkuk-Baiji oil pipeline but the
money was embezzled. The few men hired to guard the
pipeline usually turned out to be the same men who were
blowing it up. Ali Allawi says the insurgency is
largely financed by oil smuggling, and 40 to 50 per
cent of the vast profits go to the resistance.

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly
unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq
suits many inside and outside the country and it will
still remain a name on the map. American power is
steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely
confined to their camps around Basra. A 'national
unity government' may be established but it will not be
national, will certainly be disunited and may govern
very little. 'The government could end up being a few
buildings in the Green Zone,' one minister said. The
army and police are already split along sectarian and
ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners
in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out
to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody
expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will
break up with or without an all-out civil war.

Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought
in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle
for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. 'The army
will disintegrate in the first moments of the
fighting,' a Kurdish leader told me. 'The soldiers
obey whatever orders they receive from their own
communities.' The parts of the country with a
homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish,
may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian
cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an
ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The
Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the
majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able
to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south
of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be
decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting
street by street.

Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq since
1978. The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in
Iraq will be published in October.

_______________________________________________________


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060404/5b73b4a0/attachment-0001.htm