It
was a precisely choreographed media event, but that, perhaps,
does not matter if behind the manipulation of information comes
something better for Iraq and the Iraqis.
It’s
a bit easier to argue that the manipulations of information,
which formed the basis of the US and UK drive for war, are
excusable if something better followed: the fundamental point of
democracy is government of the people by the people, and a
government which lies to the people to obtain their consent
cannot be said to rule by the will of the people. Still I think
I would be prepared to forgive a lot if it eased the suffering
that Iraqis have gone through in recent years.
Jawdat
joined the Free Iraq Force which came in with Chalabi and the US
military after years of fighting the government both politically
and militarily - jail, torture and exile. He was a leader of the
1991 uprising in Hilla. After it (the 1991 uprising) was crushed
by Saddam with US assistance, he fled to the apparently
protected Kurdish north of Iraq, where he carried on his work
with the Iraqi opposition.
The
1996 uprising in the north began with a successful attack on the
Republican Guard in the city of Kirkuk, but the US forces who
were supposed to be protecting the Kurdish zone failed to
deliver the air cover they had promised to provide, allowing the
Iraqi government to counter-attack, surround and seize the
Kurdish city of Arbil. Two hundred resistance fighters were
killed and Jawdat spent the next 20 months in jail, tortured
regularly for the first six.
Despite
the double betrayal by the US, Jawdat volunteered for the Free
Iraq Force believing that, when it was their own campaign,
rather than a supporting role in someone else’s, the US
military would carry through its plans. It was not widely known
that the US and UK were regularly bombing within the
No-Fly-Zones, much less that Turkish and Iranian troops were
able to enter and attack Kurdish refugees from their respective
countries within the “Safe Zone,” and that part of that zone
was retaken by the Iraqi government while under international
protection.
After
the fall of Saddam and his statue, Jawdat says, about 90% of his
optimism was fulfilled. Now it’s about 30% as his National
Independent Party (NIP) and the Iraq Democratic Conference - of
which the NIP and 191 other parties are members -continue to be
ignored by Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Inevitably, given the high percentage of opposition activists
who were jailed by Saddam, a lot of the parties are led by
former political prisoners.
“Some
members of the Governing Council left Iraq 40 years ago. They
haven’t suffered with us. They are not eligible.”
The
manipulation of information continues, according to Jawdat, with
Governing Council members paying “under the table” for
favorable reporting in the media and passing on misinformation
to Bremer, who bases his decisions on their falsehoods. US
troops also act on unverified misinformation conducting house
raids, sometimes fatally, on maliciously given but well-paid tip
offs. “This is bad for democracy,” he says.
Democracy,
though, is the buzzword. When the US started losing more and
more soldiers and decided to revert to the June 30th power
handover date they also changed their funding policy to
prioritize those with “democratization” in the title. One
woman explained that if, at that point, you couldn’t rewrite
your project remit to include that word, then your funding was
cut.
Democratization
means teaching people about voting. The women’s centers opened
by the CPA exist to teach women about voting and to lobby for
40% representation of women on the Governing Council. The
women’s human rights center in Diwaniya was opened via
satellite by Condoleezza Rice, trumpeting the new freedoms while
women were unable to plant their winter crops because of the
unexploded cluster bombs still cluttering their fields.
Only
fifteen out of thousands of judges appointed by the CPA were
women; one had her appointment suspended by the CPA when male
lawyers disrupted the swearing in ceremony in protest at the
promotion of women to the judiciary. Only three women and
several clerics committed to denial of women’s rights were
appointed to the Governing Council.
In
addition to the denial of political and civil rights to
participate in high-level public life, women are having to deal
with a doubling of acute malnutrition, now at 8%, in the year
since the war, as well as poorer sewage treatment, hospital
conditions, water purity, employment rates and personal
security.
In
Nasariya, Samawa and Basra, it is rare to see a woman with her
head uncovered because of treats and attacks against those whose
hair is visible. In Samawa women have even been threatened for
wearing a hijab in any color other than black. Women and girls
have disappeared into their homes, to the detriment of the
youngsters’ physical and intellectual development. The lack of
physical activity impairs spatial awareness and co-ordination
and, in turn, the ability to write and to arrange objects in a
room.
Maha,
a young woman working in a youth center in Thi Qar province,
explained that only three girls use the center, compared with
over a hundred boys, and only for the sewing room because their
parents want them to learn a skill. For a couple of weeks before
the circus
arrived she visited the schools and talked to the families,
persuading them to let their daughters come to the show. Dozens,
surprisingly, were allowed; and afterwards Maha said it was the
first time she’d seen those girls smile since the war.
This
was the war to free women from the tyranny of Saddam and in a
year Maha hadn’t seen them smile. This was the war to free the
writers and artists from the censorship of the old regime and
the requirement to praise Saddam, yet the women students in the
fine art college are being prevented by violence from performing
theater and music and from making art other than Islamic art;
and women students in some of the colleges have been threatened
with suspension unless they wear a veil.
Even
without a direct threat, the collective one is tangible and
women are afraid to walk on the streets. My friend A. faces
resistance from her family every time she leaves her house, has
to lie about where she’s going, even though she’s 29, the
same as I am, because they’re scared for her. “But I have to
do it, I have to go out, otherwise I am dead.” Ask any woman
what she wants for the future of Iraq and there is one word:
security.
And
this is the point: the continuing trend for the free women of
Iraq - from the dramatic scenes of April 9th and Jawdat’s
return to Baghdad until today - is to be hidden under black
cloth, afraid to leave their homes, denied a full political role
- with the complicity of the Coalition Authorities. Moqtada
Al-Sadr’s newspaper was shut down after he threatened the
Americans, not when he threatened the Organization for Women’s
Freedom and other women’s groups, not when he threatened the
Workers’ Party and other labor organizations.
This
is the point: it is all about appearances. What counts is not
substance, but a favorable report in the US press. So when
Condoleezza opened the women’s center, it was irrelevant that
women were too scared to travel to it. A few - a very few -
high-level appointments are what counts.
Of
course none of this is - or should be - a surprise. So often
repeated, it has become a cliché to say that the first casualty
of war is truth or that, in a time of universal deceit, telling
the truth is a revolutionary act. But if the pre-war argument
had to be made regardless of truth, so must that which followed.
And
this is our challenge. As Jawdat said, manipulation of the media
is bad for democracy. Manipulation of the media allows the ones
with power to get away with abusing it, be it Saddam controlling
his domestic media and never exposed in the foreign press as
long as he was in favor of our policies, with the US, UK and
other international allies, or Bush and Blair and their pals
exaggerating the “evidence,” bullying the media outlets and
hiding behind the skirts of acquiescent news corporations.
There
are things we can do. We can stop giving money to the worst of
the corporate media - Fox “News,” CNN and so on. We can look
for and pass on more direct information, the human rights
reports of our own countries’ allies, for example, those which
our countries sell weapons to. We can look to alternative
sources for information: the internet is full of them.
Most
important, though, we can work on human rights, on solidarity
with people suffering long, before it ever comes to the stage
where the warmongers are able to throw the question back at us
- how else could we have got rid of the dictator who we’d
installed and maintained? We can work on alternative means of
resolving the situation now, so that when the next question
comes up, we already know the answer.
My
friend Layla said today, of the chaos unravelling around the
country at the moment, of the suppression of women’s rights on
all sides, “This is what we knew would happen if they deposed
Saddam in this way.”
Jo
Wilding is an Iraq-based
British human rights campaigner, writer and trainee lawyer from
Bristol, UK. 29-year old Wilding first came to Iraq in August
2001 with Voices in the Wilderness. Then she returned to Iraq as
an independent observer in February 2003 and stayed for the
month before the war and the first 11 days of the bombing as a
human shield, before being expelled by the Iraqi foreign
ministry as part of a purge of independent foreigners.
Currently
inside Iraq, Wilding is taking part in Circus 2 Iraq, “a small
group of circus performers - fools, clowns, jugglers, stilt
walkers and magicians - set up to… perform and give circus
skills workshops to children [in Iraq] traumatized by sanctions,
war and its aftermath.”
Her
writings about Iraq and ordinary Iraqis were published in the Guardian,
the New Zealand Herald, Counterpunch,
Australian radio, and in Japan, Korea and Pakistan .
Click
here
to visit Wilding’s website.
