This Is What Democracy Looks Like - report from Baghdad

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Saturday September 06, 2003 20:04 by Ewa Jasiewicz - Occupation Watch globalintifadas at yahoo dot co dot uk 001 914 360 2686

Very very delayed report on the inaugural meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council...

The Iraqi Assistance Centre, formerly the BaÂ’ath Conferences Palace,
gleams cool in the heart of Baghdad, 500 yards from its sister site of
political map-drawing, and back-breaking, the Republican Palace. The
Palace, a vast bus shuttle-divided complex, once home to the BaÂ’ath
ruling handful, the Special Republican Guard and the highest echelons of
the Mohabarat – secret national police - over 1500 of which are being
beckoned back into influence by their new paymaster the US Occupation
Administration – is now home to Occupation HQ. Dead Iraqi soldiers, from
this war, sleep under the earth of the banks of the Tigris. Four enormous
concrete Saddam heads, Caeaserite, all in an endless gaze, dwarf the
bullet-scarred landscape, omnipotent faces of an empire internalised by
millions, which divided and ruled, disciplined and punished and denied
all human potential in epic proportions. The 35-year era of SaddamÂ’s
reign stays carved into the consciousness of everybody here, like scars
in flesh, like nights spent chained. Ambassador Bremer, former head of
counter–terrorist operations in Central America, during the 1980s contra
wars, and onetime personal secretary to Nixon, has his office here. His
special republican (party) sanctioned guards, guard him; Special
Operations are planned here; Commando squads mob up here; fledgling
departments of strategy, policy, infrastructure, public order, management
and budget, aid and reconstruction, bureaucrotise here; sweltering
possees of soldiers quaff iced Pepsi here; Black Hawks and Apaches land
and take off here; soldier popped-up-top Humvees and reams of Bradleys -
the Chevy of tanks- big, chunky, cartoon-like and gas guzzling, stream in
and park here. And the cells still hold the local unruly.

Trying to get into the Iraqi Assistance Centre, formerly the BaÂ’ath
Conference Palace, a sleek, polished floored, cold-aired set of chambers,
is like passing into another country. Four borders must be crossed; an ID
must be shown at each of the four stages of entry. The preferred is a
passport, which rules out most of the Iraqi population as theirs are
invalid now and all contain the mandatory picture of the smiling
death-sated dictator himself. All pictures of Saddam are illegal now
under CPA de-BaÂ’athification regulations. Most Iraqis are stopped,
abrupt, at the first checkpoint and barked at to retreat; they need a
special letter, special permission, a press pass, or a white face with a
Western passport to smile them through. Metal detectors bleep over belt
buckles, twice over at two checkpoints, front and back, and bags are
turned through, twice. The Centre is ringed by concentric circles of
barbed wire; sand bag columns and sand-bag walls, build up the barriers;
soldiers languish at the checkpoints drinking tea-temperature water from
their backpacks, tell you ‘have a nice day’, sullenly.

Under the regime, the Conference Palace was home to elite discussions,
pan-Arab politico assemblies, skewed and changeless voting, sonorous
speeches from Party demagogues, paper-shuffling, account-tallying, and
life-steering decision-making, reaching high over the heads of the Iraqi
public, all in a days work. Nothing has changed.

The IAC, in name suggesting the dynamic of a Drop In Centre, is in fact
the nerve centre of the OccupationÂ’s civil society co-ordination and
media briefings – off limits to 99.9% of Iraqis. NGO workers converge
here, pick up their free mobile telephones, soldiers tap away emails to
their missed loved ones, co-ordination between NGOs – both new Iraqi and
foreign (numbering together over 200) and the army is arranged here, and
Administrator Bremer (re-fangled as Ambassador Bremer by the Governing
Council) and Grand Commander for the Coalition Forces General Sanchez
give regular press briefings. Evenings promise Iraqi poetry nights and
the odd traditional dancing show, in an effort to acquaint Occupation
Forces with Iraqi culture, something inconceivable given the dominant
image diet of Iraq as a desert, Iraq as nothing but hostile, moustached
uniform wearing authoritarians, Iraq as beggars and frail-boned children
fading to their graves in hospitals, Iraq as backward, Iraq as a squalid
dump full of ‘Ali Babas’ (soldier slang for 99% of all Iraqis they come
into contact with). Little know it as the home of the ‘garden of eden’ in
Babylon, the most sacred shrine for Shias, Imam AliÂ’s tomb in Najaf,
the birthplace of one of the first civilizations in the world, and
birthplace of the Arabic alphabet. Before the first Gulf War, Iraq was
on its way to being defined as a First World Country and had one of the
highest literacy rates in the middle east.

The inaugural performance of IraqÂ’s Governing Council on July 14 was, as
are regular press conferences, run like a military operation. The council
is a US handpicked Benettonised (i.e ‘all the colours in the world with
none of the conflictÂ’, For Sale) mixture of former BaÂ’ath, Assyrian
Christian, Sunni, Shia, Turkmen, Kurdish, and Communist representatives,
including Jalal Talabani (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) Massoud Barzani,
(Kurdistan Democratic Party), Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim (Supreme Council of the
Islamic Revolution), Ezzedine Salim (Daawa Islamic Party) and US propped
would-be pre-disobedience Saddams (i.e. ‘Our Guys’ in the Middle east)
Adnan Pachichi (former Foreign Minister) and Ahmad Chalabi. They all took
to the stage, their backdrop a massive flag of Iraq, divided into three
zones, rumoured to be potential zones of partition for future federalised
governance. Mohammad Bahr al-Ulloum, a Shia scholar and GC member opened
up the performance by congratulating and declaring the GC the
‘manifestation of the free will of Iraqi peoples’ and an ‘expression of
the Iraqi national willÂ’, defining the type of democratic process Iraqi
people can expect from the GC. No elections were held. No ordinary
Iraqis were consulted about the formation of the council. Also over half
of its members lived in exile throughout the toughest years of SaddamÂ’s
dictatorship. Al-Ulloum also introduced Iraqis to ‘Iraqi National
Liberation Day’ – April 11, the first date of total occupation. The
council members, amid standing ovations and applause, from many a plant
in the audience, sat down to respond to whichever questions were levelled
at them, from whichever direction, with formulaic, evenly prepared
no-conflict answers. Chalabi, preened by the Pentagon for this very day,
hailed and thanked in earnest, repeatedly, the efforts of ‘the brave
Coalition Force HeroesÂ’ who had liberated the country, to the cheers and
yelps of a female plant in the audience, screaming, ‘Aieesh Aieesh
Bush!!Â’ Long live Bush!!Â’ Taut, armed, checkered-shirted men, fled back
and forth, from one door to another, tracking invisible assassins, radios
crackling in their pockets, maybe veterans from the contra wars,
certainly veterans of killing, some in their 40s, gnarled faces, rugged
frames, their movements charged with a history of death as an aside,
death as a business, death for quotas, for fear-stirring, a strategy,
death was coursing through the room. Security groups flanked every door,
from paramilitary professionals to Italian Special Ops, a steely
surveillance in shades, chewing gum and scoping out, motionlessly, each
and every person walking by. The meeting, rehearsed and ceremonial in its
conduction, ran smooth under the gaze of Bremer and his cronies, suited
schoolboys in the front row, nodding and languishing in the perfect
complicity of it all, only to begin shirking down in their seats and
chuckling in shock/embarrassment when Caoimhe Butterly asked/uttered the
only truth a hallowed, guarded theatre of lies such as the GC may ever
hear collectively: ‘Why, after 13 years of genocidal sanctions and
American foreign policy which has steadily cheapened Iraqi blood to the
point that it has become expendable, is there the belief that the
sanctity of Iraqi lives, human rights or efforts towards genuine self
determination and sovereignty will be respected now anymore now than they
have been in the past?Â’. To which a female council member, one of three
and the only GC woman to speak at the conference, responded, flatly,
neutralizingly, by stating her own involvement in Iraqi human rights
issues for years and how she had every confidence that human rights would
be respected in the New Iraq, Now more than ever. The question burned a
blip in an otherwise entirely ready-made historical event TM., performed
for journalists, and consumed by everybody in Iraq in total alienation,
via TV screens, understood in technicolour, radiating out of The Iraqi
Media Network, the new and only, unless you have satellite, TV channel
and national source of information available to Iraq people. With its
offices located within the Presidential Palace (Occupation HQ) and its
content routinely monitored for any hint of potential incitement or
critique of Occupation force violations, behaviour or presence, the
channel re-produces the state television fake reality, fake
representations and fake communications people were subject to under the
regime.

The inauguration of the GC was a defining moment in History and America
created it. US artist Barbara Kruger has a picture, black and white,
showing just the legs and feet of a group of men, business men, men of
money, in shiny black shoes, stood in collaboration, in the process of
deal-making. The caption underneath their feet says: ‘You make history
when you do business.

The meaning of doing business, big business, perpetuating the profit
machine, on a global scale, means imposing the free market by any means
necessary, expressing the free will of the worlds elite money-makers to
incur and exploit, by any means necessary, war or occupation. YouÂ’re
either with it or against it, whether itÂ’s Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia or
West Papua, with it or against it, with them or against them, and either
choice leads to death, one more slower perhaps than the other, for the
majority poor on the planet and its ecology. For when the worlds only
superpower and its allies are in crisis, and the corpse machine needs new
capital, a new trade transfusion is a matter of emergency, national
profiles are re-written, installed dictators demolished, missiles fired,
new governments hired, contracts signed, and the curtains open and fresh
history is re-made.

The inauguration of the new Iraqi Governing Council was incredibly
violent; 35 years and 5 million murdered under Saddam; 23 coups and
insurrections in under 40 years; over 3,500 villages and hundreds of
individual homes razed; three wars, 8-years of fighting and 3million
heaped body bags with Iran; 88,000 tons of bombs dropped and 200,000
slaughtered in the 6 week first Gulf War; 13 years of infrastructure and
socially devastating sanctions leaving over a million dead from
preventable causes and Iraq ready for total economic and territorial
take-over; the war this time, over 7,000 civilians dead, and now the
domination of Iraq with over 160,000 occupation troops, military bases,
checkpoints, new prisons, new laws, new graves and skies patrolled with
black apaches. A history of turbulence and insurrection and fierce social
struggle, continuous social struggle, whether it was against the
dictatorship of the British, Saddam, the sanctions or the free market,
and the represented triumph over all of this, the culmination of it all
to now, the point, the dot at the end of a story of incredible suffering,
manipulation and resistance, was this silently, perfectly sculpted
ceremony, gagging and glossing over everything that brought it here in
fire. It was delivered with the same stoical satisfaction and hid the
same trail of mass violence, causal violence, and unrelenting bloodshed
as a smile from Saddam.