Informed Comment

Tsunami toll rises above 125,000

On very early Friday morning, Reuters was reporting that the death toll in Sunday’s tsunami had now climbed to 125,000.

I have a feeling that it will mount yet higher. Some are saying that the toll in Indonesia alone may be 80,000 or more. As relief workers reach some coastal and island areas, they are finding nobody at all, with entire villages gone in places like Aceh. Just gone.

Banda Aceh in Indonesia, which had recently seen some improvement in the security situation after a long separatist insurrection, has been devastated.

I put a courtesy advertisement on the right for Oxfam’s relief effort and blogads has put up a courtesy ad for UNICEF’s effors. On this last day of 2004, let me just ask that anyone who has been grateful for Informed Comment during the past year take a moment to donate to Oxfam’s tsunami aid project, or to UNICEF or to one of your choice. The death toll is incredible, but the needs of the living are unimaginable.

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Death and Death Threats in Iraq

Some 15 Iraqis were killed in various violent incidents on Thursday, and two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped.

Dawn reports:

“Three border policemen were gunned down in Baquba, north of Baghdad, while on leave, and the son of local police chief was kidnapped. In the capital, an Iraqi army officer was killed while strolling in the street. Four civilians were killed in an ambush at Shorgat, north of the capital, while further north two civilians were killed and four hurt when a bomb exploded near their car as it followed a national guard convoy. Two more Iraqis died and four were wounded when they tried to break through a national guard roadblock in Syniya, a woman was killed and three people wounded by a roadside bomb on the road between Baghdad and Balad and, in Samarra, a national guard was died and four others were wounded in an ambush.”

Ansar al-Sunna and 2 other guerrilla groups in Iraq have threatened to kill anyone participating in what they termed “the farce” of Iraqi elections.

CNN is reporting that all 700 voter registration workers in Mosul have resigned after death threats. The guerrillas are alleging that the secular process of American-sponsored elections will result in un-Islamic laws. I don’t see how Mosul can participate in the election under these conditions. It has a population of about a million.

The fighting in Mosul that began Wednesday resulted in the death of one US soldier and 25 guerrillas, after guerrillas blew up a truck bomb near a US facility in a coordinated attack.

Radio Sawa Iraq did an interview with Iyad Allawi on Monday in which the dispute between Allawi and Iraqi Vice-President Ibrahim Jaafari over Syria was highlighted. Allawi has accused Syria of harboring Baath guerrillas and allowing infiltration of Iraq. Jaafari has expressed extreme skepticism about these charges. The dispute between the two is in part ideological. Jaafari is a leader of the al-Dawa Party, which has good relations with Iran, which is in turn allied with Syria. Allawi is an essentially American appointee with longstanding ties to the CIA.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Adnan Pachachi, head of the Independent Democratic Bloc, called again on Thursday for a postponement of the January 30 elections. He, Ghazi al-Yawar and Nasir Chadirchi are among the few Sunni Arab politicians with name recognition still in the race.

Candidate name recognition doesn’t appear very important, however. For security reasons, the actual names of most candidates on the 78 party or multiparty lists have so far not been released. This odd situation, in which the candidates are not known amonth before the election, attests to how dire the political and security situation in Iraq really is.

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Pipes Favors Concentration Camps

That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn’t a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.

Pipes’s little project requires him to attempt to justify the internment of American citizens (of Japanese ancestry) during World War II, a violation on several grounds of the Bill of Rights. I hope Asian-Americans realize that a key wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Neoconservatives, wishes them ill.

If the American yahoos ever start putting people in concentration camps, I think we may be assured that they won’t stop with the Muslims or the Asians, and Mr. Pipes will come to have reason to regret his imprudence and, frankly, his demonic implication.

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Platform of the United Iraqi Alliance

The Iraqi newspaper “al-Adalah” published on Dec. 23 the platform of the United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly Shiite coalition sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It was translated by BBC World Monitoring. Since this party very likely will dominate parliament, it is worth looking at the platform.

First, the coalition includes the following parties:

1. Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution in Iraq SAIRI [Or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI]

2. Islamic Al-Da’wah Party.

3. Centrist Grouping Party.

4. Badr Organization.

5. Islamic Al-Da’wah Party/Iraq’s Organization.

6. Justice and Equality Grouping.

7. Iraqi National Congress INC .

8. Islamic Virtue Party.

9. First Democratic National Party.

10. Islamic Union of Iraqi Turcomans.

11. Turcoman Al-Wafa Party.

12. Islamic [Faili] Grouping in Iraq [Shiite Kurds].

13. Islamic Action Organization.

14. Future Iraq Grouping.

15. Hizbullah Movement in Iraq.

16. Islamic Master of Martyrs Movement.

As to the platform itself, it has two parts, basic principles and vision of Iraq’s polity, and then specific areas of endeavor. As for basic principles:

First, the Iraq that we want:

1. A united Iraq – land and people – with full national sovereignty.

2. A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.

3. A constitutional, pluralistic, democratic and federally united Iraq.

4. Iraq that respects the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people. The state religion is Islam.

5. Iraq that respects human rights, that does not discriminate on the grounds of sects, religions, or ethnicities, and that preserves the rights of religious and ethnic minorities and protects them against persecution and marginalization.

6. Iraq that provides a climate of peaceful coexistence among Iraqis without preferential treatment for any group.

7. Iraq in which the judiciary is independent and in which justice and equality prevail.

I’m not sure most Americans realize that the biggest and most important party coalition in Iraq, which will almost certainly form the next government, has explicitly stated in its platform that it wants a specific timetable announced for withdrawal of US troops from the country.

The rest of the statement promises security, fighting terrorism, a depoliticized military; a state guarantee of a job to every Iraqi, social security and workmen’s compensation, state support for the building of houses for homeowners; providing health services and medicine and health insurance; supporting women’s participation in politics, the economy and social life; support for youth and for families; developing industry and agriculture and the provision of basic services; education; etc.

An independent foreign policy is promised, as is membership in the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. [This plank implies non-recognition of Israel until there is a global peace settlement accepted by these two organizations).

I think we are looking at the policies of the new Iraq. They aren’t what Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz imagined.

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Christian-Muslim Violence in Egypt

In upper Egypt, a Muslim young man is dead after clashes between Muslims and Christians in a village in Minya province. There are said to be 20,000 Muslims and 500 Coptic Christians in Dimsha Hashim, and the Christians have to travel a couple of miles to the nearest church. Apparently one of the Copts had a plan to turn a private house into a church, provoking the protest by a gang of young Muslim men.

Egypt still has on its books an Ottoman-era law restricting church building to Christian-majority areas and requiring government permission, and generally Copts face a certain amount of discrimination in Egyptian society, though in general their right to life, property and worship is recognized.

Note that restrictions on the building of religious edifices by minorities are common in Eurasia. Muslims in Greece, e.g., need special permission to build mosques, and the plan to build one in Athens has been controversial. Even in the United States, Muslim communities have often faced difficulties in getting permission to build mosques or cemeteries from local municipal or county authorities.

Although about 6% of Egypt’s 70 million inhabitants are Coptic Christians, they live disproportionately in the south of the country, called Upper Egypt, and in some places in that region they form substantial populations and are economically and politically powerful. Christian-Muslim conflict is common there, and is intertwined with clan feuds.

The combination of Christian-Muslim conflict and a tradition of clan feuding has also contributed to particular success for radical Muslim groups in recruiting students in Upper Egypt to al-Jihad al-Islami, the organization that later joined with Bin Laden to form al-Qaeda. The jihadis have targeted Coptic Christians, but the government has generally intervened against the radical Muslim fundamentalists.

The Coptic Christian church goes back to the early centuries of the Common Era and is often recognized as “indigenous” in Egyptian nationalism, since the Copts are felt to be the descendants of Pharaonic Egyptians who converted to Christianity, and so are contrasted with the “Arabs.” (In reality, of course, all Egyptians are a mixture of Nile Valley, African, Arab and other groups). Copts have a special place in the mythology of Egyptian secular nationalism, therefore. But for Muslim fundamentalists they are problematic and often suspected (wrongly) of being stalking horses for Western imperialism (in fact Copts played a key role in anti-British agitations that led to Egypt’s independence of London in 1922).

Egyptians are considering the possibility of constitutional and political change as the Mubarak era begins to draw to a close. On Thursday the left-leaning Tagammu Party called for an end to the government’s emergency decrees, a sort of martial law that suspended key elements of the Egyptian constitution, on the grounds that they were blocking economic and social development (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat). Among the needed changes, Egypt needs to reform its laws to grant complete freedom of religion and to stop discrimination against minorities.

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