Dozens of Red Crescent Workers Kidnapped
The horror show in Iraq continued on Sunday, when men dressed as special police commandos invaded the offices of the Red Crescent Society [which is allied with the Red Cross] in Karrada in central Baghdad and kidnapped "dozens" (the local Adhamiyah police say they don't know how many) of employees. The kidnappers invaded the building, says al-Zaman, and separated the men from the women, then took all the men captive, including employees, guards, and visitors who happened to be in the lobby.
Al-Zaman said in Arabic that "militias belonging to religious parties yesterday" attacked "a number of Baghdad districts and buildings of civil society organizations in the center of the capital under the eyes of the police, which did not stir to stop them." One group of commandos attacked the Dental School of Baghdad University. Others conducted operations in Adhamiyah, which actually have been going on since the day before yesterday. A militia invasion of the largely Sunni Arab district of West Baghdad was beaten off by inhabitants. On Sunday, a member of the district council of Adhamiyah was killed and 3 others were kidnapped.
Reuters reports other violence, including the killing of two Sunni clerics in Iskandariyah.
Hannah Allam on the Sadr movement and the social services it provides in a country beset by poverty, unemployment and insecurity.
Colin Powell thinks Iraq is in a civil war and that victory for the US is unattainable.
PS I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.
See Brian Uhlrich's comments on this, linking to Issandr El Amrani re the New York Times op-ed by Lee Smith. Contrast to this better overview in NYT recently.
I remember a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown observed Lucy filling Schroeder's head with a bunch of nonsense. He observed that it would take the poor guy 12 years just to unlearn all the silly things Lucy had taught him. It is the same with Americans and the Neocons on the Middle East.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/18/2006 06:17:00 AM
Click to join Infoco
7 Comments:
Isn't more likely the source of Sunni/Shiite conflict in Iraq arises from the nearly 40 years of minority (20%) Baath domination and persecution of the majority (60%) Shiite population? Isn't this demographic unique to Iraq?
Such an imbalance surely had to give way sometime, as it did in South Africa where the ratio of white to black was similar. Such an overwhelming majority can only be kept subject by means of a police state and sustained intimidation to which the majority will rebel, leading to further repression etc etc.
While it can be argued that the Americans created the present situation by removing the Baath regime and then instituting majority rule, the fact remains that the Baath and (Sunni) AlQ insurgency has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Shiites since the fall of Saddam.
Surely the Iraqi Shiite point of view must be that the Baathists - and by extension Sunnis - are fighting to get their power back using the customary means and are therefore acting true to form?
Thank you for your PS! This has been driving me batty for ages, in part because it's usually cloaked in racist attitudes from both sides of the aisle against the allegedly irrational hatreds found in the Middle East and partly because it leads to ridiculous analysis and a fundamental misunderstanding of dynamics in the region. Peter Sluglett recently pointed out that in the early local elections, people often voted across sectarian boundaries. In her account of her ordeal, Jill Carroll also noted that sectarian violence didn't become the main issue until the Askariyya Shrine was attacked.
Do you remember Lee Smith's NY Times piece from May 2005 claiming that for 1400 years Shi'ites have held a position in the Muslim world similar to African-Americans before the Civil War?
Actually a good example is discussion of Syria, where a popular idea on the right says the Assad regime is weak because he is an Alawite in a mostly Sunni country. This also allegedly explains the Syrian alliance with Iran, though I doubt Khomeini was big on Alawites.
Another blogger Abu Khaleel at iraquna.blogspot.com and an Iraqi Sunni himself believes that the US-installed electoral system did a lot to increase sectarian tension.
His suggestion was that a 275 member parliament have 275 electoral districts, so that for example, it would be clear that the Kurdish voters would get a Kurdish representative, but would that representative be a nationalist, a secularist, western-oriented, etc. In other words the contests could have been over issues instead of primary sectarian loyalties. Instead the election was a nation-wide show of strength where Kurds in safe Kurdish districts competed against Shiites in safe Shiite districts over the relative power of their sects.
Of course, while that could have lead to less sectarian tension, it would not have resulted in victory for the US because the votes just are not there for a democratic Iraq to orient itself towards the United States and Israel against Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.
While we cannot go back in time, it is a good point that the United States should take more of the blame for Iraq's civil war than it is.
Barbara has a point, though it's a little off. Sectarianism arose not with the Baath but with 1990 and the sectarianism (and tribalism) used by Hussein in a desperate attempt to hold on to personal power. And even then there were plenty Shi'i in the government - all they had to do was agree with Hussein. As for sectarianism, we did it alright, by disbanding the army. That left us with only the hard-core SCIRI etc. Shi'i Right to use. It all goes back to the Bremmer days.
Support Juan's call to get rid of Abrams!
As I understand it open persecution by the Sunni Baath regime of the (mainly religious active) Shiites started much earlier - in the late 1970s, about 30 years ago, and only culminated in the 1990s when the Shiites were finally brought to submission after the Gulf War. The HRO report of the repression of the uprising makes harrowing reading.
As consequence, surely the US would have been facing an insurgency backed by 80% of the poulation had they not disbanded an army which had been experienced as an instrument of Baath oppression by the Shiites and the Kurds?
In any case the Shiites would say the Baath made their intentions plain as far back as August 2004 when it bombed the Najaf mosque as the third prong of its declaration of war, the others being the Jordanian embassy and the UN compound. Najaf was a clear, sectarian, Shiites-will-not-rule blast but many commentators and media missed the significance at the time.
The bombing killed an eminent Shiite Ayatollah who was also the brother of the present SCIRI VP and prime ministerial hopeful. I think he was the surviving Akim's 8th or 9th brother to be murdered by the Baathists over many years. A powerful message?
So it could be said the civil war began at that moment and not, as many would have it, in February of this year?
Keeping in mind this context the Shiites self interestedly supported democratic elections under US "protection" because their overwhelming demographic would guarantee they would always be the major party in government (and in control of security forces) as long as they stayed united. Sistani understood this very well.
The Kurds and Shiites also supported the PR electoral system because it ensured that no minority could ever tyrannise them again as long as the constitution was in place. Interestingly, the post Afrikaaner South African govt had many years earlier adopted virtually the same PR party list system, probably for the same reasons.
Suggestions the Iraqi electoral system should have been based on "districts" simply in order to give the Sunnis (by extension the Baath)privileged representation beyond their numbers would be answered by the Kurds/Shiites: Why?
Great PS, and your Peanuts joke is also great. Just one tiny emendation: it was Linus, Lucy's younger brother, whose head she filled with nonsense. Schroeder was the piano-playing object of her unrequited love. He didn't take anything she said seriously.
I admit, it's a lesser arena for exercising the will to truth but still :o)
Post a Comment
<< Home