What Does Democracy
Really Mean
In The Middle East? Whatever
The West Decides
By Robert Fisk
21 August , 2005
The Independent
It
makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous,
oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents
and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the
traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within
50 metres.
In the weird, space-ship
isolation of Saddams old republican palace, the Kurds and the
Shia have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution
lest it fail to give them the federations - and the oil wealth - they
want. They miss their deadline - though I found no one in "real"
Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care.
And that evening,
I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the "courage"
of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised
would be met.
Courage? So its
courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people
by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which
is in anarchy. Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is
all part of the "road to democracy" in the Middle East.
I am back on the
streets again, this time at the an-Nahda bus station - nahda means renaissance
for those who want the full irony of such situations - and around me
is the wreckage of another bombing. Smashed police cars, burnt-out,
pulverised buses (passengers all on board, of course), women screaming
with fury, children taken to the al-Kindi hospital in bandages to be
met by another bomb.
And that night,
I flip on the television again and find the local US military commander
in the Sadr City district of Baghdad - close to the bus station - remarking
blithely that while local people had been very angry, they supported
the local "security" forces (ie the Americans) and were giving
them more help than ever and that we were - wait for it - "on the
path to democracy".
Sometimes I wonder
if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will
actually collide. When will the detonation come? When the insurgents
wipe out an entire US base? When they pour over the walls of the Green
Zone and turn it into the same trashed blocks as the rest of Baghdad?
Or will we then be told - as we have been in the past - that this just
shows the "desperation" of the insurgents, that these terrible
acts (the bus station bombing this week, for example) only prove that
the "terrorists" know they are losing?
In a traffic jam,
a boy walks past my car, trying to sell a magazine. Saddams face
- yet again - is on the cover. The ex-dictators seedy, bewhiskered
features are on the front pages, again and again, to remind the people
of Baghdad how fortunate they are to be rid of the dictator. Saddam
to go on trial next month, in two months time, before the end
of the year.
Six deadlines for
the ghastly old mans trial have come and gone - like so many other
deadlines in Iraq - but the people are still supposed to be fascinated
and appalled at Saddams picture. You may sweat at home in powerless
houses; you may have no fresh food because your freezer is hot; you
may have to queue for hours to buy petrol; you may have to suffer constant
death threats and armed robbery and your city may suffer 1,100 violent
deaths in July alone (all true) but, just to take your mind off things,
remember that Saddam is going on trial.
I have not met anyone
in Iraq - save for those who lost their loved ones to his thugs - who
cares any more about Saddam. He is yesterdays man, a thing of
the past. To conjure up this monster again is an insult to the people
of Baghdad - who have more fears, more anxieties and greater mourning
to endure than any offer of bread and circuses by the Americans can
assuage.
Yet in the outside
world - the further from Iraq, the more credible they sound - George
Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will repeat that we really have
got democracy on its feet in Iraq, that we overthrew the tyrant Saddam
and that a great future awaits the country and that new investments
are being planned at international conferences (held far away from Iraq,
of course) and that the next bombings in Europe, like the last ones,
will have nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with Iraq.
The show must go
on and I know, when I return to Beirut or fly to Europe, Iraq will not
look so bad. The Mad Hatter will look quite sane and the Cheshire Cat
will smile at me from the tree.
Democracy, democracy,
democracy. Take Egypt. President Mubarak allows opponents in the forthcoming
elections. Bush holds this up as another sign of democracy in the Middle
East. But Mubaraks opponents have to be approved by his own party
members in parliament, and the Muslim Brotherhood - which ought to be
the largest party in the country - is still officially illegal. Sitting
in Baghdad, I watched Mubaraks first party rally, a mawkish affair
in which he actually asked for support. So who will win this "democratic"
election? Ill take a risk: our old pal Mubarak. And Ill
bet he gets more than 80 per cent of the votes. Watch this space.
And of course, from
my little Baghdad eyrie Ive been watching the eviction of Israelis
from their illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word
"illegal" doesnt pop up on the BBC, of course; nor the
notion that the settlers - for which read colonisers - were not being
evicted from their land but from land they originally took from others.
Nor is much attention paid to the continued building in the equally
illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will - inevitably
- make a "viable" (Lord Blairs favourite word) Palestine
impossible.
In Gaza, everyone
waited for Israeli settler and Israeli soldier to open fire on each
other. But when a settler did open fire, he did so to murder four Palestinian
workers on the West Bank. The story passed through the television coverage
like a brief, dark, embarrassing cloud and was forgotten. Settlements
dismantled. Evacuation from Gaza. Peace in our time.
But in Baghdad,
the Iraqis I talk to are not convinced. It is to their eternal credit
that those who live in the hell of Iraq still care about the Palestinians,
still understand what is really happening in the Middle East, are not
fooled by the nonsense peddled by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara. "What is this evil ideology that Blair keeps
talking about?" an Iraqi friend asked me this week. "What
will be your next invention? When will you wake up?"
I couldnt
put it better myself.