Iraqs
New Constitution
By Ghali Hassan
19 August, 2005
Countercurrents.org
The US is pushing
the Iraqi government to agree on a draft constitution which
will divide the Iraqi people and weaken their nation. The new draft
constitution is based on the November 2003 US-crafted illegitimate interim
constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), produced from
the notes book of Paul Bremer, then the US Proconsul in Baghdad. Its
aim is the colonisation of Iraq and the wholesale privatisation of Iraqs
economy.
According to US-crafted
TAL signed in March 2004, the new draft has to be approved by parliament
by the 15 August and submit it to Iraqi voters for referendum on October
15. If the draft approved, it will pave the way for another general
election in December. If the referendum rejects the draft, the
National Assembly shall be dissolved. Elections for a new National Assembly
shall be held no later than 15 December 2005. The current Iraqi
government has no choice but to agree on the draft or dissolve
as the TAL requires it but, with few days extension the quislings
have no option, but to play it safe. Intense US pressure, orchestrated
by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and US colonial emissary in Baghdad,
Zalmay Khalilzad, and backed by more than 160,000 US troops and foreign
mercenaries, makes the draft and the timing an important part of the
US imperial agenda.
The Bush administration
needs this propaganda campaign to show the world that its policy remains
on course something positive out of Iraq and that democracy
is spreading. The constitutional process is nothing
more than a placebo for US voters
Bush must at least be able
to show some success on the political field, declares the German
daily, Die Tageszeitung.
Recently, Khalilzad
has warned the Iraqi government that the US occupation must
continue and the economy must be privatised and sold to US corporations.
The Washington Post reports that Khalilzad attempted to break the deadlock
by presenting a US-crafted draft of the Iraqi constitution. The
Americans say they don't intervene, but they have intervened deep,
Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the constitution committee told
the Washington Post (August 13, 2005). They gave us a detailed
proposal, almost a full version of a constitution. The U.S. officials
are more interested in the Iraqi constitution than the Iraqis themselves,
he added. There is no need to rewrite Iraqs Constitution. It was
one of the most secular and progressive constitution in the Muslim World.
It just doesnt serve US interests.
Meanwhile, the reality
on the ground, the Iraqi people are left in the dark about their new
constitution despite their overwhelming rejection of the Occupation.
Like the fraudulent and sectarian-based January 30 elections, the new
constitution will be sold to Iraqis unpacked. The US is doing everything
to show it is wining the propaganda. Ordinary Iraqis ask
you about security, about electricity, about water, about when the occupation
will end, when the murders will end, when the rapes will end,
reported Robert Fisk of The Independent in Baghdad.
The current government
the Kurds and the SCIRI-Daawa parties has no credibility
among the majority of the Iraqi people. It was appointed by the US occupation
and has since betrayed the Iraqi people by failing to keep its pre-elections
rhetoric and demand the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
This government is also failed to provide the minimal security
and most basic living conditions demanded by the Iraqi people. Its survival
very much depends on the presence of the occupying forces.
The Kurd warlords,
US faithful allies, hold more than 25 per cent of the assembly, and
their role and intransigent will affect more than 85 per cent of the
Iraqi population. The second group or slate is the SCIRI-Daawa
party, a collection of pro-Iran expatriates and Iranian Mullahs led
by the current Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaaferi and his
deputy Ahmed Chelabi. The pro-Iran segment of the government
and the Kurd warlords are seeking to protect their self-interests and
divide Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines by way of federalism,
a euphemism for a divided nation.
The idea was first
introduced in 1991 by the US-Britain illegal and criminal no-fly
zones bombings of Iraqi towns and villages, which partitioned
Iraq into three parts. It has gained momentum since the March 2003 invasion
and the installing of ethnically-based Interim Government. The sectarian
and ethnic demarcation lines were absent before the US-Britain genocidal
war against Iraq. Terms such as Shiite south, and Sunni centre
and the like of today, reflect only the determination of outside powers
to partition Iraq, wrote Muwaffaq Rifai, editor of Al-Manara daily
in Baghdad. Since its inception, the Iraqi state have never regard its
citizens in terms of their religion or ethnicity but rather in terms
of the degree of their loyalty to the state. It is true, there are demographic
concentrations of Iraqis, but Iraqis see themselves as one people.
Ignoring that all
Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, are Muslims with small Christian minority,
Western mainstream media concentrate on promoting sectarianism and the
partition of Iraq. It is important to recognise that before the war
all Iraqis have lived in harmony regardless of their religious affiliation.
There are one million Kurds living in Baghdad, the largest concentration
in Iraq. Do they feel threatened by other Iraqis? Absolutely not! Iraqis
increasingly define themselves by classifications that were not common
before [the invasion], Dr. Harith Hassan, a well-known Iraqi psychiatrist
told Reuters News. You may have a Shiite father and a Sunni mother,
and the children don't really know how they are defined, but they are
being forced to define themselves as one or the other, he added.
The new disease of sectarianism and fratricidal conflict is the product
of US Occupation and US policy against Iraq.
The Bremers
TAL allows any three of the 18 provinces the right to form an autonomous
region, and effectively gave the Kurds a veto over the new constitution
because the TAL states that it can only be amended by 75 per cent vote
in parliament. It should be remembered that the elections were boycotted
by more than half of the Iraqi eligible electorates, and the final result
was rigged by the US in favour of the Kurds and the Allawi slates. The
elections produced no government, but a political stalemate. The aim
is to keep the quislings fighting each others, while the wealth of the
nation is siphoned off by the US military and US private corporations.
While the Western
mainstream media are concentrating on the malevolent phantasy of the
role of Islam in the new constitution, the rights of Iraqi
women the most equal and progressive in the region prior to the
Occupation and the distribution of power between the quislings,
the economic aspects and the colonisation of Iraq remain deliberately
unmentioned.
The 100 orders enacted
by Paul Bremer to privatise and sell Iraqs economy and natural
resources, the main motive behind the US invasion and occupation of
Iraq, have not been mentioned. Antonia Juhasz of the Foreign Policy
in Focus rightly called it; the Bush economic invasion of Iraq.
The US is embarking on the wholesale privatisation and colonisation
of Iraqs economy. The most brutal of these 100 orders is Order
39 which essentially forced the sale of 200 Iraqi state-owned companies
would be privatised, and that foreign companies could have complete
control of Iraqi Banks, factories and mines. These companies could transfer
all their profits outside Iraq.
Order 81, for example,
is designed to destroy Iraqs agriculture sector and convert Iraq
into a consumer rather than producer of food to feed the Iraqi population
(see my Undermining Iraq's Food Security). Order 81 deprives Iraqi farmers
of their right to save and plant seeds, a right as old as 10,000 years.
While the Iraqi constitution prohibits the sale of biological resources,
Order 81 will simply take over Iraqi agriculture, and put it in the
hands of Monsanto and the like of US biotechnology corporations. The
Order is simply a threat to Iraqs food security. In addition,
the US is introducing a new national oil law to eliminate the nationalisation
of Iraqs oil a legitimate right of Iraqis and eventually
put it in the hands of US corporations.
Collectively, the
100 orders were a form of imperial armed robbery of Iraqs wealth.
The orders impose at the point of a gun neoliberal free-market
economy controlled by US private corporations. It should be borne in
mind that these orders were enacted by an occupying foreign army without
the consent of the population, and thus they are illegal and illegitimate.
The only way for the US to continue its colonisation of Iraq and the
theft of Iraqs wealth is by installing a pro-US government dependant
on US protection, and inclined to demand full independent.
We know now that
the pretext for the invasion was a blatant lie a lie that constitutes
one of the most serious distortions of the historical record in modern
times to commit a Supreme International Crime. Every
day since the US invasion, the most basic democratic and human rights
of the Iraqi people are being violated by US troops and foreign mercenaries.
Homes are broken into and people arrested, taken away, imprisoned and
tortured on suspicion of taking part in the legitimate Iraqi Resistance.
Streets and towns are cordoned off and roads are blocked. Whole areas
of the country are under curfew and off-limits. Legitimate strikes have
been declared illegal, press freedom was removed long time ago, a culture
of corruption unheard of in Iraq before the invasion has been introduced,
and demonstrations are regularly fired upon by trigger happy
US soldiers. Will the new Iraqi constitution has the power to prosecute
foreign troops who committed war crimes against Iraqis?
More than 100,000
innocent Iraqis have been killed; the great majority was women and children.
The estimate is very conservative. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women
and children are imprisoned and tortured daily by US forces. These criminal
practices have forced joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard
Myers to move forcefully to block in the US Federal Court
the release of new evidence of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib prison, arguing it would help recruit new Islamist
fighters and endanger American lives. Then why continue
committing these crimes against the Iraqi people? Isnt it safer
to stop practicing them?
US violence in Iraq
continues, Knight-Ridder reported, [r]esidents in [al-Tagiliah],
a village north of Baghdad, said two of their farmers and five others
from another ¬village were killed when US soldiers shot them while
they were watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes and cucumbers.
On 13 August 2005, Swiss News reported that U.S. troops opened
fire indiscriminately immediately after an explosion, shooting towards
people emerging from the mosque. The director of Ramadi General Hospital
said 15 people were killed, including eight children, and 17 wounded.
In total disregard
to civilisation and humanity, the entire nation of Iraq has been deliberately
destroyed. The nations cultural heritages have been looted and
destroyed, and the health care services and education system have been
destroyed. The country still has no reliable electricity supplies and
no clean drinking water. Iraqi living condition has worsened, and many
Iraqis admit openly that life before the occupation was much better
and safer.
The daily killings
of innocent Iraqi men, women and children by US soldiers are no news
for the BBC propaganda war machine and the like in the Anglo-American
coalition. Western media have deliberately dehumanised Iraqis in Western
consciousness, and thus it is now common knowledge in the West that
non-Western lives do not count. The aim is to normalise the atrocity
in the name of Western democracy and freedom.
How do Americans expect Iraqis to like them? This extreme brutality
used by the US to spread its imperial hegemony is not going to work.
The new US-crafted
constitution is imposed by armed foreign occupation 160,000 US
troops and foreign mercenaries. It is designed to keep Iraq a colonial
dictatorship ruled by US forces behind an Iraqi façade of quislings.
It will deny all Iraqis not only their democratic and human rights to
control their economic future, but also their national independent and
sovereignty. Therefore, Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation is
entirely rational and the only solution is a rapid withdrawal of US
troops and Iraqs return to full sovereignty, wrote Alain
Gresh, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique.
The American people
should be ashamed for having allowed their government to invade and
occupy a defenceless nation. It is more shameful, they are allowing
their government to commit daily war crimes in their name. Americans
cannot pretend to live in liberty, while they deny basic
liberty and freedom to other people. The only honourable act that will
lift Americans to their dignity is to demand from their government the
full and immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia.