To
Margaret Hassan, It Matters
By Beena Sarwar
24 October,2004
Personal Political
"They
just don't get it!" The thought jumps out as one follows the Great
Presidential Debate in the USA, with John Kerry, George Bush and their
respective supporters going on and on about the "war on terror".
None of them seem to understand that not only is this a war that is
un-winnable by force alone, but their involvement in it is actually
contributing to the spiralling of violence around the world.
Brute force and
superior military power may topple regimes, as in Afghanistan and Iraq,
but unless accompanied by political initiatives, they cannot win wars.
President Bush has the gall to claim that "freedom is on the march
in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere," apparently oblivious to
ground realities. Both Afghanistan and Iraq today are more unsafe places
than ever before, suffering from thousands of civilian casualties, destroyed
infrastructure and no law and order to speak of. This has consequences
not only for the USA but for the rest of the world. Around the world,
there is an unmistakable link between the state's use of force and the
rise of 'private' violence, with law and order breakdowns and political
vacuums only worsening the situation.
If there is freedom
in Iraq, it appears to be in the hands of insurgents and criminal gangs,
engaged in what has been described as one of Iraq's "fastest-growing
enterprises": the kidnappings-for-ransom that are plaguing ordinary
citizens, although it is only 'news' when a foreigner is kidnapped.
This situation is a direct result of the US-led invasion because, as
a Reuters report notes, "American forces completely destroyed Iraq's
domestic security" ("Kidnappings-for-Ransom Fear Grips Iraq",
July
31, 2004). And the person responsible for this breakdown is G.W. Bush,
the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces, who took the decision
to send them there.
Over 140 foreign
workers have been kidnapped (including the 40 or so male hostages killed,
including Nepalis and Pakistanis) since the spate of abductions began
in April 2003. So far, few foreign women have been abducted - the most
prominent foreign worker to be kidnapped in Iraq so far, Margaret Hassan
brings their number to eight. The abducted women have until now been
freed unharmed, although there are rumours of huge amounts of ransom
money having been paid for their release. Still, this does allow some
hope for the Dublin-born 59-year old Mrs Hassan.
Mrs Hassan, who
has British, Irish and Iraqi nationality, has been living and working
in Iraq for the last 30 years, most recently as the head of the global
poverty relief organization Care. She was fiercely opposed to the US-imposed
sanctions on Iraq -- which made her work there even more crucial. She
went about her work relatively freely while the Evil Dictator Saddam
ran the country. Today, she is pleading for her life in a televised
video tape, at the mercy of her unknown captors.
Her Iraqi husband,
Tahseen Ali Hassan, a retired airline engineer who studied in Britain,
appealed to her abductors on Al-Arabiya satellite television: "I
would like to tell the kidnappers that we are in the holy month of Ramadan
and my wife has been helping Iraq for 30 years and loved this country,"
he said, stressing that his wife "had nothing to do with politics".
The kidnappers in
Iraq don't seem to care about the politics of their victims. Margaret
Hassan had been a friend of the Iraqis for long before the invasion,
as The Independent's Robert Fisk outlines in 'Kidnapped: The heroine
who offered hope for Iraq' (http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles433.htm).
Although Mrs Hassan's
kidnappers have made no demand yet, her situation is made more precarious
by the British government's acceptance of the US request to re-deploy
Black Watch, the British troops stationed in the south of Iraq to the
more combative north, in order to free up American soldiers for an all-out
second attack on Fallujah. There is already fierce opposition to this
in Britain, including by Robin Cook, who resigned as Foreign Secretary
in protest against Britain's involvement in what he, along with millions
of protestors around the world, saw as an unjustified invasion.
Mr Cook now notes
that a "large part of the problem is not that the US does not have
enough
troops but that it does not have any troops trained in peacekeeping.
They have brought their military culture of overwhelming force to Iraq
and have met any resistance with escalation." Their "heavy-handed
military tactics", he says, are actually provoking most of the
current resentment against the occupation. ('Deeper into the Iraqi quagmire',
The Guardian, Oct 22, 2004).
This is a simple
point, that that the American leadership seems incapable of appreciating,
either in terms of insurgency in Iraq, or elsewhere. The rising anti-U.S.
sentiment around the world is fuelled by US high-handedness; if allowed
to continue unchecked, it will only lead to more 'terrorism' and make
Westerners in general more unsafe. Yet, commenting on this sentiment,
high-ranking US national security officials, like one quoted recently,
still make vacuous statements like: "I don't think it matters.
It's about keeping the country safe, and I don't think that matters."
('Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide', The Washington Post, Oct 22,
2004).
For Margaret Hassan
and the dozens of others suffering at the hands of their kidnappers,
and for their families, it matters.