Patriots And
Invaders
By Sami Ramadani
The Guardian
28 September, 2003
It
was my first and brutally abrupt realisation that Baghdad, the city
of my childhood, is now occupied territory. It was also my first encounter
with a potent symbol of Iraqi hostility to the occupation forces. Sitting
in the front seat of the taxi that brought us from Amman, I suddenly
realised that a heavy machine gun was pointing at us from only a few
metres away. It was an American soldier aboard an armoured vehicle in
front of us, stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Baghdad. He
gestured disapprovingly towards our driver for approaching with some
speed, then looked to his left and angrily stuck out a middle finger.
I followed his gaze and there was a child of no more than eight or nine
sitting in a chair in front of the open gates leading to the garden
of his house. He was shouting angrily, with a clenched fist of defiance,
cutting the air with swift and furious right hooks.
Two weeks later,
and after talking to scores of people and touring much of Baghdad, it
dawned on me that that child's rebellious, free spirit was a moving
and powerful symbol of how most people in Baghdad felt towards the occupation
forces. It is precisely this indomitable spirit which survived the decades
of Saddam's brutal regime, the numerous wars and the murderous 13 years
of sanctions. And it is precisely this spirit that Bush and Blair did
not take on board when they decided to invade and occupy Iraq. They
chose instead to listen to the echo of their own voices bouncing back
at them from some of the Iraqi opposition groups, nurtured, financed
and trained by the Pentagon and the CIA. Some of these Iraqi voices
are now members of the US-appointed Iraqi governing council.
A recent report
in the Washington Post backs up the rumours I heard in Baghdad that
the Iraqi resistance to occupation is so strong that the authorities
are now actively recruiting some of the brutal officers of the security
and armed forces that Saddam himself used to suppress the people. If
true, the US administration, in the name of fighting the so-called remnants
of Saddam's regime, is now busy trying to rebuild the shattered edifice
of Saddam's tyrannical state - a tyranny which they had backed and armed
with WMD for many years. One of the popular sayings I repeatedly heard
in Baghdad, describing the relations between the US and Saddam's regime,
is "Rah el sani', ija el ussta" - "gone is the apprentice,
in comes the master."
The governing council
is not so much hated as ridiculed, and attacked for having its members
chosen along sectarian lines. Most of the people I talked to think that
it is a powerless body: it has no army, no police, and no national budget,
but boasts nine rotating presidents. One of the jokes circulating in
Baghdad was that no sooner had you brought down Saddam's picture than
you were being asked to pin up nine new ones.
Support for the
council is largely confined to some activists of the organisations that
belong to it. Indeed, it could be argued that most supporters of the
more credible organisations belonging to the council are opposed to
membership of the US-appointed body. The leaders of the Supreme Council
of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), for example, are finding
it increasingly hard to convince these supporters that cooperation with
the invaders is still a possible route to independence and democracy.
The same goes for another smaller but equally credible party, the Islamic
Da'wa, which experienced a split and serious haemorrhaging of membership
following its decision to join the council.
The now small organisation
that enjoyed majority support in Iraq in the late 50s, the Iraqi Communist
party (ICP), was opposed to the invasion and the council, but decided
to join it at the eleventh hour. Most of its supporters opposed the
move. One, a poor truck driver, described it as being even worse than
the 1972 ICP leadership decision to join Saddam's government. That policy
collapsed in a pool of blood when Saddam turned on the party's members,
killing, jailing and forcing into exile thousands of them. The truck
driver described the council as "the devil's lump of iron":
a saying which refers to the superstitious practice of keeping a small
piece of metal in the house to ward off the devil.
The gulf between
popular sentiment and membership of the council was clear after the
murder of the leader of Sciri, Ayatolla Mohammed Baqir Al Hakim. The
slogans chanted by the hundreds of thousands who marched in the three-day
funeral processions in Baghdad and Najaf - "Death to America, Death
to Saddam" and "There is no god but Allah; America is the
enemy of Allah; Saddam is the enemy of Allah" - were very much
in tune with what I witnessed in Baghdad. They revealed the strength
of anti-US feeling in Baghdad and the south.
The one area where
America has had relative success is Iraqi Kurdistan. The political situation
in this region is complex. Most Kurds believed that the no-fly zone
during Saddam's reign protected them from his chemical weapons, and
it is evident that the sanctions did not hurt Kurdistan as much as it
did the rest of Iraq. In the lead-up to the war, most Kurds accepted
the tactical notion of being protected against Saddam and the hated
Turkish forces. But despite this, it is likely that American plans in
Kurdistan will face popular opposition once the realities of US interests
and the regional contradictions reassert themselves. Meanwhile, the
historic political unity between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq is unlikely
to be broken.
What of the armed
resistance? And why is it much more evident in some parts of Iraq than
others? There is no doubt that armed resistance directed against the
US forces enjoys wide popular support and is mostly carried out by politically
diverse, locally based organisations. However, I also met many in Baghdad
who, though supportive of the "patriots" who resist the "invaders",
believe that such actions are "premature". One should, they
argue, first exhaust all peaceful means, mobilising the people in mass
organisations before confronting the occupation forces in armed struggle.
Popular sentiment can be gleaned from the conspiracy theories circulating
in Baghdad. People routinely blame the US or Israel or Kuwait for attacks
on civilian rather than military targets.
But you do not need
to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that the main reason for the
high intensity of armed conflict in areas of central Iraq and Mosul
is that the US itself decided to make these areas the arena for a showdown
that they thought they could win more easily, thereby establishing a
bridgehead from which they could subdue Baghdad and the south. They
provoked conflict by killing civilians in cold blood in Falluja, Mosul,
Ramadi and elsewhere long before any armed resistance in those areas.
The occupying forces
quickly discovered that the slightest provocation in the labyrinthine
working-class districts of Baghdad, and most cities of the south, was
being met by massive shows of popular strength on the streets. The US
military command are surely aware that Iraqis in these areas are heavily
armed, well-trained and better organised.
The US authority's
nonsense about a "Sunni triangle" and "Shi'ite Baghdad
and south" is a smokescreen which has so far failed to divide the
Iraqi people or drive them into internecine conflict. The only people
who now believe that the US will back a democratic path in Iraq are
the few who have still not fully grasped America's role in Iraq's modern
history, the strategic significance of Iraq, or the nature of US foreign
policy today.
Leaving the city
on the road back to Amman, when our car passed by the house of that
precocious child, I realised why my love for Baghdad remained undiminished
despite 34 years in exile.
· Sami Ramadani
was a political refugee from Saddam's regime and is a senior lecturer
in sociology at London Metropolitan University