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The Other Myth: If It's Not al-Qaida, It's Tribalism, or Sectarianism
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[The imperialists pulled this one in Ireland, and have done it right
along in Iraq, and now are playing the same tune in Kenya. Those
primitive wogs... they fight over their tribal / religious / clannish
loyalties. It's never about occupation, exploitation of resources,
imposition of foreign-chosen leaders, control of land, education,
economy, or anything it's really about. - NYTr]
Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches - Jan 4, 2008
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000716.php
The myth of sectarianism:
The policy is divide to rule
By DAHR JAMAIL
IF THE U.S. leaves Iraq, the violent sectarianism between the Sunni and
Shia will worsen. This is what Republicans and Democrats alike will
have us believe. This key piece of rhetoric is used to justify the
continuance of the occupation of Iraq.
This propaganda, like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and
reality due largely to the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow
job by the corporate media on the issue of sectarianism in Iraq has
ensured that the public buys into the line that the Sunni and Shia will
dice one another up into little pieces if the occupation ends.
It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American
invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare
between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of
organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of
the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia.
Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.
Soon after arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was
considered rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individuals
sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the
most common answer I would receive was, I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi.
On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received
from an older woman, My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can
you tell which half of me is which? The accompanying smile said it all.
Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia
prayed in one anothers mosques. Secular Iraqis could form lifelong
associations with others without overt concern about their chosen sect.
How did such a well-integrated society erupt into vicious fighting,
violent sectarianism, and segregated neighborhoods? How is one to
explain the millions in Iraq displaced from their homes simply because
they were the wrong sect in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Back in December 2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had
recounted a recent experience to me. During the first weeks of the
occupation, a U.S. military commander had showed up in Baquba, the
capital of Diyala province located roughly twenty-five miles northeast
of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shia population. He had asked to meet
with all the tribal and religious leaders. On the appointed day the
assembled leaders were perplexed when the commander instructed them to
divide themselves, Shia on one side of the room, Sunni on the other.
It would not be amiss, perhaps, to read in this account an implanting
of a deliberate policy of divide and rule by the Anglo-American
invaders from the early days of the occupation.
There have been no statistical surveys in recent years to determine the
sectarian composition of Iraq. However, when the Coalition Provisional
Authority, led by Paul Bremer, formed the first puppet Iraqi
government, a precedent was set. The twenty-five seats in the Iraqi
Governing Council (IGC), were assigned strictly along sectarian lines
based on the assumption that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20
percent Sunni, and 20 percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni. For good
measure, a couple of Turkoman and a Christian were thrown in.
It is evident that this puppet troupe deployed at the onset of
democracy in Iraq was mandated to establish to the population that it
was in the larger interest to begin thinking, at least politically,
along sectarian and ethnic lines. Inevitably, political power struggles
ensued and were cemented and exacerbated with the January 30, 2005,
elections.
Mild surface scratching reveals a darker, largely unreported aspect of
the divisive U.S. plan. A UN report released in September 2005 held
Iraqi interior ministry forces responsible for an organized campaign of
detention, torture, and killing of fellow Iraqis. These special police
commando units were recruited from the Shia Badr Organization and Mehdi
Army militias.
In Baghdad during November and December 2004, I heard widespread
accounts of death squads assassinating Sunni resistance leaders and
their key sympathizers. It was after the failure of Operation Phantom
Fury, as the U.S. siege of Fallujah that November was named, that the
Iraqi resistance spread across Iraq like wildfire. Death squads were
set up to quell this fire by eliminating the leadership of this growing
resistance.
The firefighting team had at its helm the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John
Negroponte, ably assisted by retired Colonel James Steele, adviser to
Iraqi security forces. In 1984"86 Steele had been commander of the U.S.
military advisory group in El Salvador. Between 1981 and 1985
Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras. In 1994 the
Honduras Commission on Human Rights charged him with extensive human
rights violations, reporting the torture and disappearance of at least
184 political workers. A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into
the U.S. role in Honduras has placed on record documents admitting that
the operations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by
special intelligence units, better known as death squads, of
CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured, and killed
thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.
Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.
The only public mention of any of this I have seen was in Newsweek
magazine on January 8, 2005. It quotes Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary
of defense at the time, who discussed the use of the Salvador Option
in Iraq. It compared the strategy being planned for Iraq to the one
used in Central America during the Reagan administration:
"Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S.
government funded or supported nationalist forces that allegedly
included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel
leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and
many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a
success"despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent
Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal."
U.S.-backed sectarian death squads have become the foremost generator
of death in Iraq, even surpassing the U.S. military machine, infamous
for its capacity for industrial-scale slaughter. It is no secret in
Baghdad that the U.S. military would regularly cordon off
pro-resistance areas like the al-Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad and
allow Iraqi police and Iraqi army personnel, masked in black
balaclavas, through their checkpoints to carry out abductions and
assassinations in the neighborhood.
Consequently, almost all of Baghdad and much of Iraq is now segregated.
The flipside is that violence in the capital city has subsided somewhat
of late now that the endgame of forming the death squads, that of
fragmenting the population, has been mostly accomplished.
Baghdad resident, retired General Waleed al-Ubaidy told my Iraqi
colleague recently, I would like to agree with the idea that violence
in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine, but the truth is far
more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the
demographic map of Iraq. Baghdad today is a divided city.
Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdads municipalities told my
colleague, Ali al-Fadhily, Baghdad has been torn into two cities and
many towns and neighborhoods. There is now the Shia Baghdad and the
Sunni Baghdad to start with. Each is divided into little town-like
pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.
Al-Adhamiyah, on the Russafa side of Tigris River, is now entirely
Sunni, the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is
purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya, and small strips of Aamil which
are dominated by Shia militias.
Not being privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the
Iraqi police and Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder
why the U.S. military does little or nothing to stop them. The
Americans ask [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the sectarian
assassinations knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the
sectarian cleansing, says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars
Association, a leading Sunni group.
A more recent manifestation of the divisive U.S. policy has been the
purchase of members of the largely Sunni resistance in Baghdad and in
al-Anbar province that constitutes one-third of the geographic area of
Iraq. Payments made by the U.S. military to collaborating tribal
sheikhs already amount to $17 million. The money passes directly into
the hands of fighters who in many cases were engaged in launching
attacks against the occupiers less than two weeks ago. Tribal fighters
are being paid $300 per month to patrol their areas, particularly
against foreign mercenaries. Today the military refers to these men as
concerned local citizens, awakening force, or simply volunteers.
Arguably, violence in the area has temporarily declined. Those
Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by
separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes, announced a
thirty-two-year-old man from Ramadi, who spoke with al-Fadhily on terms
of anonymity, They know they are sinking deeper into the shifting
sand, but the collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and
will in the end use this strategy against them. By the end of November
2007, the U.S. military had enlisted 77,000 of these fighters, and
hopes to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are
Sunni.
Politically, the U.S. administration maintains its support of the
Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. The fallout has been blatantly
clear. On the first of December, Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the
Accordance Front, which is the Sunni political bloc in the Iraqi
Parliament, was placed under house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security
forces in the Adil neighborhood, west of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces
also detained his son Makki and forty-five of his guards. They were
accused of manufacturing car bombs and killing Sunni militia members in
the neighborhood who have been working with the U.S. military. Members
of the Accordance Front, which holds 44 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi
Parliament, promptly walked out. Maliki has, several times in the last
several weeks, hurled public accusations and criticisms at al-Dulaimi,
sending political and sectarian shock waves, further crippling the
crumbling political process.
It is important to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence,
acts only as told. After the January 2005 elections, the government
that came into power had chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its prime
minister. When Jaafari refused to toe the U.S./UK line, Condoleezza
Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw flew to Baghdad, and before
their short trip ended Jaafari was out and Maliki was in as prime
minister.
In the context of these facts let us now return to the big question:
Will Iraq descend further into a sectarian nightmare if the occupation
ends?
An indicator of how things will likely resolve themselves upon the
departure of foreign troops may be drawn from the southern city of
Basra. In early September, 500 British troops left one of Saddam
Husseins palaces in the heart of the city and ceased to conduct
regular foot patrols. According to the British military, the overall
level of violence in the city has decreased 90 percent since then.
This may or may not be a guarantee of a drop in sectarianism upon the
departure of the invading armies, but it does prove that when the
primary cause of the violence, sectarian strife, instability, and chaos
is removed from the equation of Iraq, things are bound to improve
rapidly.
Are we still going to believe that the occupation is holding Iraq
together?
[Dahr Jamail, who spent eight months in Iraq as an independent
journalist, is author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an
Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). The New
York Times Stephen Kinzer describes his writing as international
journalism at its best. Dahr is currently on a national speaking tour
sponsored by Haymarket. ]
(c)2004-2008 Dahr Jamail.
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