Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 52-54
Southern California Chronicle
AFSC Human Rights Observers Paint Grim Picture of Iraqi Life Under U.S. Occupation
By Pat and Samir Twair
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AFSC observers Rick McDowell and Mary Trotochaud (staff photo S. Twair).
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UPPERMOST IN the minds of Iraqis, say human rights observers Rick McDowell and Mary Trotochaud, are fear of the future, the threat of civil war and dread of suicide bombers.
The two Iraq Representatives for the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) are informing Americans about the past 10 months they spent in Baghdad, where they will return in April. The first stop on their U.S. lecture tour was Los Angeles, where the mainstream media failed to cover their public talks.
“Fear of the Saddam regime has been replaced by a fear of the future, of an encroaching civil war,” stated Trotochaud, who, with McDowell, arrived in Baghdad last May to observe the living conditions of the occupied population.
“The U.S. won neither the war nor the peace,” interjected McDowell. “Increasingly it’s Iraqis who are being killed. The people simply do not comprehend the motives of the suicide bombers—they say no Iraqi would kill Iraqi women and children.”
The Iraqis blame unguarded borders, which permit extremists to enter the country. Even though they would like to see U.S. troops withdraw, the AFSC representatives explained, Iraqis fear the chaos that would ensue.
McDowell and Trotochaud concurred that the Iraqis are edgy, frightened and hopeless over the continuing war. Low-flying aircraft are heard at night, along with the thud of mortars and bombs. There are more and more barbed-wire enclosures, concrete barricades around former palaces, and guards armed with AK-47s watching buildings.
Unrest over the occupation is compounded by the failure to improve electricity, sanitation, phone service, health care and security.
“The people are asking, what’s going on? Why can’t the U.S. improve their standard of living?” McDowell continued. “A laborer earns the equivalent of $3 a day, a surgeon earns $150 a month—yet it costs $4.50 for a kilo of meat. But an expatriate who works for Halliburton makes a minimum of $20,000 a month. Whatever money is being spent is going directly to the corporations, which do not put their profits back into Iraq.”
A question frequently asked the speakers by U.S. audiences, they said, is where is all the Iraqi oil that was going to pay for reconstruction?
“The U.S. predicts $13 billion may be realized from Iraqi petroleum sales,” McDowell noted, “but that scenario is if things go well—and nothing has occurred as planned.
“It costs the U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion a week to keep the troops in Iraq,” he pointed out, “yet these funds are to run out in September.”
Trotochaud stated that the people have no faith in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).
“If anything, it has fractured the population even more,” she said. “Each of the 25 members in the council heads a ministry, and each tends to bring in his relatives and cronies, who are not qualified to carry out their duties. The people complain that before, they had one Saddam—now they have 25 Saddams.”
As for Ahmed Chalabi, she said, Iraqis are scornful and suspicious of him.
When asked about rumors that women’s rights have diminished under U.S. rule, Trotochaud noted that, last December, some IGC members introduced a resolution that would have replaced the secular 1959 personal-status law with shariah laws, which would limit a woman’s right to education, employment, inheritance, divorce, child custody and personal movement. Women’s groups protested the possibility that shariah law would be part of the Interim Constitution, and the resolution did not pass.
Iraqi women are more insecure than before the war, Trotochaud added, and girls are being kept at home for their safety rather than going to school. Another problem, she emphasized, is that families are being broken up.
A case in point is the American duo’s landlord and his wife. Because the young Iraqi couple fear the bombings and kidnappings, the wife will take her two children and live in Amman until security is established.
But this is a couple who can afford a temporary separation, McDowell said, noting that there are more than 70,000 homeless people living in camps growing around Baghdad, or dwelling in bombed-out buildings which have not been dismantled.
“There is a 1.4 million housing unit shortage in Iraq,” he told the audience. “Now people who have lost their homes because of the economic crisis, or widows and children of dead soldiers, must live in derelict structures or deserted army barracks lacking electricity or running water.”
McDowell further pointed out that, instead of having Iraqi scholars write their own history, a Washington, DC agency is charged with writing new textbooks for Iraqi students.
Similarly, he added, Iraqis see military bases being constructed on their land, when it should be up to the Iraqi people to decide if foreign bases should be there.
“There is a lot of talk about democracy, but it is a system that has to be practiced and officials in charge must be held responsible,” Trotochaud said. “At present, there is no accountability for lives lost, casualties incurred, or how the money is being spent. Reconstruction is the last thing that is happening in Iraq.”
George Bush and his neocon supporters said the Iraqi people would greet incoming American troops as liberators. How do the people feel about U.S. soldiers today? the AFSC pair was asked.
“That is another bungled job,” Trotochaud answered. “When the Americans first arrived, they were treated as liberators. They met with the Iraqi people. But after the attacks began, the soldiers hunkered down and were concerned only with their own security. The tragedy is that as new troops arrive they won’t interact with the people at all.”
The streets see considerable Humvee and tank traffic, while cement walls are going up around Saddam’s palaces which now are headquarters for the occupying army.
Asked by the Washington Report who would wage a civil war, McDowell replied: “No one anticipated the civil war in Lebanon, but once bloodshed begins, it’s neighbor against neighbor, and no one knows when it will end. The Kurds don’t want to relinquish their new autonomy and the other Iraqis don’t want them to form a separate state. If Shi’i were to be victimized, Iran might come to their rescue. There’s no way to identify what might spark such a war.”
Tortochaud concluded by recalling a woman whose three sons and a nephew had been arrested and taken away to an unknown destination by American troops. When relatives were spirited away in the past, she said, people knew who to ask—they might not like the answer, but there at least was someone to ask.
Under Saddam, the Iraqis knew the rules for survival. Now they no longer do. Fear of the regime has been replaced by fear of the future.
Barghouti Introduces Initiative
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| Dr. Mustafa Barghouti (staff photo S. Twair). | |
Should the Palestininan National Initiative (moubadara) catch on with the majority of Palestinians, it could be as threatening to Ariel Sharon as Gandhi’s nonviolent protests were to the British occupying India. At least it seems so when Dr. Mustafa Barghouti describes the grassroots alternative to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
In June 2002, just two months after Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank, the Initiative was announced by its founders, Dr. Barghouti, the late scholar Edward Said, Ibrahim Dakak and Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi.
Speaking before several hundred people at a program sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Barghouti said he and Said had planned to make a U.S. tour to inform Arab-Americans about the Initiative, but Dr. Said’s untimely death last fall precluded the tour.
Barghouti began by citing the facts on the ground: since the onset of Intifada Two, he said, 2,845 Palestinians have been killed, 525 of whom were children. In the past three years a total of 28,000 Palestinians have been arrested.
With each peace initiative, he noted, checkpoints increased to a total of 734 in the West Bank. Barghouti, who is president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, said that delays at checkpoints have directly caused the deaths of 84 Palestinians, 28 of whom were children.
Not only have the Palestinians witnessed the construction of 102 new Israeli settlements on their land, he continued, but they are watching the erection of the Apartheid Wall which cuts deep into the West Bank and has isolated 26 primary care clinics between the Green Line and the Wall. When the second phase of the Wall is completed, 71 clinics will be isolated.
“The Wall is spoiling the economic fabric of the Palestinian community,” Barghouti emphasized. “Soon we will need hydraulic lifts to move the people over the wall so they can get to school or work,” he jested.
Nonetheless, Barghouti said, the Zionist project is in crisis.
“Sharon said he would crush the intifada within 100 days,” he pointed out. “Now he’s tried for over 1,000 days, it has cost the Israelis $23 billion, and 300,000 Israelis emigrated last year—so that more Jews are leaving than coming into Israel. What’s more, after 55 years of oppression, the Israelis see that there are 4.8 million Palestinians, the exact same number as Jews.”
At present the infant mortality rate for Palestinians is 20 deaths per 1,000 births. “And if it weren’t for the checkpoints,” the physician said, “that figure would be 16 deaths per 1,000.”
“Fragmentation is our greatest enemy,” he warned. “If Sharon has his way, we will be put into walled enclaves with a warlord to run each of these ghettoes.”
The objectives of the Initiative, as outlined by Edward Said, are liberation from, rather than cooperation with, the Israeli occupation; and a broad base in civil society, which does not include military or security people from Arafat’s regime.
According to Barghouti, who was a delegate to the 1991 Madrid Peace negotiations, it is essential for Palestinians in the diaspora to reconnect with those living under occupation.
Applause greeted his statement that corruption must be wiped out and elections held as soon as possible. There is already proof of mass popular support, he noted, such as a synchronized call Feb. 23 to stop all activity at noon in major cities in protest of the Apartheid Wall. Everything ground to a halt at the appointed time.
The Ramallah-based physician/activist knows Israeli brutality firsthand, and is regarded as a hero for sustaining beatings and a broken knee cap on Jan. 2, 2002, when Israelis arrested him for entering Jerusalem, the city of his birth. He had gone there to speak at a press conference on the disastrous impact Israeli checkpoints have made on the health care of Palestinians.
“For the first time in 36 years,” he pointed out, “Israel has been brought to a court of international justice. We had a skilled legal team who presented a fantastic case to the judges, while outside the Israelis made all the mistakes we did 30 years ago. They staged protest demonstrations, but our counter-demonstrations were four times larger.”
Barghouti was referring to the hearing at the International Court in The Hague, which Israel boycotted, instead bringing a bombed-out Israeli bus and signs such as “The Hague Supports Terror.”
While it will take four to six weeks before a decision is announced, Barghouti said, if the judges stick to the rule of law it would be difficult not to decide in favor of the Palestinians.
“We must make the price of occupation higher to the Israelis than the benefits of occupation,” he argued. “We have reached the limit, we will not give up one more meter of land.”
What if it is too late for an independent Palestinian state? he was asked.
“If Israel destroys all potentials of a Palestinian state,” Barghouti replied, “then our fallback position will be to ask for a binational state that grants equality, not an apartheid situation.”
The grassroots approach seemed to be taking hold as enthusiastic Palestinian Americans, responding to Barghouti’s call to “organize, organize, organize,” signed up to serve on committees in the U.S.
PAWA Focuses on Prisoners
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Teenage girls portray Palestinian women prisoners at PAWA’s annual event (staff photo S. Twair).
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“Stories of Courage” was the theme of the Palestinian American Women’s Association’s International Women’s Day celebration March 13 in the Garden Grove Hyatt Regency.
Highlighting the program was a dramatic performance by 11 young women portraying actual Palestinian women political prisoners. Each reader had prepared a factual account of the arrest and incarceration of actual prisoners who were jailed as young as age 14.
Sahar Francis, an attorney for the Jerusalem-based human rights group Addameer (“conscience”), discussed the plight of 6,000 prisoners in Israeli detention, 94 of them women.
“We hear about negotiations, but never about prisoners,” stated Francis, who had traveled earlier that week from Israel. “Prisoners were not even discussed at Oslo. If a peace agreement ever is to be reached, prisoners should be released without conditions.”
Women prisoners have to share the same bathroom with men in detention centers, Francis said, and when Israeli policewomen search women prisoners men observe the procedure. All family visits have been stopped since the onset of Intifada II, she added, and medical care is poor—it takes months before needed surgery is taken care of, and two women gave birth in their cells.
Catherine Cook, the co-author of Stolen Youth, published this year by Pluto Press, described the conditions of the 300 to 350 incarcerated Palestinian children. Since 2001, she said, it has been common for guards to attack prisoners, conduct daily strip searches and spray tear gas into cells—all violations of international law.
Young prisoners do not receive a formal education, Cook noted, with the only subjects taught being Hebrew, Arabic and math. These young people are not prepared for the violent environment of prison life, she stated, and called their treatment a deliberate Israeli policy to return them to their communities without rehabilitation.
ADC Convenes Annual Banquet
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) was the scheduled keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Los Angeles/Orange County Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, but the Michigan primaries made it impossible for him to appear at the Feb. 7 gala.A video message was aired to the audience of 400 from Conyers, one of the few lawmakers who did not vote for the PATRIOT Act. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez took the podium and also discussed the dangers of the Act.
Chapter president Ban al-Wardi, an immigration attorney, has been instrumental in offering free legal clinics for immigrants. She also has conducted hate crimes and discrimination interventions on behalf of students, employees and victims of crime, assisted with a hate crimes brochure published by the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, and developed a special registration “Know Your Rights” packet for immigrants.
Media interviews, radio campaigns and participation at protests and vigils at the Westwood and Los Angeles Federal Buildings have been among the chapter’s major activities the past year.
Palestinian Economist in L.A.
“Walls always fall,” stated Palestinian political economist Leila Farsakh. “In five years there will be a state in Gaza, but Israel will be debating for the next 15 years on what to do with the West Bank.”The post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University met for an informal gathering of academics and activists in the home of Dr. Mahmood and Nancy Ibrahim to answer whatever questions were posed to her.
And answer them she did.
Farsakh, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, is completing a book entitled The Palestinian Migrant Laborer and the Future of the Palestinian State.
When asked the results of her research for the book, the Jenin-born scholar replied:
“From 1974 to 1993 Palestinians accounted for one-third of the labor force inside Israel—they were integrated into the Israeli economy. After Oslo, the labor flow fluctuated as Israel began to rely on foreign workers. Gazans were not allowed to work in Israel, while West Bankers were. Eventually the people of Gaza were totally separated from Israel.”
Until 1993, Farsakh said, the Israelis didn’t want to deal with the Arabs, but Oslo obliged them to discuss a Palestinian state. Post-Oslo Israeli incomes increased by 15 percent, while Palestinian incomes decreased by 15 percent. The word “occupation” was eradicated from the media, Frasakh observed.
The collapse of Oslo was followed by Camp David II, which marked the first time Jerusalem was discussed.
Next came the road map, but it offered a Palestinian state with provisional orders that could jeopardize Palestinian sovereignty. Two positives of the road map, according to Farsakh, are the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, EU and U.N.), which is to enforce the agreement, and a multinational force to protect the Palestinians and ensure that the Israelis withdraw.
“Implementation is always the problem,” she noted, “and Israel doesn’t always comply.”
The physical realities are killing the possibility of a Palestinian state, while the people live in 16 bantustans with no freedom of movement, she said.
“The Israeli public is in panic and calls the bomb attacks a war of extinction,” she elaborated. “The reality is a two-state solution is dead. The Israeli reality is that it doesn’t want one state. The Palestinian reality is that it wants to be left alone. The international community wants a two-state solution, if only for a short while.
“The most worrying fact,” she concluded, “is that the weak party can’t get justice and the strong party wants Bantustans.”
Asked what she foresees, Farsakh replied: “Economic factors will push for a one-state solution with open trade and borders.”
Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.
