Al-Ahram Weekly | Focus | 'We are Palestinians now'

Since 1997, an obscure US organisation has been promoting a preemptive and explicitly aggressive approach to securing American dominance in the 21st century. Under cover of such terms as "benevolent hegemony" and "preventive war", they have spent the last years elaborating their plans for the use of excessive military force to intimidate the rest of the world. Many of the key supporters of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) entered the White House along with George W Bush in 2000, and have been instrumental in designing and launching the war on terror in general, and the occupation of Iraq in particular. This week, a People's Tribunal opens in Brussels, Belgium, to try the PNAC for their part in dragging the world into a state of permanent war. The BRussells Tribunal, inspired by the hearings held in 1967 by philosopher Bertrand Russell into American war crimes in Vietnam, is just the first session in a series of citizens' forums which will be held around the world over the next year, and which seek to expose and condemn the dark face of current American foreign policy. As the Tribunal opens in Belgium,Frederick Bowie spoke to participants about what they hoped to achieve, and what the world needs to know about America's neo-conservative palace revolution.

'We are Palestinians now'

Hana Al-Bayaty is an Iraqi- French documentary film maker. Based in Brussels, she works on the coordinating team of the BRussells Tribunal. Her film On Democracy in Iraq is being screened as part of the Tribunal's cultural programme. She is due to return to Iraq this summer to make a film about the aftermath of the war.

My father was one of the founders of the Ba'ath Party. He left the party in 1962, in the first leftist schism. In 1975 he went into exile, after having suffered oppression, like the majority of Arab intellectuals. But he's always remained very involved in politics back home.

I'd just returned from a long journey, when he called to say that there was going to be a meeting in London, organised by the former Iraqi ambassador to the UN. The idea was to get together all the nationalist opposition parties: the Shias, the Sunnis, the Kurds, the Turkmans, everyone. Islamists and Marxists, all round the same table. These people were all opposed to the regime, but they were against the war as well, and they wanted to work out what they could do about it. They knew they needed to project an image, but they didn't want to leave the job to just anyone. So they turned to me, and said: "Daughter of Iraq, you have to come and film us!" ( Laughs ).

No. We just turned to our families. We ruined our grandmothers to make this film!

It was held in Ealing, London. The discussions lasted for seven hours. It was quite tense: it was 28 years since these parties had been together round the same table. And this was three weeks before the invasion. So it was an important historical moment. Some of the people who were there have since defected to the Americans...

Everyone there really believed that a peaceful solution was still possible. But they were also very aware -- and you can see this in the film -- that if there was a war, it would lead to occupation, not liberation, and that the purpose of this occupation would be to destroy the Iraqi state. And that is what has happened.

The state had already been partly destroyed, hadn't it, by the first Gulf War and by the sanctions?

The Iraqi state had been decaying for some 15 years. Everything was falling to pieces -- the infrastructure, the social structures, the culture of the people, everything. I can't tell you how painful it is to see that -- how economic sanctions can tear a culture apart. The Iraqis are a profoundly secular people. Their entire history has been based on the separation of the state and religion, and on the idea of a private sphere within Islam. It was the sanctions which drove them into the arms of religious organisations. Under the sanctions, the state could no longer perform its role. So who took over? The Islamist groups, who went round calling on people, door to door.

I have a lot of respect for the Islamists. I've seen what life was like under the sanctions. What was there for people to believe in? The regime? No. The West? Even less so. If Western values meant imposing these sanctions on them -- how could they respect the West?

When life is getting more and more difficult, more and more desperate, people turn to religion. It's a natural human response. And I think that the Islamists did some very good work. I was surprised, because personally I don't feel at all close to them. But under sanctions, it was the Islamists who revived links between town and countryside, who provided the channels for the inhabitants of the countryside to help the people in the city, and vice versa. They recreated a parallel system of solidarity, which enabled the people of Iraq to survive. And after the regime fell, it was the Islamists who called for unity, and forbade people from settling old scores. The first orders both the Shias and the Sunnis issued was to tell people not to settle scores as long as Iraq was not governed by its own citizens. And these were real fatwas. When the country is in chaos, it's good to hear Islamists saying things like that. They saved us from a bloodbath.

As for the state, it is the whole system that has been destroyed now. Baghdad was destroyed in 1991, and yet the city came back to life. You can rebuild a city. But now the state itself is dead. The social system is dead. Who knows what kind of struggles may emerge from these ruins.

The real problem for the West is the possibility of an Iraqi democracy. Under cover of getting rid of a dictator, the real goal is to prevent a true Iraqi democracy from emerging.

So what is it that the Americans are now trying to put in place? A non-democratic regime? A sort of compromise between democracy and a puppet government? Or is it just a game that they are playing?

This is not democracy. The tradition of appointing notables to rule such countries has been around for centuries.

If you think that a foreign power can appoint a government to write the constitution of the state, and that that is "democracy", then you have a problem. There is no way the constitution which they are drawing up now can last. Why should the Iraqis recognise this constitution? It's not their constitution! You cannot set up a democratic process without giving the people power to decide for themselves.

The Western powers will say that they have to proceed in this way, to avoid the country descending into anarchy...

But it is anarchy! What is this, if not anarchy? We're there already! I've never seen my people and my country in such a state. All we want is to put this anarchy behind us. And to add to that, there has been so much looting. No one can estimate the true consequences of looting on such a scale.

The looting was very well organised. There were militias patrolling the town in vans, who knew exactly where they wanted to go. It was these militias which created a situation in which other people felt able to join in. After the violence of the sanctions, and then the war, when the regime finally fell, it's normal that people are going to be tempted.

I have read accounts that suggest that the looting wasn't at all anarchic, but was in fact very well planned.

The evidence we have makes that clear. It's a shame that in the West, we are only interested in symbols. So much has been written about the looting of the Mesopotamian Museum. Of course, it's a tragedy. But really, I couldn't care less about the museum. What matters to me is that all the civil registers were looted, all the administrative archives. So now, if they want to shift people about, they can just go ahead: no one will be able to prove that his house is really his. It's already happening in Kurdistan. People who worked for 45 years for a regime that oppressed them now find they have no pension: they can't prove that they really worked for all those years. That's what I mean by the destruction of the state. I don't know how people are going to cope with the consequences in the long term. For instance, the coalition have got rid of all the old school books, and the new history books are being printed in London. This is their idea of "rebuilding": the most stupid idea in the whole of history. They call it reconstruction, but in fact it's a tabula rasa.

Arab friends who visited Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad told me that many Iraqis had actually welcomed the war.

Iraqi civil society came out clearly against the war. Even though it was difficult for civil society to differentiate itself from the regime, they were able to convey messages and communicate with the world outside. But for the people in general -- they have been through so many wars, why would they object to another, if it was really going to rid them of their dictator? In every country, you can find lots of people who will welcome a liberator if he says he is coming to save them from their torturer. People who aren't aware of the relationship that exists between the man who's torturing them, and the man who has come to liberate them ... But in Baghdad itself, I think that people were very well aware of that relationship.

Do you think it was really possible to get rid of the regime without violence -- I mean, without such a degree of violence?

It would have taken a lot longer, that's for sure. I have to believe it, or I would become completely cynical. You saw how the regime fell? No one can say that the regime was strong. It was strong when it came to terror, perhaps, but it was empty at the core. So there was a possibility it could be overthrown, and we were aware of that.

The Iraqis knew that the regime was running out of time, and at the same time, the end never seemed to come. I believe that what we needed was to keep the inspectors there, and keep international pressure up on the regime itself, so as not to leave it enough room for manouevre, so as to stop it from committing any more massacres. The regime never massacred Iraqis when the international community was on its case. The big massacres -- including Hallabja, if indeed that really was the work of Saddam ... -- all occurred at moments when the regime was being left alone by the West. But when the West applied pressure, and the UN had people in Iraq, the regime couldn't do that kind of thing.

And there was more and more political activity over these last years. People were even trying to set up underground newspapers. There was more communication between people; the word on the street was, "Right, we've had enough". But there was no way you could ask the Iraqi people to rise up while they were living under sanctions. Under sanctions, everyone got up in the morning and spent the whole day just looking for something to eat that night. That was all they had the energy for.

It wasn't that the regime was strengthened by the sanctions, but simply that the people were weakened to such an extent, that they were necessarily weaker than the regime. The regime continued to rake off money, individuals enriched themselves. But it wasn't building up its strength. Look at the Iraqi army: if the regime had been strong, the army would have been able to put up some sort of fight. But the regime was weak. It was living off the state of psychosis it had instilled in the country over the previous 30 years.

Exactly. We are lucky in Iraq. We have a large highly educated middle class. But civil society needed more time to take possession of the political arena. If the people had been able to live normal lives while the regime was being placed under all sorts of constraint, that would have driven a huge hole through its legitimacy. Already, the regime was showing its weakness. But the sanctions allowed the regime to pose as a victim alongside the people. If the political and military sanctions against the regime had been maintained, and the economic sanctions had been lifted so that the people were able to live, the regime would not have lasted long. There are countless examples of that in history.

It's difficult to speak about the Iraqi resistance when one if outside. For those of us who are in the West, we were just happy to see them understand certain things so quickly. Remember, the resistance began only three weeks after the war ended. That was very quick, even though for those of us on the outside, those three weeks seemed to last forever.

Sabotage quickly came to play a large part in the resistance. I'm very proud of the fact that the Americans still haven't managed to start exporting Iraqi oil. It's not very difficult to do this kind of thing: all you need is a homemade bomb you can lay beside a pipeline. Nor does it put anyone's life at risk. But it's still very brave, because the people who do that know that the reconstruction of the country cannot start until they begin exporting oil again. So they are accepting the sacrifice of living poorly. They are refusing reconstruction for as long as their country is occupied.

I spoke to the chief engineer of the Baghdad Electricity Department recently. He told me that in 1991 the war did just as much damage as it did in 2003, but in three months they had managed to get everything working again, even though they were working under sanctions, with just their own means. Whereas now, the Americans have been trying for a year, with all their wealth and power, and things still don't work. So there's a real will to prevent that from happening!

There are Iraqis who are very worried about the future of Iraq. When you have links with this country, you have no choice but to worry. Of course, I cannot help being very concerned for the future of Iraq. But Iraq has been destroyed. Iraq is finished for the next two generations. Today, Iraq is fighting for the future of other countries, other peoples. The Iraqi resistance are fighting for a certain idea of justice. Of course, they're also fighting to put a stop to the occupation, but they know that if they fail, their failure will open the door for a thousand wars to come. And above all, it will be enormously dangerous for the Palestinian people.

You have to realise that this is a country that has been living under a dictatorship for 30 years, under sanctions for 15 years. It has had to cope with all the consequences of being bombed with depleted uranium. How can I be hopeful for Iraq in the short term? But this occupation goes far beyond that: this isn't just a war against Iraq, it's a war against all of us. And that's why everybody feels concerned. Certain fundamental principles which we thought we all subscribed to have been broken and cast aside.

So if I'm working on a project like the BRussells Tribunal, it's because I want to show that there can be another way. And I know that other people feel the same way, because I saw them. There were 15 million people in the street. All around the world there are many many people who find this whole situation completely absurd and abhorrent: the way relations are conducted between states, between cultures. There is no more dialogue. It's not that I'm young and idealistic: I just happen to believe that we deserve better than this, and that we are capable of much better too.

So if the BRussells Tribunal matters, it's not just in itself, but because it's part of a whole movement, which takes different names at different times, and which is essentially autonomous, non-hierarchical. This war, and all the debates around it, have brought together a lot of people who are questioning everything they thought they knew, and who are open to hear what others have to say. That's been going on since 11 September. People were so shocked by 11 September, that it created an opening for a new kind of politics.

In England, I think what really got people out in the streets was not just sympathy with the Iraqi people, but the impression their government was lying to them once again.

That's why I think this war has proved far more important in political terms than Kosovo. Who protested over Kosovo? Almost no one. Yet in terms of the art of war, it was an extremely important development. But Iraq is just so symbolic.

I remember speaking to my father on the telephone just before the war broke out. I asked him what we should expect, and he said: "We all need to get ready, because in a few weeks from now, we will be Palestinians". And I remember thinking, no, that's not possible in Iraq, not that. But today, that is what I see happening.

The Americans control the roads. They stop people travelling from one town to another. They've destroyed the whole telecommunications system, to try and prevent people from organising. They destroyed all the telephones after the war. So no one can communicate now, not even the resistance. But that's what's so beautiful about the resistance: there's nothing hierarchical about it. One day it's Falluja that resists, another it's Nasseriya that resists, and so on. There isn't one single over-arching organisation, but a thousand different organisations, and a thousand different forms of resistance, many of which are completely non-violent.

		15 - 21 April 2004 Issue No. 686 Focus	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875