Flagging symbols
Torture is about physical subjugation; but then so is occupation, writes Azmi Bishara. The two go hand
Just as we were contemplating a new flag, fashioned with digital graphics and with no reference to a history or a people, we heard news about torture. The news had to come from America, or it wouldn't be news. The flag is just a piece of coloured cloth. But in the mysterious lore of patriotism and statehood it is the standard of the people, of the warden and the prisoner, of the master and lackeys. We all experienced flags as children, shivering in the schoolyard during our daily salute; as adults, in the army, or when spitting on the flag in whose name attrocious crimes are perpetrated. We have a love-hate relation with flags, an intense relationship that brings people together. Yet, there will always be those who scoff at the idea of the flag.
Flags do not change with coups unless to signify a new historical epoch. Tampering with symbols brings psychological disturbance in its wake, calling into question the legitimacy of the entity for which they are supposed to stand. Coups have taken place in Iraq without a change in flag, or at least its colours. There is something to be gleaned from this, even if understood in the language of symbols that is so repulsive to those who have smashed idols and condemned fetishism on their way to enlightenment. There is a long- standing popular acknowledgment that certain colours are associated with the fertile crescent. Blue is not one of them.
The two blue stripes in the new Iraqi flag symbolise the Tigris and the Euphrates. The yellow between denotes the Kurds. The flag is said to represent Iraq, but Iraq is more than the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Kurds.
A flag without symbolism is perhaps not all bad. But this one has symbolism, and it says nothing about the Arabs.
A crescent -- a nod to Islam -- is rendered in light blue and, below two stripes of the same hue. No wonder people were incensed. There is only one factional entity in the region, one that combines religion and ethnicity, and its flag is strikingly similar.
Those who oppose the status quo in Iraq have a point. They say that the country went from under the heels of one regime to another, from one type of totalitarianism to another, without ever having a glimpse of its true self. Dictatorship is associated with violence, and its alternative is supposed to be enlightenment. Now, Iraq's emancipation is dressed up in bold strokes, in blue, white, and yellow, as if it were an advertisement for a sushi restaurant.
Minimalist strokes, two colours, abstract design. The flag's modernity transcends reality, negates facts. One fact it negates is that Iraq is a country of multiple colours and almost no straight lines. The Iraqis, Sunnis and Shias, are largely Arab. They come from Arab clans, live in Arab cities. But it is the non- Arabism of Iraq that the flag chooses to highlight. Non-Arabism has a flag at last.
As I contemplated the implications of the abstract standard, I was reminded of Rifaat Chaderchi's glass and metal modern architecture. How could he have come up with such a design, I wondered. Then news of Abu Ghraib arrived, providing further insight into the enlightenment we have been given, filling in the spaces between the flag's minimalist stripes.
The torture was blamed on some US and UK military personnel, men and women. The news is causing much outrage. But the events took place last year, sometime between October and December. It took half a year for the leaks to happen, and only once on television did the world take notice. But how many cases of brutality, torture, and killing went unreported?
What happened in Abu Ghraib is not the exception, as General Myers would have it, but the rule. It is the rule because Iraq is a country under occupation and occupation is always a state of physical violation, of the arbitrary use of force, or of lenience, to secure the submission of the occupied.
In a colonial context, democracy may be worse than despotism. In dictatorships some people are specialised in torture and interrogation. But democracies, when they take control of another nation, grant the right of brutality equally to all members of the democratic nation. Ordinary young people, women included, engage in torture as if it were a normal course of events. Perhaps it is too limiting, too oriental to think of torture as the exclusive domain of men with big moustaches. Perhaps we should be more open minded, more politically correct, and grant equal rights to men and women of all ages.
Humanists have always been baffled by the significance of torture, particularly when the torturer enjoys inflicting pain on others. The essence of torture is the violation of privacy, body privacy in particular. The body is the temple of the soul, the sanctuary of the ego. The subjugation of another body, when not an act of love, is one of hatred. The contrast between physical intimacy and the lack thereof is at the heart of torture. The latter combines both physical and psychological pain. It also combines the most public of matters with the most private -- state, policy, and army versus the human body. The humiliation, pain and helplessness turn the body into an Achilles heel, into an enemy of the self.
The investigations and testimonies use such terms as "wrongdoing" in reference to "preparing" the detainees for investigation and keeping them "awake" by tying them with wires. On occasion the captors used the pronoun "it" to refer to the captive in question. One "it" was made to masturbate, with his head in a sack. Another "it" was made to bend over in an obscene pose. This is only a snippet of a bigger and uglier picture.
The lawyer of the six soldiers now under investigation was among the defence panel in the Vietnam My Lai trials. He is hoping to defend the soldiers by blaming their superiors in the intelligence service and the so-called "contractors" hired for security jobs. A fine defence, perhaps. I personally hope that the snowball may roll until it rolls over the US president. The defence lawyer, speaking to Seymou Hersh of the New Yorker, says: "Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?"
What the lawyer is suggesting is that the soldiers in question needed to be told about such things. First of all, the victims were not just forced to walk around nude. They were beaten and raped, piled on top of each other and forced into perversions. Secondly, and I find this particularly galling, the lawyer is suggesting that young people in America do not understand that such matters are humiliating. That the only reason these acts were humiliating was that the detainees were Arab and Muslim.
Suddenly, the soldiers are just innocent young people who carried out orders without fully understanding the extent of the barbarity involved. Suddenly, the question is one of conflict between civilisations having a different view of sexual freedom. I beg to differ. If ever there is a place in which you can best examine the link between sex and control, between sexual humiliation and power; if ever there is a place in which you may understand the objectification of women and the question of sexual colonialism, it is America.
Some US intellectuals, the same people who justified cases of torture following 11 September, have regarded the Abu Ghraib events as an exception, as a sign of the confusion of young men sent to carry out orders in far off places. Proudly, these intellectuals state, "this should not happen to us." But these same intellectuals have already justified torture -- for example, of a hypothetical bomber with knowledge of a bomb ticking somewhere. Again, torture is linked to the dialogue of cultures. This is absurd. Every crime committed in the Abu Ghraib prison was as sadistic in the eyes of average Americans as in those of the rest of the world.
Articles written in the aftermath of 11 September to justify cases of torture do not mention one case in which useful information was procured through brutality. What these articles did, however, was create a climate accepting of torture. What these articles, and a torrent of chat shows, did was demonise Arabs and Muslims, particularly men, paving the ground for the Abu Ghraib events to take place. The defence lawyers are not going to admit that the defendants in the Abu Ghraib case are deviants or perverts. But if the defendants were normal, the conclusion is more poignant. If ordinary young men and women are prone to committing torture in a situation of occupation, then perhaps occupation is to blame.
The thumbs-up is the one signal I wish to see outlawed, because of its crude symbolism and macho crassness, even when made by a women. This was the signal the soldiers made in the pictures leaked out of Abu Ghraib. If the occupation needs a flag in Iraq, here is a symbol that might suit it.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/689/re11.htm