born 1976, political Scientist and freelance journalist
[04/03/2010]
If we fraction Iraqi reality and try to explain it from a uni-dimensional perspective -or from abroad- we will hardly understand anything. As we plunge among its people and share food and debates, travel and sleep, with people as independent as you can be in this country, we get nearer to understanding an evidence so obvious that we can only state it in order to promote a desired debate. The Iraq of 2010 is not the Iraq of 2003. Seven years have gone by and with them many events. Most of them extremely violent, painful and unfair. And when the answers change -due to the natural evolution of the events- it is important to change the questions to avoid the record from becoming scratched.
There is a canonical version, difficult to change due to the physical distance and the insurmountable breach that the level of danger in the streets of Baghdad has imposed on foreigners, increasingly lost in the dark room generated by the risk of kidnapping. In opposition to this version, there is the kaleidoscopic version, more complex and full of nuances. You can only gain access to it through proximity, time, patience and listening, without prejudices; to what the Iraqis who stayed in Iraq, out of choice or obligation, can and want to tell us.
In April 2003, a coalition of foreign military forces overthrew Saddam Husseins' regime with various goals in mind. Among them, the most obvious ones where the control of the country's natural resources and getting rid of a political figure, a former ally, who was increasingly uncomfortable in the regional balance. The logical and legitimate resistance that any occupation entails started then. Following this point of view, the resistance is still active, even if nobody is capable of tracing where it is, other than a bunch of exiles who have proclaimed themselves its leaders and who have a professional past (before 2003) that is best left unknown. Everything that is not occupation or resistance is collaboration supported by Iran. Many Iraqi exiles and some solidarity organizations make the effort of trying to transmit this point of view. It has a certain logic to it and -even more importantly- it says what most people want to hear, out of habit, previous positioning or just because changing one's opinion in the face of facts is frowned upon in bars and debates. If there is a massacre of civilians in the streets of Baghdad it is always Al Qaeda's doing. In other words, it is foreigners or masked ghosts. And if it has to be admitted at some point that it is Iraqis murdering Iraqis, the answer is always the same: "death squadrons" paid by the United States, Israel or Iran in order to lay the blame on the insurgents or the next door neighbor (according to which way the wind blows), hence feeding the anti-imperialist discourse.
However, in the divided Iraq of 2010, an Iraq that hardly exists as we knew it, reality is much more complex. Nearly a third of the country, the Iraqi Kurdistan, works in a regime of quasi-independence from the "federal" government, with its political leaders actively participating, at the same time, in the central regime, even to the point of presiding the country (like Jalal Talabani in his palace of Al Jadiriya in central Baghdad). And nearly another half of the country, from Baghdad to Basra, with an overwhelming Shiite majority, is controlled by parties and militias that, in one way or another, have reached internal agreements after a few years of internal conflict, and they now live their own cold war with what is left of the occupying forces, withdrawn within their bases and witnessing the events alternatively from the distance of the guns ready to go back to the streets or from the offices of the administration. It is as obvious as it is uncomfortable to many of us that the word "occupation" is synonymous with revolution, liberation, the fall of the former regime and the end of Saddam's dictatorship. And that working for the coalition has been and still is the aim of thousands and thousands of young Iraqis, attracted by money and the possibility of migrating, not as political exiles, but migrating for economic reasons, due to defeatism and collaboration. That Erbil and Suleimanya in the Kurdish north have never lived through a period of tranquility, liberty and development like the one they are undergoing nowadays is considered only as pure "propaganda of the Israeli-American protectorate". The stories of the inhabitants of the Gharmian region about the thousands of people who were gassed or buried alive by Saddam's army while the pro-independence warriors where executed and their bodies left hanging, rotting in the doorways of their houses until they decomposed are, for many, a minimal detail when it comes to understanding why the Kurds gave free entrance to the foreigners who would overthrow the man who was applying against them a full-blown ethnic cleansing process.
In today's Iraq we can find army soldiers working side by side wiith the Americans in the same way that seven years ago they used to work for the regime that the coalition toppled. Mayors, MPs and governors who are struggling, according to their own testimony, to build, for the first time in the story of their country, a democracy, and NGO activists who are trying to influence the debate opened on the reform of the Iraqi constitution through civic mobilization, signing petitions, organizing demonstrations and participating through political parties and all kinds of civil society associations. All this is covered by the more than 300 newspapers published in a country in which, only seven years ago, there were only four available, and they were all censored.
And, in view of the Iraqi parliamentary elections, in which a strong debate is taking place, along with executions and explosions, the vetoing of candidates is presented as a repressive measure against the former Ba'ath Party and the Sunni minority to strengthen the idea that it is Iran who decides in the government of Iraq through its control of the Shiite majority. But if the real motives of this exclusion are analyzed, we could consider that this is just an excuse, with the Ba'ath being the MacGuffin of this horror movie, in order to discard rivals in the electoral race. It happened to Salh Al Mutlaq, leader of a Sunnite faction. Because he was electorally threatening the governmental coalition. But how many Sunnites are there now in the parliament and in the electoral lists, even in Al Maliki's government? How many are there in the mixed lists? How many generals of the Iraqi army have an obvious past of participation in Saddam's regime? It is probable that the supersizing of the Ba'ath party is not even positive for those who intend to make it the embodiment of the Sunnite -a falsehood-. Or not even for those who intend to annul its former members, many of them perfectly integrated in society.
And it is no less certain that if you have a free afternoon to ask around in the streets of Najaf, around the Khoufa University, the former base of the Spanish army, you will not find negative opinions regarding the presence of troops there. Even though they only shine by comparison with the indefensible conduct of many American soldiers. Or that, from the point of view of the formulation of a Spanish foreign policy, the sudden decision of withdrawing the troops invalidated Spain as an actor in the design of the future of the country, diminishing and damaging any channel of dialogue with the Iraqi authorities who felt, to say the least, betrayed. An opinion worth mentioning is that, when you rummage through a house, it might be a good idea to tidy it up before leaving.
An obvious reality, that will be glaring to anyone scrutinizing this country, is the growing energy of the Iraqi society, that is organizing, participating, debating and intervening in its future. Civil, daily, persevering and threatened resistances, in a context where, even if they had no previous knowledge of democracy, that constructive force, many -those who stayed- are making the effort of not giving up. In a context, of foreign occupation, that is starting to recede and in which, sadly, many of the men and women who continue to -even if less frequently- to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers in the middle of streets, hotels and ministries, tearing apart dozens of fellow countrymen, no longer carry passports of foreign jihadists.
How many Iraqis have died in the hands of the violence provoked by the invasion? How many Iraqis have died tortured by fellow countrymen in the framework of the sectarian violence that ravaged the country? Who can guarantee the authenticity of the responsibility claims of the market massacres? Who can draw the red line dividing terrorism from resistance when, for every dead occupying soldier hundreds of Iraqis have fallen under anonymous bombs?
How many millions of Iraqis have been forcefully displaced? How many of the conversations and debates with the actual inhabitants of Baghdad are centered on the return of the departed and who believe, mistakenly, that it is impossible to go back or are simply better off living abroad than in a broken country, with the full legitimacy of someone who has decided to emigrate in search of a better life but with a different cause for their exile to the one stated? How many Iraqis do not go back because the transition in their country brings with it the revenge for those who collaborated actively with the massive human rights violations committed by the toppled regime?
Without forgetting that it is true that a number of Iraqi provinces are still -in the beginning of 2010- practically out of reach for the journalists who travel without armed escort, or for any Iraqi who is not from those provinces, like Diyala, Ramadi, or Anbar or Mosul. And that those are precisely the places where you would hear different opinions from the ones collected in these texts. Quite often, the key and the limit of journalism is that you talk with those willing to talk and you can only reach reachable places. Due to that, journalism can hardly ever pretend to be objective. The cards, on the table. Out of honesty.