The Law of Karma

Amidst the chaos and disaster in Iraq there will always be good news. A few days ago, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, was sentenced to death. He is better known in the western world as "Chemical Ali", after ordering the use of chemical weapons to systematically eradicate the Kurdish population in the North in 1986-1989 that led to the deaths of approximately 180,000 Kurd's.

It was reported that he openly boasted of the nickname "Chemical Ali". After he was sentenced to death...five times...all he could mumble was "Thank God". This criminal was caught on tape saying "I will hit them with chemical weapons and kill them all...Who is going to say anything about it? The international community? curse the international community!" and there is a video (that can easily be found on youtube) which shows him kicking prisoners in the face...but of course you will always find some people who are ready to defend the ba'athists and their ideology of hate and genocide.

The interesting thing about this execution is that rumours are spreading he might be hanged in Kurdistan. I am no Sikh or Buddhist, but I believe in karma. Saddam was hanged inside an intelligence building that was used to execute his political opponents and now his cousin, Chemical Ali, might be hanged in Irbil or Halabja. Karma at its best. What goes around, comes around.

"With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together. Roughly speaking, this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, but there was no rigorous check of identity documents, and strict chronological age seems to have been less of a criterion than size and appearance. A strapping twelve-year-old might fail to make the cut; an undersized sixteen-year-old might be told to remain with his female relatives. ... It was then time to process the younger males. They were split into smaller groups. ... Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustled into large rooms, or halls, each filled with the residents of a single area. ... Although the conditions at Topzawa were appalling for everyone, the most grossly overcrowded quarter seem to have been those where the male detainees were held. ... For the men, beatings were routine. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 143-45.)"

In case you were thinking, Tapzawa isn't a German concentration camp run by Nazi's...Its a concentration camp near Kirkuk. The men who were "processed" were taken away to be killed in mass executions.

"Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front, and dragged into predug mass graves; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; still others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it -- a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 12.)

These crimes, along with the other war crimes that were committed by the Ba'ath regime must never be forgotten. It is only when people forget these crimes that they begin to think life in Iraq under Saddam was better. Life under Saddam was not 'better', its just that Al-Jazeera wasn't there to report every murder, every raid, every rape, every execution and every crime.

Political Football

I know football and politics are in two different leagues, but Iranian football seems to compliment their politics perfectly. It's dirty. Today was the final of the WAFF Championship between Iraq and Iran.

While watching the game today, I couldn't help but notice striking similarites between their football and politics (with regards to Iraq). After they scored the first two goals, which I admit were excellent, they seemed to have only one thing on their minds. It was almost as if they were subconsciously telling each other 'when ever an Iraqi has the ball, break his legs'.

After 30 minutes of beautiful football everything seemed to change. The Iranians started playing extremely rough, barging, kicking, tripping over and just general foul play. They started focusing less on the ball and more on their opponents legs.

I lost count of how many yellow cards were issued and one of their players was sent off after being warned twice for aimlessly hacking away at players. Iraq started to gain momentum and were playing brilliant attacking football, nice moves, nice passes, but just as they go near the goal they slow down and lose the ball. That is also how Iraqi politics is, all the hype, all the hard work, all the effort...but just no results.

Playing with a man down, the Iranians were outclassed for much of the 2nd half. This is when they decided to use another dirty tactic...grass rolling. Yes, I know, everyone in the middle-east does it. Its just a lot more frustrating when your on the receiving end. Every time an Iranian player had the slightest knock, he would act as if he'd been shot with a double-barrel pump-action shotgun and would spend the next minute rolling over the grass in excruciating and unbearable pain. The aim being of course to kill the time.

Iraq's constant attacking paid off when they managed to get a goal from the penalty spot which was smashed into the net by Salih Sadir (hes from Najaf!) just 4 minutes before the end of the game. The referees assistant decided to add 5 minutes extra-time to compensate for the time the Iranian players were spending on the grass staining their clothes. It wasn't enough time for the Iraqi's and the game ended 2-1. Oh well, we still have the Asian Cup to look forward to.

I am always proud of the Iraqi team, regardless of whether they win or lose. It's wonderful seeing Kurd's, Arab's, Shia's and Sunni's all playing side-by-side for their country. I had the privilege of meeting and playing football with some of them when they came to London. Every Iraqi, regardless of religion, sect or race cheers for the national team.

Our Common Struggle

I haven't posted for a while now on my blog which is weird because lately Ive had a lot of time on my hands, but the main reason is that, for me, the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be getting dimmer and dimmer. Almost every day we are receiving SMS's from my family in Najaf complaining about the situation down there, and that's only Najaf, they haven't even tasted what its like to be in Baghdad. And its not just Baghdad.

Things aren't looking good in the rest of Iraq either. The shrine in Sammara gets attacked (again!), more and more sunni mosques are being destroyed, every day more and more people are getting killed, 10,000 soldiers are being sent to Diyala to fight Al-Qaida, the remains of an Iraqi taekwondo team that was kidnapped over a year ago have finally been found (skulls and bones) and just recently the US forces discovered a neglected orphanage where little boys were starving to death.

I have always been an optimistic person, but its hard to tell if I can continue to be optimistic under these circumstances, and even as I'm saying it I feel embarrassed because I'm not even in Iraq. Only god knows what these poor people are going through every day and I think I'm even going to give up imagining what it must be like.

I have always said that removing Saddam Hussein was the best option for Iraq, because it doesn't only mean the end of a brutal and ruthless dictator, but probably the end to a sadistic dynasty that would have followed and plagued Iraq for decades to come. Its just the manner of both the US and Iraqi government that worries me. I don't for a moment believe that either of them are trying to complicate things or make them worse, but they are making mistakes and they should learn from them. When one of the holiest shrines in Iraq gets blown to bits, if you cant re-build it (bearing in mind both the US and Iraqi governments at the time promised to) the very least you can do is make sure things like that don't happen again. The terrorists simply came back over a year later and finished the job.

But its not just shrines or mosques, buildings made up of stone and bricks, human life is far more valuable and even the terrorists know it, which is why they continue to target innocent civilians. After all the bad news I almost half sighed in relief after reading this wonderful op-ed by the Iraqi Prime Minister.

The first thing I thought of when I read the title was the "3 years on" post I wrote over a year ago. "Why do people expect so much so fast from a country whose people had to suffer 3 decades of unimaginable terror!?".

Well, here it is:

America had its civil war. Why expect freedom to come easy to Iraq?

BY NOURI AL-MALIKI Wednesday, June 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Americans keen to understand the ongoing struggle for a new Iraq can be guided by the example of their own history. In the 1860s, your country fought a great struggle of its own, a civil war that took hundreds of thousands of lives but ended in the triumph of freedom and the birth of a great power. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation signaled the destruction of the terrible institution of slavery, and the rise of a country dedicated, more than any other in the world of nation-states then and hence, to the principle of human liberty.

Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated. As your country was fighting that great contest over its unity and future, Iraq was a province of an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance. A half a century later, the British began an occupation of Iraq and drew the borders of contemporary Iraq as we know them today. Independence brought no relief to the people of our land. They were not given the means of political expression, nor were they to know political arrangements that respected their varied communities.

Under the Baath tyranny, Iraqis were to endure a brutal regime the likes of which they had never known before. Countless people were put to death on the smallest measure of suspicion. Wars were waged by that regime and our national treasure was squandered without the consent of a population that was herded into costly and brutal military campaigns. Today when I hear the continuous American debate about the struggle raging in Iraq, I can only recall with great sorrow the silence which attended the former dictator's wars.

It is perhaps true that only people who are denied the gift of liberty can truly appreciate its full meaning and bounty. I look with admiration at the American debate surrounding the Iraq war, and I admire even those opinions that differ from my own. As prime minister of Iraq I have been subjected to my share of criticism in that American debate, but I harbor no resentment and fully understand that the basic concerns of Americans are the safety of their young people fighting in our country and the national interests of their society. As this American debate goes on, I am guided and consoled by the sacred place of freedom and liberty in the American creed and in America's notion of itself.

War being what it is, the images of Iraq that come America's way are of car bombs and daily explosions. Missing from the coverage are the great, subtle changes our country is undergoing, the birth of new national ideas and values which will in the end impose themselves despite the death and destruction that the terrorists have been hell-bent on inflicting on us. Those who endured the brutality of the former regime, those who saw the outside world avert its gaze from their troubles, know the magnitude of the change that has come to Iraq. A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves. Some of our neighbors have made this struggle more lethal still, they have placed their bets on the forces of terror in pursuit of their own interests.

When I became prime minister a year and a half ago, my appointment emerged out of a political process unique in our neighborhood: Some 12 million voters took part in our parliamentary elections. They gave voice to their belief in freedom and open politics and their trust imposed heavy burdens on all of us in political life. Our enemies grew determined to drown that political process in indiscriminate violence, to divert attention from the spectacle of old men and women casting their vote, for the first time, to choose those who would govern in their name. You may take this right for granted in America, but for us this was a tantalizing dream during the decades of dictatorship and repression.

Before us lies a difficult road--the imperative of national reconciliation, the drafting of a new social contract that acknowledges the diversity of our country. It was in that spirit that those who drafted our constitution made provisions for amending it. The opponents of the constitution were a minority, but we sought for our new political life the widest possible measure of consensus. From the outset, I committed myself to the principle of reconciliation, pledged myself to its success. I was determined to review and amend many provisions and laws passed in the aftermath of the fall of the old regime, among them the law governing de-Baathification. I aimed to find the proper balance between those who opposed the decrees on de-Baathification and others who had been victims of the Baath Party. This has not been easy, but we have stuck to that difficult task.

Iraq is well on its way to passing a new oil law that would divide the national treasure among our provinces and cities, based on their share of the population. This was intended to reassure those provinces without oil that they will not be left behind and consigned to poverty. The goal is to repair our oil sector, open the door for new investments and raise the standard of living of Iraqi families. Our national budget this year is the largest in Iraq's history, its bulk dedicated to our most neglected provinces and to improving the service sector in the country as a whole. Our path has been made difficult by the saboteurs and the terrorists who target our infrastructure and our people, but we have persevered, even though our progress has been obscured by the scenes of death and destruction.

Daily we still fight the battle for our security. We lose policemen and soldiers to the violence, as do the multinational forces fighting along our side. We are training and equipping a modern force, a truly national and neutral force, aided by our allies. This is against the stream of history here, where the armed forces have traditionally been drawn into political conflicts and struggles. What gives us sustenance and hope is an increase in the numbers of those who volunteer for our armed forces, which we see as proof of the devotion of our people to the stability and success of our national government.

We have entered into a war, I want it known, against militias that had preyed upon the weakness of the national government and in the absence of law and order in some of our cities, even in some of the districts in Baghdad, imposed their own private laws--laws usually driven by extremism and a spirit of vengeance. Some of these militias presented themselves as defenders of their own respective communities against other militias. We believe that the best way to defeat these militias is to build and enhance the capabilities of our government as a defender of the rights of our citizens. A stable government cannot coexist with these militias.

Our conflict, it should be emphasized time and again, has been fueled by regional powers that have reached into our affairs. Iraq itself is eager to build decent relations with its neighbors. We don't wish to enter into regional entanglements. Our principle concern is to heal our country. We have reached out to those among our neighbors who are worried about the success and example of our democratic experiment, and to others who seem interested in enhancing their regional influence.

Our message has been the same to one and all: We will not permit Iraq to be a battleground for other powers. In the contests and ambitions swirling around Iraq, we are neutral and dedicated to our country's right to prosperity and a new life, inspired by a memory of a time when Baghdad was--as Washington is today--a beacon of enlightenment on which others gazed with admiration. We have come to believe, as Americans who founded your country once believed, that freedom is a precious inheritance. It is never cheap but the price is worth paying if we are to rescue our country.