“WHAT THE MOBILIZATION OF THESE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO HAVE TASTE THE FIRST TIME AT THE COMEDY OF POLITICAL COMMITMENT?”
So now they feel they have been fooled by this president who was reelected with 63% of the vote. And has also as its victory the 84% turnout: proof, he said, the accession of Iran to the Republic of mullahs. ”Say that all Iranians are not for this man, we’re ashamed of him,” slips a student of French literature who slips between stone-throwing youth holed up in the university and bikers to black shells that charge on the sidewalks.Despite the dead – a dozen, according to preliminary results – and the wounded away on stretchers, despite the shots slamming into the city, they continue to shout their anger: “What to do with the mobilization of young people who have tasted for the first time the intoxication of political commitment? asks a college professor met in the street. Genius will not fit so easily that in the light … ”
The Revolutionary Guards have regained control of the crossroads of Tehran. Civilian or military fatigues, armed with my day and night hounding telescopic machine guns, they deter young people to talk to Westerners. The information ministry has banned foreign journalists from covering protests of the opposition who have won the big cities: the regime has now anxious to close the dangerous interlude of freedom of expression he had thought strong enough to allow during the campaign. However, this publicity stunt for the benefit of Western public opinion has sharply dropped. And the crackdown began: mass arrests, including that of the brother of former President Khatami, newspaper closures of the main opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. And the injury list lengthens. But young Iranians are afraid of nothing. As if they had been stifled for too long, they continue to explain: “We supported Mousavi because we had no other choice.It is the product of a wider selection than an election, “said a disillusioned student activist entrenched within a faculty. We did not party, we are not organized. Our goal?Take as long as possible. ”
This battle is played out in Tehran, but also in Isfahan or Shiraz. Reformers and conservatives: each side wants to prove that he won by mobilizing the greatest number of his supporters to replay the election in the street. Both Iran who are unaware and do not understand. He, sophisticated, intellectuals, students and middle class that wants to embrace the world. Against a popular Iranian clerics spewing corrupt as far as the “imperialist Zionist enemy.” ”Fans of television satellite against those military songs of the Revolutionary Guards,” said one Iranian journalist. Each camp has its mullahs.Ayatollah Sanei, for example, openly supports the reformers. But Ayatollah Yazdi was, he welcomed the victory of Ahmadinejad, which “strengthens the links between Islam and the revolution …”
A campaign lip
President Ahmadinejad said he decided to seize power by rigging the election? ”How else do you explain that for the first time, the precise outcome of the vote was announced two hours after the closure of polling stations? said a taxi driver. Either these elections are rigged, or Ahmadi knows the future and should remain president for life! ”
But following the elections, the Freedom Square in Tehran, Ahmadinejad’s supporters are an impressive crowd: “Tell that we are the most numerous, while Iran is behind Ahmadinejad because he is hardworking, incorruptible and close to his people, “shouted a bank employee. To illustrate these words, President Ahmadinejad, hoisted on the hood of an old Jeep, came to greet his supporters simply and warmly as if he knew them all personally. The women tied their chadors to form cordons. It is a disciplined army of supporters who listens to his head with adoration. Among them, two young girls in colorful veils and plucked eyebrows settle for the black mass of long chador. These are two students in journalism: “We support the president because we believe first and foremost the good of the country, not our liberties. Thanks to him, Iran has stood up to big powers, the United States. We made our pride! ”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Tehran, a procession of tens of thousands of people peacefully contesting the vote: “We are so many want to end this dictatorship!” One enraged supporters Mousavi. The reformist candidate has been leading the event in which a man is gunned down by militiamen. But it seems a bit overwhelmed by his supporters who shouted to him: “Mousavi will claim your voice!”
Mir Hossein Mousavi, Prime Minister of Khomeini, made a campaign lip, hesitating over every word, vague to the point that Iranian comedians have dubbed “Machin-thing.” In meetings, his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, who found the words to inflame the audience.What a contrast with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! This high tribune of its charm, never out of countenance, in a flash from the most disarming sweetness to a stinging harshness. In reality, there is much difference between the candidates in the presidential election between their supporters.
“An unbearable cheating”
A few days after the announcement of his victory, the president is bright. To the foreign press, he revisits his classic anti-Western catechism. He said the Western media related “to the capitalist system arrogant and ignorant” failed to dissuade the people to abstain in elections. The Islamic republic is “a model of religious democracy in the world.” The Iranians are more concerned than ever “to the line of imams martyrs.” And he denounced the agitators of this “velvet revolution drone from abroad.” By assigning manipulations western wave of protest, the Iranian president seemed delighted to find a new pretext to postpone the invitation to dialogue launched by Barack Obama. But Ahmadinejad has taken the measure of the revolt? ”Twenty-five million people voted for me and they exist,” he insists. Other? ”From bad losers who could barely like after a football game … Too simple?
While proponents of Mousavi denounce the election result as an “unbearable cheating,” the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who unconditionally supports her foal Ahmadinejad in this crisis: “It’s a divine miracle.” In Iran, now The struggle is no longer between the camp of the reformers and conservatives, but between those who want to defend at all costs velayat-e faqih, the founding principle of the Iranian regime that creates confusion between religion and politics, and those who wish to detach.
During the election campaign, Mousavi had advocated amendments to the Constitution, but without daring to go into detail. Violently attacked by Ahmadinejad, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani had written to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei asking for his support against the president. But the spokesman of the Presidency had immediately made the comparison with the old letter by Ayatollah Montazeri to Imam Khomeini for permission to take his distance from the Velayat, this “government of the learned.”Letter which had led to the shelving of Montazeri.
Today, Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the daughter of former Iranian president, calls it as openly as “the supreme leader is not a king whose dynasty would be frozen for centuries …” With his machine-gun speed, she denounced the elections, the absence of observers at the counting Mousavi, lack of ballots available in the bastions of the reformers. ”In Iran, the op position is the majority not the minority,” says she.
Niloufar, a theology student who voted for Mousavi but whose father, an officer in the Iranian army, is a fan of Ahmadinejad, agrees: “They have so abused Islam,” sighs the girl that the only solution to safeguard the gains of our revolution is to separate religion from politics. “
She was furious to be here in this little piece of Iran located in the heart of Portland Place in London. So close but so far from home. The evening with his friends ae ae drafting the dul fa, she listened with a shudder, the telephone, the cry of “Allah Akbar” which rise rooftops of Tehran. In Iran, where 30% of the population have satellite dishes, Pouneh Ghoddousi is a star: “Your Turn”, his show gives a voice to listeners. At the height of the crisis that shook Iran since the disputed election of 12 June, the program was broadcast four times a day.Like most of the 140 people who are active in the design offices of the BBC Persian Pouneh was a journalist in Tehran for the New York Times. Then she got tired of being constantly questioned and harassed by officials of the Ministry of Information. Same route for Motallebi, a prominent blogger who was imprisoned in Evin prison, including murderers and rapists, and who now oversees the programs on the Internet. Keramat or Kamber, head of television news, and who trembles at the thought of not being able to find his wife in Tehran.All these young journalists living in the pace of Iran, while maintaining contact with their friends, their families, their informants. “We know what is going on, but it’s so frustrating not to be treading water,” sighs Pouneh. Their messaging, emails arrive without interruption, “Mousavi decided to create a party political” … “Great event scheduled Thursday to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the student revolts” … “Desjournalistes the official Iranian news agency Fars reported to have resigned to show their disapproval.” Presenter ignites, “Of course, we must check, but it would be a significant new!” Remarkable, indeed. The Fars news agency has been the spearhead of attacks by the regime against the BBC fa, accusing him of being an instrument of war in the hands of the Zionists. A few days ago, the chief justice, Ayatollah Sharoudi, even prohibits any cooperation with the editors of London, on pain of severe reprisals. “Now we are endangering those whom we contact, even over the phone …”Iranian state television broadcasts daily false confessions. And that of the woman explaining that it is a BBC Persian, which prompted her to launch grenades into the street. Pouneh has just spent his last show with the theme of forced confessions. Took a strange appeal: that of an agent of the security services of Khorasan in eastern Iran, saying how sorry he was … But that is another testimony that has most upset: “An Iranian who lived in London had just learned that his brother had been killed in U17 events. A unsure how the news to his parents … “For her, her work is a continuation of the events that followed on 12 June:” The Iranians were angry in their corner realized that they don ‘ were no longer alone. Today, this disenchantment has become a collective force. We’ll see what he will become … “
]]>Only the third lingers, happy for the opportunity to speak. No one has come to pick him up. Hadji Gul Raman relates the worst with a smile. His teeth broken by punches the day of his arrest. The air conditioning that froze his bones in midwinter. The fire extinguishers that sprayed ice water on the twenty prisoners piled up in chain-linked cells. The lack of privacy, the daily fights to use the sole toilet … These humiliations and tortures, formerly used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, are still standard operating procedure at Bagram, in spite of Barack Obama’s declaration. In spite of the horror he seemed to profess for these aberrations of the “war against terrorists” begun by his predecessor. And yet, Raman did not experience the “techniques” in use during the first years of Bagram prison, built eight years ago. He did not live through what Omar Kadr – 15 years old at the time of his arrest – suffered; Kadr, whom the screws transformed into a living mop, wiping him across the floor after having coated it with floor wax. Or those that Dilawar – dead in 2002 after having been hung by the hands for four days, although there was no evidence against him – endured. According to the autopsy report, Dilawar’s legs had doubled in volume.
So Hadji Gul Raman spent three years in this dungeon of America-at-war because, like almost all Afghans, he possessed a Kalashnikov … One day in December 2006, Raman left with his uncles to find his cousin, Hadji Ahmed Sharkan, a district governor in Helmand province, kidnapped by traffickers – a national sport in Afghanistan. At a checkpoint, American soldiers searched them. They arrested the one holding the weapon; they ended up releasing the others. Raman never saw either lawyer or judge; it is consequently impossible to verify his version of events … “They crossed me off the list of the living,” he says. “I knew neither how long I would remain imprisoned nor where I was.” How to locate a place that does not exist?
On No Map
For the Bagram detention center, located on an American military base in northwestern Kabul, does not figure on any map. The site of the biggest American military prison outside the United States is classified a defense secret. Unlike Guantanamo, no journalist has been able to visit the two sand-colored hangars surrounded by concrete. No outside observer, no Red Cross inspector, has had access to the detention center’s “special” quarter where “very high-value” prisoners are interrogated. In this “black jail,” as the detainees call it, the individual concrete cells have no window; the lights remain on 24/7. Last August, the American government limited time spent in these interrogation sites to … two weeks.
Bagram, the prison which, in the words of an American military prosecutor, would make Guantanamo look like “a five-star hotel.” Bagram, the dread of Afghans who all know a family member or a neighbor who disappeared one day without a trace, swallowed up by that black hole. Bagram, which American human rights activists have dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo.” For after the new president’s election, the American attorney general decreed that those imprisoned there – unlike those in Guantanamo – could not contest their detention before a civilian judge, nor even see a lawyer … A decision so contrary to the principles asserted by Obama that he is today suspected of wanting to replace the Cuban penal colony with the Afghan prison. While the number of detainees at Guantanamo has continued to decline (there are now less than 200), it has rapidly increased at Bagram, particularly over the last few months. According to American Army spokesman Stephen Clutter, there are 750 today, including 30 non-Afghans and five minors. It is as though the United States, enmeshed in its struggle against terrorism and al-Qaeda, had finally determined that it couldn’t, in time of war, make do without a lawless prison where every means is legitimate for “harvesting” intelligence. Initially a triage center for prisoners arrested in the Afghan theater of operations, Bagram became the final destination for suspects arrested in the framework of the war against terror.
In the early morning hours of a glacial December day, squatting men wait in the Kabul prosecutor’s rose garden. They have come to enquire about their disappeared. Families from every region of Afghanistan have sent their old people: those who can no longer work in the fields sometimes camp for whole months in the capital in hope of having news about their prisoners. The prosecutor receives notables only, those who can produce a letter of recommendation signed by their tribal chieftain. The others are tossed from offices to little cubicles, directed to subalterns who chase them away with the back of a hand or rush to lose their files in the stacks of paperwork.
In the batch, there are guilty persons to be sure, authors of attacks animated by hatred of the occupier. But the majority of stories these men tell describe the extraordinary misunderstanding that has settled in between Afghans and the occupying troops. Fear and incomprehension. Culture shock, skillfully exploited by warlords or simple peasants: to get rid of a troublesome rival, all one has to do is denounce him as a dangerous Taliban to Western soldiers who understand nothing about all these quarrels. This war conducted by strikes of blind raids sends people to prison for years who are often guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Abdul Razak, a Kandahar bazaar merchant, was detained for five years at Guantanamo, then Bagram, because he had … the same name as the Taliban minister of the interior. Abdul Rahman, also jailed in the Afghan prison, was accused of having killed a policeman who was not yet dead the day of his arrest … The affair that brought Alam Khan, a young peasant, to Bagram is just as absurd. His father, an old man whose face is crisscrossed by deep wrinkles, railing against the Americans’ lack of discernment, relates: “One day, in Zabul province, our neighbor Nasrallah shot my son, whose land he coveted, twice. During his convalescence, my son swore to take revenge. But before he could do so, Nasrallah had denounced him to the Americans to protect himself. He claimed that my son was a Taliban commandant, a certain Salim. Yet everybody knows that this Salim is not even from our district!”
“Zoo Smell”
Outraged by these arbitrary arrests, the committee for peace and reconciliation (charged with rallying the “moderate” Taliban to the Afghan government) and President Karzai have asked the Americans to allow the Afghan legal system to reexamine the cases of prisoners for whom their tribal chieftains vouch. The Americans – as in Iraq – finally agreed to communicate certain files to the local authorities. At this time, the committee has received over 2,300 letters from tribal chieftains which have led to hundreds of liberations. Committee member and law professor Hachimi, former adviser to the Afghan justice minister, acknowledges that these discharges have frequently been as arbitrary as the arrests: “It’s too dangerous to go to the provinces to hear the protagonists. So we settle for having the detainees repeat their version of the facts. If there’s no discrepancy, we propose their release. And the Americans decide …”
Sayed Sharif Sharif, the Afghan judge charged with preparing the cases that the Americans agree to communicate to him, receives visitors in a tiny office, the cupboards of which overflow with paper. He will never forget the first time he visited the prison at Bagram: “The dogs, the zoo smell that emanated from the cages …” Of the 600 cases he has been able to examine, 200 prisoners were immediately cleared – “judicial errors.” The others were tried on minor charges and released after two years of prison. “As for the hundred or so Bagram prisoners arrested before 2007, we’ve never been able to obtain access to their files,” says Judge Sharif.
“We Even Have to Pay the Judges”
Barack Obama, who has not given up on closing the prison at Guantanamo, has never mentioned Bagram in his speeches. Yet, after his election, he signed a decree ordering the closure of all secret sites under CIA control. That decree, however, was not applied to Bagram, because it comes under the responsibility of the Army’s special forces section … Such mystery surrounds this detention center situated in the combat zone that a good many Americans do not even know of its existence. Human rights activists’ actions have lifted a corner of the veil. The American Civil Liberties Union, a New York-based NGO whose mission is “defending and preserving the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” brought a legal action and obtained a ruling obliging the American military penitentiary administration to reveal the names of most Bagram detainees. But those who figure on that list remain “enemy combatants” and still do not have the right to representation by a lawyer.
Tina Foster, a lawyer for the legal NGO headquartered in New York, the Center for Constitutional Rights, was defending Guantanamo prisoners when she realized that the worst physical maltreatment undergone by her clients had taken place at Bagram. Since she has been looking into the case of the “Afghan gulag,” the young woman receives Obama’s promises with skepticism. The American government has just announced that it was considering confiding the administration of the prison to the Afghan government as soon as it had trained the necessary personnel. But Tina Foster doesn’t believe it. She points out that no date has been fixed for this transfer of power that is all the more hypothetical in that President Karzai, who for months has been trying – in vain – to form a government, has never been weaker. “They’re not preparing to close the prison at all,” states the lawyer. “On the contrary, they’re enlarging it. The United States needs Bagram to be able to replace Guantanamo. With respect to the methods of the war against terror, nothing but the language has changed from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.” Meanwhile, for the last few months, the Bagram prisoners against whom there is the least evidence are being progressively transferred to the Afghan Pul-e Charkhi prison – which is also being enlarged. There, they recover an identity and receive a verdict, a prelude to their exit from prison: a manner of providing a legal framework to their liberation, in the absence of any for their incarceration. But this step towards freedom is not without pitfalls, since, in the Afghan legal system, other ambushes lie in wait for “releasables.” As the father of Hayatullah, a 20-year-old prisoner who has hoped for months to get out of the Pul-e Charkhi limbo, explains: “If my son is innocent, why not liberate him directly? Since he’s been at Pul-e-Charkhi, we have to pay all the time, even the judges. But we don’t have the means … The rich Taliban commandants, they have comfortable cells; they’ve even got cell phones!”
In a confidential 700-page report on the prison system in Afghanistan ordered by Gen. David Petraeus, marine officer Douglas Stone has demonstrated the system’s perversity. Of 600 prisoners incarcerated at Bagram in June 2009, at least 400 were innocent! But the detention conditions and prison overpopulation result from the multiplication of military operations, notably in the south of the country, frequently leading to the transformation of innocents into fanatics. In other words: arbitrary detentions and abuse manufacture terrorists on an assembly line; a vicious circle that the dispatch of 30,000 additional soldiers risks reinforcing. And which seriously undermines the cause for which America fights in Afghanistan. Such is the paradox of Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is conducting wars on two fronts. A sincere humanist who maintains secret prisons in violation of the principles of that America which elected him.
Since Obama has been the United States president, the number of prisoners at Bagram prison has continued to rise. To answer human rights activists’ criticisms, the American administration has just built a new building (cost: $67 million) as yet unoccupied. It will be able to shelter only 300 prisoners of the 750 still held in the dilapidated cages of the old prison.
Tina Foster
Since 2005, Tina Foster, a 35-year-old New York lawyer, has gone to bat for Bagram prisoners. In their name, she submits habeas corpus petitions (in principle, it is illegal in the United States to imprison anyone without a trial) but up until now, in vain. Tina Foster campaigned for Obama, thinking that he would put an end to the illegal methods implemented in the name of the “war against terror.” Today, she is cruelly disappointed.
For barely two years, and thanks to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Bagram prisoners have been able to communicate with their family members through videoconferencing. The ICRC also obtained permission, in September 2008, to organize family visits within the confines of the prison. However, recently, detainees have refused to participate to protest against their conditions of imprisonment.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was Bagram prison’s most famous detainee. He stayed there before being sent to a secret jail in Poland, then to Guantanamo. At Bagram, he was tortured: “They stuck a tube in my anus into which water was poured,” he confided to Red Cross representatives.
At the London Conference on Afghanistan, the question of national reconciliation with the Taliban was discussed … According to the UN’s Kabul representative, Norwegian Kai Eide, a first subject of discussion with the Taliban faction could bear on the “list of detainees at Bagram prison.”
Sara Daniel, for Le Nouvel Observateur (c) 2010
Translation: Truthout French Language Editor, Leslie Thatcher.
]]>Pillar of the revolution, then a technocrat for the Islamic Republic, he has become the hero of the reform camp. Opposite a regime at bay, the former Iranian prime minister claims he’s ready for martyrdom.
He loves the Ayatollah Khomeini and the poetry of Garcia Lorca. Even during these times of extreme tension, each time Mir Hossein Moussavi brings his team members together – those who aren’t yet in prison – he always begins by reading a poem. “Stay a true friend to your friends; use no violence towards your enemies …” one of Moussavi’s most fervent admirers, filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, recites from memory. The translation of these somewhat cloying verses doesn’t temper the enthusiasm of an artist tortured for five years in the shah’s jails and who would like to save his dear revolution: “Oh, if only our future president declaimed verses of poetry rather than diatribes about the Holocaust?” he dreams out loud.
The standard bearer for the “green revolution” is a discreet intellectual. Who searches for the words he finally murmurs. Who has hang-ups about a physique he deems a little unattractive. And who has long been suspected of running for the presidency a little bit accidentally. Wasn’t it his wife, the couple’s strong personality, who put him up to it? Or maybe even the Supreme Guide himself, judging that his charisma deficit and elocutionary shortcomings would leave him no chance opposite populist tribune Ahmadinejad?
The Gandhi of the “Dirt”
All that already belongs to the past. Mir Hossein Moussavi is no longer that timid and maladroit orator who seemed rather relieved when a defective sound system prevented him from pronouncing an electoral speech. Little by little, lifted by the human tide of his supporters who refused to leave the streets after the announcement of the results, he has changed. Now, he says: “I have grown.” And it’s true that one hardly recognizes him, so much has he become identified with this massive protest that has surprised the whole world. He is one with the crowd. He promised demonstrators to stay by their sides whatever happens. He now shares their fate. He is instilling them with his determination and also his prudence, even if it means bridling their impatience. And he’s feeding on these neophytes’ enthusiasm, drunk on a freedom they’re ready to snatch at the peril of their lives. He has also taught them how to turn the regime’s own breviary against it. They chant: “God is great,” and people understand: “Down with the Guide!”
Modest, Moussavi acknowledges the path he has covered: “I’m nothing but a simple militant…. It’s you who have made me aware of my responsibilities,” admits the former apparatchik, who at the beginning of his campaign preached only timid reforms. How can anyone be surprised that he aroused so little enthusiasm at first? On the eve of the election, when they chanted his name in front of foreign journalists, his supporters were almost apologetic: “He’s our own itty-bitty Obama! We didn’t really have a choice.” And every time, this anxiety came through: what if he gave up? “Where are you, Moussavi? Give us a sign; we’re ready to die for you!” pleaded a young girl the day the results were announced. “He must be under his covers, terrified by this movement that’s outstripping him,” doubted one student who felt quite alone opposite the hordes of armed motorcycle police ready to charge even then. But no, Moussavi refined his discourse, with that concern for precision that character izes him. “Article 27 of the Constitution authorizes peaceful assembly. The duty of the police is to protect the demonstrators, not charge at them …” he said after the violence that bloodied last Saturday. Today, Moussavi declares himself ready for martyrdom. Have those whom President Ahmadinejad described as “dirt” found their Gandhi?
The first time that Ahmad Salamatian, ex-secretary of state for foreign affairs for Iran and an MP from Ispahan, heard people talk about the “Moussavi couple,” it was before the revolution. At the fine arts school where the Moussavis met, the young woman did not wear the veil, but went lightly clad. It was a photo from those years that Ahmadinejad threatened to show during the televised debate against his opponent. Bad idea: Iranians don’t appreciate that kind of coarse attack. At the time, influenced by the thought of sociology of religions professor Ali Shariati, a figure in the opposition to the Pahlavi monarchy, the Moussavis belonged to a school of thought that demanded a classless society, the end of Western domination and a revolutionary nationalism close to Third World national liberation movements. At that time, people talked mostly about Moussavi’s wife: Mir Hossein was only the husband of the future Iranian revolution’s Joan of Arc. Zorah Kazemi, a daughter of the bourgeoisie, the daughter of a colonel, sister to a television anchorwoman, wrote scathing dissenting attacks, like this best-seller that circulated underground: “The Veil: My Weapon.” A little book with feminist emphasis, in spite of its title, that professes a Shi’ite Islam political orientation, colored by Marxism. To escape the Shah’s police, the spouses chose pseudonyms: Zorah opted for “Ranavard” (the sprinter), and Moussavi for “Rahro” (the long-distance runner). A revealing choice, according to Salamatian: “Moussavi is a marathon runner. It’s his endurance that will win points in the test of strength he’s begun against the regime.”
Filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf remembers how, from prison, he passionately followed the couple’s ascension and Zorah’s provocations: “We expected she’d be locked up too.” In fact, only Mir Hossein would spend a year in prison on account of his distant relations with the Palestine Group, an organization more concerned with learning about weapons handling than with supporting the Palestinian cause. Today, Moussavi still does not recognize Israel, but he denounces Ahmadinejad’s statements denying the Holocaust.
During the revolution, Moussavi was singled out by Ayatollah Beheshti, a progressive intellectual who entrusted him with the post of editor-in-chief of the Islamic Republic Party’s newspaper – the party which the present Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, leads. Within the editorial department, the two men did not get along: it was the beginning of an animosity and struggle for power that still go on. After the revolution, when his sole protector, Ayatollah Beheshti, was assassinated in 1981, Moussavi placed himself under the protection of Ahmad Khomeini, the son of the Guide. When he became president of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei tried to name his protégé, Ali Akbar Velayati, as prime minister, but Parliament imposed Moussavi on him.
So began eight years of difficult cohabitation. The two men agreed on nothing; neither on the economy: Moussavi is an interventionist socialist, a technocrat who busied himself with softening the economic impacts of the war against Iraq on the underprivileged classes; nor, most particularly, on the competencies of the president: which would be reduced little by little to those of a ceremonial figurehead during the revolutionary festivities. “They stole my presidency,” Ali Khamenei declared. The Hodjatoleslam maintained such a searing memory of those years that one of his first decisions, when he became Supreme Guide, was to eliminate the post of prime minister in 1988. That decision occasioned a very violent sparring match between the two men. Moussavi accused the Guide of wanting to muzzle Parliament and of dragging the country towards a dictatorship. Already.
Resonating All the Way to Qom
So Moussavi began a stretch in the political wilderness that would last twenty years. The architect returned to his abstract paintings inspired by Mondrian and renovated the family home built by his father, a bazaar merchant. He also became the cultural adviser for the reforming President Khatami, then for Rafsanjani, considered one of his principal godfathers today. A curious pairing. Between the billionaire mullah and the modest architect who didn’t even take advantage of his time in power to acquire himself a house, there’s not much in common. Apart from the same enemies, which will bring people together. Since the beginning of the revolt, Rafsanjani has made the rounds of the mullahs of Qom, Iran’s ideological capital, to rally them to the fight for Moussavi. Thus, he would have been received by the representative of Ali Sistani, the Iraqi ayatollah of Nadjaf, one of the clerics most respected in Iran, who preaches quietism, the separation of religion and political matters.
Is Moussavi really a moderate? Isn’t he first of all a nationalist concerned with his country’s highest interests? “The West mistrusts Moussavi somewhat because he concluded the secret agreements with father of the Pakistani bomb A.Q. Khan’s network to clandestinely acquire uranium enrichment technology. He also declared that his position on the nuclear issue was not so different from Ahmadinejad’s,” one diplomat observes. “However, Mir Hossein wants to change the country’s extremist image. And he’s the only politician who has defied the Supreme Guide, challenged today all the way up to and including his religious qualifications.” Up until now, Moussavi has satisfied himself with demanding a new, free and transparent election. A demand that resonates all the way to Qom. Since the beginning of the revolt, the forbidden book of Ayatollah Hairi, “Wisdom and Government,” has been circulating the seminaries again. This “Kant of Islam,” who demands that the Koran be read in the lig ht of reason, deems that even the Prophet himself wouldn’t have any right to govern unless that right had been granted to him by the people. And what if, in Iran, Allah had changed sides?
]]>Monday 15 June 2009
Why that change of heart?
Moussavi’s partisans are going much further than he. It is as though he were being pushed by them to take on a stature that he was not previously known for. The demonstrations surprised everybody: no one, including Moussavi, expected that the movement would take on such scope.
From the announcement of the election results, little groups formed spontaneously on all the street corners, in the expectation of a rallying call. It was only after that that Moussavi contested the results. At the same time, the regime’s partisans also began to occupy the field. Confrontations broke out while the riot police set to charging regime opponents. In fact, since Saturday, we’ve seen a demonstration of force by both sides, each of which seeks to legitimate the election a posteriori. It’s possible, nonetheless, to imagine another scenario with respect to Monday’s demonstration. Has it all been prearranged? Moussavi has met with Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the latter has called on him to calm things down. Perhaps Moussavi, unable to suddenly dissolve the movement conducted by his partisans, has decided to go to the demonstration to calm things down?
Lots of pressure on foreign journalists has been reported. Are you also encountering problems with doing your work?
The atmosphere is very tense, but we are able to work. For several days, we lived through something unbelievable. We did whatever we wanted. In the street, everyone was talking. Demonstrators from both sides came to see us to try to win us over to their respective causes. But the regime took over again with the confrontations: we were put under increased surveillance, with identity checks, etc. Foreigners are perceived as enemies of the regime, suspected of having fomented a velvet revolution along with the opposition. Ahmadinejad, moreover, is constantly repeating that in his speeches – which still doesn’t prevent the two sides from continuing to approach us in the street.
Ahmadinejad was officially reelected with 63 percent of the votes. A result that should be ascribed to the fraud denounced by Moussavi, to a too-weak opposition, or simply to the popularity of the outgoing president?
I think that that outcome is the result of all those three reasons together. Ahmadinejad is truly more charismatic and popular than Moussavi: his rallies bring together at least twice as many partisans as Moussavi’s. Ahmadinejad appeals because he is charming, close to the population; he acts as though he were the salesman in the neighborhood store – I’ve seen him go by myself in a car that doesn’t look like anything special – which is exactly the opposite of the super-rich mullahs who have grabbed the country’s wealth.
With respect to fraud, it’s difficult to know. We’ve just watched a strange exercise: the staging of elections in a non-democratic regime … What is certain is that the regime did not simplify Moussavi’s task. It never stopped putting sticks in his wheels: a non-operational microphone during a rally, web sites supporting Moussavi blocked … But it wasn’t just Moussavi: reform candidate Mehdi Karoubi had a ridiculously low result – which allows the thought that he could have been the victim of fraud. Still, while it’s true that although Ahmadinejad may not have really had 63 percent of the votes, his partisans are nonetheless more numerous and more disciplined than Moussavi’s. The pro-Moussavi movement, on the other hand, is not structured and he has no political party.
Are there reasons to believe that the movement will last?
That’s very difficult to say. That’s never been seen. The movement is not limited to Tehran and the small burghers north of the capital; it spills out into several other cities. It seems to bring together all those who contest the regime: even Iranians who didn’t vote since they didn’t believe in these elections have come down into the streets. They have a very determined air and have demonstrated incredible courage in confronting the regime this way. The two sides give prominence to a social economic and religious fracture: the third of the country that voted for Moussavi is better off, while Ahmadinejad’s electors enjoy more modest circumstances and are more indoctrinated. The pro-Moussavi partisans are beginning to call the system into question. Moussavi has even evoked, through hints, the separation of religion and politics. Which really frightened the regime. We can expect a formidable repression, since, obviously, the regime is stronger than the demonstrators – mass arrests have already begun. But the regime runs the risk of wreaking havoc. Asking a third of the population to swallow its anger may have medium-term effects.
It’s also possible that the regime has allowed things to spill out, the better to counterattack by brandishing the specter of a revolution. Now that it’s in the process of losing its American enemy since Obama’s accession to office – given his search to calm things down – the regime may want to create a “domestic enemy.”
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
]]>Thursday 10 December 2009
In the last presidential election, he came in sixth out of 41 candidates. A good showing for a man who was once defense minister to Najibullah, the former pro-Soviet president of Afghanistan, murdered by the Taliban. Shahnawaz Tanai nostalgically evokes the “good old days” of the Soviets, which he seems not to be the only one to miss. According to him, there are many commonalities between NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan and the Soviet period. First of all, the Russians, like the Americans, relied on warlords of evil repute in order to take over power. Then Russia, like NATO today, was unable to pacify the country because of the open border with Pakistan, which assured the Mudjahadijn a rear staging base. “In 1985, six years after the beginning of the Soviet invasion, the debates began in Russia, exactly like today in the West, on the legitimacy of the government in place in and on the Soviet Union’s economic troubles …The Russian Army’s morale was at a nadir and people in Moscow were wondering about the opportunity of sending more soldiers: Brejnev was for, the KGB was against …” In 1988, Najibullah sent his defense minister to Moscow to convince Gorbachev to stay in Afghanistan: “I gave him the advice I could give the Americans today: to envisage the stages of a withdrawal, you must first secure the major axes and the principle cities, Mazar, Herat, Kabul, and give the army logistical support.” Najibullah’s former minister remembers a meeting between Najibullah and Fidel Castro: “Castro advised Najibullah to appear less dependent on Gorbachev. Karzai should also put some distance between himself and the Americans …”
Sara Daniel
translation Leslie Thatcher, http://www.truthout.org/12110908
]]>The idea is highly controversial. Its detractors explain that any attempt at dialogue would be considered a sign of weakness by the fundamentalist guerrilla at precisely the moment when the West is demonstrating the scope of its determination to pacify the country militarily. Didn’t Mullah Omar just violently reject the proposals for national reconciliation that President Karzai since his investiture has ceaselessly tried to engage him in? Nonetheless, Barack Obama has repeated that NATO’s troop withdrawal should begin in 18 months. Yet, nothing proves that the counterinsurgency strategy he has opted for will be a success in the meantime. Consequently, the Afghan president maintains all channels open and, far from official platforms, enemy leaders are talking to one another.
In spite of the fighting, meetings occur between the clandestine headquarters of the blind mullah and the Afghan government. From Pakistan to Kabul, intercessors see to it that messages are passed under the watchful eye of the Americans. Even American Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, it would be necessary to come to the point of conducting a policy of a reconciliation with people who have killed American soldiers: “Isn’t that how wars always end?” he declared during a NATO meeting.
Maulvi Arsala Rahmani is one of those messengers. Under the Taliban regime, he was minister for religious affairs. Today, he has returned to the Afghan Senate. He receives people in his house in Kabul, where he is under good protection and spied on by several countries’ intelligence agents. Enveloped in an Uzbek coat lined in gray fur, he prays with fervor, as though better to reflect on the questions he is asked. To hear him tell it, he would like to reconcile everybody. For he likes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and … Mullah Omar. He mentions his “friend, Osama” (bin Laden), whom he knew well in Sudan, then during the jihad. According to Rahmani, Mullah Baradar, the present Taliban operational commander, is a “good and honest man.” And he misses Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose armed groups are covering the south of the country with blood: “We always used to be together …” Nonetheless, he believes that the time has come for the guerrilla movement to dissociate itself from his “friend Osama.” But are the members of Mullah Omar’s choura (council of notables), with whom he is in contact, ready for that divorce? In his opinion, it’s not impossible. For, in spite of their military “success,” the Taliban, like all soldiers, would like to be able to go home. Moreover, and contrary to what has been suggested in Mullah Omar’s communiqués, it is sometimes the guerrilla leaders, and not the Afghan presidency, who take the initiative for these meetings, Maulvi Arsala Rahmani assures me. Last year, Mullah Baradar led a Taliban delegation to Kabul to talk with Karzai’s older brother, Qayyum.
Born to the same tribe as the Afghan president, Mullah Omar’s right hand man is supposed to be a more conciliating man than his mentor. Patient, charismatic, he has proved to be a redoubtable enemy for NATO’s troops. At the head of the Quetta choura in Pakistan, it is he who manages the war chest – the booty from kidnappings and trafficking – and who coordinates attacks. Above all, it is he who has been authorized to speak in the name of the man the insurgents consider the commander of the faithful: Omar. “Should there ever be discussions, he will be an indispensable interlocutor,” asserts Rahmani.
In Kabul, the former minister is sharing his home with another one of these “intermediaries” who sound out the Taliban and regularly meet with Barack Obama’s advisers. His beard is black, his turban, cream-colored: Pir Mohamed was the president of the University of Kabul under the Taliban regime: “Afghanistan is composed of several groups. No one should be excluded … That’s what I said to Holbrooke, who shares my point of view!” Repeating – for whatever purpose it might serve – that, at the time, he had tried several times to convince Mullah Omar to allow him to give girls a religious education, he asserts that today he has warned the White House special envoy against the new pacification strategy for the country: “Afghanistan is not Iraq. The Taliban come from very different origins. Mores come from Uzbekistan, Kandahar or Khost. And one may neither set the tribes against one another nor buy them: there are too many of them!”
Yet, is seems that the political leadership of the Taliban, tossing around between Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi, would like to put an end to its wanderings in Pakistan. That’s the sense of the messages from the Quetta choura and its representatives, Baradar and Mohamed Mansour, former chief education officer. The rebels would like to install themselves somewhere, then form a government-in-exile to elaborate the conditions for a negotiation with the Karzai government. Why not in Saudi Arabia where Mullah Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has already tried to organize a meeting between the enemy sides? Then from Riyadh, the Taliban leadership could negotiate its own neutrality in exchange for a right to return, amnesty and participation in political life after the withdrawal of foreign troops.
Isn’t this scenario unrealistic or premature? Our intermediaries agree: it will not be easy to convince Westerners to guarantee a safe haven for the same people they’re fighting. But the two men insist on the necessity of cutting the guerrilla off from its Pakistani sanctuary. Even though they know Afghanistan will not be at peace until Pakistan agrees to it. “As long as Pakistan’s vital interests, such as the future of the Durand Line, are not taken into account, all discussions will fail,” explains Rahmani. According to him, the key to potential negotiations is in the hands of the Pakistani mullahs, themselves under ISI – the Pakistani secret services’ – control. As are Mullah Fazel Rahman and Sami ul-Haq, who lead the coalition of Pakistani fundamentalist religious parties. “Before the Taliban, it is they who must be convinced to make peace, because today they control al-Qaeda and bin Laden and hold the future of the region in their hands …” On this point, at least, the former Taliban and Barack Obama come to the same conclusions.
Maulvi Arsala Rahmani
Religious affairs minister under the Taliban regime, he is a member of the Afghan Senate today. He has contacts within circles close to the Pakistani secret services.
Pir Mohamed
Former rector of Kabul University. He meets regularly with Richard Holbrooke and representatives of the Quetta choura.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef
He was the sole interface between the Taliban regime and the international community from 1996 to the end of 2001. He was imprisoned at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2005. He would like to see the Saudis play a role in future peace talks.
Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil
Former foreign affairs minister for the Taliban, he played the role of intermediary between the Americans and Taliban groups in Kandahar and negotiated the conditions for surrender with the Americans at the fall of the regime.
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Sara Daniel, translation Leslie Thatcher for thuthout
http://www.truthout.org/12110908
]]>David Albright, a former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency and a specialist in the Pakistani program, is very worried to see that country developing an arsenal that has already doubled in ten years: “On a site as vast as Khushab, which employs over a hundred people, there can be sabotage, infiltrations, and thefts. The Pakistani government assures us that the nuclear weapons are well-guarded. But only a few months ago, it also asserted that the Taliban represented no threat to the state …”
Those worries exasperate the guardian of Pakistan’s nuclear program, 58-year-old Gen. Khaled Ahmed Kidwai. Located in the heart of Chaklala, a residential neighborhood of Islamabad reserved for the army, his office of the division of strategic planning brings together generals and politicians. That’s where he organizes protection of the bomb against the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s scientists, Indian intelligence services, and also American curiosity. During his frequent trips to the United States, he tries to make people forget the biggest nuclear arms trafficking in history – to North Korea, Libya and Iran during the 1990s – organized by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Such a leak, Khaled Ahmed Kidwai repeats to experts, could not recur today. According to Kidwai, the security system he has created is “infallible”: hadn’t General Musharraf – who feared that the Americans would attempt to confiscate the bombs – asked him to develop the ultra-secret subterranean caches from the time of the very first nuclear tests? Kidwai asserts that surveillance of the 70,000 people who work in the Pakistani nuclear sector, starting with its 8,000 researchers, is tight. But his Western interlocutors also remember that it was Kidwai precisely who was supposed to manage the “Sultan Mahmood affair.” That scientist, who designed the Khushab reactor intended to manufacture Pakistan’s first plutonium bomb, was fascinated by the connections between science and the Koran. He had stated to his friends that the Pakistani bomb was the property of the umma, the global community of Muslims. In August 2001, while al-Qaeda cells were putting the final touches on their attacks of the twin towers, Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden …
Three Threats
After September 11, the news of that interview sowed panic in Washington. A CIA nuclear expert, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, was entrusted with the difficult task of assuring that al-Qaeda did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Today, the former CIA agent, who took a position at Harvard five months ago, keeps in his office as a trophy one of the centrifuges Libyan President Kadafi bought from Abdul Qadeer Khan. “The key to the security of the Pakistani nuclear program is … secrecy,” he explains. “So no one knows exactly where the Pakistani bombs hidden in subterranean bunkers are.”
Pakistan is signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not authorized any international inspection since it joined the club of nuclear countries in 1998. Larssen says, “It would be very naive to believe that the Pakistani Army would reveal all its nuclear secrets to us in exchange for our assistance. They have no reason to do so!” Moreover, while the Americans have granted secret aid of $100 million to Pakistan over the last six years to secure its nuclear arms, in the end, they gave up the idea of handing over their Permissive Action Links, the electronic access codes that defuse the weapons when bad numbers are entered. The United States shared its codes with France and even with Russia, but they ultimately refused to reveal their security system to the Pakistanis. Result: the Pakistanis protect their arsenal by keeping the detonators and the missiles in different locations.
According to experts, three threats hover over the Pakistani arsenal: the first and least likely is the overthrow of the government by the Taliban. The second is a general breakdown in the communication system. The third, the most likely to happen, simply because it already has, is a theft of nuclear material by those scientists associated with hub of Pakistan’s nuclear system. The New York Times was able to obtain an intelligence services report citing the case of fundamentalist Pakistani students educated abroad who wanted to be recruited as researchers by the Pakistani military nuclear program. Another subject that concerns American intelligence services are those Pakistani laboratories still bearing the name of A.Q. Khan. It is impossible, in fact, to precisely quantify the amount of fissile material produced there or to prevent researchers from selling their nuclear savoir-faire to other countries or organizations …
According to Larssen, Pakistan represents a more serious nuclear danger than Iran or even North Korea. “If Pakistan loses track of a single one of its weapons, we have a serious problem,” he says. The former CIA expert is not very optimistic: “We have to apply ourselves to avoiding a nuclear catastrophe in the twenty-first century. That will be a difficult task: from now on, the threats won’t be coming from the superpowers, but from terrorist organizations, small groups and small countries.” Like Pakistan.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher
]]>As we make our way down, Beirut offers a sad spectacle. Under control of the army, which has deployed its tanks and its Jeeps, the streets of the capital are impeded by concrete barricades, mounds of rubble or plastic bristling with flags that slap like declarations of war and with photos that no one dares remove any more, such as portraits of Syrian President Bachar al-Assad. Militiamen who have swapped their fatigues for sweatpants cause an atmosphere of fear and accusation to prevail. Everyone looks dazed. Even the “winners.”
Nabih Berri’s Amal Party militiamen, who have replaced those of Hezbollah in West Beirut the last few days, are also gloomy, as though this revenge taken on their fellow citizens had a bitter taste. The atmosphere is sticky, much more so than during the 2006 war when Hezbollah – in spite of its ruined neighborhoods – proclaimed its “divine victory” over Israel. Today, the Party of God enjoys a discreet triumph. Only a very few young militiamen, apparently content, do “wheelies” on their new playground, the road to the airport, blocked by rubble.
I meet Walid Jumblatt, prisoner in his own home on Clemenceau Street, in Beirut, in the atmosphere of a wake. His eyes are half-closed as though he wanted to maintain the illusion for a while that this beginning of a civil war was only a nightmare. “Hafez al-Assad [father of the present Syrian president] had announced that he would burn down the mountain and now see; they’ve done it. Reread these pages that Mitterrand wrote in ‘L’Abeille et l’Architecte’ [The Bee and the Architect] on the ancestral hatred between the Syrians and the Druze,” blurts out this man who would normally explore the psychological subtleties of his reversals of alliance with humor. But this is no longer the hour for textual exegesis, but rather for despair: “The pro-Syrians have succeeded in their military coup d’état; now we’ll witness the translation of this victory into a political coup. What Nasrallah wants; he’ll get.” Prime Minister Fouad Siniora eventually refused to negotiate under constraint, whereas the army had decided to freeze the decisions that set off the Lebanese powder keg: the dismissal of the Shiite head of airport security and control of Hezbollah’s telecommunications network. And the fighting continues.
The same despair reigns in the corridors of Sunni Party head Saad Hariri’s house, where this pillar of the majority confesses to political error, without quite spelling it out: “We would never have imagined that Hezbollah would dare attack Beirut. But such an operation, which calls into question both the regional and global order, had been prepared for a long time. In any case, they would have found another pretext for taking power.” At the Hariris’, they know it will cost them dearly with their base for not having called for taking up arms against the “Shiites.” Already in the North, in Tripoli, Saad Hariri’s party, the Current of the Future, is having trouble not being swamped by Salafist extremists, especially in the Palestinian camps. These jihadists have launched an appeal for war against “the Persians:” “Hezbollah militants have entered our men’s homes. Using threats, they’ve replaced photos of Rafic Hariri [the assassinated former prime minister] with those of Hassan Nasrallah. People are afraid and soon you’ll see that there will be rallies to whoever is strongest.”
In West Beirut, in the 90 percent Sunni Barbour neighborhood, Hassan, a Shiite Amal Party militant, stands guard from Nabih Berri’s former house. He denies launching a new sectarian war by taking up arms against Hariri’s Sunni Party. According to him, the “resistance parties,” Amal and Hezbollah, are not Shiite, but a multi-sectarian coalition directed against Israel. “Lots of Sunnis around here support us, come and see.” But the guided tour of supposedly pro-Hezbollah Sunnis said a lot about the pressures the Shiite militias are exerting on them. Only one little girl dares to confess her rue: “My parents taught me to hate Israel, not my own brothers.” As for her father, he doesn’t believe in civil war: “The communities are too mixed up; it’s the politicians who talk about Shiite and Sunni, but we’re all Lebanese!” Sad recollections: these professions of patriotic faith recall those of Iraqis who were outraged when they were asked what sect they belonged to before the outbreak of the civil war.
In the house next door, Hezbollah Shiites pray around the photo of their son, Hassan Ali, who died in Bint Jbeil, in the south of the country, during the July 2006 war with Israel. Due to the compulsory cult of secrecy, it wasn’t until they were informed of his death that his parents learned of his membership in the Party of God. His family talks about their hatred for the Hariri, for “Saudi billionaires.” But it’s social resentment far more than the religious question that feeds their animosity. They don’t recognize the Lebanese government. As far as they’re concerned, Sayyed (descendant of the Prophet) Nasrallah is the true head of state.
Suddenly, an employee of Lebanon Electricity rings their doorbell to have them pay their bill. He’s thrown out without any ceremony: “By what right do they ask us, poor people, for money, while Hezbollah pays us a salary since our son’s death?” They believe this functionary can only be an agent for the other side….
In Ashrafieh, Beirut’s Christian neighborhood, although life is softly resuming at café patios, people talk only about “the situation.” And the role of the international community. “The problem is that we no longer have any recourse. Everyone, inside the country as well as outside, is connected to the Lebanese parties. The West and Saudi Arabia support Hariri; Iran and Syria are behind Hezbollah. So then who can arbitrate?” sighs one journalist. A politician from the majority harps on his resentment against France. “They wanted Munich: they’ve got it! Today Iran controls the country. Tehran has restored its ‘border’ with Israel that had been destroyed during the 2006 war. Bravo for the international community!”
In the entourage of Parliamentary President Nabih Berri, whose Amal Party supported the military coup begun May 7, people acknowledge that the party was overtaken by its base and is not in complete agreement with the Hezbollah leader. But above all they accuse the government of having committed an unpardonable mistake: “In a multi-sectarian country like Lebanon, for good or for ill, you don’t fire the head of airport security, a Shiite, without negotiating with the religious communities!” In 1975, it was the same sort of risky decision at the time, the disarmament of Palestinian groups that supplied the pretext for a disproportionate riposte. And then Lebanon foundered into civil war.
Sara Daniel, Translation: Leslie Thatcher.
]]>Pierre-Jean Luizard: Five years after the American intervention, there is still no Iraqi state. Reconstruction of institutions under the occupation regime has proved a failure. That means the triumph of private interests – communitarian interests first of all, then, to an ever greater extent, local ones. All Iraqi political actors, without exception, have been caught up in an infernal mechanism that ends up emptying their actions and their speech of any political meaning. With no state to protect them, the Iraqis have, in fact, reverted to the lowest common denominator: the tribe, the clan, the neighborhood. It’s a vicious circle: the foreign occupation bars any stabilization of a state and the absence of a state prevents consideration of an end to the occupation.
LNO: It seems that the agreements the American Army has made with yesterday’s enemies, with the Sunni guerilla, to fight against al-Qaeda have resulted in a decrease in violence. What do you think of this American strategy? Is it the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq?
Luizard: Al-Qaeda never planned to take power in Baghdad. The international jihadists’ sole objective is to trap the Americans on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates by perpetuating chaos as long as possible. In their eyes, Iraq is a choice battlefield against the Americans for stakes that far exceed the Iraq framework. Now the present situation offers them infinite possibilities for maintaining chaos. Up until now, al-Qaeda was curbed by its posture as defender of the Sunni community in Iraq. Today, the Americans have freed them from that “mission.” In desperation, the Americans armed and financed their enemies of yesterday, with the immediate result of dividing the Sunni into a thousand rival allegiances, for the nature of any tribal policy is that it cannot satisfy everyone. When you make an alliance with one tribe, when you pay them, you alienate another. For every fire you put out, you fan ten others. Al-Qaeda prospers in this hotbed of rivalries, enjoying an inexhaustible pool of kamikazes who now act – not in the name of the Sunni – but in application of the lex talionis after a husband, brother or son is killed by the new American-armed militia. The consequence is that the Americans have precipitated the atomization of the Sunni community, the ranks of which are now as divided as the Shia.
LNO: So Bush’s decision to send an additional 30,000 men to Iraq, “the surge,” is a bogus success?
Luizard: In despair over the Iraqi situation in 2007, the Americans played their last card with “the surge.” They bet enormous resources on “the surge.” But the reversion to tribalism in Iraq cannot serve them the same way it served the British during the years 1920-1930. The Americans cannot continue to give 300 euros a month – almost twice a teacher’s salary – to every militia auxiliary whom they arm. The temporary reduction in violence is due solely to this windfall. Wouldn’t it have been better to have had a relatively homogeneous enemy to negotiate with on a political basis than these thousand allegiances that fight one another, mortgaging any political solution?
LNO: Is the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq that the Democratic candidates for president call for a realistic perspective?
Luizard: Today in Iraq, there can only be a pretence of withdrawal. Look at what’s happening in Basra, where thousands of people demonstrated to demand that the British return to the center city! They can’t leave their homes any more without risking death…. So we’ll witness a bogus withdrawal, just as the surge was a bogus victory intended for the consumption of American public opinion. The Americans are betting heavily on private security companies. These mercenaries who come from all over the world are called to play a growing role in this conflict, with the dangers and unintended consequences we’ve already seen. But this privatization has its limits. Without the massive presence of a foreign army, it’s the whole laboriously constructed system that risks collapse.
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