| |
Exiled Shi'ites just want to go
home
By Ron Synovitz
KUWAIT -
Sayed Muhammad Radha al-Ghazwini, a 62-year-old
businessman from a prominent Iraqi Shi'ite family, has
been living in exile since the first year of rule in
Baghdad by Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. He fled in
fear from his hometown of Karbala after he wrote a poem
and recited it during a 1969 religious festival honoring
Imam Ali, a cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and a holy
man revered by Shi'ites around the world.
Al-Ghazwini recalls that the mood of the
festival was jovial, with some foreign Arab dignitaries
laughing at his historical puns. But he says that the
room grew silent when he recited the final stanza
containing a question that dared to ask whether the
revolution that brought the Ba'ath Party to power less
than a year earlier would benefit the Iraqi people in
the long run.
Sitting at a small jewelry shop he
now owns in a Kuwait City market, al-Ghazwini recites
the words he spoke more than half a lifetime ago, words
addressed to the Ba'ath Party leadership that changed
his life forever:
"The basic principles of the
revolution, seen as so white and holy, were not meant to
inspire aggression.
The rulers of the past were
corrupt for so long and bought their supporters.
They'd forgotten that corruption is the main cause
for the collapse of crowns.
Learn the lessons of the
past and try not to make the same mistakes.
For a
decade, we have suffered the drought of oppression.
Will your rule be any different?"
Soon
after he recited the poem, al-Ghazwini says that agents
from the Ba'ath Party stormed into the home of his
father to try to find him. But al-Ghazwini wasn't there.
He escaped from Iraq after his father told him about the
search.
Iraq's Shi'ites live mostly in the south
of the country and share religious, but not ethnic, ties
with Iran. Iraq's central governments, drawn from the
more prosperous Sunni minority, have often sought to
marginalize the Shi'ites politically by claiming they
have conflicting allegiances to Iraq and Iran, a charge
that the Shi'ites reject.
Al-Ghazwini is one of
thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites living in exile in Kuwait
today. He says that he is not a member of any of the
fractured Iraqi opposition groups that are meeting in
Arbil - the main city in Kurdish-controlled northern
Iraq - in an attempt to put on a show of unity for their
wavering sponsors in Washington.
But al-Ghazwini
does advocate democracy as the best chance to bring
stability to a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Indeed,
compared to the rhetoric of the main Iraqi Shi'ite
opposition faction in exile, the Iranian-based Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, al-Ghazwini
and other Iraqi Shi'ites in Kuwait appear relatively
moderate.
While the Iranian-backed Supreme
Council claims it already has moved 5,000 armed fighters
into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, al-Ghazwini says
the thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region are neither
armed nor organized to do battle.
If Saddam's
regime falls, he says, "The Iraqi people who live
outside of Iraq now, particularly those in Kuwait and
the [Persian] Gulf [region], [would] wait to be sure of
the results of this transition" before they attempt to
return to Iraq. He suspects that they will wait to see
if the post-Saddam government "will be for their
benefit, and whether it will be a civilian and
democratic regime that they have confidence in and feel
secure about. This is due to their bad experiences in
the past."
The historical experiences
al-Ghazwini refers to are not limited to the repression
Iraqi Shi'ites have faced since Saddam rose to power
during the 1970s through his secular Ba'ath Party.
Hussein, who is a Sunni by origin, has purged Shi'ites
from the party and excluded them from the bureaucracy
and security forces.
Al-Ghazwini says that
Shi'ites also will never forget their failed uprising in
southern Iraq, which broke out in March 1991 after the
United States had routed Iraqi troops from Kuwait. That
uprising was fueled by a statement made on February 15,
1991 by former US president George Bush. In that speech,
Bush - attempting to prevent a ground war - said that
further bloodshed could be prevented if the "Iraqi
military and the Iraqi people take matters into their
own hands and force Saddam Hussein ... to step aside".
Since then, Bush and his advisers have explained
that what they really had hoped to see in Iraq in 1991
was a kind of palace coup by military officers within
the Ba'ath Party and to see such an uprising gain the
support of Shi'ites in the south and Kurds in the north.
The US chose not to support the uprising that did take
place, fearing further instability, and the revolt was
brutally crushed by Saddam. The Kurds and Shi'ites felt
betrayed by Washington.
Al-Ghazwini says that
most Iraqi Shi'ites in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia today
will wait to see what plans emerge from Washington for
any post-Hussein Iraqi government before they try to
return to Iraq.
As Iraqi opposition leaders
prepare for their meeting in Arbil this week, many fear
the divisions among them are causing the US to back away
from the idea that they represent a credible political
force for a post-Saddam Iraq. Washington has said that
it plans to occupy Iraq after toppling Saddam's regime.
And there are indications that the US may do much of the
initial work administering the country.
Still,
very few details are publicly known about the kind of
occupation government Washington is considering. Some
reports suggest an 18-month military occupation with a
US commander who runs the country along with a civilian
administration. But it remains unclear whether such a
civilian administration would be appointed by Washington
or the United Nations or whether there might also be a
transitional Iraqi government similar to the
post-Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq has thrived as
a largely democratic, independent territory outside of
Saddam's control since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
Protected by US and British jets patrolling the northern
no-fly zone, and aided by the United Nations
oil-for-food program, the 4 million Kurds in Iraq's
self-governing areas have achieved a level of democracy
and free-market prosperity that is rare in a Middle East
dominated by autocrats and economic stagnation.
Numbering more than 30 million people across
four countries, the Kurds are the world's largest
stateless people. Yet their 12-year experience with
independence in northern Iraq has proved to be an
astonishing success, says Peter W Galbraith, a former US
ambassador and one of Washington's top experts on the
Kurds. "Kurds constantly say in the north: This is a
Golden Age. This is the best we've ever had it. They're
governing themselves, and they have a government that's
focused on the interests of the people. And I think it's
very understandable that they want to retain that,"
Galbraith said.
But a US plan for postwar Iraq
is putting the Kurdish experiment at risk, says
Galbraith, who in the 1980s helped to uncover and
document Iraqi military atrocities against Kurds,
including the 1988 massacre at Halabja, in which 5,000
to 7,000 Kurds were killed in a chemical-weapons attack.
"The president of the United States had talked about a
democratic Iraq, and now the administration is talking
about 'representative' government and not wishing to
create democracy. It seems to me that that's a betrayal
of what the United States stands for. It's a betrayal of
what the Iraqi people are entitled to."
Ahmad
Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress
opposition umbrella group once considered a favorite of
Washington, says that he still does not know anything
about Washington's plans. But Chalabi insists that
whatever involvement opposition leaders have in a
post-Saddam Iraq, they must show the Iraqi people that
they are allies of the US rather than its agents.
Analysts say that to do this, the fractured
opposition will have to show Washington that it can
gather under its own initiative in Arbil and reach
common ground on a collective leadership with a common
platform that goes beyond a simple call for democracy.
Al-Ghazwini says that he hopes the feuding among
opposition groups doesn't continue at Arbil because that
would further weaken Washington's already skeptical
interest in establishing a civilian government: "I have
been praying to god that this corrupt, criminal regime
[of Saddam Hussein] will be replaced with a democratic
one so we can return home under the justice of a decent,
democratic, civilian government; a government that
respects people, their souls, their rights; and treats
all men, women, and children in Iraq equally. Our
biggest hope is to return to Iraq as soon as possible."
Meanwhile, al-Ghazwini says that he and other
exiled Iraqis who are staying in Kuwait for now are
troubled by the antiwar demonstrations that have been on
the rise in Europe and the US in recent weeks, "We feel
puzzled by these demonstrations. We are thankful that
people have such sympathy for us as Iraqi people. But we
wonder why all these protesters [in the West] don't know
how horrible the situation is for the people in Iraq
[under Saddam Hussein] and for those outside of Iraq."
He says that if the antiwar demonstrators in
Europe and the US had lived through the same experiences
as the Kurds in northern Iraq or the Shi'ites of
southern Iraq, they would be demonstrating instead for
Saddam's immediate ouster. "These people are, in fact,
misled," al-Ghazwini says. "They don't know the true
nature of [Saddam's] regime. They assume that the
opposition in Iraq enjoys the same rights that they have
in their countries. They don't know that a wolf is on
the loose in Baghdad and is cutting the Iraqi people
into little pieces. The [Iraqi] people are waiting for
salvation. They hope that a foreign power will come and
help save them by kicking this regime out of the
country."
And al-Ghazwini concludes that the
exiled Iraqis in Kuwait and elsewhere - many who still
have loved ones inside Iraq who could be killed in a new
war in the Persian Gulf - are eager to see Saddam's
regime ousted by any means possible: "It is a wild
regime that has killed thousands of people and left
behind thousands of orphans and widows. This evil regime
has compelled thousands of us to escape [from Iraq] in
fear of [Hussein's] vengeance. They have become homeless
people around the world, in places like Iran and Saudi
Arabia, and they are now waiting impatiently on the
borders for the hour of their salvation."
Despite the jewelry shop he has owned since his
retirement from a career in banking, which led him from
London and Tehran to Jordan and Kuwait, and despite the
seven children he has raised to adulthood or the 23
grandchildren he now has around the world, al-Ghazwini
says that he does not consider himself to be a man who
has settled down. He says that he is also waiting
eagerly, but watching carefully, for the right moment
when he and his family can return safely to his
homeland.
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
