| |
THE ROVING
EYE
The marvels of
de-Ba'athification
By Pepe Escobar
OWJA and TIKRIT - Saddam Hussein's birthplace,
Owja, near Tikrit, used to be the ultimate Middle East
gated community. One could only get inside if one knew
someone from the ruling elite - and he had to personally
fetch you at the gates. Now Owja is semi-deserted. Most
residents were Ba'ath Party members. Many fled the
country. Some are back. There's the occasional graffiti
on the walls: "Saddam yes, Bush no". Residents are
afraid of talking to foreigners - they could be branded
Israeli or American agents, and their houses marked with
a cross by some factions of the Iraqi resistance.
Recently, an American commander gathered the
local sheiks in the house of the former minister of
interior, Ibrahim al-Hasan, and asked what they wanted.
Residents recognize there have been some improvements:
they have running water, 22 hours of electricity a day,
schools are working and there will be a new hospital.
"People here want to live peacefully," says a resident.
But he implies that the resistance will always be there;
sometimes peaceful, sometimes with weapons. "The
Americans come to schools and ask what people want, but
they always ask their questions with tanks."
A
former high official in the ministry of education agreed
to talk to Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity.
"People who lived in this region were from three
classes. Sixty percent were ordinary people living off
agriculture or commerce. Thirty percent in between were
high officials, and 10 percent were the upper class.
Most of them are now in jail or outside the country."
Saddam was generous in Owja. "He gave people land, and
he ordered a development bank to lend them money," the
high official said. Saddam also said everybody should
build their houses following a certain design. Owja
follows a neat design and is very homogeneous in
architectural terms.
The high official paints an
extraordinary portrait of Saddam at 15. After all, they
were classmates in Tikrit. "He was brave, naughty,
always smiling, dying to make jokes. He was a good
student. And a very private individual. He was fond of
volleyball and an avid reader of magazines. After the
first year of secondary school he went to live in
Baghdad."
In an orchard, sipping tea in the
early morning, the high official finally relaxes and
tackles the crucial points. "We were sure we had no
weapons [of mass destruction]. The Americans themselves
gave us these weapons in the 1980s," he said. "Saddam
was the legal leader of his people. Now the Americans
have conquered Iraq. What is the crime of the Ba'ath
Party so now so many are not paid and can't get jobs?"
This man was no Saddam henchman, but an educated
civilian in a position of power. He sprinkles his
comments with quotes of Bernard Shaw and John Milton's
Paradise Lost . "I served the government for 43
years. Now I'm sitting in my house. Why do they not take
advantage of my experience? I studied in India, I have
been to the West many times."
He would have many
reasons to be revengeful, but he is not. "Americans
should solve the problems of the people in Iraq. If they
did that, all matters would be OK," the official said.
He knows one of the ministers in the 25-member Governing
Council picked by the US as a form of an interim
administration. He admits some of them may be competent,
but the conversation keeps drifting to the past. "The
previous regime was very modern. We were not divided
according to ethnic lines. If the Americans want to
build a new government they should follow the same way.
And in the past, if we made any mistake in implementing
a government policy, our punishment was double. Many
people were hanged or shot here."
Meanwhile, in
neighboring Tikrit, the Americans are kept extremely
busy by the resistance. A recent raid in the outskirts
of Tikrit apprehended 93 surface-to-air missiles, 450
kilograms of C-4 explosives, 115 rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs), 430 grenades, 94 rocket launchers and
hundreds of remote detonators - of the same type used in
recent car bombings. This is the largest weapons cache
apprehended since the end of the war in April.
Lieutenant-Colonel David Poirier, commander of the 720th
Military Police Battalion, based in Fort Hood, Texas,
said operations like these are "breaking the back of the
fedayeen [para-military]".
This raises
the crucial question of whose backs are in effect being
broken. It could be the backs of Saddam loyalists,
Ba'ath Party former high officials, former Mukhabarat
(Iraqi intelligence service) agents, or all of the
above. Tikritis know very well the Mukhabarat have
enormous weapons caches all over Iraq; it knows how to
use them; it can distribute large amounts of cash; and
it would be able to plant agents among Iraqis
collaborating with the occupation as well as inside the
United Nations building. Tikritis also know that many
Mukhabarat have been recruited to work for the
Americans. The American raids may confiscate weapons,
but they still fail to catch any major suspects for the
simple reason that Americans have no human intelligence
on them. Is Saddam behind all this? Tikritis are mum
about it. Not only in Tikrit, but also in Fallujah,
Samarra, Baqouba, Ramadi and Baghdad there's a sense
among large swathes of the population that Saddam might
one day be back. It may be fear, it may be trauma, it
may be inability to deal with the loss of the "father of
the tribe", but the perception is always there, fueled
by Saddam's endless stream of recorded jihad calls. This
popular perception is coupled with another one, even
more dangerous for American objectives. As a Baghdad
businessman puts it: "What the Americans want is a
Saddam without Saddam, without the mass killings. A
Saddam speaking English." And who fits the bill
perfectly? Ahmad Chalabi, the widely despised Pentagon
protege and rotating chairman of the Governing Council
during the month of September.
Tikritis tell of
endless episodes of people firing in the air to
commemorate a marriage and scared American patrols
shooting back at people in the wedding. They speak of
ambushes followed by the inevitable encirclement of an
area, where even street kids and minibus passengers to
Baghdad are thoroughly searched. They tell of how people
expected a goodwill gesture from the Americans, "like we
did ourselves". Tikrit was conquered without any
battles. Instead, US proconsul L Paul Bremer dissolved
the army saying, "This humiliation will not stand." It
did not, as Tikritis reveal that the local resistance
took its cue from Fallujah in early June - through
images widely broadcast by al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya
television stations.
In Baqouba, Salah, a man
who filmed marriage ceremonies and sold clerics's
cassettes was able to became a correspondent for
al-Jazeera. He said "People are proud of their city or
their village when a bomb explodes. They call me. If
there are no Americans killed, even the Iraqi policemen
are disappointed." Tikritis wholeheartedly agree. In
Tikrit, as well as in other parts of the Sunni triangle,
the stark reality of an Iraq in a total void - of
employment, of government - is very vivid. 10 million
people are unemployed in Iraq at the moment - 60 percent
of the working-age population. Every day, the al-Kindi
hospital in Baghdad receives between 10 and 20 Iraqis
shot by Americans. Everywhere in the Sunni triangle
people stress that the Americans have failed to fill the
void and guide a lawless society, and their bunker
mentality has just accelerated the further collapse of
local authority. The void has been occupied by Islam -
the only possible common identity capable of facing
America. The mosques at Friday prayers are overflowing.
Bremer and the euphemistically-denominated
Coalition Provisional Authority, housed in Saddam's
former main Republican Palace near the Tigris in
Baghdad, simply cannot hear the voices in the streets
because they wouldn't dare leaving their bunkers. So the
voice of the streets came to the bunker - via three
rockets. The Republican Palace, the Conference Palace
and the hotel al-Rashid are the symbols of the American
occupation. The triad forms what journalists and
diplomats call "the bubble".
Bremer and many
military commanders live in the al-Rashid. The hotel is
even more inaccessible than during the Saddam era -
surrounded by roadblocks and barbed wire. Inside the
Republican Palace, a thousand American bureaucrats are
busy trying to remodel a crucial Middle Eastern country
- the cradle of civilization - about which they know
practically nothing and make no effort to understand. So
no wonder the new folk hero in Tikrit, Baghdad and all
over the Sunni triangle is the solitary individual who
fired three rockets against the al-Rashid last Saturday
morning.
Tikrit has a governor inevitably
appointed by the Americans. His court of miracles is no
different from Fallujah's, with the cast of expectant
characters including former army officers, former
Mukhabarat agents proposing their services to the
occupation forces, prisoners' widows or victims of
violent GI search patrols. They all refer to Saddam as
"the president" - as most Iraqis still do. An aura of
nostalgia when they talk about the recent past - like
the former high official in Owja - is inescapable. As
well as the refrain: "With the Americans, everything is
destroyed. How do they work? They don't want anybody
among us." It's unlikely the thousand bureaucrats at the
Republican Palace in Baghdad are able to answer these
questions.
Some people are actually profiting
from the situation. At the very modern University of
Tikrit - built by Saddam in the 1990s and with many
buildings still unfinished - a conversation with the
head of the English department is fascinating especially
by what he doesn't say. Former teachers who were members
of the Ba'ath Party have been "suspended" - and he
happens now to head the department. He refuses to say
anything about the dreams and hopes of his students in
such a critical city and at such critical times -
something weird for an academic who must be listening to
endless stories every day. Actually, he spends most of
his days commuting because he is a Kurd from Kirkuk, and
he was imported by the Americans. So this may be the
secret of de-Ba'athization cooked up by the bunkered
American bureaucrats in Baghdad: a competent man like
the former high official in Owja is ostracized just
because he was a party member (otherwise his career
would be dead), while an imported, mediocre bureaucrat
is rewarded with an important university posting. No
wonder the voice of the streets will keep on rocketing.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
