Severian
5th August 2006, 10:40
From the Guardian (op-ed by the leader of a human rights group) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1837002,00.html) Emphasis added.
Our meddling is accelerating this descent into civil war
The US occupation did not create the sectarian tensions that disfigure Iraq - but its policies entrenched the divisions
Mark Lattimer
Friday August 4, 2006
The Guardian
The leaked report from Britain's outgoing ambassador in Iraq, warning that "civil war and a de facto division of Iraq" are now a likelihood, elicited a studied silence from Downing Street and Whitehall yesterday; but William Patey's fears could not have come as a surprise.
The toll of sectarian killings has increased inexorably over the past few months since the destruction of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, and the violently reworked geography of Baghdad and other mixed cities is beginning to resemble nothing so much as the mono-ethnic enclaves that 15 years of civil war imposed on Beirut. When I bumped into the former Iraqi defence minister last week, on the day that preparatory talks on national reconciliation broke up without agreement, he had the dead-tired eyes and relentless pessimism of a man losing a war.
But if the UK government often sounds as if it is in denial regarding sectarian war in Iraq, that may be because it and the US are partly to blame. Prior to the 2003 invasion, all Iraq's main opposition groups supported the continuance of a unified Iraqi state and emphasised the long tradition of inter-community cooperation and mixed marriages. Shias in particular would cite the fact that they fought alongside Sunnis in the Iran-Iraq war, and would point to the Shia uprising in 1991 - when revenge attacks were not targeted on sectarian grounds but included Sunni and Shia collaborators alike.
Yet one of the first acts of the coalition authorities was to create the Iraqi Governing Council, in which membership, and the power that went with it, was divided up on communal lines. Government ministries were similarly divided, and patronage soon ensured that they became dominated by officials from the minister's own sect or ethnic group. US advisers appeared to be applying the same power-sharing model they had promoted in Bosnia - and injecting some of the inter-communal poison that still courses through Bosnian politics - despite the fact that Iraq had not experienced a civil war. This error was compounded when Donald Rumsfeld placed enormous pressure on the Iraqi authorities not to extend the deadline for drawing up the new Iraqi constitution, thereby effectively destroying any chances of including Sunni Arab parties in the drafting process.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been the failure to hold the Iraqi government to account for mass human rights violations, against Sunni civilians in particular. For a long time these were reported in a kind of code: while suicide bombs and roadside attacks were immediately (and generally correctly) ascribed to Sunni insurgents, and justifiably condemned by Washington and London, we would read only that the bodies of another dozen or so civilians had been found dumped in Baghdad, their hands bound and with marks of torture.
It took the UN assistance mission in Iraq to help publicise the existence of alleged Shia death squads operating within the ministry of the interior. Only in a confidential report would the UK government talk of these militias as frankly as Ambassador Patey did: "If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hizbullah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority."
The Iraqi human rights ministry investigates abuses in prisons and detention facilities, but the new minister, Wijdan Mikha'il, admitted to me that her investigators are sometimes too frightened to report what they find. The day before we met in June, she had delivered to the US authorities her unpublished investigation of the massacre at Haditha, where US marines were accused of killing up to 24 civilians; she told me that it was an attempt to introduce independent oversight. ("How can they do the investigation all by themselves if they were responsible for the incident? Who will believe them?")
We must be clear: although the 2003 invasion set the dogs of war running, western governments did not create sectarianism in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's repression of the Kurds and Shias left a legacy of inter-community hatred, and Iraq's new government is faced with insurgent groups such as al-Qaida, animated by Sunni supremacism, pursuing a deliberate strategy of sparking inter-community conflict in order to destabilise the country and unite Sunni opposition to the Shia-led government.
Yet time and again the policies of first the coalition authorities and then the multinational force in Iraq, far from promoting reconciliation, have entrenched sectarian divisions. The fear is that their legacy in Iraq will be seen not in Iraq's new multicultural parliament but in districts such as al-Dora, south of Baghdad, where Sunni and Shia have lived side by side for generations, but which are now systematically being emptied of their original population as people flee for the relative safety of their own kind. The bodies of the victims of sectarian killings are left to rot, or be eaten by dogs in the street, because their families are too frightened to collect them.
· Mark Lattimer is the director of Minority Rights Group International www.minorityrights.org
****
Discussion?
I think it's all true, except this is only half-true: "Prior to the 2003 invasion, all Iraq's main opposition groups supported the continuance of a unified Iraqi state and emphasised the long tradition of inter-community cooperation and mixed marriages." The Kurdish nationalist parties had de facto independence and aimed to keep it - as they have.
'Course, that's the one part of Iraq which isn't descending into a Yugoslavia-like bloodbath - and the one part which isn't under the occupation. The Daily Show today showed a tourism commercial from Iraqi Kurdistan - one of its selling points is that there are only about 200 "coalition personnel" there.
Also of interest: U.S. soldiers say civil war has started. (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003176836_civilwar05.html)
While more media attention has been focused on Lebanon lately, the UN has reported that about 3,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every month.
Our meddling is accelerating this descent into civil war
The US occupation did not create the sectarian tensions that disfigure Iraq - but its policies entrenched the divisions
Mark Lattimer
Friday August 4, 2006
The Guardian
The leaked report from Britain's outgoing ambassador in Iraq, warning that "civil war and a de facto division of Iraq" are now a likelihood, elicited a studied silence from Downing Street and Whitehall yesterday; but William Patey's fears could not have come as a surprise.
The toll of sectarian killings has increased inexorably over the past few months since the destruction of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, and the violently reworked geography of Baghdad and other mixed cities is beginning to resemble nothing so much as the mono-ethnic enclaves that 15 years of civil war imposed on Beirut. When I bumped into the former Iraqi defence minister last week, on the day that preparatory talks on national reconciliation broke up without agreement, he had the dead-tired eyes and relentless pessimism of a man losing a war.
But if the UK government often sounds as if it is in denial regarding sectarian war in Iraq, that may be because it and the US are partly to blame. Prior to the 2003 invasion, all Iraq's main opposition groups supported the continuance of a unified Iraqi state and emphasised the long tradition of inter-community cooperation and mixed marriages. Shias in particular would cite the fact that they fought alongside Sunnis in the Iran-Iraq war, and would point to the Shia uprising in 1991 - when revenge attacks were not targeted on sectarian grounds but included Sunni and Shia collaborators alike.
Yet one of the first acts of the coalition authorities was to create the Iraqi Governing Council, in which membership, and the power that went with it, was divided up on communal lines. Government ministries were similarly divided, and patronage soon ensured that they became dominated by officials from the minister's own sect or ethnic group. US advisers appeared to be applying the same power-sharing model they had promoted in Bosnia - and injecting some of the inter-communal poison that still courses through Bosnian politics - despite the fact that Iraq had not experienced a civil war. This error was compounded when Donald Rumsfeld placed enormous pressure on the Iraqi authorities not to extend the deadline for drawing up the new Iraqi constitution, thereby effectively destroying any chances of including Sunni Arab parties in the drafting process.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been the failure to hold the Iraqi government to account for mass human rights violations, against Sunni civilians in particular. For a long time these were reported in a kind of code: while suicide bombs and roadside attacks were immediately (and generally correctly) ascribed to Sunni insurgents, and justifiably condemned by Washington and London, we would read only that the bodies of another dozen or so civilians had been found dumped in Baghdad, their hands bound and with marks of torture.
It took the UN assistance mission in Iraq to help publicise the existence of alleged Shia death squads operating within the ministry of the interior. Only in a confidential report would the UK government talk of these militias as frankly as Ambassador Patey did: "If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hizbullah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority."
The Iraqi human rights ministry investigates abuses in prisons and detention facilities, but the new minister, Wijdan Mikha'il, admitted to me that her investigators are sometimes too frightened to report what they find. The day before we met in June, she had delivered to the US authorities her unpublished investigation of the massacre at Haditha, where US marines were accused of killing up to 24 civilians; she told me that it was an attempt to introduce independent oversight. ("How can they do the investigation all by themselves if they were responsible for the incident? Who will believe them?")
We must be clear: although the 2003 invasion set the dogs of war running, western governments did not create sectarianism in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's repression of the Kurds and Shias left a legacy of inter-community hatred, and Iraq's new government is faced with insurgent groups such as al-Qaida, animated by Sunni supremacism, pursuing a deliberate strategy of sparking inter-community conflict in order to destabilise the country and unite Sunni opposition to the Shia-led government.
Yet time and again the policies of first the coalition authorities and then the multinational force in Iraq, far from promoting reconciliation, have entrenched sectarian divisions. The fear is that their legacy in Iraq will be seen not in Iraq's new multicultural parliament but in districts such as al-Dora, south of Baghdad, where Sunni and Shia have lived side by side for generations, but which are now systematically being emptied of their original population as people flee for the relative safety of their own kind. The bodies of the victims of sectarian killings are left to rot, or be eaten by dogs in the street, because their families are too frightened to collect them.
· Mark Lattimer is the director of Minority Rights Group International www.minorityrights.org
****
Discussion?
I think it's all true, except this is only half-true: "Prior to the 2003 invasion, all Iraq's main opposition groups supported the continuance of a unified Iraqi state and emphasised the long tradition of inter-community cooperation and mixed marriages." The Kurdish nationalist parties had de facto independence and aimed to keep it - as they have.
'Course, that's the one part of Iraq which isn't descending into a Yugoslavia-like bloodbath - and the one part which isn't under the occupation. The Daily Show today showed a tourism commercial from Iraqi Kurdistan - one of its selling points is that there are only about 200 "coalition personnel" there.
Also of interest: U.S. soldiers say civil war has started. (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003176836_civilwar05.html)
While more media attention has been focused on Lebanon lately, the UN has reported that about 3,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every month.