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*** Postcards in support of Ahmed Zaoui *** An Occupied Country By Howard Zinn, October 24, 2003 September 29, 2003.- It has become clear, very quickly, that Iraq is not a liberated country, but an occupied country. We became familiar with the term "occupied country" during World War II. We talked of German-occupied France, German-occupied Europe. And after the war we spoke of Soviet-occupied Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Europe. It was the Nazis, the Soviets, who occupied other countries. We liberated them from occupation. Now we are the occupiers. True, we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but not from us. Just as in 1898 we liberated Cuba from Spain, but not from us. Spanish tyranny was overthrown, but the United States established a military base in Cuba, as we are doing in Iraq. U.S. corporations moved in to Cuba, just as Bechtel and Halliburton and the oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The U.S. was deciding what kind of constitution Cuba would have, just as our government is now forming a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation. An occupation And it is an ugly occupation. On August 7, the NY Times reported that U.S. General Sanchez in Baghdad was worried about Iraqi reaction to the occupation. Iraqi leaders who were pro-American were giving him a message, as he put it: "When you take a father in front of his family and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground you have had a significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect in the eyes of his family." (That's very perceptive) CBS News reported on July 19: "Amnesty International is looking into a number of cases of suspected torture in Iraq by American authorities. One such case involves Khraisan al-Aballi. Al-Aballi's house was razed by American soldiers, who came in shooting and arrested him and his 80-year old father. They shot and wounded his brother.... The three men were taken away...Khraisan says his interrogators stripped him naked and kept him awake for more than a week, either standing or on his knees, bound hand and foot, with a bag over his head. Khraisan said he told his captors 'I don't know what you want. I don't know what you want. I have nothing.' 'I asked them to kill me' says Khraisan. After eight days, they let him and his father go....U.S. officials did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the case....'We are in fact, carrying out our international obligations, which I'm satisfied we are doing,' said Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. June 16, two reporters for the Knight-Rider chain wrote :about the Faluji area: "In dozens of interviews during the past five days, most residents across the area said there was no Baathist or Sunni conspiracy against U.S. soldiers, there were only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops . . . .One woman said, after her husband was taken from their home because of empty wooden crates which they had bought for firewood, that "the United States is guilty of terrorism". According to the same reporters, "residents in At Agilia - a village north of Baghdad - said two of their farmers and five others from another village were killed when U.S. soldiers shot them while they were watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes, and cucumbers." The ancient city of Ur, 6000 years old, the London Observer reports has been pillaged by the occupying army. Alongside an ancient pyramid, which people from all over the world come to see, a military base has been established. Soldiers who are set down in a country where they were told they would be welcomed as liberators and find they are surrounded by a hostile population become fearful, trigger-happy, and unhappy. "We've been reading the reports of GIs angry at their being kept in Iraq . . .". An ABC News reporter Iraq said that in mid-July he was pulled aside by a sergeant who told him: "I've got my own 'Most Wanted List'. " He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime. 'The aces in my deck," the sergeant said, "are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz." Such sentiments are becoming known to the American public. In May, a Gallup Poll reported that only 13% of the American public thought the war was going badly. By July 4th , the figure was 42%. More ominous, perhaps, than the occupation of Iraq, is the occupation of the United States. I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to cross the border - dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials (ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the United States in 1848) - those Mexican workers are not alien to me. Those 20 million people in this country who are not citizens and therefore, by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes and held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights - those people are not alien to me. But this small group of men who have taken power in Washington, they are alien to me. I wake up thinking: this country is in the grip of a president who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air, what kind of world will be inherited by our children and grandchildren. More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong, that this is not what we want our country to be. More and more every day, the lies are being exposed. And then there is the largest lie - that everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a "war on terrorism" - ignoring the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people's homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security. You get some sense of what this government means by the "war on terrorism" when you examine what Secretary of Defence[War] Rumsfeld (one of those faces on the sergeant's "most wanted" list) said a year ago when he was addressing the NATO ministers in Brussels. He was explaining the threats to the West (imagine - we are still talking of "the West" as some holy entity, as if the United States, having alienated most of the Western countries, was not now wooing Eastern countries, and trying persuade non-western countries we want only to liberate them). Rumsfeld, explaining the "threats" to the West and why they are invisible and unidentifiable said: "There are things that we know. And then there are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know that we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know....that is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence....simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist." Well, Rumsfeld has clarified things for us. That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of Sept. 11 will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are. That explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorising the population. That explains why the government, not knowing who are terrorists and who are not, will put hundreds of people in confinement at Guantanamo under such conditions that eighteen have tried to commit suicide. That explains why, not knowing which non-citizens are terrorists, the Attorney General will take away the constitutional rights of 20 million of them. The so-called "war on terrorism" is not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but is a war on the people of the United States. A war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the super-rich. The lives of our young are being stolen It's been interesting to me that polls taken among African-Americans have shown consistently 60% opposition to the war in Iraq. I did a phone interview about the war with an African-American radio station in Washington DC, a programme called "GW on the Hill", After I talked with the host there were eight call-ins. Colin Powell had just given his speech to the United Nations about Weapons of Mass Destruction. I took notes on what the callers said: John: " What Powell said was 'political garbage" Another caller: "Powell was just playing the game. That's what happens when people get into high office." Robert: "If we go to war, innocent people will die for no good reason. Kareen: "What Powell said was hogwash . . .War will not be good for this country." Susan: "What is so good about being a powerful country?: Terry: "It's all about oil." Another caller: "The U.S. is in search of an Empire and it will fall as the o mans did. Remember when Ali fought Foreman. He seemed asleep but when he woke up he was ferocious. So will the people wake up." It will become more and more clear that the casualties of war are not just abroad, but here. It is often said they can get away with war because unlike Vietnam, the casualties are few. True, only a few hundred battle casualties, unlike Vietnam. But battle casualties are not all. When wars end, the casualties keep mounting up - sickness, trauma. After the Vietnam War, veterans reported birth defects in their families due to the Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam. In the first Gulf War there were only a few hundred battle casualties, but the Veterans Administration reported recently that in the ten years following the Gulf War, 8000 veterans died. Two hundred thousand of the 600,000 veterans of the Gulf War filed complaints about illnesses, diseases incurred from the weapons our government used in the war. We have yet to see the effects, in the current war, of depleted uranium and other deadly weapons, on the young men and women sent there. What is our job? To point all this out. Our faith is that human beings only support violence and terror when they have been lied to. And when they learn the truth - as happened in the course of the Vietnam War - they will turn against the government. We have the support of the rest of the world. The United States cannot indefinitely ignore the ten million people who protested around the world on February 15. The power of government - whatever weapons it possesses, whatever money it has at its disposal -- is fragile. When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered. We need to engage in whatever actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at certain points in history and creating a power which governments cannot suppress. Howard Zinn, ZNet Commentator, writes regularly for The Progressive -- where this article also appeared. _________________________________ US
soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops By
Patrick Cockburn in Dhuluaya, October 12, 2003 US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood. Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons." Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district. "They
made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were
cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have
taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri,
a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for
compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers
described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because
'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the
Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was
now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added. Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death." The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us." Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops. Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth." _____________________________________________
*** Postcards in support of Ahmed Zaoui ***
The New Zealand Anglican Social Justice Commission has printed postcards to be sent to the Prime Minister and Minister of Immigration (see text below). The postcards are available free from the ASJC, and they would like your help to distribute them! If you are interested, please tel (04) 384 5458 or email just_mike@clear.net.nz and say how many you would like, and provide your name and address so they can be posted to you. Postcard text: "To the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark and Hon. Lianne Dalziel, It
is unacceptable that Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui remains in a prison
institution without charge, where he has now been since December 2002,
(the first 10 months in solitary confinement) and that the accusations
against * The Refugee Status Appeals Authority concluded that Ahmed Zaoui is 'an articulate, intelligent, committed and principled individual, who, despite the hurdles placed before him over the ten years remains a passionate advocate for peace through democracy in Algeria'. * The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that 'everyone has the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution' (Article 14); and 'receive a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of any criminal charge against him' (Article 10). Given this we call upon you to: - either recognise the findings of the Refugee Status Appeals Authority, that found Ahmed Zaoui innocent of terrorist activities or associations, and therefore release him and grant him refuge; - or, at the very least, disclose the New Zealand SIS (Security Intelligence Service) accusations that you claim provide the basis for his continued detention in order that he can have a 'fair and public hearing.' " There is space for your name, address and signature.
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