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Indicting the Reader
By
Garda Ghista
14/01/08 "ICH" --
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Layla Anwar
is the pseudonym for an Iraqi blogger, in her early to
mid-forties, who appears to be writing directly from Baghdad,
right in the line of fire, so to speak. She comes from a
secular, upper-middle class, Sunni background and remains loyal
to Saddam Hussein. Unlike the blogger Baghdad Burning, Layla
does not write for the American left. Rather, she writes to all
Americans, including the American left, and condemns us all
along with the Bush-Cheney regime. She indicts every single
American for being a part of the destruction and devastation of
her motherland. She writes to the enemy.
Her blogs are a blunt
description of life in Baghdad in the time of war - a war of
American imperialism in its endless quest for natural resources.
But then again, this war is not limited to oil. War makes a
handful of people extremely rich and renders millions destitute
or dead. The rich elite are the scores of corporations and
sub-contractors who receive lavish contracts from the U.S.
government – companies like Halliburton, Blackwater, Monsanto,
Citibank, Chase Morgan, AT&T and Bechtel - who have all gone to
Iraq to make millions in the work of "reconstruction", that is,
reconstructing everything the U.S. bombed to the ground. So
this is an illegal war of aggression for the sake of plunder and
profit. The Nuremberg Trials called such wars the "supreme
international crime."
On July 5, 2007,
Layla sends the readers "A Postcard from Iraq." It is the height
of irony. Her words, while describing the tyranny and agony of
war, are riddled with sarcasm. She outdoes the entire world in
sarcasm to make her point, to get it into the heads of the
readers what is happening in Iraq. First she reminds us of her
two relatives, Kamal and Omar, who were kidnapped and imprisoned
in "detention centers." Then she tells us about Salam, another
relative, who was kidnapped and beaten to a pulp. And a few days
before writing this entry, it happened to Raouf. Raouf is not
his real name. But she gives him the name "Raouf" because in
Arabic it means "kind spirited, gentle." She tells us that Raouf
is a gentle soul who loves "poetry, arts, animals, the land…
which he cultivated with great care and love." One day he leaves
Baghdad to check on his small plot of land an hour's drive away
in the country. He wants to check if his fruit trees, birds and
chickens are all right. But, just a few hours after reaching
there, men come and take him away. They keep him for three days
and torture him non-stop. Layla writes, "They used iron rods,
chains, rubber hoses, sticks… Sometimes the three pounded him in
unison. Sometimes they would take turns. The only respite he had
is when they stopped for 'prayers'!" Due perhaps to the constant
phone contact between his torturers and Raouf's wife, they
finally drop him on the road. They do not kill him. He walks for
miles until he reaches home. Externally he lives. But internally
he has died. Layla sends us all a "Postcard from Iraq" to tell
us his story, to tell us the reality that is Iraq.
On July 9, 2007 Layla
writes "Some Thoughts on Forgiveness." She asks the question,
how to forgive when the abuse, humiliation, destruction,
devastation, torture, rape and annihilation continue? There
needs to be some time out, she says. There must be a break
from the hell of imperialist torture of the Iraqi people. But
there is never any break. Christ was crucified just once. But
we, the invaders, are crucifying Layla and her country daily,
without end. And even if she could forgive us, she says, She,
Iraq, will never forgive us. The dead fish and floating corpses
in the Tigris and Euphrates will not forgive us. The burned down
palm trees, the ancient ruins, the toxic waste and crumbled
roofs will not forgive us. Layla says, don't ask me for
forgiveness. Ask Iraq.
In another blog
entry, "Add'o'holic", written on July 29, 2007, Layla talks
about numbers. She makes so many calculations for us, the
reader - the reader who cannot see the horror that is Iraq. She
wants us to see the horror, to grasp it. This time, she tries
by using numbers. She has lists of the dead, and lists of the
imprisoned in Adhamiya concentration camp, Al' Ameriya
concentration camp, and the Yarmook, Karrada, Amil, Mansur, and
Taji ghettos. She has lists of the tortured, the exiled and the
disappeared. All these lists are in her head. Then she has
lists of all the sick, lists of the unemployed, and the
emotionally traumatized. The lists in total include all her
family members, relatives and friends. And then it also includes
their family members, relatives and friends. It includes
everyone, she says, except the hookers in the Green Zone. Killed
are 2.7 million (500,000 children), 2.2 million in exile (2,500
per day), 2.2 million internally displaced, so 2.7 million
slaughtered and 4.9 million refugees. Subtract that from 25
million Iraqi population and you have 20 million (rounded off).
She calls it genocide. She reminds us that when the same events
took place in Rwanda, the U.S. called it genocide. But today, in
Iraq, the U.S. government calls it democracy and freedom.
On August 7, 2007,
Layla writes another blog entry called "Why is Half of Iraq in
Absolute Poverty?" From the very beginning, she indicts the
reader, that is, the American people. She says, "What does it
say about you? What does it say about your countries? What does
it say about your institutions? What does it say about your
governments, your 'culture', your 'civilization', your history,
your 'progress', your 'values', your concepts … ?" She just
keeps asking the reader, why? The reader is caught. She says, if
only 5 million of you had protested in front of the White House
or 10 Downing Street, the war could have been stopped. The
context, the raison d'etre for all her blogs, is the war, the
horrors of war. The intended audience is not other Arabs. The
intended audience is the perpetrators of war, that is, the
Americans. It is either the men in blue suits who give the
orders for soldiers to go to Iraq and rape, torture, sodomize
and kill the simple civilians of Iraq, or the soldiers who carry
out these crimes, or the entire nation of 301 million Americans,
who by their silence are as guilty as the soldiers who
slaughter, and as guilty as the men in blue suits and black
hearts sitting in the White House, giving the orders to kill
while having coffee and donuts. Saddam Hussein gave speeches,
but they were to his own people and the people of neighboring
countries. Layla Anwar takes on a far more difficult task, a far
more hostile audience. She directs her blog at the enemy, the
occupier, the torturer, the rapist, the destroyer of her
motherland. The difference is that she is using the internet,
which means her potential audience is the entire world. Second,
her rhetoric remains uploaded. It is not a speech that is heard
one evening on the news and then gone forever. Her blog entries
are all there staring us in the face. Her unbounded rage, her
seething and swearing, is right in our face whenever we visit
her blog.
In each and every
blog entry, Layla Anwar wants desperately for us, the reader,
the American, and whoever else collaborates with us, to grasp
the horror that is Iraq. We cannot grasp it from Fox News. Fox
News will prefer to report on Paris Hilton's release from jail
or Britney Spears' latest custody hearing, or worse yet, Barack
and Hillary. We cannot grasp it from Senate hearings on C-span
because it is unbearably intellectualized, complexitized, and
justified, with terms like "collateral damage" not even
mentioned or, if at all mentioned, never clearly defined as
drill holes in the bodies of young men, burned up corpses of
beautiful 14-year-old girls by US soldiers to destroy the
evidence of rape, or sodomization of 12 year old boys by US
soldiers in Abu Ghraib and twenty other prisons throughout Iraq.
We never hear about those twenty other prisons, do we. In fact,
today there is complete silence of goings on in Abu Ghraib. Some
say that nothing has changed; the torture, the rapes, the
sodomizing continue. The only difference today is that no
cameras are allowed. It is a policy of "hide the evidence of
U.S. war crimes." So with no cameras, no pictures, complete
censorship of the reality of war, and instead constant TV
coverage of American Idol (70 million Americans watched the
finals in 2007), how then will the American people grasp the
utter brutality of war, particularly when the present generation
never went through a war and their great great grandfathers are
not here to tell them the horrors that took place in the
American Civil War? The final proof of that brutality is 120
suicides per week by returning veterans. They cannot cope with
the guilt.
By the grace of God,
Layla says, they had no drills for Raouf. When he returned to
them,
"Raouf was so
badly tortured, he was unrecognizable. You cannot see his eyes
anymore. His face, his nose, are so swollen, as if about to
explode with pain and hurt. His body, his body, the marks of a
thousand rods, chains, sticks on it. His legs, his back, his
chest, his arms, his stomach… His white shirt was dark brown
with blood. Someone took pictures. For the memory, for the
record, for the family album. An Iraqi family album. … It is a
miracle they did not kill him. It is a miracle they did not
drill him …"
The torture of Raouf
is living proof of the horror of US imperialist war in Iraq. Is
further proof needed? In the blog "Add'o'holic" Layla provides
more proof. She provides statistics. But statistics are just
numbers on a page, aren't they. It is not the same as reading
about the beastly torture of one man named Raouf.
We learn more about
the logos of Layla Anwar In "Why is Half of Iraq in Absolute
Poverty?" Layla quotes a BBC radio show, which in turn quotes an
Oxfam report stating that over 70 percent of Iraqis no longer
have access to clean drinking water. Before 2003, all Iraqis had
water to drink. The same Oxfam report stated that today more
than 50 percent of Iraqis are malnourished and one out of three
Iraqis is starving. Fifty percent live in abject poverty. She
provides more numbers for us. Ninety-two percent of Iraqi
children have learning impediments due to mental trauma. And
ninety-nine percent of Iraqi children are traumatized for life.
The logic, the statistics are all documented in the Oxfam
report.
In the blog "Some
Thoughts on Forgiveness," she explains very simply that the
predator is still in her country, still killing, torturing,
plundering, raping and sodomizing her people. The reality of
the continuation of imperialist occupation cannot be disputed by
anyone. Hence, does the question of forgiveness arise?
The ethos, the moral
character of Layla Anwar is unknown. She lives in Baghdad,
thousands of miles away from America, and as per internet norm,
it is unlikely that we will ever meet her. We cannot know in
detail about her character. We know from other blog entries that
in her helpless, hopeless rage, she does not hesitate to tell
the reader at regular intervals, "Fuck you all." We know from
reading more of her blog that she is a highly educated, literate
and articulate woman. Frankly, in this particular context, the
assessment of the moral character of Layla Anwar borders on
criminal in comparison to the mighty crimes and tortures being
committed on Layla herself, on all her family members and their
family members, on the entire population of Iraq, on the rivers,
the date palms and soil of Iraq. What right does the critic,
any critic, have to discuss the moral character of Layla Anwar
in view of the American imperialist occupation of her country
with all the suffering that inflicts on her people?
Pathos is pervasive
in Arab Woman Blues. No other Arab, man or woman, appeals to the
conqueror, the occupier, the invader, the rapist, with the depth
and the agony that Layla Anwar appeals. She spews wrath and
fury at us all for bringing such colossal destruction to her
people. But sometimes she appeals. Perhaps in every human being,
even in the worst of circumstances, in the nadir point of their
existence, the flame of hope continues to feebly flicker. She
recounts how Raoul's wife begs and begs his captors to please
release her husband. And then she writes,
"So when some
bastard writes to me calling me a 'negative, whining, dram
queen' because am not using my 'talents' to 'uplift' the
arrogant western minds into 'Forgiveness and Beauty' – Notice
how the occupier asks the occupied to uplift him/her! I offer
this postcard from Iraq instead of my usual 'whining'… Yes, take
it all and forget about us. Just forget us … and let us breathe
a little. For it hurts to breathe, really hurts to breathe in
Iraq."
Layla never ceases
indicting the reader. In "Add'o'holic" she again throws the
numbers in our faces:
"700,000
killers roaming around. 1 for every 30. The biggest army in the
world. The No. 1 army in the world. Sophisticated, developed,
techno-logically advanced, surge after surge…applying
"professional Darwinism" as one of your Senior officers likes to
call it. And four years down the line, with its logistic
support teams, its soldiers, its militias, its contractors, its
mercenaries, its peshmergas, it has not been able to control and
secure one neighbourhood, not one alley way, not one street
corner.... Now what do you call that? I call that DEFEAT.
Some of you think of Defeat the Hollywood way. Like soldiers
head bent down, with bags packed walking away into the sunset.
That is the movies, Dears. DEFEAT is when you have at least
700,000 assholes working for you and you keep increasing their
numbers and you still can't make it. See what I mean? Now the
flip side of defeat is RESISTANCE. Four years down the line,
if you do not call that RESISTANCE, I do not know what is. And
you are supposedly the No. 1 army in the world. You can surge
all you want, bring in all the mercenaries in the world, pay
trillions and trillions of dollars, hire every contractor
possible, wheel and deal with every enemy you like, make pacts
with militias, thugs, drillers, torturers, snipers … You are
DEFEATED." Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is called
RESISTANCE."
In "Why is Half of
Iraq in Absolute Poverty?", Layla continues her relentless
indictment of the American people:
So I ask you
again – why? What have Iraqis done to you? Did they invade you?
Did they steal your homes? Did they imprison you? Did they
torture you? Did they rape you? Did they occupy your lands? Of
course, some of you will come and present me with your usual
condescending, paternalistic, patronizing lists of political
theories, attempting to explain the inexplicable. Save your
time and energy… I know all about your theories of imperialism,
neo-cons… I also know all about your handy explanations
regarding oil, cartels, monopolies, globalization. None of that
satisfies me. I still need to know why? Why us? Why Iraq? Why
this? Why now? If you fail to answer that question, then you
would have not learned one single thing about yourselves. And I
say yourselves because your governments are a reflection of who
you are, your aspirations, your mindsets, your thinking, your
illusions. You are part of it and it is part of you. And I can
see right now there are nothing but murderous thoughts – yours…I
don't care for your 'yes buts'. I truly don't. And that applies
to all of you. All of you whose governments have a finger in the
Iraq pie.
If you had
really wanted, you could have easily gone en masse, in front of
your government's offices … if only 5 million of you, not more,
only 5 million, had done that and had thrown your passports in a
huge bonfire in front of your White House, 10 Downing Street or
wherever the hell you happen to be, then I am sure, we would not
be experiencing what we are experiencing now."
Layla both pleads and
condemns without ceasing. The emotional appeal is there, but it
is a double-edged sword. Many Americans cannot tolerate the
indictment and curse her blog. Others, like myself, already
understand the crimes of American Empire and feel those crimes
only more acutely when reading her entries. In pondering on the
millions of tears flowing in Iraq, Layla's searing indictments
just leave my face covered in tears. Her radicalism causes
readers to either love her or hate her. She is no centrist. She
is a radical, and sometimes history remembers the radicals of
this world.
She begins slowly,
casually, with a flippant comment as if speaking to the wind
outside her door. But then she begins to insert the searing
intensity of her own character, throwing more and more
statistics in our face, naming more and more varieties of
torture, talking about this rape and that rape of her Iraqi
sisters, and asking over and over, why? It will not be possible
to forget that question, along with her hundreds of other
questions, to the occupiers. She begins, almost sweetly
sometimes, but with the bitterest of ironies, describing the
gentle Raouf, his lands and gardens, birds and animals, and then
she reaches the climax of his torture followed by the slaughter
of his soul. And we are the cause of that slaughter, we are the
cause of all the suffering in her country. We stand indicted
again and again. We are the invading imperial army, we are the
shallow, indifferent Americans living an easy, comfy life back
in America. Who would forgive us? Is there anyone who would
forgive an army for its invasion, with all the rapes, tortures,
crimes and genocides that invariably accompany every invasion in
history?
Layla's delivery is
abusive, derisive and denigrating. She is highly articulate in
the English language, and she uses words to humiliate the
occupiers to the maximum. She uses every word to shame us, to
compel us to put our faces to the ground. She asks us:
Will Iraq ever
forgive you? I am the wrong person to ask forgiveness from. Ask
Her. But before you ask Her, stop doing what you are doing. You
cannot continue in your ways and ask for forgiveness. It is
simply not possible. In the meantime, She will continue driving
you out by the same equal sheer force that you have used on Her.
Read Her history and you will know. And trust me, you will come
begging for Her mercy."
Now is not the time
to worry about Layla's abuse. It is the time to worry about the
crimes of Empire on innocent peoples around the world. We also
cannot forget the people of Afghanistan or the people of Iran,
whom Cheney is just itching to slaughter. We need to step
outside the imperialist American box, and face her questions
directly, find the answers, and then write to Layla and beg for
forgiveness. And then we need to do everything possible on the
ground to stop the endless serial wars waged by our government.
Garda Ghista is a freelance journalist, author of The Gujarat
Genocide: A Case Study in Fundamentalist Cleansing, and Founding
President of the
World Prout Assembly, a
movement dedicated to transferring political and economic power
from corporations to the common people.
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