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Iraq’s Parliament: New Farce
By Ghali Hassan
03/24/05
"ICH"
- - Despite
calls to demonstrate kind of independence, the so-called Iraq’s
‘national assembly’ met inside the fortress of the “Green
zone”. Western media hailed the first meeting as another
“historic” moment in Iraq’s road to ‘democracy’. In
Iraq, the story is of a widespread dismay and anger that the
elections have not produced any change on the ground or even a new
“government”. The same expatriate quislings, just more divided
on sectarian line than before the elections, are gathered to
discuss their new positions. They met in the shadow of US forces
to announce that their symbiotic relation with the Occupation will
continue, and that the US forces will stay in Iraq to protect them
and terrorise the Iraqi people. It was anything, but a democratic
parliament.
It was a US theatrical show with Iraqi puppets playing as
actors.
The
US is slowly achieving its original aim of dividing Iraqis in
order to justify prolonged Occupation of Iraq and siphoning its
resources. The New York
Times reported on March
17, 2005 that interviews of Iraqis “indicated
in particular a striking sense of disillusionment among [Iraqi]
Shiites .
. . [and]
suggested a hardening of the sectarian divisions that were visible
in the election”. From the beginning the US played the sectarian
card to destroy the unity of the Iraqi people. The
Kurds, who have been used by foreign powers time and again, are
the tools for this deliberate policy.
With
new veto power granted to the Kurds under the US-crafted and
unconstitutional Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the law
laid down by former US Proconsul Paul Bremer, Iraq has been
divided into one small Iraq in the north and a bigger Iraq to the
south. The TAL gave the Kurds, who make less than 12 percent of
the Iraqi population, a 27 percent of the seats in the new
‘national assembly’. The US-crafted power allows the Kurds to
derail any democratic solution, let alone an end to the Occupation
in Iraq.
So, the Kurds veto in Iraq is the US card. It can be
accurately compare with the US veto card at the UN. Further, the
TAL is also forms the blue print for any new Iraqi constitutions.
In other words, Iraq self-determination is the hostage of the US.
The Iraqi people have no say in the affairs of their country. This
is the reason for the ongoing wrangling and haggling over the
forming of the new fictitious “government”.
The
Kurds, led by their opportunistic and self-serving warlords, are
aiming at ethnic cleansing the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and
incorporated it into their mythological country of
“Kurdistan”. The Kurds have never been a majority in Kirkuk.
They remain a small minority with US-armed militia, the Peshmerga.
According to the 1957 Iraqi census, the majority of Kirkuk
population were Iraqi Turkoman and Iraqi Arabs (Christians and
Muslims). Kurds number in Kirkuk has decline since 1977,
especially during the 13-years (1991-2003) of the genocidal
sanctions against Iraq when many Kurds moved to the North and
North-eastern regions of Iraq that was effectively less
embargoed than the rest of the country.
It is important remembering that the Kurds, despite their small
number in Iraq, have enjoyed better treatment than in Iran and in
Turkey, where their numbers are much larger than in Iraq. In
Turkey, more than 14 million Kurds live in despair, poverty and
military repression, and until recently speaking Kurdish in the
public was illegal in Turkey. Compare this with Iraq where
schools, hospitals and well-known universities built by former
Iraqi governments to serve all Iraqis in the North. It is easier
for Western mainstream media and Western governments to look the
other way and ignore realities. Western mainstream media have no
problem selling democracy with illegitimate elections than
providing the public with honest and independent information.
Furthermore,
evidence from Iraqi sources obtained by Scott Ritter, former
UNSCOM weapons inspector, suggests that the Bush administration
and its Allawi’s gang hampered with the elections results and
lowered the Shiites votes from ‘56 percent of the vote to 48
percent’, through a ‘secret vote count’ and ‘reengineering
the post-election political landscape in Iraq dramatically’ to
fit with the US-designed kind of democracy for Iraq, AlterNet.
The
elections were ‘the farce of the century’. The
US-based Carter Centre, which monitored elections around the
world, did not participate in the Iraq’s elections because
Iraq’s elections do not met elections’ criteria, such as free
and safe environment, and the ability of candidates to move
freely. All independent voices in Iraq, regardless of ethnicity,
have boycotted the elections. As I have pointed out earlier, the
elections have divided Iraqis and reinforced sectarianism.
The
elections were ‘demonstration’ elections aimed at American and
Western citizens at home. In other words, it was a PR exercise to
promote new form of colonialism and illegal armed conquest. The
US-crafted elections were designed to legitimise the Occupation of
Iraq and promote
US influence around the globe through ongoing military aggressions.
‘Democracy under Occupation’ is the new motto of the White
House.
It
isn’t ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ or human rights that the US
is promoting; the US is promoting its own
corporate interests.
The most brutal and dictatorial regimes in the world, including
the Middle East, are the closest allies of the US. A fact the US
supports wholeheartedly. The brutal and dictatorial regime in
Egypt is the second largest US aid recipient after Israel. The
corrupt dictators of the Gulf States led by Saudi Arabia are the
US closest allies for over half-century. Further, the US
encourages and supports the abuses of human rights in these
countries by the outsourcing
of torture.
The
policy, which called ‘extraordinary rendition’, is the
practice by which innocent prisoners and detainees in US custody
are sent for interrogation in foreign countries that practice
torture, such as Egypt Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Arab leaders
should be ashamed for associating the Arab World with such an
appalling practice that should be the trademark of the US alone.
The
US did not invade Iraq for the sake of ‘democracy’,
‘freedom’ or
to safeguard human rights, these are the pretexts for domestic
consumptions and war. It should be remembered that the original
pretext for the war was that Iraq possessed large arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which was proved to be a lie.
The Bush’s Doctrine of ‘pre-emptive’ illegal wars of
aggression designed to impose US hegemony on defenceless people
using all kinds pretexts to justify its aim. Since the US invasion
and Occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi people are the most abused and
unfree people on the planet today. The destruction of the city of
Fallujah and the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi citizens by US
napalm and chemical weapons amount to war crimes and in direct
contravention of the Geneva Conventions.
In
the US, returned soldiers are telling a horrific picture of what
is like for Iraqis to live under Occupation. US soldier Camilo
Mejia who refused to return to Iraq after taking leave in October
2003, said recently; “I thought of the suffering of a people
whose country was in ruins and who were further humiliated by the
raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army… And I realized
that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq
turned out to be true... I realized that I was part of a war that
I believed was immoral and criminal, a war of aggression, [and] a
war of imperial domination. I realized that acting upon my
principles became incompatible with my role in the military, and I
decided that I could not return to Iraq”. [1]
After
his return from Iraq, ex-marine
Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey sums
up the war in a recent interview; “[What we are doing in Iraq]
sickened me so that I had actually brought it up to my lieutenant,
and I told him, I said, ‘You know, sir, we're not going to have
to worry about Iraq - you know, we're basically committing
genocide over here, mass extermination of thousands of
Iraqis’”. [2]
Self-censored
media shields the government from any wrongdoing and keeps the
public entertained and in place. As professor
William Cook of the University of La Verne in southern California
noted that;
“None of the Iraqi 100,000 dead have a voice to cheer Bush's
Doctrine; none of their family members have been asked about its
benefits; no one concerned about the ensuing years' invisible
companion, depleted uranium, has a voice; none of the maimed - the
blind, the limbless, the sick and dying - have a voice; no one has
been asked about America's 14 military bases being a permanent
part of the Iraqi landscape; no one has been asked about America
determining that Iraqi resources should be sold to the most
favoured private bidder, primarily non-Iraqi; and none of the
[innocent, men women and children] prisoners subjugated to [abuse
and] torture at Abu Ghraib [and other expanding US prisons in
Iraq] has been asked about America's virtues and its democratic
ways”.[3]
The
war was a murderous crime, and that those who are responsible for
it, and for the destruction of the Iraqi civil society should face
war crimes trials like the leaders of Nazi Germany.
A
farce parliament produced by illegitimate elections in the shadow
of war of aggression and occupation does not make a nation
democratic, free and sovereign. It makes a colonial dictatorship.
The US-led foreign forces have no business in Iraq. Iraq’s
liberation and self-determination from foreign invaders are the
unquestionable legitimate rights of the Iraqi people.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be reached by e-mail here
Links:
[1]. Camilo Mejia, Regaining My Humanity. http://www.codepink4peace.org/National_Actions_Camilo.shtml
[2]. Amy Goodman interviews Jimmy Massey, (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212)
[3]. William Cook, http://www.counterpunch.org/cook03162005.html
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