BY ROHAN PEARCE
The first meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council was held in Baghdad on July 13. In the following week, two US soldiers were killed, and 13 injured, by rocket-propelled grenade attacks launched by Iraqi resistance fighters in Baghdad, and thousands of Iraqis marched through the streets of the predominantly Shiite town of Najaf denouncing the Governing Council and the US occupation.
These events indicate that the council, composed of 25 Iraqis handpicked by US-appointed dictator Paul Bremer, has failed to demobilise resistance to the US occupation. The council includes former banker Ahmad Chalabi, who left Iraq as a teenager and is the Pentagon's favourite to head a future US puppet regime in Iraq.
Set up to give an Iraqi face to the US occupation regime, the council has, in theory, more powers than the "advisory council" Washington originally planned for the country. However, the council has no real independent authority — any of its decisions can still be vetoed by Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Significantly from the White House's point of view, the council involves some political groups which have been critical of the occupation, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, believed to be the largest Shiite political organisation, and the Iraqi Communist Party.
Seven days after the council was set up, 10,000 people marched through the southern Iraqi town of Najaf chanting "No to America, no to colonialism, no to tyranny, no to the devil!". The local US occupation authorities claimed the protest was sparked by false reports that Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr was to be arrested, after he gave a sermon on July 18 denouncing the Governing Council.
A further sign indicating that opposition to the occupation is still strong among Shiite Muslims was a statement by US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz at a July 21 press conference in Mosul. Wolfowitz told journalists (without, apparently, any intentional irony): "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."
US officials' statements on "foreign interference" have ostensibly been aimed at Iran and Syria. However, their anti-Iran rhetoric has frequently included veiled warnings to Iraqi Shiite groups opposed to the US occupation.
Washington's efforts to "win the hearts and minds" of Iraqis have been undermined by the repression it has increasingly had to resort to to suppress Iraqi resistance to the occupation.
According to a report released on July 3 by Reporters Without Borders, escalating political repression has included "US troops ransacking the Baghdad offices of Al Adala, organ of the country's main Shiite political party, Iraqi police arresting a crew of the [Dubai-based] pan-Arab TV station al Jazeera as they were filming an anti-US demonstration, the point-blank-range shooting death of a freelance British cameraman in central Baghdad and the killing of the Mosul bureau chief of a Kurdish TV station in an armed clash."
On July 23, the Washington Post reported that the CPA had ordered the shutting down of the Baghdad-based Al Mustaqila (The Independent) newspaper. According to Iraqi witnesses, US troops ransacked the paper's office and arrested Abdul Sattar Shalan, Al Mustaqila's manager.
A statement from the CPA said the paper was shut down because of an article allegedly titled "Death to all spies and those who cooperate with the US; killing them is religious duty", reporting on anti-occupation demonstrations by Shiites in Fallujah. The CPA's censorship regulations ban articles which call for opposition to the US occupation.
Also on July 23, Amnesty International issued a report expressing alarm about the US occupation forces' violence against Iraqi civilians, including repeated use of lethal force against peaceful protesters.
The report lists multiple incidents of the use by US troops of lethal force against unarmed civilians, in which the death of Saddi Sueliman Ibrahim Al Ubayadi stands out. Witnesses told the human rights organisation that when Ubayadi's house was raided in the early morning by US troops in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on May 14, the soldiers had beaten Ubayadi with their rifle butts. "He ran out of the house to get away from them; soldiers shot him a few metres away and he died immediately", the report said.
Amnesty accused the US occupation forces of using "inhumane" methods of detaining and interrogating Iraqis, including prolonged sleep deprivation and restraint in "painful positions". "Such treatment would amount to 'torture and inhumane treatment' prohibited by the fourth Geneva convention and by international human rights law", the report said.
Based on interviews with former Iraqi prisoners, the report also alleged that some had been housed in tents under extreme heat and without adequate drinking water. "Amnesty International has received a number of reports of cases of detainees who have died in custody where ill treatment may have caused or contributed to deaths that have been reported", the report said.
Amnesty spokesperson Judit Arenas Licea told Agence France Presse that "People are afraid of going out on the streets, being picked up and going missing". She said she was struck by the fact that at a meeting of Iraqi civil associations in Baghdad on July 22 people were more eager to talk about abuses under the US occupation than those that had occurred under Saddam Hussein's regime.
"You still have the same crowds of people outside Abu Gharib Prison looking for their relatives", she said, referring to the prison where, under Hussein's brutal regime, many Iraqis vanished after being detained by the security police.
Despite promising a program of "de-Baathisation" of Iraq, Washington is reviving Â鶹´«Ã½ of Saddam Hussein's spy network. According to a July 22 New York Times report, members of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress have been meeting with the former members of Mukhabarat, the Hussein regime's spy service, with the aim of creating a new spy agency.
The meetings appear to be at the behest of the Pentagon. Abdulaziz Kubaisi, an INC member spear-heading the effort, told the paper, his people were "sending back information to the Pentagon, to people who are responsible. They know the nature of what we're doing. There is coordination. We have representatives of [US defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld at the INC."
One of the Pentagon's reported aims is to use a reconstitute Iraqi spy agency to provide aid to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, an Iranian emigre group that since the mid-198Os has mounted terrorist attacks into Iran from Iraqi territory.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 30, 2003.
Visit the