[Mb-civic] One of the Best-Michael

[Michael Butler]

  Iraq: A Silenced Majority
   From Interviews with My Family
   By Stephan Said
   t r u t h o u t | Perspective

  Sunday 19 December 2004

  Since my return from this fall's busy touring schedule, I have been  able
to reach my family in Iraq regularly for the first time since the  beginning
of the war. One of the most important things we can do for  them, and for
the people of Iraq, is to counteract the unjust  dehumanization of their
entire nation of people, by giving voice to  the silenced majority there who
want peace. This silenced majority  rarely makes it into the mainstream
press because they are not killing  people, and because they support neither
the US occupation and its  puppet interim government, nor the minority of
reactionary extremists  in their own country, who are on our front pages
every day. And so,  I've decided to begin a series of reports on what
"ordinary" life is  like in Iraq through interviews with my family and their
friends.

  I come from a large Sunni family originally from Nineveh, but now  spread
between Mosul and Baghdad, and I am grateful to report that all  of my
nephews, nieces, aunts and uncles are alive.

  If you listen to Democracy Now!, you may have heard my Uncle Ghazi's
voice the last time I did. My uncle Ghazi was Chief Electrical  Engineer for
the entire country until he retired in the nineties. The  last time I heard
his voice, it was crackling through a small bedside  radio on the day the
invasion began, when Amy Goodman interviewed him  from his home. I shall
never forget lying there, hearing Ghazi's  unshakeable, dignified voice,
when Amy asked him what he and his  family planned to do, "Will you leave
town or ...?" and he responded,  "What can we do? We are expecting our first
grandchild in the next two  months. So we will gather the family and take
them into the basement  until the bombing stops." Arundhati Roy, also on
line from India,  burst out in tears, thoroughly disturbed that Americans
could hear  such a testimony and not do everything possible to stop the war
that  would begin a mere three hours later. Still composed, Ghazi went on to
say that he did not blame all Americans for the acts of their
administration ... he understood how a people, any people, and in this  case
the Americans, can be systematically disinformed.

  When I reached my cousin Omar at home in Baghdad last week, he said  his
father had been stranded in Mosul since the siege on Fallujah.  Ghazi had
gone to our family home there to be with my aunts Zeineb and  Butheina for
Ramadan feast. He told my father that when the siege on  Fallujah began and
the "freedom fighting" (or "insurgency" as it is called in the American
media) spread to Mosul, the whole town shut  down, everyone too afraid to go
out, no businesses open, as though the  place were deserted. Speaking with
my father from their family home,  Ghazi reported that now conditions are so
bad, that the vast majority  wishes Saddam Hussein were back in power ... it
was better then, even  for the majority who either endured or tolerated, as
my family, but  did not support the Baathist regime.

  Four of my aunts and uncles are doctors in the main Hospitals in both
Baghdad and Mosul. From contact with them, I can only imagine what it  does
to a doctor's heart to try to heal, knowingly in vain, a people  who now may
have become the first victims of irreparable, long-term  geno-contamination
in human history. Already at the Conference on Nuclear Arms in Hamburg,
October 2003, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, Prof. of  Science at the University of
Ryukyus, Okinawa, reported the US had  dropped on Iraq the equivalent of
250,000 times the radioactive  nuclear waste dropped on Nagasaki. Different
from Nagasaki, however,  the contamination in Iraq is widespread, dispersed
over entire regions  of the country, bullets, strewn casings, armor,
fragments, shrapnel ... all containing radioactive waste.

  From scant reports and video that leak past the mainstream embargo on
images from Iraq, we can only assume that Fallujah has been leveled  like
Dresden was in the 2nd World War. At an event coordinated by  Veterans for
Peace at New York City's Community Church this past  Sunday, at which I
sang, the Nation's correspondent Christian Parenti described why the siege
on Fallujah was such a critically huge  mistake: it was a city with more
Mosques than any other city in Iraq,  beloved across the religious spectrum.
Now many of those Mosques are  no more than rubble, and the total $82
million magnanimously pledged  by the US to rebuild the city would scarcely
be enough to rebuild more  than a couple of these churches alone.

  But the truth is, Fallujah's damage is far worse than meets the eye.  The
entire city could very well be a permanently uninhabitable  radioactive
zone, yet we hear about the noble efforts of the US to  move the 250-300,000
inhabitants back in to live in the now poisoned  homes, water, earth, and
air. I reflected on this with my friend  Dennis Kyne at the School of the
Americas Protests a couple weeks ago.  Dennis, a Gulf War II vet and former
Fort Benning medic, was trained  by our government to detect radiation
sickness from Depleted Uranium  in American soldiers using the weapons the
government itself had given  them to use. Why are the top administration and
military officers in  the US knowingly allowing irreparable, widespread, and
lethal  contamination of Iraq to occur? Is it intentional?

  Men in my family have been military officers since the days of the
Ottomans. My great uncle, Selahuddin Sabagh, was a leader of the Four
Colonels' Revolt against the British in 1941, perhaps the single most
pivotal incident in the anti-colonial movement that spread thereafter
throughout the middle east and North Africa as a call to independence.
Sabagh and his four colleagues were publicly hung by the  British-installed
regime as a message against the Iraqi will for  freedom.

  It is an understatement to say that the Iraqi and Mesopotamian  struggle
to be free of forced rule has a long history. The giant-sized  presidential
campaign posters of interim prime minister and US-backed  former Saddam
Hussein strongman Ayad Allawi, shown going up around  Baghdad on today's
cover of the New York Times, don't fool the  citizens of a politically
evolved society. The average Iraqi citizen  is much more aware of the
workings of power in politics and media than  their Fox News-addicted
American counterparts. Iraq is a land where  Democracy has its oldest roots,
where Hammurabi's code of law  pre-existed Moses, and came 1,700 years
before Christ, where  Christianity, and subsequently Mohammedism, became
popular as  revolutions against economic imperialism 2,000 years ago, where
the  Ottoman Empire led the world in religious tolerance in the days when
Europe and its foundling United States were in the throws of  Inquisitions
and Puritanism. This is a land where war, after war,  after war has been
waged for the cause of economic imperialism since  the beginning of time,
while the majority of families huddled with  their children in their
basements, waiting for God to bring an end to  greed, once and for all.

  My father and uncle have told me over and over again how in their
childhood, their friends were Shia, Kurdish, Jewish, that they lived  in the
same neighborhoods together without incident, indeed even with  joy. They
insist, knowingly, that their cultural landscape has become  increasingly
violently divided by domestic and foreign imperialist  power which needs to
divide to conquer, and keep the nation under  control for the interests of
power.

  The ordinary Iraqi, the silenced majority, is not fighting in the  Mahdi
Army, or for the insurgents, or joining the American-installed  governing
authority and its 'police.' The silenced majority, like my  nephews and
nieces hiding in their basements, hoping they can just go  outside, or get
to school again, or get food, water, electricity  regularly again, know in
their hearts that it is economic imperialism  itself that suppresses them,
and that the US Government and military  are pawns for corporate interests.
They understand the cause of global justice all too well. They know their
enemy is a globally endured  system in which the ability for some to have
more power and wealth  than others creates and sustains a legacy of
dominance, divisiveness,  oppression, violence, and hatred to maintain
power.

  From this perspective, the American military, the Baathists, Ariel  Sharon
and Likkud Israel, Bin Laden, al Sadr, or Saddam Hussein, are  all cousins
in an endless parade of foot soldiers for the same  problem: the system of
economic dominance we all live under that  requires oppression. When I asked
my family what they thought was the  only way to peace in Iraq, they
answered, "The only way for peace in  Iraq, or on earth now, is through a
total revolution in society. One  no short of the dream that Christ,
Mohammed, and all the prophets  spoke of, in which real equality brings an
end to this entire unjust  way in which we all live together."

  Yours in the belief that another world is in the making,
   Stephan Said, aka Stephan Smith

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  Stephan Smith is an Iraqi-American artist and activist whose new album
"Slash and Burn" is out on Artemis Records. His song "The Bell," or  "Daquat
al Nakous," with Pete Seeger, Dean Ween, and DJ Spooky has  become an anthem
for the global antiwar movement.

  http://www.stephansmith.com, you can email him at stephan at stephansmth.com

 

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