[Mb-civic] Iraq: A Silenced Majority

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122004Y.shtml

  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

  -------

  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

 

  -------

   Jump to TO Features for Monday December 20, 2004   


 © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org




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   ---   George Orwell


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