You Can't Bomb Beliefs / Überzeugungen lassen sich nicht zerbomben
Eine differenzierte Betrachtung des irakischen Widerstands (englisch)
Im Folgenden dokumentieren wir einen Bericht der amerikanischen Schriftstellerin und Kolumnistin Naomi Klein. Die Kolumne erscheint am 18. Oktober 2004 in der Wochenzeitung "The Nation".
Der Artikel setzt sich auf eine sehr differenzierte Weise mit der Rolle des schiitischen Predigers al Sadr im irakischen Widerstand auseinander. Dessen religiöser Fundamentalismus wird verurteilt, seine Frauenfeindlichkeit und politischen Perspektiven für das Land werden abgelehnt - dennoch ist er in den Augen Kleins eine Symbolfigur des Wunsches einer großen Mehrheit der Iraker nach einem Abzug der ausländischen Besatzung. Klein setzt sich auch mit - falschen - Bildern mancher Linker auseinander, die in al Sadr einen antiimperialistische Rebellen sehen möchten.
Schließlich geht Klein auf die entscheidende Frage ein, was das irakische Volk zu erwarten hat, wenn al Sadr die Wahlen (so sie denn stattfinden) gewinnen würde. Al Sadrs religiöser Fanatismus sei tatsächlich eine Bedrohung für das Volk - doch die Präsenz der US-Besatzung biete eben auch keinen Schutz davor ("... but US forces won't protect Iraqi women and minorities from it any more than they have protected Iraqis from being tortured in Abu Ghraib or bombed in Falluja and Sadr City."). Fortschrittliche Menschen sollten daher al Sadr gegen amerikanische Angriffe in Schutz nehmen, denn diese Angriffe gelten nicht einem Mann, sondern der Möglichkeit auf eine demokratische Zukunft des Irak. Sadrs demokratische Rechte zu verteidigen, sei - so Kleins dialektische Wendung - der beste Weg, den weiteren Aufstieg des religiösen Fundamentalismus im Irak zu bekämpfen. ("Progressives should oppose the US attack on Sadr, because it is an attack not on one man but on the possibility of Iraq's democratic future. There is another reason, as well, to defend Sadr's democratic rights: It's the best way to fight the rise of religious fundamentalism in Iraq.")
You Can't Bomb Beliefs
by Naomi Klein
(from the oct. 18th 2004 issue of The Nation)
My first run-in with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army
came on March 31 in Baghdad. The US occupation
chief, Paul Bremer, had just sent armed men to shut
down the young cleric's newspaper, Al Hawza,
claiming that its articles comparing Bremer to
Saddam Hussein incited violence against Americans.
Sadr responded by calling for his supporters to
protest outside the gates of the Green Zone,
demanding Al Hawza's reopening.
When I heard about the demo, I wanted to go, but
there was a problem: I had been visiting state
factories all day, and I wasn't dressed
appropriately for a crowd of devout Shiites. Then
again, I reasoned, this was a demonstration in
defense of journalistic freedom--could they really
object to a journalist in loose pants? I put on a
head scarf and headed over.
Demonstrators had printed up English-language
banners that said, Let Journalists Work With No
Terror and Let Journalists Do Their Work. That
sounded good, I thought, and started doing my work.
I was soon interrupted, however, by a black-clad
member of the Mahdi Army: He wanted to talk to my
translator about my fashion choices. A friend and I
joked that we were going to make up our own protest
sign that said, Let Journalists Wear Their Pants.
But the situation quickly got serious: Another Mahdi
soldier grabbed my translator and shoved him against
a concrete blast wall, badly injuring his back.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi friend called to say she was
trapped inside the Green Zone and couldn't leave:
She had forgotten to bring a head scarf and was
afraid of running into a Mahdi patrol.
It was an instructive lesson about who Sadr actually
is: not an anti-imperialist liberator, as some on
the far left have cast him, but someone who wants
the foreigners out so he can shackle and control
large portions of Iraq's population himself. But
neither is Sadr the one-dimensional villain painted
by so many in the media, a portrayal that has
allowed many liberals to stay silent as he is barred
from participating in elections and to look the
other way while US forces nightly firebomb the
civilian population of Sadr City, where the fighting
recently knocked out electricity in the midst of a
Hepatitis E outbreak.
The situation requires a more principled position.
For instance, Muqtada al-Sadr's calls for press
freedom may not include the freedom of women
journalists to cover him. Yet he still deserves to
have his right to publish a political newspaper--not
because he believes in freedom but because we
supposedly do. Similarly, Sadr's calls for fair
elections and an end to occupation demand our
unequivocal support--not because we are blind to the
threat he would pose if he were actually elected but
because believing in self-determination means
admitting that the outcome of democracy is not ours
to control.
These kinds of nuanced distinctions are commonly
made in Iraq: Many people I met in Baghdad strongly
condemned the attacks on Sadr as evidence that
Washington never intended to bring democracy to
their country. They backed the cleric's calls for an
end to occupation and for immediate open elections.
But when asked if they would vote for him in those
elections, most laughed at the prospect.
Yet here in North America, the idea that you can
support Sadr's call for elections without endorsing
him as Iraq's next prime minister has proved harder
to grasp. For arguing this position, I have been
accused of making "excuses for the theocrats and
misogynists" by Nick Cohen in the London Observer,
of having "naively fallen for the al-Mahdi militia"
by Frank Smyth in Foreign Policy in Focus and of
being a "socialist-feminist offering swooning
support to theocratic fascists" by Christopher
Hitchens in Slate.
All this manly defense of women's rights is
certainly enough to make a girl swoon. Yet before
Hitchens rides to the rescue, it's worth remembering
how he rationalized his reputation-destroying
support for the war: Even if US forces were really
after the oil and military bases, he reasoned, the
liberation of the Iraqi people would be such a
joyous side-effect that progressives everywhere
should cheer the cruise missiles. With the prospect
of liberation still a cruel joke in Iraq, Hitchens
is now claiming that this same anti-woman, anti-gay
White House is the Iraqi people's best hope against
Sadr's brand of anti-woman, anti-gay religious
fundamentalism. Once again we are supposed to hold
our noses and cheer the Bradleys--for the greater
good, or the lesser evil.
There is no question that Iraqis face a mounting
threat from religious fanaticism, but US forces
won't protect Iraqi women and minorities from it any
more than they have protected Iraqis from being
tortured in Abu Ghraib or bombed in Falluja and Sadr
City. Liberation will never be a trickle-down effect
of this invasion because domination, not liberation,
was always its goal. Even under the best scenario,
the current choice in Iraq is not between Sadr's
dangerous fundamentalism and a secular democratic
government made up of trade unionists and feminists.
It's between open elections--which risk handing
power to fundamentalists but would also allow
secular and moderate religious forces to organize--
and rigged elections designed to leave the country
in the hands of Iyad Allawi and the rest of his
CIA/Mukhabarat-trained thugs, fully dependent on
Washington for both money and might.
This is why Sadr is being hunted--not because he is
a threat to women's rights but because he is the
single greatest threat to US military and economic
control of Iraq. Even after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-
Sistani backed down from his opposition to the
handover plans, fearing civil war, Sadr continued to
oppose the US-drafted Constitution, continued to
call for the withdrawal of foreign troops and
continued to oppose US plans to appoint the interim
government rather than hold elections. If Sadr's
demands are met and the country's fate is truly left
in the hands of the majority, US military bases in
Iraq will be in serious jeopardy, as will all the
privatization-friendly laws pushed through by
Bremer.
Progressives should oppose the US attack on Sadr,
because it is an attack not on one man but on the
possibility of Iraq's democratic future. There is
another reason, as well, to defend Sadr's democratic
rights: It's the best way to fight the rise of
religious fundamentalism in Iraq.
Far from reducing the draw of extremism, the US
attack on Sadr has greatly strengthened it. Sadr has
deftly positioned himself not as the narrow voice of
strict Shiites but as an Iraqi nationalist defending
the entire country against foreign invaders. Thus,
when he was attacked with the full force of the US
military and dared to resist, he earned the respect
of millions of Iraqis living under the humiliation
and brutality of occupation.
The heavy-handed attempts to silence Sadr have also
served to confirm the worst fears of many Shiites--
that they are being betrayed by the Americans once
again, the same Americans who supported Saddam
during the Iran-Iraq war, which took the lives of
more than 100,000 Iraqis; the same Americans who
told them to rise up in 1991, only to leave them to
be slaughtered. Now, under siege once again, many
are seeking refuge in the certainties of
fundamentalism, not to mention in the emergency
social services provided by the mosques. Some are
even concluding that they need a tyrant of their
own, a fierce fundamentalist to do battle with the
other strongmen trying to control Iraq.
This shift in attitude is evident in all the
polling. A Coalition Provisional Authority poll in
May, after the first US siege on Najaf, found that
opinion of Sadr had improved among 81 percent of
Iraqi respondents. An Iraq Center for Research and
Strategic Studies poll ranked Sadr--a marginal
figure only six months before--as Iraq's second most
influential political player after Sistani.
Most alarming, the attacks appear to be boosting
support not only for Sadr personally but for
theocracy generally. In February, the month before
Paul Bremer closed down Sadr's newspaper, an Oxford
Research International survey found that a majority
of Iraqis wanted a secular government: Only 21
percent of respondents said their favored political
system was "an Islamic state" and only 14 percent
ranked "religious politicians" as their preferred
political actors. Fast-forward to August, with Najaf
under siege by US forces: The International
Republican Institute reported that a staggering 70
percent of Iraqis want Islam and Shariah as the
basis of the state. The poll didn't differentiate
between Sadr's unyielding interpretation of Shariah
and more moderate versions represented by other
religious parties. Yet it's clear that some of the
people who told me back in March that they supported
Sadr but would never vote for him are beginning to
change their minds.
In response to my last column, "Bring Najaf to New
York," The Nation received a letter from Maj. Glen
Butler, a US Marine helicopter pilot stationed in
Najaf. Major Butler defends the siege on the holy
city by saying that he and his fellow Marines were
trying to prevent the "evil" of "radical Muslims"
from spreading--"Our desire is to keep Najaf in
Najaf."
Well, it's not working. Helicopter gunships are good
at killing people. Beliefs, when under fire, tend to
spread.
* * *
Response to Butler's letter: There are several other
points Butler raises that demand a response. He
dismisses my claim that children have been killed by
US soldiers in Najaf as "the stereotypical 'baby
killer' myth." I wish it were a myth. In the week I
wrote my column, the New York Times ran a story
quoting Hussein Hadi, the deputy director of Najaf's
main hospital. Dr. Hadi said that the death toll
from the siege Major Butler participated in
"includes more women and children than before. 'This
time, it's the average people that are dying.... Now
the Americans are using heavier weapons. We see many
children with more severe injuries.'"
Butler claims that US troops had to go into the
cemetery because Sadr "left us little choice." Yet
the battle against Sadr--like the invasion itself--
was a choice from the start. For the first year of
the occupation, armed resistance against US troops
was concentrated in the so-called Sunni Triangle;
there was no organized Shiite resistance to speak
of. It was only after US occupation powers closed
down Sadr's newspaper, arrested his deputies, fired
on peaceful demonstrators and surrounded his mosque
that the Shiites were goaded into battle. A similar
provocation was staged in August, precipitating the
siege on the shrine and the cemetery fighting.
Coalition forces broke a two-month truce by
arresting several key Sadr supporters and then
sending a convoy of six military vehicles to
surround the home where Sadr had been staying,
sparking an armed battle. Army officials said it was
a mistake.
As for Butler's "culturally sensitive military," I
don't doubt that many individual soldiers are doing
their best to learn about the country they are
occupying. But the overall picture is distinctly
more grim. This is the same culturally sensitive
military whose first act as occupier was to hang a
US flag over the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos
Square, sending the unmistakable message that Iraq
had just been conquered, not liberated. This
military is part of the same culturally sensitive
occupation that thought it would be a good idea to
get an NYU professor who had never been to Iraq to
write the first draft of Iraq's Constitution, then
unveiled a new blue-and-white Iraqi flag that looked
remarkably like the Israeli flag (both schemes were
scrapped due to public outrage). It's the same
military that, in April, bombed Falluja's Abdel-Aziz
al-Samarrai mosque and in August provoked the siege
that damaged mosaics on the outer walls of Najaf's
sacred Imam Ali Shrine.
Butler insists that he is not fighting Iraqi
nationalists opposed to a foreign occupation but
ruthless foreign jihadists who want to kill
Americans for kicks. To bolster this claim, he cites
an article in Time magazine about "the New Jihad."
Yet the article in question makes no mention of
Sadr, Najaf or the Mahdi Army; it is focused instead
on a narrow subset of fighters in the Sunni
Triangle. In Butler's case, this may be an honest
mistake, but when the same line comes out of the
White House, it is a clear strategy. Lumping regular
Iraqis fighting occupation into the same "terrorist"
category as Baathist holdouts and Al Qaeda sadists
conveniently masks the unpleasant fact that US
forces are now at war against the very people they
supposedly invaded Iraq to liberate--not because
they oppose elections, as Colin Powell claimed
recently, but because they dared to demand them.
But never mind that. Now Butler claims that he is
not fighting for the freedom of Iraqis but for me--
so I "can continue to live in peace, free to grumble
and dissent." Having been in the surgery wards and
funeral processions of Sadr City on the mornings
after US troops have done their peacekeeping, I can
assure him that he is not making anyone safer. Not
in Iraq, and not at home.
Source: The Nation, 18 October 2004
http://www.thenation.com/
Zurück zur Irak-Seite
Zurück zur Homepage