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POCKETS of RESISTANCE - Special Report from Baghdad

Pockets of Resistance is published online by Dark Night Press and supports the struggle for liberation of indigenous peoples

These dispatches by John Ross, veteran reporter on Mexico, will continue until time runs out. The author implores you to try and save his life by informing the president of the United States that he is on site at the Daura Oil Refinery in Baghdad and by demanding that the White House cancel plans to bomb that facility and indeed, all others in this ancient land of Iraq. Inshallah.

"We Eat America for Breakfast": Baghdad Waits for Bush's Rain of Death

Period: Mar. 1-7, 2003, #353

BAGHDAD (Feb. 28)--The afternoon sky over Baghdad browned ominously as the sandstorm swirled in from the surrounding desert. Suddenly, the dirt was flying everywhere, filling the mouth with grit, a choking blast of hot, stifling air that would not abate until near midnight. Some taxi drivers cursed, fearing the worst for their already damaged vehicles, while others were enthused. "God is great!" rejoiced the ferret-faced, bearded driver who carried me home from a crosstown meeting.

Indeed, the storm was a portent of weather to come as the desert heats up to 100 plus degrees. Here the spring and summer sandstorms blow like the Russian snow that snatched victory from Napoleon and the Nazis back in history's frozen museum. The heat here, they say, will fry the brains of the invading army, and
because the brains of the US barbarians are now embodied by killer computers, their machines of war will slow and discalibrate, and the 3,000 missiles Bush brags he will drill down upon us in an unprecedented 48-hour blitzkrieg are not guaranteed to kiss their targets with any precision. Above all, this is not good news for my new neighbors here.

Everywhere I travel, the war is in the air. In Mosul, 200 miles to the north, where the desert climbs into the cold mountain rain, if the experience of 1991 is any teacher, a bloodbath seems inevitable as US proxy Kurds and Turkish troops (if their Parliament greenlights their participation) will go at it with the Iraqi army, trapping the civilian population in a deadly squeeze.

A delegation of Human Shields who have come to Iraq to interpose their bodies between the Bush bombs and the people of this unlucky land visit the edge of town and pause before one of this ancient city's 15 crumbling gates, each embossed with the emblem of the eagle king Asyripanipani, who protected Mosul from other barbarian hordes long centuries ago, much as the Human Shields dream of doing now--although such a defense we know in our open secret hearts is a mere symbol, a kind of metaphor before the coming slaughter.

Mosul still bears the unmistakable scars of 1991. We visit sites blasted by the US "smart" bombs a dozen years back--the telephone company smashed to smithereens, a Christian church where the roof literally blew in, killing four worshippers at prayer, we are told by the young house priest. Mosul is the site of some of Christendom's earliest crusades, a multicultural oasis where 8,000 orthodox Catholic families still reside. We bus down the valley to a fourth-century monastery hewn from the surrounding mountains--the ruins of a church built in 150 AD are said to be nearby, such relics being in spitting distance of Jesus Christ himself, as an erudite fellow Shield observes.

This particular monastery, whose chambers breathe a musty antiquity, was damaged in a firefight between Kurds and Iraqi troops after the US assault, and such engagements are a certainty once the American death machine has done its dirtiest work here.

The sinister Moloch, with its head of a snake and fearsome eagle talons, will greet the invading army when it descends upon Babylon, now a dusty, sparsely attended tract an hour south of Baghdad whose reconstructed walls will surely fall when Bush's missiles zero in on the presidential guest house here in their
painstaking search and destroy for Saddam Hussein--erasing his ubiquitous portraiture from public buildings alone may take a thousand times the number of heat-seeking rockets in the Yanqui arsenal.

We stroll through the ruins, a world heritage site, with a friendly posse of school kids, the only visitors this late February morning, trailing behind us chanting "Down with Bush!," practicing their rudimentary English and slapping fives. "How are you?" and "Hi, my name is Muhammad" are particular favorites.

The Shields have come to Babylon hoping to set up shop here, but the Iraqi authorities build roadblocks. The Minders want us to install at what they consider to be priority infrastructure sites--refineries, power plants, water treatment facilities that are sure to be bombed--but not hospitals, schools or the ancient ruins that define this place. We send our volunteers into the facilities the government insists we man and woman in pursuit of a quid pro quo that would hopefully grant us access to the humanitarian sites we have come here to protect, but there is no real dialogue with the authorities, and the push and pull of where the Shields now in Baghdad will be deployed seems destined for a dark end. Spanish and Turkish comrades have already threatened to return to their home countries unless they are allowed to pitch their tents in front of local hospitals, but how easily their exit will be accomplished is still anyone's guess. No, we are not yet unwelcome guests, but the writing is indeed on the wall, and the choices narrow as the war draws near.

But settling in at the Daura Oil Refinery and the Seventh of April Water Treatment Facility is only half the business we are about. The international volunteers are resolved to maintain a steady drumbeat of street protest, and almost daily we parade along the boulevards of Baghdad, yelling at both Bush and Blair to get off the Iraqi people's backs. On Sunday Feb. 23 we strung up a 17-meter-long banner on one of the eight bridges that connect the banks of the Tigris River (all were blown the last time around), strumming guitars and shouting poems to the joyous honking of horns. "Bush--The Whole World Is Watching You!" the banner reads, but whether it can be seen 10,000 miles away in Tampa, Florida, from whence the missiles will be triggered, is not assured.

That same morning, we marched on the United Nations headquarters here, our hands tied together by thick rope, to ask that international tribunals be convened to try us for the war crime of being human shields, as suggested by US "defense" secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Should we be declared innocent, we demand that Rumsfeld be tried instead for the potential million murders his grotesque weaponry could carry out in the coming days.

The day before, the Turkish comrades had danced through Martyrs' Square, pounding drums and tambourines in an exuberant effort to drown out the dirges of death that Bush and Blair duet. Earlier that morning, we had descended upon the International Press Center, hollering "No More Lies!" into the cubicles of corporate media, which just loves this "war" (more likely a massacre) because it means booming ratings and bigger budgets, billions in expanded advertising revenues, and extravagant overtime for the all-star correspondents and their crews. "No More Lies!" we shouted at a CNN flunky, Ingrid Kormanack, who stomped out of her cardboard-walled cave muttering: "I ask the questions around here."

But for all our fury, in the still of the soon-to-be-exploding, we know it is all a pantomime. The missiles will whistle in very soon, possibly as early as the new moon (Feb. 28)--historically, the U.S. has always bombed the world by that small light. Many here would just as soon get it over with as quickly as possible, because the waiting is killing their souls. "We eat America for breakfast," says Bassam, an ex-army man who invented a way to feed sheep chicken-shit (32% protein) in the
aftermath of the last war, and now works as a driver at the swank Palestine Hotel. "Every morning, we listen to the news. If it is good our day will be good, but if it is bad we cannot eat..."

Bassam and I have agreed to celebrate our birthdays together--my 65th is Mar. 11, when we may still be alive, but his is Apr. 19, by which date our fate will surely be sealed. Only an impossible miracle--the apparition of the Pope in Baghdad or a transplant of George W. Bush's evil heart--can save us now.

John Kenneth Turner wrote MEXICO BARBARO as the Diaz dictatorship was crumbling back in 1910. John Ross reincarnates MEXICO BARBARO as the PRI dictatorship comes tumbling down nearly 90 years later.

Copyright 2003 by John Ross. Please do not reproduce before end of period in head.

The Open Veins of the People

"And my veins do not end in me" - Roque Dalton

FACT : Every bombing campaign the United States has ever unleashed has begun in the dark of the new moon

They will bloody the new moon
With their terrible daggers,
Blunt the horns
Of this luminous crescent
And rip open the night
That mothers us all.
The killers will fall upon us
And dreaming will be disallowed
Only the screams
Of the skinned victims
Will be permitted
In this new American nightmare.

We have come here
To this ancient land
To share the evisceration
Of hope with our
Blood sisters and brothers.
We say that we will stand
Between the bombs of Bush
And the cradle of civilization
But indeed this is all pantomime
And metaphor.
Now only a god
Who died long ago
Can deconstruct the monsters
Who plan this genocide

I am an old man
Who has lived
An honorable life
And now seeks
An honorable death
But I refuse, above all,
To surrender
My beating heart
To these whores of war.

Wherever my soul
Shall fly tomorrow
It will never
Stop cursing
The bastard
Who calls himself Bush
And I shall survive
In the flowers of the desert
And the open veins
Of the people.

John Ross, Baghdad, Mar. 2, 2003
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Pockets of Resistance is published online by Dark Night Press. With each newsletter, our mailing list has grown. We suggest a donation of $12.00/year or whatever you can afford to help us cover our expenses. You can send your donation to Dark Night Press, PO Box 3629, Chicago, IL 60690-3629. You can
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Pockets of Resistance, while focused on indigenous liberation issues, supports multi-dimensional quests for human liberation from imperial power by addressing the factors and conditions that make these struggles necessary. For us, liberation involves the creation of circumstances in which relationships based on recognition of and respect for the interconnectedness among all living things are given primary value.

The name of our electronic newsletter recalls the words of Subcomandante Marcos, who reminds us that pockets of resistances against imperial power
take many shapes:

"Each one of them has its own history, its own differences, equalities, demands, struggles, and accomplishments. If humanity still has a hope of survival, of improvement, that hope is in the pockets filled with the excluded ones, the leftovers, the ones who are disposable.. There are as many shapes as there are resistances, and as many worlds as there are in the world. So draw the shape you prefer. As far as this thing about pockets goes, they are as rich in diversity as the shapes resistance takes."

"Dark Night" recalls the words of Chief Sealth who, two generations before the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, forecast a future for his relatives which promised to be long and dark. Dark Night Press and the dark night relatives are engaged in ending the darkness.

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