Rights gains of Iraqis are blows to U.S. war drive

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This important article confirms, among other things, that the release of
prisoners was truly nationwide -- probably one of the biggest human rights
victories worldwide in recent years.

Despite Burns' attempts to suggest otherwise, protests of the families of
the disappeared demanding information and acknowledgment are no more
inherently proimperialist in Iraq than they are in Mexico or Argentina.

The rising desire of Iraqis to defend their country, among other processes
in the masses, has proved incompatible with the maintenance of a front of
"totalitarian" unity by the military-police regime.

Among other things the defense of Iraq will probably require a considerable
degree of decentralized initiative and organization, given the weapons the
imperialists have for disrupting communications networks.  (The Cuban
territorial troops militias are organized to meet this threat, as well as
others, but of course Cuba makes no pretense to totalitarian-syle
centralziation.)

Imperialism's main target in Iraq is not Saddam Hussein but the independence
and sovereignty won over decades of struggle by the people of  Iraq.  In the
situation today, a defense of  Saddam's regime against imperialist "regime
change" pretty much comes with the package of defending the country.

But it is becoming more important to have in mind that
Saddam's government and the independence and sovereignty of the people of
Iraq are not the same thing.

It is a very positive development that protests by millions of antiwar
advocates around the world;   the strikes in Italy, the United States,
Italy, Spain and elsewhere by unions (many themselves antiwar advocates)
that resist subordinating workers' interests to the imperialist war drive;
and rising anti-imperialist struggle in Venezuela, Argentina, and other
countries; and the activity of the truly proletarian internationalist
government of  Cuba have all contributed to buying precious time for the
masses to begin to regain their confidence in Iraq.

All these forces have stood on the same side of the fundamental line
drawn by the worldwide class conflict over the war in Iraq.

I have to admit that even the futzing around by Washington's imperialist
competitors and by the regimes in Moscow and Peking in the Security Council
has had unintended progressive consequences
.
Hats off  to everybody in the struggle and DON'T RELAX!
Fred Feldman

In Opening the Gates of Its Gulag, Iraq Unleashes Pain and Protest
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 22 - President Saddam Hussein's decision on Sunday to
open the gates of his prisons and let tens of thousands of political
prisoners and common criminals go free has afforded ordinary Iraqis a rare
glimpse into the gulag that has maintained his power for 23 years, and
prompted small but remarkable protests by some who lost relatives into the
grim embrace of the state security police years ago.

The protests over the last two days are the most visible sign of a new and
potentially seismic trend: A willingness among ordinary people to speak up -
if only in relatively small numbers, briefly, and to the accompaniment of
strident praise for Mr. Hussein - for rights obliterated by him in his 23
years as Iraq's absolute ruler.

Iraqis said they knew of no previous occasion, in Baghdad, when people had
taken to the streets to march on a government building, and then had
persisted in protests even after secret police fired automatic rifles into
the air, as they did today.

Some who attended a protest at a secret police headquarters on the outskirts
of Baghdad on Monday said there were at least 700 people taking part who for
some time defied orders that they disperse.

"Where is my son? I demand to know where is my son!" one middle-aged woman
in a black cloak cried, as she huddled with a group of women at the head of
150 protesters who staged a noisy rally today outside the Ministry of
Information beside the Tigris River in central Baghdad.
Similar cries went up from other women desperate to know what had become of
long-lost husbands and sons and brothers, in some cases sisters and
daughters, who disappeared into the vast network of prisons and detention
centers as long as 20 years ago. The details that stuttered out as the women
told their tales were like episodes from the nightmares of Soviet Russia:
Men and women, and even teenage children, picked up by anonymous enforcers,
usually in unmarked cars, and never heard from again. As officials pushed
reporters back, ordered security guards to fire warning shots into the air,
and pleaded with the women to still their cries, the women's accounts of
their wrenching doorstep partings, and of the dates - 1980, 1987, 1991,
1992, 1997, 1999 - rang out like the tolling of a sexton's bell.

Iraqis who attended the protest on Monday at the secret police headquarters
said most in the crowd seemed resigned to the grim inevitability that their
relatives were dead. Those Iraqis said they had been told by some protesters
of rumors heard years ago that their relatives had been shot or hanged on
the day they disappeared. Still, the protesters said, they had never given
up the hope, however remote, that the missing had somehow survived to become
nameless numbers in some prison or detention cell.

Only now, those Iraqis said, after desperate, unrewarded vigils at the
prisons in Baghdad and elsewhere that emptied out on Sunday, had the
families accepted that their hopes were gone. Still, those people said, the
mothers and fathers and daughters and sons had demanded, when confronted by
secret police officials at the Monday protest, that they be told when their
relatives had died, and where they could go to find the remains and perform
the observances that the traditions of faith in this overwhelmingly Islamic
country demand.

Why Iraq's reclusive leader decided so abruptly on an amnesty, abandoning at
least for the moment one of his principal mechanisms of control, remained a
topic of astonished debate among this nation's 22 million people. But
whether he intended to try to checkmate President Bush, who has called him a
murdering tyrant, or to build new support among the previously disaffected
as he hunkers down for his showdown with the United States, his "gesture of
love," as officials described the amnesty, appeared, at least partly, to
have backfired.

The desperate searches of many families, from cellblock to cellblock at Abu
Ghraib, a grim fortress 20 miles west of Baghdad, then on to other prisons
and detention centers, and in some cases from Baghdad to Kerbala and Basra
and other cities, seemed only to have confirmed the worst that many Iraqis
had feared about the system they have lived under for much of their lives.
By letting tens of thousands go, Mr. Hussein, in effect, was revealing to
untold numbers of other families that he had nothing to give back to them.






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