Workers' Daily Internet Edition: Article Index :

Manifest Destiny

Iraq: Clarification Needed on Status of Prisoners after 30 June

UN Security Council Resolution Legalises Imperialist Occupation in Iraq

Iraq, 1917: The looking glass of history.
On the Eve of "Handover" of "Full Sovereignty" to Iraq

Don't Be Fooled! The Occupation isn’t over

"Manifest Destiny", an opera by Keith Burstein, is to be given its premiere on Sunday, June 27, at the Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JR, at 7.30pm.

This performance is a benefit performance in aid of Corin and Vanessa Redgrave's Guantanamo Human Rights Commission.

Tickets £18 (£3 + £15 donation).

For further information contact the Box Office on 020 7328 1000 or book online at http://www.tricycle.co.uk

Amnesty International Open Letter to the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations

Re.: UN/NYt/072/04

His Excellency Mr John D. Negroponte,
Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations
Permanent Mission of the United States of America to the United Nations
799 United Nations Plaza
New York, NY 10017

9 June 2004

Dear Ambassador Negroponte,

Before the Security Council adopted resolution 1546 (2004) on Iraq, Amnesty International wrote to Council members on 2 June, asking the Council to address several concerns arising from the draft text then before it. Among them was the need to clarify responsibility for prisoners currently held by the occupying powers, as well as for any prisoners or detainees to be held by the multinational force under US command after 30 June 2004. As you know, resolution 1546 provides that, after that date, the multinational force (MNF) will have the "authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in accordance with the letters annexed to this resolution". The letter attached to the resolution from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, specifies that the MNF's activities will include combat operations against forces resorting to violence and will be able to resort to "internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security".

Amnesty International welcomes the commitment of all forces in Iraq, expressed in the resolution, to act in accordance with international law, including obligations under international humanitarian law. However, we are deeply concerned that the Security Council failed to ensure that the resolution, or the letters attached to it, clarify what will happen to the thousands of prisoners currently held by the occupying powers. There is no reference to any legal basis or legal safeguards that will apply if any future arrests or internment are carried out by the forces of the United States of America (USA) and other countries contributing troops to the MNF, prominent among them those of the United Kingdom (UK). Amnesty International notes that "Internment...for imperative reasons of security" is a measure provided for in Articles 42 and 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to occupation and subject to a number of safeguards listed in that convention.

Resolution 1546 also fails to address how those who have subjected Iraqis to widely reported abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law or who may do so in future will be held individually accountable, or how that process will change after the Interim Government of Iraq will assume authority after 30 June 2004. This important question concerns not only members of the multinational forces themselves, but also contractors working for them who have also been implicated in abuses in Iraqi prisons, but who have so far not been held accountable.

Unfortunately, both the US and UK forces operating in Iraq have failed to meet their obligations under the Geneva Conventions as occupying powers and under the human rights treaties to which Iraq is a party to protect detainees and internees in their custody from torture and ill-treatment, and to grant them the legal safeguards to which they are entitled. The Council, on its part, has not discharged the special responsibility for these prisoners which it assumed when it endorsed, in resolutions 1483 and 1511, the specific authorities, responsibilities and obligations under applicable international law on the part of the USA and the UK, as occupying powers.

Amnesty International is therefore asking the United States of America, as leader of the multinational force operating under unified command, to clarify whether all those currently held by US forces and those of its partner in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the United Kingdom, will be released on 30 June 2004. Resolution 1546 states that the occupation will end on that date. If that is indeed the case, we would expect the occupying powers to release all prisoners, detainees and internees. They may only be re-arrested by the Iraqi authorities if there are grounds under Iraqi law, consistent with international standards, to detain them. The observance of the maximum amount of transparency in respect of all those held by the occupying powers, now and during this period of transition, is particularly important.

Furthermore, Amnesty International would like to be informed by the drafters of the resolution whether all Iraqi Prisoners of War, currently held in their custody and entitled to protection under the Third Geneva Convention, will be released by 30 June 2004, consistent with the declared end of occupation and end of international conflict. If they are not to be released, Amnesty International requests to be informed where and in whose custody Prisoners of War will be held, and what protective measures are afforded to them under applicable international law.

Finally, Amnesty International wishes to receive clarification about the respective powers of arrest and detention of the Iraqi forces and the multinational force in the course of the exercise of the latter's broad powers granted in the resolution to take "all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq...including by preventing and deterring terrorism". We would appreciate learning which of these parties will authorize arrests, searches, detentions, or internment, on what legal basis such measures are taken, and at what stage any detainees or internees taken by the multinational force will be handed over to Iraqi authorities.

Recalling reports of torture of Iraqis not only by the occupying powers but also by the Iraqi police, Amnesty International would welcome information about the legal and practical safeguards that will apply to arrest, detention and internment; what access international and Iraqi organizations will have to those held; and whether prisons and detention centres will be placed under Iraqi government or other control. The international community should know what measures are in place to ensure that the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment will be strictly observed by Iraqi, US and other forces. In this respect, we would appreciate knowing your views about our recommendation that the United Nations should have a specific monitoring mandate to supervise all places of detention.

We will share the contents of this letter with other Council members, in view of the responsibilities which we believe they share for the welfare of prisoners and detainees in Iraq. We urge you and all other Council members to request that the reports of the Secretary-General to the Council on Iraq will include detailed information on the questions raised in this letter. I would be most grateful to receive your response.

Yours sincerely,

Yvonne Terlingen
Amnesty International Representative at the United Nations

By José Reinaldo Carvalho, Journalist, Vice President of the Communist Party of Brazil, chairman of international relations

Last week, in a 15-0 voting, the United Nations Security Council approved the resolution 1546 proposed by the United States imperialism and its trusty British ally regarding the so-called power transfer to Iraqis, also establishing the stages and conditions according to which it will take place. That was all Bush wanted in a moment when the occupation forces are placed under heavy strain, being relentlessly attacked by a diversified armed resistance that is dispersed throughout the country, in a moment when his policy of war and military occupation is being vehemently condemned by democratic and anti-imperialist forces all over the world and by the international and American public opinion, with greater intensity after the atrocities committed in the hellish prison that is Abu Ghraib were revealed.

Since the nightmare of defeat began to disquiet Bush and the ultraconservative group that leads the government in the United States, the need to remove the Iraqi issue from the electoral scene with the presentation of a "positive" result has imposed itself. That is what originated the plan that now is advanced in the form of UN Security Council resolution 1546.

The resolution was preceded by the creation of a "temporary government" that will substitute from June 30 on the "government council" and succeed the Provisory Coalition Authority. But the temporary government is a counterfeit, an improvised arrangement, as all its members are appointed by the occupation authorities or chosen as a result of negotiations made with tribal chiefs and political leaderships interested in taking advantage of the new situation created in Iraq by the war of aggression and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. It is enough saying that the government leader, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, is a long-time ally of the United States and his connections with the CIA are well known.

The unanimity granted to resolution 1546 in the Security Council was certainly made possible due to the fact that the United States ceded in some issues, especially after France’s observations and contrapositions. Those were secondary concessions, more related to form than to depth, to process than to content, and overly characterised by ambiguity. For instance, it is affirmed in the text that the temporary government will be granted the power to demand international troops to leave, but it makes clear that the "multinational" force led by the United States will be dismantled only in January 2006, regardless of the will of new governors.

As far as the process of transferring power is concerned, the resolution establishes a schedule according to which a national conference will be called in July to choose the Consulting Council and promote elections in January 2005 to elect a transitory National Assembly, which will provide a transition government that will draft the Constitution and lead the country to the election of a constitutional administration in December 31, 2005. Those are all superficial and secondary aspects that are bound to oblivion in the face of an objectively explosive situation and the colonialist appetite of the United States.

But the fact is that since its approval on June 8, resolution 1546 has turned into a campaign flyer to Bush as it is presented as the democratic achievement resulting from the military intervention, now with the approval of the "international community", which finally "recognised" the United States’ reasons. A repugnant lie. Resolution 1546 is an indecent document and the abject capitulation of the Security Council to an imposition impinged by imperialism.

This is not the occasion to analyse intentions. We know that many cast their votes considering that it is the reflex of a possible commitment and also believing that it would help restore sovereignty in Iraq. But it is false. On the contrary, the Security Council legitimates occupation, which is prolonged to a dilated term, creating the illusion that now the UN will play some role in the Iraqi crisis and that there is a legitimate government to lead the country’s matters. And worse of all, the resolution consummates the fraud of turning the aggressive forces of occupation under the leadership of the United States into a "multilateral force", granting it the right to fight resistance and gun down everyone who does not submit to the occupation regime.

The anti-imperialist forces cannot display an attitude different from denouncing the UN resolution 1546 as a decoy, as much as it must fight vigorously against the now legalised occupation. The wound opened by the United States’ aggression will keep bleeding; the chaotic situation that the imperialist war produced will hardly turn into normality; despair and pain caused to immense portions of the population by the occupation regime will not be transformed into hope, comfort and peace just like magic. The temporary administration will always be seen as a puppet government at the service of the invader. Patriots will always target it.

The UN blessing will not change the slightest bit as long as the character of the United States occupation or the colonialist purposes of President Bush and his ultraconservatives are concerned. It also will not diminish the force of the resistance movement. The plan that presented the Middle East "democratisation" during the G-8 meeting, held soon after the approval of resolution 1546, and the divulged evidences that the United States already has a "contingence" plan with a view to perform a "government transition" in Syria are facts that reveal that the United States’ imperialism will follow the road of interventionism and aggression regarding other countries.

By Robert Fisk, The Independent, June 22, 2004

They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today – and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...

On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.

Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq. That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.

Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.

That same 11in by 18in poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp – "foxed", as booksellers say – which may have been Private Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.

In a letter to me, she called this "his precious document", and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. It reads now like a funeral dirge:

"Proclamation... Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators... Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers... and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile... But you, people of Baghdad... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals... It is the hope and desire of the British people... that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth... Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain... so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq."

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Iraqi soldiers – in Mesopotamia. He spoke "often and admirably," his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.

But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: "My father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his 'nephew'. I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years."

In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign. The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than 80 years later, Shameem Bhatia, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan, would send me an amused letter, along with a series of 12 very old postcards, which were printed by The Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms; another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him; others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river, and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, one of its buildings shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. The ruins then looked, of course, identical to the Iraqi ruins of today. There are only so many ways in which a shell can smash through a home.

As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by "local [Arab] notables" that "we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition". But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters, ending in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle.

The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of United Nations sanctions that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when spare parts for the pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague Patrick Cockburn found "tombstones... still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed... A quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage."

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived in 1917. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets "gaped emptily. The shops were mostly closed... In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia, coffins and half-mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town [three hundred people were dying of it every day] the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves... There was no longer any life in the town."

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. There was, of course, no "cordial" reception of British troops in Baghdad. Indeed, Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army but who "always entertained friendly ideas towards the English" were jailed – not in Abu Ghraib, but in India – and found that while in prison there they were "insulted and humiliated in every way". These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand Iraq over to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of "independence" for the Arab world if he fought alongside the Allies against the Turks – on the grounds that "some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia".

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia (the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that) and that "clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end" – which was not how Lt-Gen Maude expressed Britain's ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917.

Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that "taking Mesopotamia... means spending millions in irrigation and development". Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in 2003.

Those who want to wallow in even more ghastly historical parallels should turn to the magnificent research of the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah, whose volume on the British occupation was published in Beirut long before Saddam's regime took over Iraq, at a time when Iraqi as well as British archives of the period were still available. Attiyah's Iraq, 1902-1921: A Socio-Political Study, written 30 years before the Anglo-American invasion, should be read by all Western "statesmen" planning to occupy Arab countries.

As Attiyah discovered, the British, once they were installed in Baghdad, decided in the winter of 1917 that Iraq would have to be governed and reconstructed by a "council" formed partly of British advisers "and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants". The copycat 2003 version of this "council" was, of course, the Interim Governing Council, supposedly the brainchild of Maude's American successor, Paul Bremer.

Later, the British thought they would like "a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives". The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became "oriental secretary" to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion: "The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased... They can't conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it."

Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude's proclamation issued * * 11 months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told (which, of course, they were not) that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name, and which in fact had been written by Sir Mark Sykes – the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with F Georges-Picot for French and British control over much of the post-war Middle East.

But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. "I imagine," the correspondent for The Times wrote on 23 September, "that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."

Within six months, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. "Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression? What would happen if we withdrew?" Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion". By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on "local political agitation, originated outside Iraq", suggesting that Syria might be involved.

Come again? Could history repeat itself so perfectly? For Lloyd George's "anarchy", read any statement from the American occupation power warning of "civil war" in the event of a Western withdrawal. For Syria – well, read Syria.

AT Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq in 1920, took a predictable line. "We cannot maintain our position... by a policy of conciliation of extremists. Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money... We must be prepared... to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions."

There was fighting in the Shia town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The British demanded "the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot", and the leading Shia divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a target. "Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out," a British political officer wrote.

The British now realised that they had made one big political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq – the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. For Badr, read Muqtada al-Sadr.

In 1920, another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Colonel Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted "heavy punishment" on the tribe. For Fallujah, of course, read Fallujah. And the location of the heavy punishment? Today it is known as Khan Dari – and it was the scene of the first killing of a US soldier by a roadside bomb in 2003.

In desperation, the British needed "to complete the façade of the Arab government". And so, with Winston Churchill's enthusiastic support, the British gave the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. Henceforth, the British government – deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession, and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914-18 war and was waiting for demobilisation – would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled his hat out of the ring just before the invasion), so we have installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA "asset", as prime minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did. Our soldiers can hide out in the desert, hopefully unattacked, unless they are needed to shore up the tottering power of our present-day "Faisal".

And so we come to the immediate future of Iraq. How are we to "control" Iraq while claiming that we have handed over "full sovereignty"? Again, the archives come to our rescue. The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill's support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen in Iraq. Churchill urged the employment of mustard gas, which had been used against Shia rebels in 1920.

Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, "that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting..."

This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call "war lite". But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris's official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that "they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured".

TE Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that "it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions". Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer "maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb". He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, Charlton "knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally."

Already, we have seen the use of almost indiscriminate air power by the American forces in Iraq: the destruction of homes in "dissident" villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons are allegedly concealed, the slaughter-by-air-strike of "terrorists" near the Syrian border, who turned out to be a wedding party. Much the same policy has been adopted in the already abandoned "democracy" of Afghanistan.

As for the soldiers, we couldn't ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so we buried them in the great North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad, where they lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties. We didn't hide their coffins. Their last resting place is still there for all to see today, opposite the ruins of the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy.

As for the gravestone of Samuel Martin, it stood for years in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: "In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn, Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire."

In the gales of shellfire that swept Basra during the 1980-88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen. Sic transit gloria.

DON’T BE FOOLED!

The Occupation isn’t over

Compiled by Sussex Action for Peace (SafP), www.safp.org.uk

1. Iraq remains an occupied country and will continue to be occupied after the
   ‘handover of power’ on June 30^th. Neither the existence of the Interim Government nor the United Nations resolution endorsing this government changes the situation. Iraq is still occupied by 138,000 US troops, and US economic and political forces still maintain control of Iraq’s economic and political life. The new Interim Government reflects US control of Iraq, not the beginnings of democracy.

2. Here are the facts

   Who put the Interim Government in power?

1. It was not the Iraqi people. No Iraqi voted for ‘their’ government.
1. The Interim Government was appointed. Nominally, this was by the UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. In reality, the US had a huge say. Lakhdar Brahimi himself said ‘Paul Bremer (US controller of the Coalition Provisional Authority) is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country.’
1. The deadline for Iraq’s first elections is not until January 2005, when a ‘transitional’ government is due to be elected. There is no guarantee this deadline will be stuck to. The example of Afghanistan, where elections have still not been held, is not promising.

2. Who is in the Interim Government?

1. The new Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is known throughout Iraq for his longstanding role as a British MI6 and US CIA asset, as well as for his links to the intelligence services under the former Baathist regime in Iraq.
1. Five of the six leading posts in the government are held by people who lived a significant part of their lives abroad. At least two Cabinet members are US citizens. In addition to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, at least seven others were members of exile groups funded by the United States.

2. What powers will the Interim Government have?

1. The Interim Government will not have the authority to reverse the major decisions made by the US pro-consul Paul Bremer, including laws privatising Iraqi resources, denying press freedom and allowing foreign corporations to control the reconstruction process.
1. The Interim Government will not have the power to make new laws. However, the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority has recently passed 30 new laws, including laws creating a new Ministry of Defence, national intelligence service and stock exchange.
1. The Interim Government will technically have the power to ask US and British forces to leave Iraq. It is extremely unlikely to do this, as its power rests on a foundation of US military force and money. One of Iyad Allawi’s first acts as prime minister was to call for foreign troops to remain in Iraq after 30 June.

 

Who controls the military forces?

• The Iraqi government will not have control over the occupying forces. The US has the authority to deploy its troops to carry out whatever operations are ordered by the Pentagon, whether or not the Iraqi government agrees; 138,000 US troops and 20,000 coalition troops will still be in Iraq.
• US and British occupation troops will continue to enjoy legal immunity from being prosecuted in Iraq after the planned power transfer, stealing away the right of Iraqis to sue them over abuses and other war crimes. 
• There is a huge mercenary army in Iraq. The US has paid billions of dollars to companies that now have as many as 20,000 employees carrying out military functions ranging from logistics and troop training to convoy escort and interrogations. Last month the US awarded a $293 million contract for coordination of security support to a British firm called Aegis Defence Services. There are moves to make contractors - mercenaries - exempt from Iraqi law in the same way as the military.
• The US will be in charge of recruiting, training and supplying all Iraqi forces, both military and police. The entire budget for those armed forces and police will come from the Pentagon's military budget. Until the Iraqi police and army have a separate recruitment and command structure from the occupying army, and until they are paid and supplied by Iraqis instead of Americans, they will continue to be an enforcement arm of the US occupation.
• The US is constructing 14 ‘enduring bases’ – long-term encampments for thousands of American troops to maintain a presence in Iraq indefinitely. They will be positioned so that they can rapidly intervene in all major regions of the country.

• Who will control the day-to-day administration?

• The creation of the largest US Embassy ever, at a cost of $2.5bn and with 2,000 – 3,000 US employees, will allow the new US Ambassador, John Negroponte, to oversee and control the developing Iraqi administrative apparatus.
• Between 110 and 160 US advisors will remain in the ministries of the new Iraqi government.

• Oil and aid – who will control the purse strings?

• In the short term, oil revenues will not be high enough to cover government costs. Pipeline sabotage has cost the country more than $200m in lost revenues over the past seven months.
• After the fall of Saddam Hussein, management of oil revenues was placed in the hands of the Development Fund for Iraq, a group of 10 foreigners and one Iraqi appointed by Bremer. The UN resolution called for this group to continue its work for five more years.
• The Interim Government is legally prohibited from making changes in oil policy ’until such time as an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq is properly constituted.’ International banking organizations, notably the IMF and the World Bank, will continue to exercise ‘accounting authority over the spending’ of all Iraqi oil revenues.
• The resources for Iraqi reconstruction lie primarily in $18.4 billion of US aid. Dispersal of this money is wholly at US discretion. The US will therefore almost fully control the resources necessary to rebuild and maintain the country's infrastructure and the economy, potentially for years to come.

• Don’t be fooled!

  The idea that the occupation has now ended is likely to become a crucial weapon in the struggle to undermine opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, both here and in the US.

  Join us in calling for a full military withdrawal from Iraq and the transfer
  of real sovereignty to those who genuinely represent the Iraqi people.