More executions

Iraq's latest surge: state executions

The Guardian reports (September 17th): In the bloody shadow of Iraq's recent surge in violence lurks another troubling statistic: this year, Iraq has executed nearly 70 people accused of terrorist-related activities, including 17 men and women last month alone.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/iraq-latest-surge-state-executions

Iraq executes 13 men following unfair trials marred by torture allegations

AI reports (September 25th): All executions in Iraq must be halted immediately, Amnesty International urged after 13 men were executed in Baghdad.

Today, the organization has been able to confirm the names of nine of the men, who were executed on 22 September following death sentences imposed after unfair trials and based on “confessions” allegedly extracted under torture. Four others were also executed that day, bringing the total number of executions in Iraq so far this year to at least 73.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/iraq-executes-13-men-following-unfair-trials-marred-by-torture-allegations

The spectre of Iraq

When commentators claimed after last week’s parliamentary vote that Iraq had played a key role in motivating MPs  to vote against military intervention, it was an important public acknowledgment of the ongoing disaster wrought by US-UK foreign policy. Gone was the New Labour narrative that Iraq today is better off than under Saddam Hussein. Although it rarely makes the front pages, the sheer volume of bad news from this country will not have escaped many MPs.

Take the Wikileaks and related whistle-blowing stories that dominated the summer headlines. Iraq was at the centre of the most damaging revelations. Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder, were documented. US forces are alleged to have colluded in these activities, as well as themselves continuing to abuse prisoners long after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004. US forces operating helicopter gunships were also accused of killing 14 unarmed civilians in a series of previously unreported incidents.

British troops were also deeply implicated. The Guardian reported that 90 complaints involving 128 Iraqi civilians were being investigated in the aftermath of the Wikileaks revelations. Earlier this year lawyer Phil Shiner took 180 different statements –  with another 871 to follow – before a judicial review hearing at the high court in London in a claim seeking to demonstrate that Britain broke international laws of war by pursuing a policy of systematic torture.

The long-term social consequences of invasion also constitute a lasting deterrent to intervention elsewhere. One in two households in Baghdad alone have lost a family member. A million have died. A further million have been left disabled.  One in six Iraqis is an orphan. An estimated sixteen percent of the Iraqi population has been uprooted. There are an estimated 450,000 Iraq refugees in Jordan alone.

Drinking water remains unsafe. Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's free market ideology. Unemployment is regularly estimated at over fifty percent. Seventy percent of doctors are estimated to have fled the country. Homelessness is widespread. Water shortages are destroying agriculture, power shortages crippling industry. Permanent damage has been inflicted on the country’s historic cultural heritage. Besides the looting and deliberate destruction of historic sites by the US military, tens of thousands of historic artifacts are now in US hands.

Some of the long-term effects of the occupation are most felt in the city of Falluja.
US forces flattened three-quarters of the city in their 2004 bombardment, with up to 6,000 people killed. The US admits that it used white phosphorous as a battlefield weapon in its assault on Fallujah. Repeated studies now show a dramatic spike in birth defects in the city of Falluja. One suspected cause of the birth defects is depleted uranium shells, fired in 2004 by US forces in the city, which contain ionising radiation. A recent survey in the city showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14 year olds. The UK also used depleted uranium weapons during the invasion. It will cost about $30m to clean DU from around 300 sites in Iraq. Meanwhile, similar post-war health problems are being documented in other Iraqi cities.

Politically, Iraq is also becoming increasingly authoritarian. There has been a surge in the use of the death penalty. Brutality and torture are rife in its jails. Rape of women in prison is widespread. Additionally, new laws have been passed to crack down on the independent media. According to the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, the first two years following the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq were the worst since the fall of the former regime in terms of violations of press freedoms.

The position of trade unions has also deteriorated significantly in Iraq. There are reports too of police crackdowns on gay people. The Education Ministry has banned theatre and music classes. Many girls still dare not go to school or college because of violence and kidnappings. Women’s equal rights in law have been replaced with statutes giving tribal leaders the power to regulate family affairs according to their traditions - a huge step back.

At the heart of the problem is the sectarianisation of the state. When elections were first held, occupation forces organised them on the basis of Shia and Sunni slates. Thenceforth, religious affiliation could be a deciding factor in whether you worked or had state protection, and thus became a significant source of friction. But, conveniently, it did allow the occupiers to reinvent their role as that of arbitrator between warring religious factions.

After the 2010 elections, it took several months and several visits from the US Vice President and State Department officials to cobble together a government. When a government finally did emerge, one politician claimed that Cabinet seats had been bought at a secret meeting in the house of an Iraqi businessman. “Buying” a ministry is nothing new in Iraq. The ritual of power-sharing is all about sharing the spoils of power among political parties and transforming state institutions into fiefdoms of competing groups.

The Electricity ministry best illustrates the complete corruption of the Iraqi state. The money the government has poured into the electricity sector would have bought every Iraqi family a modern furnished flat in a western country, the Oil and Energy Commission of the Iraqi parliament said in July. The commission estimated that the hard cash spent on the electricity sector “equals ten times the annual budget of Bahrain.”

But this corruption was inherited from the US reconstruction programme. A recent report to US Congress said private defence contractors, which had some 170,000 employees on the ground, reaped some $140 billion in profits in Iraq. Halliburton alone, whose former CEO was Dick Cheney,  made $39.5 billion on Iraq. Some of these profits came from flagrant overcharging, such as the contractor that billed the US government $900 for a switch that was valued at $7.05, a 12,000 percent mark-up. In 2012 Transparency International ranked Iraq 169th out of 175 countries for corruption. More than three quarters believed it had got worse in the last three years.

The division of ministries among competing elites, with different sectarian affiliations, was probably the cause of this year’s Abu Ghraib prison breakout of 850 prisoners. That’s the accusation of the Ministry of Justice against the Interior Ministry, whom it accuses of collusion in the incident. Others accuse the security forces of allowing sectarian militias to set up checkpoints and carry out attacks on civilians. Here too the role of US occupiers can be traced - a recent documentary highlighted the role of US Special Forces operatives in training sectarian militias to commit acts or torture that helped fuel the narrative of a civil war.

Dominating all this is the sheer level of violence in Iraq. Government figures show 989 people were killed in July, making it the deadliest month in five years. The origins are complex, given the role of US special forces and the Iraqi state itself, the attribution of a lot of the violence to Al Qaeda and a renewed Sunni insurgency reacting against a Shia sectarian bias evident in many state institutions that denies Sunnis work and rights.

The crisis in Syria exacerbates these problems. Some commentators point to the role of Assad in fuelling violence within Iraq for geopolitical reasons. Others argue that the activities of a Sunni-led armed opposition in Syria strengthen Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Faced with mounting violence, Iraq’s  government is now turning back to the US for lethal aid.

Reuters reported recently: “The United States and Iraq agreed to boost cooperation to keep Iran from flying weapons over Iraq to Syria, and to curb the radicalization of young Iraqis and other spillover effects from the Syrian conflict.” The irony is that the US invasion of Iraq and the occupation-organised elections actually strengthened Iranian influence in the region. So Iraq also stands for many policymakers as a testament to US incompetence.

Anti-war activists can take some credit for keeping these issues alive. It wasn’t just the sense of betrayal, having been lied to by Tony Blair ten years ago over WMD, that motivated some Labour MPs to rule out military action against Syria. It was also the pickets of their surgeries, the anger of their constituents and other ongoing efforts of peace activists that made MPs uncomfortable about voting for intervention this time on the basis of flimsy intelligence, incoherent military strategy and no search for a diplomatic solution.

Iraq’s Dysfunctional Elite

By Harith Hasan

Global Research, August 13, 2013

Al-Monitor 9 August 2013

Last month, demonstrators in the southern Iraqi cities of Nassiriya and Basra organized nightly rallies to protest the government’s failure to provide enough electricity for households during the notoriously hot summer. With temperatures exceeding 113 degrees Fahrenheit during July and August, most households get less than 12 hours a day of electric power. The Iraqi government spent $28 billion to reform electricity services, which became one of the most critical problems in the country since the second Gulf War in 1991.

The failure to handle this problem is another cause for the increasing disillusionment with the government. Responding to the popular rage, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in a TV interview that he was manipulated by the minister of electricity and his staff, who provided him with incorrect information about their system’s capacity. Although the minister of electricity position has been rotated among five people since 2006, none of them managed to make tangible improvements. But this did not prevent political parties from competing to obtain this position, a contest driven less by a “commitment” to social welfare and more by the fact the ministry is contract-rich. During a TV interview, Khalaf al-Ileyan, whose party was “awarded” this ministry according to a 2006 power-sharing agreement, said that he was offered a $2 million “down payment” and a monthly $1 million if he accepted a nomination for this position.

This confession might be shocking, but in fact it reflects habitual relations within Iraqi elite. “Buying” a ministry is nothing new in Iraq. The ritual of power-sharing has become all about finding ways to distribute the growing oil revenues among political parties and transforming state institutions into fiefdoms of competing groups. Initially, the power-sharing formula was presented as a method to create an inclusive system of government that departs from the legacy of exclusionary politics. In practice, power-sharing has become a power apportionment, what Iraqis call: Muhasesa. This is partly because it emphasized ethnic and sectarian categories in determining political weights, which turned institutions into instruments of political conflicts rather than being frameworks to solve them.

Maliki has exploited the failures and gaps of this system to create a shadow state that is loyal and responsive to him. He managed to maneuver this system and build strong personal influence within the security institutions, armed forces, independent institutions and Iraq’s judiciary. In an oil-dependent country like Iraq, the executive branch tends to become stronger than the legislative branch because it manages more resources and more complex networks of patronage. But these measures have only intensified political conflict while failing to make the state more efficient.

Divided between Maliki’s camp, whose authoritarian disposition is increasing, and his rivals’ camp, whose only alternative is more “apportionment” politics, the political elite is evidently out of touch with the demands of average citizens. Maliki accuses his rivals of doing everything to hinder his government; his rivals say that the failure is caused by his policies. Their contest is more about finding a scapegoat and less about identifying new ways to address the state’s failure.

The problem overrides this short-sighted dispute among opportunistic politicians. It is rather about the way Iraq’s economy is working and the way in which the lack of strong institutions affects a responsible and wise management of the wealth. The Iraqi constitution stipulates: “Oil and gas are the Iraqi people’s property,” but the true story is different. According to the UN Development Program, 75% of Iraqis identified poverty as the most pressing need, 79% of households rated electricity as “bad” or “very bad,” and only 26% of the population is covered by the public sewage network. This, despite Iraq’s GDP growth from $20 billion in 2002 to $128 billion in 2012, thanks to growth in oil production, which accounts for 60% of GDP and 90% of government revenue.

For years, it has been repeated that Iraq is a rich state and a poor society. The path Iraq has taken has only confirmed this saying, despite the improvement in per capita income. Powerful political parties managed to extract their revenues through the networks of patronage they run within state bodies. One way to do so was by awarding governmental contracts to real or fake companies in exchange for bribes or commissions.

One example is the Ministry of Interior’s $40 million contract with a British businessman, James McCormick, to import “bomb detectors” that turned out to be dressed-up divining rods. McCormick was convicted on four accounts of fraud in England, yet his devices were still used by Iraqi security. Some officials, including the prime minister himself, insist that not all these devices were fraudulent. After two years since Iraqi authorities arrested Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, the army’s bomb squad commander, on corruption charges for taking bribes to purchase McCormick’s fake explosive detectors, he was recently released and the charges against him were dropped.

Security-related ministries have seen the worst examples of corruption because of their huge budget allocations, poorly monitored US financial support and the urgent need to build them from scratch. There are reports by the Integrity Committee, the US general inspector in Iraq and the Parliamentary Security and Defense Committee, on the hundreds of millions wasted because of corruption in these ministries. Yet, except for a few mid- or low-level officials who found no political sponsor, all partisan senior officials managed to escape punishment or accountability. As the highest constitutional body with a mandate to monitor executive officials, the parliament was supposed to play a crucial role in addressing this corruption. In reality, it did nothing but deepen it by relating accountability to sectarian targeting and behind-the-scenes compromises on the basis of “let my guy go, I let yours go.” Among average Iraqis, the parliament itself is very notorious, especially for legislation it passed to provide its members with huge salaries and benefits.

The state in Iraq has always been the main shaper of social change and hierarchies. Post-Saddam Iraq is no exception. In the last few years, and as a result of the flourishing clientelism and political nepotism, new alliances have emerged between political groups and sectors of the business class in a sort of collaboration based on crony capitalism. Each major group has its own favorite entrepreneurs, who benefit from contracts awarded by the group’s representatives in the government and, in turn, they support the group financially.

Politics is mixed with business everywhere, but in Iraq this takes the form of direct looting of “national” wealth by a new oligarchy composed of conflicting political groups and their economic and bureaucratic clients. The political process which was initially intended to break with the authoritarian past is becoming more influenced by elite politics and interests than people’s needs. Politicians resort to identity politics and ethnic and sectarian incitement to overshadow their personal benefits generated by a process which, instead of solving ethno-sectarian tensions, reproduces them.

Harith Hasan is an Iraqi scholar and the author of Imagining the Nation: Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq. On Twitter: @harith_hasan

Falluja

http://randompottins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/fallujah-must-not-be-forgotten.html

GICJ calls to restore justice and accountability for Iraq

GICJ reports (June 2013): During the 23rd session of the Human Rights Council, on behalf of over 300 NGOs, a number of statements were delivered by Geneva International Centre for Justice (GICJ). The statements addressed key issues such as the total breakdown of public services, the disastrous situation of the Iraqi judicial system, the excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, torture and abuse as well as the recent killing of demonstrators. The NGOs exposed how the US-invasion is responsible for the disastrous situation and reminded the United Nations of their responsibility to restore justice and accountability. They reiterated their on-going demand to appoint of a Special Rapporteur on Iraq and called to send clear message to the Government of Iraq that it can no longer execute at will and with impunity.

http://www.gicj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=305&Itemid=41

Parliament debates the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq

Three months later than the actual anniversary of the war in Iraq, left MPs managed to secure a parliamentary debate on an issue most would rather not talk about. Caroline Lucas introduced, saying:
“It is a grim understatement to say that the Iraqi people do not have security. There are deep concerns about human rights, massive corruption, unemployment and miserable basic services, such as electricity and water supplies. But even if Iraq finds a way out of its current difficulties, as we all fervently hope it will, there is the legacy of the last 10 years of warfare and terrorism as well. Part of that legacy is the deeply disturbing cases being taken to our High Court, involving more than 1,000 killings and acts of torture committed in Iraq by UK forces. We must have public scrutiny of the systemic issues arising from these cases and look to reform the training and oversight of our armed forces.

What of our own country? Do we feel more secure? Is the terrorist threat diminished because of those 10 years of bloodshed and chaos? In fact, the contrary is true. According to the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Iraqi invasion increased the terror threat in Britain, radicalising a generation of young British Muslims and substantially increasing the risk of a terrorist atrocity on UK soil. A major unprovoked attack without UN authorisation took place with dire consequences. These terrible and deeply troubling outcomes add real substance to the argument that this was the biggest foreign policy failure of recent times.

As an individual, I opposed the war in Iraq because it was my view that the burden of justification for undertaking a major unprovoked attack had not been met. I joined the anti-war protest in February 2003, which saw between 1 million and 2 million people marching in London, the biggest political demonstration in history. In successive polls by different and reputable agencies, around two thirds of British citizens say the Iraq war was a mistake.”

The Government’s position was predictably pathetic, cheerily quoting
IMF reports about Iraq’s recent economic growth - hardly surprising
given the long years of economic sanctions the west imposed on it
before invading, and at the same time hiding behind the years-overdue
Chilcot Report in terms of UK culpability.

In response to Caroline Lucas’s suggestion that future voted on going to war be unwhipped, Jack Straw and others suggested the whip on this issue ten years ago was pretty informal. Paul Flynn MP responded:
“I have received a message during the debate from someone expressing, in very strong language, incredulity at the suggestion that there was not a strong Whip on that day in March. I have been here for 26 years and it was the strongest Whip I have ever encountered. Many of those who were opposed to the war—about 30 or 40 of them—who had signed motions and early-day motions against it were bribed, bullied and bamboozled into changing their minds to either abstain or vote in favour of it. Almost all of them regret that bitterly. It was the most important vote of our careers and it is not true to say that it was easy to make our minds up. It was not. The threat was there that we would lose our seats and that the Prime Minister would resign. Members who were in any doubt were called in to see Ministers to be persuaded. Members of the Committees who had knowledge that we did not have, such as the Intelligence and Security Committee, went around cajoling Back Benchers saying, “If you knew what we know, you’d vote for war, but we can’t tell you because it’s all secret.” They were being fed nonsense and exaggerations as well.

Our reluctance to accept the truth seems extraordinary to me. It would be flattering to describe today’s speech from the Government Front Bench as vacuous. Even now, the Government cannot admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It is little short of insanity to suggest that anyone still believes that there were such weapons.

Members have questioned whether anyone foresaw what would happen. A great many people foresaw it at the time. To suggest otherwise is another attempt to rewrite history. I have dug out a letter that I sent to the then Prime Minister in March 2003 to point out what the consequences of the invasion would be. I see with nausea that Tony Blair is now explaining that the inherent nature of the Islamic religion was responsible for the terrible event that took place in Woolwich a few weeks ago. It was not. That event was a reaction to what happened in 2003.”

The following are just extracts from speeches that can be read in full here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130613/debtext/130613-0002.htm#column_522

jeremy Corbyn MP: “It was a shameful day for Parliament, and it was a shameful day for the whole political system in this country. Outside in Parliament square, there were thousands of people. They thought, naively perhaps, that they would be listened to. Some 1 million and more had marched in central London—maybe 2 million were on the streets of London that day—and 600 demonstrations on every continent of the world, including Antarctica, had been held a month before, and the opinion polls all showed that there was no support for this war against Iraq. They thought that Parliament would reflect their views and their wishes.

The vote that day in which Parliament, sadly, endorsed going to war not only did enormous damage to Parliament, but did enormous damage and a disservice to a whole generation, because they had put their hopes in the political process to carry out their wishes and it did not do so. That engendered cynicism and we are still dealing today in many ways with the legacy of the war in this country.”

Katy Clark MP focused on “the effects of depleted uranium and other weaponry used in Iraq. It seems to have resulted in very unusual levels of birth defects and other conditions, especially among children who were conceived during the Iraq war. I intend to focus on those issues mainly because they are not often talked about and because those are issues on which the Government could be taking more action so that we can understand what happened and learn the lessons from that for the future.

The use of depleted uranium in weapons has been controversial from its development in the 1960s to the present. Much of the work in this area has been done on the effects on veterans, rather than on civilian populations. The Ministry of Defence discovered in the early research and development programme that depleted uranium released a chemical that was toxic and radioactive and that contaminated areas that it had been fired into. The scientific work that has been done, as I said, related mainly to veterans, but in recent years more evidence has been collected from civilian populations, including in Iraq.

The work relating to veterans shows clearly that in certain circumstances depleted uranium has the potential to cause cancer and damage to DNA. It can lead to birth defects and contaminate soil and ground water. Depleted uranium was used in the first conflict in Iraq in 1991 and also in the more recent conflict in very significant quantities. It is thought that 290,000 kg of depleted uranium was fired during the Gulf war in 1991, and that in the first six months of the Iraq invasion 140 kg of depleted uranium was used. Studies of the effects on civilian populations which have been made public so far show a staggering rise in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war, with high rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs. Compelling evidence seems to link these birth defects and miscarriages to military assaults.

We cannot sure whether these are due to depleted uranium or the effects of other ammunition used in the area, but it is clear that there are particularly high levels of birth defects, for example, in Falluja, where the United States has admitted using white phosphorous shells, although it has not admitted using depleted uranium. Findings published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology are the latest in a series of studies suggesting a link between bombardment and a rise in birth defects. Its findings in 2010 prompted the World Health Organisation to launch an inquiry into the prevalence of birth defects in the area affected. Although that report was expected to be published last year, it still has not appeared. Some claim that it is being buried and 58 scientists have written to the Iraqi Government and the World Health Organisation calling for its immediate publication. It is right that we, as elected politicians, ask the British Government to use their influence and power to do everything they can to ensure that as much information about these issues is brought into the public domain.
As a result of previous work, the Work Health Organisation is looking at nine high-risk areas in Iraq, including Falluja and Basra. We need to say clearly that we want that information in the public domain. We must do more to work out exactly the impact that some of the weaponry used in modern warfare has on civilian populations. Perhaps in previous centuries the effects of war were felt predominantly by military people and those who went to war, but one of the clear effects of modern warfare is that many of the types of weaponry used have long-term implications for civilian populations.

Of the studies that have been made available in the public domain, one shows that more than half of the babies born in Falluja between 2007 and 2010 were born with a birth defect. Before the siege the figure was more like one in 10, and prior to the turn of the millennium fewer than 2% of babies were born with a birth defect. According to that study, in the two years after 2004 more than 45% of all pregnancies surveyed ended in miscarriage, whereas the figures before the bombing were below 10%. Between 2007 and 2010, one in six of all pregnancies ended in miscarriage. The research that is in the public domain is clearly incredibly concerning.

Another piece of research looked at the health histories of 56 families in Falluja and examined births in Basra in southern Iraq, which was attacked by British forces in 2003. It found that more than 20 babies in 1,000 were born with births defects at the maternity hospital in 2003, which is 17 times higher than the rate recorded a decade previously. In the past seven years, the number of malformed babies born has increased by more than 60%, to 37 in every 1,000.

We have spoken a great deal today about the politics that led up to the decision to take forces into Iraq in 2003, and that is absolutely proper, but the reality is that families in Iraq are now dealing with the aftermath of decisions that might have been taken by the British Government and the action of British and other troops. I think that it is beholden on Parliament to insist that the Government do everything they can to ensure that this is researched more thoroughly.”

Parliament debates tenth anniversary of the Iraq war

A Parlaimentary debate on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war took place yesterday. The media have not reported this at all. The full test is available here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/chan17.pdf - pages 522-594.

It was introduced by Caroline Lucas MP and there were particularly strong speeches from Paul Flynn MP from p568 onwards, Jeremy Corbyn MP from p580 on and Katy Clark MP from p585, concentrating particularly on the catastrophic effects on health resulting from munitions used in the conflict.

The Government's position was predictably pathetic, cheerily quoting IMF reports about Iraq's recent economic growth - hardly surprising given the long years of economic sanctions the west imposed on it before invading, and at the same time hiding behind the years-overdue Chilcot Report in terms of UK culpability.