| | | Iraqi protests shake regime |  |
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Dr.Hannani Maya
المشرف العام
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تاريخ التسجيل : 21/09/2009
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 العمل/الترفيه : الأنترنيت والرياضة والكتابة والمطالعة
 | موضوع: Iraqi protests shake regime  الأحد 27 فبراير 2011 - 4:07 | |
| Iraqi protests shake regime  Tens of thousands protested in cities throughout Iraq yesterday against the economic oppression and corrupt officials imposed by the US occupation regime, as well as the US occupation itself.
Complaining of joblessness, worsening electricity outages, food shortages, and rising food prices, they denounced or demanded the resignation of several national and local officials. Even though Iraq has the world’s second-largest oil reserves, social conditions are atrocious. The official unemployment rate is over 15 percent (in reality much higher), large parts of Iraq have only a few hours of electricity a day, and the country is still occupied by 47,000 US troops—with Iraq’s oil fields now largely in the hands of Western energy firms.
Iraqi security forces fired on protestors in several of the at least 17 cities where protests took place. Fifteen demonstrators were confirmed killed and at least 130 were wounded. Despite warnings from Iraqi officials, there were no suicide bombings or attacks by anti-US forces on the demonstrators.
Protestors defied curfews and an explicit warning from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki the day before, who had told Iraqis not to attend the protests. They also defied opposition from Shiite clergy, including Moktada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose spokesmen told Al Sumaria Television that they feared that "infiltrators" would profit from the protests.
Al-Sadr issued a cowardly statement, alleging that participating in the protest would make it easier for state forces to justify a crackdown: "They are attempting to crack down on everything you have achieved, all the democratic gains, the free elections, the peaceful exchanges of power and freedom. So I call on you, from a place of compassion, to thwart the enemy plans by not participating in the demonstrations tomorrow, because it’s suspicious, and it will give rise to the voice of those who destroyed Iraq."
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the resignations of provincial governors in Baghdad, Basra, and Nasiriya at the end of the day.In the capital, Baghdad, the authorities deployed masses of soldiers to enforce a lock-down and banned all vehicle traffic in an attempt to prevent people from reaching the protests. Al-Maliki imposed similar vehicle bans in Mosul and Samarra. Baghdad’s international airport was also shut down.
An estimated 5,000 protestors nonetheless massed on Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which was heavily guarded by pro-regime security forces. Protestors marched on the Green Zone, the heavily-guarded district that houses the US occupation authorities, the US embassy, and Iraq’s parliament.Protestors denounced al-Maliki as a liar, with one man telling the Christian Science Monitor: "I’m a laborer. I work one day and stay at home for a month. [Maliki] says people will do better than they did under Saddam Hussein—where is it?"
The protestors breached two concrete blast walls on Jumhuriya Bridge, the main access point to the Green Zone. Police charged the protestors, while Iraqi Army helicopters buzzed the crowd, stirring up large clouds of dust to disorient them.At the protests in Baghdad, Sadrist spokesman and Member of Parliament Sabah al-Saadi faced shouts and jeers. One said, "You have to cut your salary—we have nothing! Why are you taking so much money when we have no money?"
In the southern port and oil hub of Basra, protestors reported as numbering between 4,000 and 10,000 knocked over a concrete blast barrier and demonstrated in front of the offices of Governor Sheltagh Aboud al-Mayahi. They demanded that he resign and that Basra officials face trial for corruption.Basra protestors also demanded food ration cards and jobs. One protestor was reported killed in Basra.
Several cities in the center of the country faced large-scale protests. In Fallujah, a city repeatedly devastated by US military assaults, 1,000 protestors demonstrated and clashed with police outside municipal buildings. Nine protestors were injured.In Tikrit police fired on protestors trying to take over a government building, killing two and injuring nine.
In Mosul, the capital of Iraq’s northern Nineveh province, hundreds of protestors demanded jobs, better public services, an end to corruption, and the resignation of provincial governor Athel al-Nujafi and the provincial council. After an unidentified person threw a grenade near the government building, the guards opened fire on the protestors. Five were killed and 15 others wounded.
Earlier in the day, protestors stoned the convoy of al-Nujafi and his brother, Osama, the provincial parliamentary speaker.Demonstrators in Hawija, a city near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, reportedly tried to occupy the city’s municipal building. Security forces fired into the crowd, killing three protestors and wounding 15 according to Fattah Yaseen, the Hawija police chief.
By Alex Lantier, WSWS Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz 0 comments   Links to this post Labels: Al-Jazeera, Iraqi Protests, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, The BBC if (window['tickAboveFold']) {window['tickAboveFold'](document.getElementById("latency-1286139989081219934")); } Protests followed by detentions, beatings  Iraqi security forces detained hundreds of people, including prominent journalists, artists and intellectuals, witnesses said Saturday, a day after nationwide demonstrations brought tens of thousands of Iraqis into the streets and ended with soldiers shooting into crowds.
Four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest at Baghdad's Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.
"It was like they were dealing with a bunch of al-Qaeda operatives, not a group of journalists," said Hussam al-Ssairi, a journalist and poet, who was among a group and described seeing hundreds of protesters in black hoods at the detention facility. "Yesterday was like a test, like a picture of the new democracy in Iraq."
Protesters mostly stayed home Saturday, following more than a dozen demonstrations across the country Friday that killed at least 29 people, as crowds stormed provincial buildings, forced local officials to resign, freed prisoners and otherwise demanded more from a government they only recently had a chance to elect.
"I have demands!" Salma Mikahil, 48, cried out from Tahrir Square on Friday, as military helicopters and snipers looked down on thousands of people bearing handmade signs and olive branches signifying peace. "I want to see if Maliki can accept that I live on this," Mikahil said, waving a 1,000-dinar note, worth less than a dollar, toward Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's offices. "I want to see if his conscience accepts it."
The protests - billed as Iraq's "Day of Rage" - were intended to call for reform of Maliki's government, not revolution. From the southern city of Basra to northern cities of Kurdistan, protesters demanded the simple dignities of adequate electricity, clean water and a decent job.
As the day wore on, however, the demonstrations grew violent when security forces deployed water cannons and sound bombs to disperse crowds. Iraqi military helicopters swooped toward the demonstrators in Baghdad, and soldiers fired into angry crowds in the protest here and in at least seven others across the country.
And in that way, the day introduced a new sort of conflict to a population that has been targeted by sectarian militias and suicide bombers. Now, many wondered whether they would have to add to the list of enemies their government.
Ssairi and his three colleagues, one of whom had been on the radio speaking in support of protesters, said about a dozen soldiers stormed into a restaurant where they were eating dinner Friday afternoon and began beating them as other diners looked on in silence. They drove them to a side street and beat them again.
Then, blindfolded, they were driven to the former Ministry of Defense building, which houses an intelligence unit of the Iraqi army's 11th Division, they said. Hadi al-Mahdi, a theater director and radio anchor who has been calling for reform, said he was blindfolded and beaten repeatedly with sticks, boots and fists. One soldier put a stick into Hadi's handcuffed hands and threatened to rape him with it, he said.
The soldiers accused him of being a tool of outsiders wishing to topple Maliki's government; they demanded that he confess to being a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Hadi told them that he blamed Baathists for killing two of his brothers and that until recently he had been a member of Maliki's Dawa Party.
Hadi said he was then taken to a detention cell, his blindfold off, where he said there were at least 300 people with black hoods over their heads, many groaning in bloody shirts. Several told him they had been detained during or after the protests.
Hadi, who comes from a prominent Iraqi family, and his colleagues were released after their friends managed to make some well-placed phone calls."This government is sending a message to us, to everybody," he said Saturday, his forehead bruised, his left leg swollen.
Although the protests were primarily aimed at reform, there were mini examples of revolution all day Friday, hyperlocal versions of the recent revolts in Egypt, Tunisia and, in a way, Libya. Crowds forced the resignation of the governor in southern Basra and the entire city council in Fallujah. They also chased away the governor of Mosul, the brother of the speaker of parliament, who was there and fled, too.
The protests began peacefully but grew more aggressive. Angry crowds seized a police station in Kirkuk, set fire to a provincial office in Mosul and rattled fences around the local governate offices in Tikrit, prompting security forces to open fire with live bullets, killing four people. Three people were killed in Kirkuk.
Six people were killed in Fallujah and six others in Mosul, according to reports from officials and witnesses in at least seven protests. On Saturday, officials reported additional deaths: a 60-year old man in Fallujah; two people, including a 13-year old boy, in Qobaisa; and two in Ramadi, all in predominantly Sunni Anbar province.The reports attributed most casualties to security forces who opened fire.
By sundown in Baghdad on Friday, security forces were spraying water cannons and exploding sound bombs to disperse protesters, chasing several through streets and alleyways and killing at least three, according to a witness.Two people were also reported killed in Kurdistan, in the north.
The day's events posed a unique challenge for the Obama administration, which has struggled to calibrate its responses to the protests rolling across the Middle East and North Africa but has a particular stake in the stability of the fledgling democracy it helped usher in.Analysts said Friday's developments were at best awkward for the United States.
"Obama wants to convey that yes, Iraq has a number of problems that need to be addressed, but the country is on the right track," said Joost Hiltermann, deputy director for the International Crisis Group's Middle East program. "You can't possibly say, 'Iraq is in a crisis, and by the way, we're leaving.' "
The United States is set to complete the withdrawal of all its troops from Iraq by the end of the year.The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad played down Friday's violence, as well as the draconian measures Maliki took to stifle turnout.
Iraq's security forces "generally have not used force against peaceful protesters," said Aaron Snipe, an embassy spokesman. "We support the Iraqi people's right to freely express their political views, to peacefully protest and seek redress form their government. This has been our consistent message in Iraq and throughout the region."
The turnout Friday appeared to surprise many of the demonstrators, coming as it did after a curfew on cars and even bicycles forced people to walk, often miles, to participate. There were also pleas - some described them as threatening - from Maliki and Shiite clerics, including the populist Moqtada al-Sadr, to stay home.
Sadr, whose Mahdi Army is blamed for some of the worst sectarian violence of the war, is now part of Maliki's governing coalition and attempting to position himself as both insider and outsider. Sadr's power lies in his rare ability to call hundreds of thousands into the streets, and analysts said he is perhaps concerned about losing his impoverished urban followers to the new and still only vaguely unified protest movement .
By mid-morning in Baghdad, people were walking toward Tahrir Square along empty streets fortified with soldiers in Humvees, snipers on rooftops and mosque domes and checkpoints with X-ray equipment that might reveal a suicide vest.
Young and old, some missing legs and arms, some chanting old slogans of the Mahdi Army, the protesters passed crumbling high-rise apartment buildings webbed with electrical wires hooked to generators. At times, the air smelled like sewage."Bring electricity!" they shouted. "No to corruption!"
By afternoon, several thousand people were milling around the square, which is next to a bridge leading to the heavily guarded international zone housing the government's offices. Overnight, security forces had hauled in huge blast walls to block the bridge from protesters, who nonetheless managed to hoist a rope around one of them and pull it down.
"As you can see, they are hiding behind this wall!" shouted Sbeeh Noman, a white-haired engineer who said he walked 12 miles to reach the square and was now heading for the bridge. "The government is afraid of the nation. They have found out that the people have the real power."
By Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz 0 comments Links to this post Labels: Barak Obama, Iraqi Protests, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, Repression, The USA, the Washington Post if (window['tickAboveFold']) {window['tickAboveFold'](document.getElementById("latency-8761856916086224067")); } Democracy hijacked '100 mini-Saddams'  Of all the protests raging across the Middle East, Iraq stands out because it has already undergone recent radical political change. Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003 and Iraqis have held half a dozen rounds of elections, but people still do not feel their government represents them. The lesson is clear: going to the ballot box does not by itself constitute a democracy.
This might be because eight years after the end of autocracy, citizens and elected officials seem to have little or no understanding of democratic institutions. Friday's "day of rage" protests, when as many as 15 were killed, showed that Iraqis have been unable to differentiate between rallying for a cause, and simply expressing frustration mixed with violence. In one example, angry protesters in the governorate of Wasit burnt the mayor's offices, a key institution of local government.
Harbouring grievances against the elected mayor, who was elected in 2008, is legitimate. But setting fire to a public building, which actually is owned by the protesters as much as anybody else, shows the lack of a distinction between the mayor and public offices in general. And protesters shouldn't be resorting to arson anyway.
Like ordinary citizens, Iraqi officials seem unable to differentiate between the private and public spheres. Since 2003, Iraqi politicians have been treating the state like the spoils of the victory against the Saddam regime. Politicians have made ministries into personal fiefs, which they use to distribute rewards to their personal loyalists. Many if not most politicians have embezzled public funds and use patronage to foster their tribal-style leadership.
These politicians may only be able to wield absolute control over a few levers of power, but it is a microcosm of the autocratic regimes of Tunisian's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam's bygone era. Instead of having a single person at the helm of the entire patronage network, Iraq today has dozens of mini-autocrats, each controlling their slice of public funds to nourish their own networks.
Instead of state institutions functioning in the public interest, too often they are hijacked by private individuals. This has led to popular frustration despite seven years of elections, a free media and endless political debate. One common phrase compares the situation now to the former regime: "Saddam is gone, but we now have 100 Saddams."
Fortunately, in Iraq, like elsewhere in the changing Middle East, not all news is bad. Despite the odds, democracy is evolving. In 2003, a reporter with one of the many satellite TV channels conducted a "man in the street" survey of opinions about democracy in the country.
"Democracy? Where is this democracy? There is no electricity, there is no water, and I have been waiting in line to fill my gas tank," a middle aged man said. For most Iraqis at the time, there was no difference between an effective democracy and a queue at a gas station.
Since then, Iraqis have been slowly developing a deeper, although sometimes still troubling, political awareness. During the run-up to Iraq's parliamentary elections held in March 2009, another TV station did a report on favoured candidates. A young man said: "I will elect whomever of these politicians can steal money and pass it on to the people and those around him.
"There are some politicians who steal and keep the money for themselves, and there are others who steal and give to others."
While the country is fortunate to have the second largest oil reserves in the world, there is no amount of national wealth that can excuse the corruption of Iraqi politicians and their gifts to their cronies. For Iraqis to reap the benefits of their natural resources, politicians have to assume a different role - or be forced to. Instead of emperors of their own little kingdoms, Iraq is in desperate need of technocrats. The answer may begin with paying better salaries that will attract civil servants instead of profiteers - although many parliamentarians have drawn considerable salaries in recent months while achieving remarkably little.
The recent nationwide unrest has shaken the ruling elite, and lawmakers announced in the last two days cuts to their salaries and bonuses. Of course, nobody could promise to stop embezzling funds, although the protests were really about corruption and not salaries.
Iraq, like many other Arab countries, still has a long way to go before democracy takes deep root and governance improves.Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians are being transformed from tribal leaders into elected officials, and ordinary people from followers into citizens with political rights. The process is certainly not completed yet, but it is on track.
In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other countries where despots might soon collapse, democracy should not be expected overnight. The process will differ from one nation to another and setbacks should be expected.Like Iraq, the transformation process has started in some Arab countries and democracy should be expected to start budding here and there. After the revolutions of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the Middle East will never be the same again
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, The National Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz 0 comments Links to this post if (window['tickAboveFold']) {window['tickAboveFold'](document.getElementById("latency-6528912963912834781")); } Iraq refinery shut by bomb attack  An early morning gun and bomb attack has shut down Iraq's biggest oil refinery, Baiji, with at least two employees killed.The attackers stormed the site in Salaheddin province north of Baghdad at 0430 (0130 GMT), planting bombs in one of its units.
A fire broke out and the installation was badly damaged, officials said.At one time the refinery was controlled by al-Qaeda, who used it to fund militants.It is one of three major refineries in Iraq, the others being in the capital Baghdad and at Basra in the south.
Police said it took 50 fire engines to control the fire at the refinery, which processes about 150,000 barrels of oil per day."Armed men entered the refinery and shot dead two of the engineers," said Abdul Qader al-Saab, the facility's deputy chief.
"Then they detonated bombs at one unit, the al-Shamal unit, of the refinery, which represents 25 percent of the refinery's production. In the morning, we came to put out the fire, which erupted as a result of the bombs."
'Timing'
The governor of Salaheddin province, Ahmed al-Jubouri, said the refinery had "completely stopped"."It's a big loss for the whole country. All Iraqi cities depend on its production," he told Reuters.An unnamed official at the refinery said fixing the damage would take "a long time", saying the damage was "severe".But he added that it was hoped a partial restart could be made "in the next few days".
The BBC's Jonathan Head in Baghdad says that militant attacks on strategic targets are a regular occurrence in Iraq, but the timing and target of this one will worry the government.Inconsistent fuel supplies are one of the big complaints made by Iraqis about their living conditions, our correspondent says, and the attack comes a day after angry protests in several cities.
Meanwhile, in the southern town of Samawa, a second refinery was shut down by fire, but officials said initial reports indicated it was started by a technical failure rather than an attack, according to Reuters.
The BBC Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz 0 comments Links to this post if (window['tickAboveFold']) {window['tickAboveFold'](document.getElementById("latency-2138688189338576829")); } Guard killed in refinery attack  Gunmen have attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery, killing a guard and forcing a shutdown which threatened to exacerbate acute electricity shortages that have prompted violent protests.
The gunmen detonated bombs which sparked a fire and forced the facility to halt operations, officials said.
A few hours later, a small refinery in the south shut down after a technical failure sparked a fire in a storage unit, they added.If not fixed swiftly, the two shutdowns could translate into long lines at fuel stations and even longer power cuts.
The attack on Iraq's largest refinery, Beiji, began at about 3.30am, with armed men killing one guard and wounding another before planting bombs near some production units for benzene and kerosene, said the spokesman for Salahuddin province, Mohammed al-Asi.
He added that about 45 soldiers have been brought in temporarily to protect the facility, and that technicians currently repairing the refinery estimated it would be back online later this week.
Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said an investigation would be launched and that he hoped operations could resume shortly.The closures could spell trouble for Iraqi consumers, especially at a time when the weather is just beginning to warm up and more citizens will be relying on their air conditioning.
Thousands have marched on government buildings and clashed with security forces in cities across Iraq in an outpouring of anger, the largest and most violent anti-government protests in the country since political unrest began spreading in the Arab world weeks ago.
The protests, billed as a 'Day of Rage', were fuelled by anger over corruption, chronic unemployment and shoddy public services from the Shiite-dominated government.
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