Too bad all those laughing and smiling peaceniks couldnt spare...

Too bad all those laughing and smiling peaceniks couldnt spare one miserable placard and thought for the real victims, meanwhile , a good time was had by all:

Robert Horvath: Long march to ignorance

February 18, 2003

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WE know that Saddam Hussein is grateful to the peace movement. After the wave of anti-war demonstrations around the world on January 19, the Iraqi tyrant informed his military elite that Western peace activists 'are supporting you because they know that evildoers target Iraq.'

But what do the long-suffering Iraqi people make of their self-appointed defenders in the peace movement? What might be the reaction of Kurds and marsh Arabs, survivors of systematic genocidal violence, to the rhetoric of a Christian pacifist like Dr. Peter Matheson, the eminent religious historian, who declared at Melbourne peace vigil that he is protesting against the impending war because 'we put people first - the Iraqi people in the first instance'?

A trait common to many survivors of inhumanity is the desire to bear witness. In his Nobel Lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalled how in the GULAG, ‘there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us.’ But the urge to testify was always tempered by fear of the indifference of an uncomprehending world.

Author and concentration camp survivor Primo Levi, attempting to explain his first jarring conversation with Polish peasants after his release from captivity, recalled that 'we had always dreamed of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone.'

Today there are countless survivors ready to testify about the living hell of Saddam’s Iraq. But like Primo Levi half a century ago, they face a contemptuous audience. For much of the peace movement, the ‘Iraqi people’ is an abstraction, which relieves them of the need to confront the tragic fates of actual men and women at the hands of the Iraqi security apparatus. We hear ritualised expressions of distaste for the Baath regime, but few pacifists are prepared to confront the exterminationism that links Saddam’s systematic genocide of 100,000 Kurds and his obsessive pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

But if peace activists insist on posing as the defenders of the Iraqi people, then they ought to listen to the testimony of Iraqis who escaped the grip of the killing machine that is the Iraqi state. Matheson, whose scholarship has given voice to beleaguered Christians under Nazism, ought to consider the evidence of ‘Ozer,’ the Kurdish construction worker who provided some of the most important eyewitness testimony about the ‘Anfal’ campaign, Saddam’s final solution to the Kurdish problem.

Ozer was arrested after his village was burned down by Saddam’s security forces. In April 1987, he was one of the thousands of civilians interned in the notorious Topzawa concentration camp, the main processing centre for the victims of the Anfal. It was here, in scenes of bureaucratic inhumanity reminiscent of the holocaust, that deportees permitted to live were segregated from those marked for extermination.

Like tens of thousands of other Kurdish men and boys, Ozer was taken from Topzawa in a convoy of sealed, windowless military buses, which were joined by bulldozers near the execution grounds. What saved his life was an attempted break-out by the prisoners, when their bus became bogged in deep sand within earshot of the firing squads. The guards raked the bus with machine-gun fire, but Ozer managed to escape into the desert killing fields. “I passed only trenches filled with bodies,” he told Human Rights Watch. “I also saw many mounds made by bulldozers. The whole area was full of trenches with corpses.”

Ozer’s vision of hell has been corroborated by 18 tonnes of Iraqi government documents, which were captured from police stations by rebels during the tragic uprising of March 1991. These documents – some charred from the fighting, some partly shredded – constitute a chilling record of the Baathist regime’s crimes against humanity. Like Ozer’s testimony, they were acquired at a terrible human price.

They demonstrate, in minute detail, the inner workings of what Samir al-Khalil called ‘the republic of fear’: government orders for mass deportations and summary mass executions, transcripts of phone surveillance recordings, reports on relatives of dissidents singled out for reprisals, comments on the successful burning of villages. They also testify to the persistence of what Hannah Arendt, with reference to Eichmann, called the banality of evil. Routine atrocities are recorded in files that are often adorned with ornate lettering in coloured felt-tip pens, the artistry of bored apparatchiks doodling while genocide is in progress.

In its scale relative to population, in its exterminationist ferocity, and in its systematic, bureaucratic character, the Anfal campaign deserves comparison with the worst crimes of the twentieth century. Like the holocaust and the Stalinist terror, it defies the conventional analyses and the relativist sensibilities of many Western intellectuals.

But perhaps those now protesting so loudly in the name of the Iraqi people could try to imagine what their own lives would be like in Baathist Iraq. Perhaps Matheson, a dissenting cleric in a democratic society, might try to empathise with those of his Iraqi counterparts who refused to submit to Saddam. We know that in the aftermath of the 1991 uprising, 105 Shi’ite Muslim clerics and scholars were executed. Since then, the regime’s death squads have made it clear that no Muslim leader can speak out with impunity.

In February 1999, soon after delivering a sermon demanding the release of imprisoned clergy, the Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr was gunned down alongside his two sons. This murder was merely the most shocking in a chain of assassinations and disappearances that a UN report has described as ‘a systematic attack on the independent leadership of Shia Muslims in Iraq.’

During the coming months, peace activists will pose as defenders of ‘Iraqi women,’ another abstract category that absolves them of the need to consider the actual lives of Iraqi women, who live in daily terror of the ‘violators of women’s honour’ on the payroll of the ‘Amn’ secret police. Do not expect our pacifists to recall the trauma of the young woman who was raped in order to make a video to intimidate one of her relatives, the exiled opposition activist Najib Salahi. Nor will they honour the memory of Dr. Najat Haydar, the courageous obstetrician, who spoke out against the regime’s corruption, and was publicly beheaded as a prostitute by government thugs in October 2000.

As they march in our streets, few of the peace demonstrators will reflect upon the fate of Iraqis who exercised their own right to freedom of assembly. One of the most sinister Iraqi internal documents to reach the West is a 1991 directive from the Amn’s Baghdad headquarters to a regional office. It calls for the site of a demonstration to be surrounded, the elevated points occupied by snipers, and demonstrators to be massacred with the aim of killing 95% of them but ‘saving’ the rest for interrogation.

That murderous statistic, so typical of the Iraqi secret police, exemplifies the flaws of the peace movement’s own conceptual framework. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in 1974, the real distinction is not between peace and war, but between peace and violence. There is no peace, if diplomatic niceties are preserved between states whilst internally states are slaughtering their own citizens.

The agony of the Iraqi people under Saddam is an affront to the conscience of humanity, and their liberation is, as President Bush has argued, ‘a great moral cause.’ The same cannot be said of the procession of Westerners travelling to Iraq as self-styled ‘human shields,’ in a cruel parody of the Iraqi regime’s attitude towards its own civilians. As long as peace activists aspire to defend the Iraqi people from everyone but its executioners and torturers, their cause will be nothing but a distasteful reminder of the West’s long complicity in Saddam’s tyranny. Robert Horvath, a specialist in the history of human rights, is an Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow