Archives » Friday, February 13, 2009
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Newsweek
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Feb 13, 2009 04:48 PM
By Lennox Samuels
It seemed like a typical Friday in Baghdad during celebrations for
Arbaeen, the ceremony that comes 40 days after the anniversary of the
death of Imam Hussein.
Hypnotic chants wafted over the city and men and women, some pushing
strollers, walked along Karrada Inner Street and Mohammed al-Qasim
Highway on their way to the holy city of Karbala. It was hard to tell
that bombers had killed more than 60 Shia Muslims and injured dozens
more in three consecutive days of mayhem.
And that is how the Shiite pilgrims wanted it. Yes, bombings in Baghdad
killed at least 12 people Wednesday, followed by the death of eight
more a day later in a suicide attack in Karbala itself and finally, the
slaughter of at least 32, mostly women and children, by a female
suicide bomber near Iskandiriyah on Friday. Iraqis walking stoically
along the pilgrimage route and worshiping in Baghdad and Karbala
mosques had decided they would not yield to terrorists trying to
reignite violent sectarianism. The pilgrimage, once an act of defiance
against Saddam Hussein, has become an act of defiance against
terrorism.
“These terrorist acts will increase our determination to do the
pilgrimage. We will challenge terrorism,” Mohammed Ajaj Kazem, a
27-year-old farmer from Nasiriyah, tells NEWSWEEK. He walked five days
from his hometown to Najaf, another holy city, en route to Karbala.
Kazem is among the millions of Iraqis who went to the polls Jan. 31 to
elect provincial councils. For him, the election represented a decisive
shift toward a new Iraq and he will not to be distracted from seizing
the future. Others say the same thing. Despite strong provocation,
Iraqis may at last be finding the will to resist the call to violence.
Many are motivated by sheer war weariness and the desire for normality.
In the Karrada and Mansour districts, men are starting to throng cafes
again. Families browse electronics stores along Outer Karrada Street.
Residents regard empty, abandoned hulks and ask openly when the
structures will be rehabilitated or demolished. A middle-aged
university professor who has not worked for months since his 7-year-old
son was kidnapped says he just wants to have his son back and return to
teaching. Some Iraqis who worked for Coalition forces or contractors
and had been desperate to secure visas to America now say they want to
stay and help rebuild.
Iraqis increasingly want to be left alone to fix their enervated
society. And they’re not just talking about the Americans and their
coalition partners. More of them are articulating a deep suspicion of
and exasperation with their geographical neighbors, especially Iran and
Syria. Some see the hand of Tehran in the pilgrimage bombings. “The
terrorism is financed by neighboring governments unwilling to free
their own people and become like Iraqis,” says Kamal Abbas, 32, a Najaf
policeman making the trek. “Iran has incubators in Iraq and they feed
the extremists of both sects [Shia and Sunni] to try to destroy Iraq.”
His comment blithely presumes an imminently democratic Iraq. Kazem, the
Nasiriyah farmer, does too. “Those bad people do not like democracy to
spread from Iraq to their homelands, like Syria and Saudi Arabia,” he
declares.
Along with such awareness comes a widening political savvy. Provincial
election balloting, which saw Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s
candidates grab the largest proportion of votes in nine out of 14
provinces, suggested that Iraqis no longer can be expected to vote
along mostly religious lines. Some pilgrims confirmed that, along with
a shrewd assessment of high-stakes politics. “Some of the violence in
Iraq comes from the political powers,” says Yasir Zaki, 28, a Baghdad
contractor. “The parties that failed in the last elections started to
cause violence in order to oblige the powers that did win to bring them
into the government.”
Violence, some Iraqis say, could be reduced at least to a degree if the
political chess game ended. The government would become a meritocracy,
with no regard to allocating ministries on the basis of party
affiliation. “Some parties try to create problems for other parties in
order to take ministries from them," Jalal Ali Hassan, a 45-year-old
Baghdad businessman, tells NEWSWEEK. “The solution is to let the prime
minister choose figures for the ministers who are not from parties.”
Such a system, of course, assumes the prime minister can be trusted to
make merit-based decisions.
Further, Iraqis are increasingly vocal in demanding that the government
expend its energy on their needs. Some look at the success of the
Kurdistan region of their country with a degree of envy and admiration,
despite their antipathy toward the Kurds. And they understand that
central and southern Iraq must be as uncompromising in the quest to
properly exploit the nation’s lucrative oil industry and attract
business and even tourism, while keeping people safe.
They also prescribe a frontal assault on government corruption. Amin
Ali, 44, works at Doura Refinery. He says oil revenues are not spent on
building power stations or more refineries, but on unrelated, even
irrelevant projects. “Ministries like Trade, Oil, Electricity,
Industry, their performance is catastrophic,” he says. “They are
spending their budgets on issues that do not develop the performance of
the ministries themselves. He adds that, “Corruption is stronger than
anything else in the country. I think it is as dangerous as the armed
groups and the insurgency.”
With many Iraqis focused on the route to development, it is less likely
that Iraq’s nascent self-confidence will be snuffed by deadly terrorism
on the road to Karbala. Granted, the lethal attacks of the last three
days showed that the nation’s improved security forces cannot prevent
suicide attacks and bombings, even with hundreds of soldiers and
police, aerial surveillance and numerous checkpoints. But those trying
to scare off pilgrims are certain to fail. Karbala governor Akeel
al-Khazali said more than 4 million are making the march. “Each time
they create an incident, they are making more people want to go,” says
Riyadh al-Ghoraifi, a 50-year-old Baghdad expert on family trees. And
those seeking to use the pilgrimage attacks to incite renewed violence
may find Iraqis are not so eager to turn on each other, again.
--With Hussam Ali and Saad Al-Izzi
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