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Remembering a Friend Lost to Saddam’s Terror

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The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq has unleashed a torrent of repressed memories — tales of torture, disappearance, and summary executions. Iraqis searching for long-lost relatives and friends broke into prisons only to discover clandestine cemeteries and dozens of mass graves.

Some families did find solace, identifying and burying the body of a loved one taken from them years ago. But most of the dead remain unidentified, including my friend Gad Gross. He was killed near Kirkuk in 1991 while covering the Shi’ite and Kurdish uprisings that were encouraged by the last Bush administration during and after the Gulf War.

Now that the hostilities have finally abated in Iraq, many Iraqis will hopefully have the opportunity to recover the remains of those who have been missing for so long. Hopefully, too, the remains of Gad will be found and identified. I last saw him on the afternoon of March 28, 1991, on the northern edge of Kirkuk.

There were four of us, three young Western journalists and one equally young Kurdish armed guerrilla, Bakhtiar Abdel Rahman, our guide. Kirkuk fell to Saddam’s forces in seven hours. With a Kalashnikov over one shoulder and a pistol tucked into his belt, Bakhtiar led Gad, carrying several cameras, toward some nearby houses under heavy fire, while a French photographer, Alain Buu, and I dove, one after the other, into a nearby ditch.

All night, Iraqi soldiers camped around us. Their machine gunners shot into fields that the day before had been filled with hundreds of Kurds fleeing the city, mostly women either carrying or leading children. Not long after dawn, Alain and I heard a commotion coming from the nearby houses — it sounded as though Iraqi soldiers were capturing people. Within minutes, we heard the burst of an automatic rifle, followed by one long, loud scream, before another burst cut it short.

Peering over the edge of our ditch, Alain and I saw a group of Iraqi soldiers walking away from the scene, one soldier holding Gad’s blue camera bag over his shoulder. We continued to hide until about an hour later, when a soldier saw Alain, who jumped up and surrendered. The Iraqis seemed ready to shoot us, too, until an officer, evidently newly arrived at the scene, intervened.

Wearing the uniform of Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath party, he ordered the soldiers to save us for interrogation. They led us to another Iraqi officer, an army Special Forces captain, who greeted us with angry words: “Your friend, he kill himself. You know why? He had a gun.” I do not know whether Bakhtiar might have given Gad his revolver. But nearby, Alain and I saw Gad’s camera bag. Hanging from it were his laminated press cards, stained with blood.

Iraqi authorities released Alain and me 18 days later. But neither Gad nor Bakhtiar’s remains have been recovered. Gad, like me, was an only child. His mother, Edith Gross, is an ethnic German painter born in Romania who later immigrated to West Germany with her son when he was a young teen.

But they were not welcomed by some German neighbors who disparaged them for their foreign roots. Gad decided to apply to become an American high school exchange student and later won a full scholarship to Harvard.

He returned to Eastern Europe after graduating, and his photographs of Romanian babies dying of AIDS made the cover of Newsweek. Right after I met him, he won the Missouri Award of Excellence for his picture of two Romanian soldiers sitting on a toppled statue of Lenin.

By then, Gad was planning his next step. He applied to Yale law school while he was in Jordan, intending to study the protection of human rights. But he did not live to learn that he had been accepted.

Germany will not recognize Gad’s death without his corpse, keeping Edith without benefits. She wants to bury his remains near her home in Cologne. With so many graves across Iraq, finding Gad’s remains will not be easy.

The writer is the Washington representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Between Tyranny and Bombs: A Review of “Baghdad Diaries”

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BAGHDAD DIARIES: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile
By Nuha al-Radi
Vintage. 217 pp. Paperback, $12

[NOTE: The Iraqi painter and author of this book, Nuha al-Radi, died not long after her book was published on August 30, 2004 in Beirut.]

Try to imagine yourself or your family living in Baghdad over the past decade, enduring tyranny, privation and wars. What if your family came from the old ruling guard but the quality of your life had only eroded under President Saddam Hussein’s regime? Would you blame him and his cronies for your plight, or blame America for the twin punishments of sanctions and bombings?

The answers to these questions may help explain why at least some Iraqis today seem so ungrateful to the United States. Not long after being liberated from Iraq’s homegrown dictatorship, large crowds began demonstrating against the subsequent U.S. military occupation. The mood soured faster across Iraq than leading U.S. officials or news commentators had expected, but readers of this book will see through a window into Iraq that they missed.

Born in Baghdad during the Second World War, Nuha al-Radi is a Western-educated Iraqi who retains an Eastern outlook. A world-renowned sculptor, ceramist and painter, she is a survivor from a once-thriving cultural community rooted in ancient Mesopotamia, which remains among the most respected artistic traditions in the Arab world. While she was pinned down in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Baghdad, and afterward, while she was in exile in both Eastern and Western countries, this artist stopped working with her hands to speak with her head.

Anyone comfortable with the jingoism passing for journalism on many American television networks may find some passages in “Baghdad Diaries” as hard to digest as green, moldy bread. But if one is wondering how millions among the audience of the Qatar-based satellite television network, Al-Jazeera, today see Iraq, the raw and often bitter passages of this artist’s diary are a good place to start:

“Everyone was preparing and hoarding foodstuffs in their freezers, never imagining that they would bomb us out of electricity. Now the big question is whether to keep the freezer and fridge doors open or closed. If they stay open the rubber seals will dry out, and if closed they smell.”

Nuha al-Radi’s story begins in 1991 with the last Gulf War. She is an unmarried woman, living near her mother and struggling to get by. Another central character is her dog Salvi, named after the Spanish painter Salvador Dali. The artist says they are “well-to-do” Iraqis who live not far from the Mansur neighborhood, where Hussein was filmed walking among supporters in the street after the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The author’s late father was an ambassador back when Iraq was ruled (briefly) by British-backed kings, and her family, like others associated with the old monarchy, waned under Hussein’s regime. “Ma says she feels like Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” writes al-Radi, “except that we are far from starving.”

This is an impressionistic chronicle, and anyone looking to learn more about the rich ethnic and religious mosaic that is Iraq will not find it here. Although its author does not say it, “Baghdad Diaries” is told from the point of view of Iraq’s traditionally privileged minority based in the capital. Compared with most other Iraqis, this elite has long managed to live reasonably well even under so-called revolutionary regimes.

Some of the author’s friends and acquaintances had low-level jobs in Hussein’s government. One of her friends worked for Uday, the more notorious of Hussein’s two sons, and was told to wear “a smart dress and make-up” for work. Another friend’s nanny worked inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. “She said that when someone was caught stealing, they gathered the staff together, brought in a doctor who chopped off this guy’s hand, and immediately dunked it into boiling oil to cauterize it.”

This grisly account is told without commentary; al-Radi saves most of her outrage for America’s apparent disregard for the plight of the Iraqi people. “We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti take-over, yet we have been paying the price for it. Meanwhile Our Leader is alive and well — or not so well, we do not know. We’re living,” she goes on, “like Peter Sellers in [the 1968 film] ‘The Party,’ refusing to die and rising up again and again, another last gasp of the bugle.”

Al-Radi’s narrative possesses a disarming charm. Her snapshots of the strangulation of Iraq play out in the smaller details of daily life: “The birds have taken the worst beating of all. They have sensitive souls which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration [of bombing]. All the caged love-birds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion.”

Al-Radi looks at Iraq like a woman who insists on viewing a canvas only through a magnifying glass, intimately describing its texture while failing to see the wider scene. But however narrow its focus, “Baghdad Diaries” offers an unfiltered perspective on a widely misunderstood world.

Contra Saddam Hussein: Porque no hubo insurreccion

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Published here (translated from the LAWeekly).

¿Por qué los iraquíes no se sublevaron en contra de Saddam Hussein? Lo más seguro es que muchos recuerdan la última vez que lo hicieron después de seguir las instrucciones comandadas por los Estados Unidos.

Al momento que la guerra del Golfo Pérsico concluía, el entonces presidente de Estados Unidos, George Bush, padre del actual mandatario, urgió a los iraquíes a “tomar las cosas en sus propias manos, para forzar a Saddam Hussein, el dictador, a renunciar”. Dos semanas después, muchos en verdad atendieron esas palabras para pelear en contra de su propio gobierno, el cual la Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA) predijo que colapsaría.

?Saddam Hussein se enfrenta a su desafió político más serio, después de 20 años en el poder?, afirmaba la CIA en marzo de 1991 en un reporte secreto escrito durante el mes que duraron los levantamientos. “El tiempo no está de su lado”, continuaba el informe.

El levantamiento comenzó el 28 de febrero de 1991 en Basora, ciudad situada en el extremo sur de Irak, cuando el comandante de un tanque perteneciente a una columna de soldados iraquíes que en ese momento se retiraba de la ocupación de Kuwait, se desvió hacia la plaza Sa’ad, cerca de los cuarteles generales del partido oficialista Ba’ath.

En esa ocasión, y en una escena que los actuales planificadores del Pentágono soñarían con que se repitiera hoy, el mencionado comandante del tanque salió de su blindado y denunció a Hussein, regresando luego a su interior, y procediendo entonces a volar en pedazos un mural, del tamaño de un edificio, con la imagen del gobernante.

El combate se extendió en ese entonces hacia el interior de Basora, mucho antes de alcanzar el conocido barrio de Jamoriya, lugar donde residía el soldado iraquí, Mohammad Honan, quien afirmó que paramilitares pertenecientes al partido Ba’ath merodiaban por las calles.

“Todos escuchamos los disparos que provenían desde la ciudad”, me dijo Honan en ese entonces, al tanto que alguien más también gritaba que se trataba de “una revolución. Ellos están gritando y disparando”, aseveró Honan, quien fuera uno de los tantos soldados que se incorporaría en la revuelta para derrocar a Hussein.

Miles de soldados, en su mayoría árabes shiítas, se unieron a los civiles e invadieron el cuartel general del partido Ba’ath, para proceder y vaciar las cárceles principales de la ciudad. Así, en pocos días, la Intifada, como la llamaron los incontables iraquíes que se unieron a la insurrección, se extendió hacia al norte sobre el río Eúfrates, consumiendo primero a Nasiriyah y Samawah, para luego llegar a las ciudades santas shiítas de Najaf y Karbala, a solo 50 millas al sur de Bagdad, los mismos y actuales teatros de combate en el presente conflicto.

Por ese entonces solo el levantamiento de los kurdos en el norte de Irak llamó la atención de la prensa; sin embargo, “la insurrección shiíta en el Sur del país fue más peligrosa para el régimen que la insurgencia de los kurdos en el norte”, afirma ahora un contemporáneo y antes ?cable clasificado? del Departamento de Estado: A través de Irak, al menos 14 de 17 ciudades estaban bajo control de los insurrectos durante las 4 semanas que durara el levantamiento, y que incluía cada ciudad bajo dominio de los shiítas en el sur, y cada ciudad de los kurdos en el norte.

El levantamiento de 1991 incluso estalló en el propio Bagdad. Un reporte secreto del Departamento de Estado fechado el 24 de marzo de 1991 afirmaba: “El descontento no se limitaba a los levantamientos en el norte y el sur? tres barrios en Bagdad (uno de ellos conocido como Saddam) habían sido acordonados por los militares por varios días debido a actividades en contra del régimen”.

Pero justo en el momento en que la Intifada se desenvolvía, los Estados Unidos y oficiales iraquíes negociaban un cese al fuego que formalmente pondría fin a la Guerra del Golfo en 1991.

Después de redactarse e imprimirse el primer párrafo del acuerdo de cese al fuego, y el cual restringía los vuelos de “ala fija” iraquíes, los generales de Saddam dijeron que querían agregar un nuevo punto, y era que a Irak se le permitiera pilotear helicópteros artillados. Los militares dijeron a los negociadores estadounidenses las dos razones por las que Irak necesitaba los helicópteros: 1) Para lograr transportarse a las negociaciones de paz, 2) para transportar a sus soldados heridos.

Para el tiempo en que los levantamientos fueron ahogados en sangre, el mundo entero sabía que las verdaderas intenciones del régimen de Saddam eran usar los helicópteros para masacrar a los rebeldes kurdos en el norte, después de que miles de civiles huyeran de Irak hacia la vecina Turquía e Irán, durante los primeros días de abril en 1991. No obstante y hasta esa fecha, portavoces estadounidenses repetidamente dijeron a los periodistas de que no conocían mucho acerca de combates en el interior de Irak.

Resulta ser ahora que los estadounidenses estaban mintiendo. Portavoces de los Estados Unidos sabían que a solo 12 días, con relación al mes de los levantamientos, el régimen de Saddam ya estaba usando los helicópteros en violación de al menos el espíritu contenido en los acuerdos de cese al fuego. “A través de Irak, los militares cuentan con sus helicópteros para combatir a los insurgentes, disparando indiscriminadamente sobre civiles en áreas con actividad de resistencia”, se lee en un secreto briefing de la mañana, preparado para el entonces Secretario de Estado, James Baker II, y fechado el 12 de marzo de 1991. Pero a pesar de todo, Estados Unidos se mantuvo despreocupado y permitió que la sofocación del levantamiento se desarrollara sin ninguna objeción.

Yo mismo experimenté esa traición sobre el terreno hace 12 años en la rica ciudad petrolera de Kirkuk en el norte Irak, tan codiciada entonces como lo es ahora, y en donde recuerdo uno de esos días cuando la Merga Kurdo Pesh , traducida literalmente como “aquellos que enfrentamos la muerte”, se las arregló para mantener sus posiciones y rechazar así a las fuerzas elite de Saddam el 28 de marzo de 1991, para luego sucumbir a medio día después de más de cinco horas de combate.

En los cruces en el extremo norte de la ciudad, miles de personas apresuraban el paso sobre dos caminos que conducían fuera de la misma, al momento que ocasionalmente algún vehículo, camión o bus cargado con algunos pasajeros, aceleraban con rapidez sobre la misma dirección. Nadie podía imaginarse por cuánto tiempo habrían de caminar y casi todos ellos contaban con agua para el camino. Muchas mujeres ataviadas en el tradicional atuendo de los kurdos cargaban a unos niños, mientras otros tantos menores y en fila les seguían al paso con lágrimas en los ojos.

En esa mañana y por solo ciertas horas, el régimen de Saddam solo desplegó un puñado de sus helicópteros, al tiempo que la Merga Kurdo Pesh disparaba hacia el cielo a través de sus armas de fuego antiaéreo capturadas al gobierno. Sin embargo y ya por la tarde, helicópteros de fabricación soviética aparecieron súbitamente por el cielo y repartiéndose sobre el entorno de la ciudad, lanzaron múltiples ataques de explosivos cohetes. Muy rápido, cualquiera a su vista, empezaron a correr.

En ese tiempo, muchos iraquíes, a lo largo de su país, fueron inundados de esperanzas. Muchos Merga Kurdo Pesh, en el norte de Irak en marzo de1991, afirmaron a periodistas occidentales cómo muchas mujeres kurdas habían dado a sus recién nacidos el nombre de “Bush”. Sin embargo, muchos de estos recién nacidos murieron al ser expuestos, semanas después de que sus padres y familia tuvieron que huir. No es de sorprenderse entonces, ahora en el 2003, el que solo un puñado de iraquíes estén rebelándose al compás de las fuerzas lideradas por los Estados Unidos.

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Frank Smyth, quien cubrió la Guerra del Golfo en 1991 para CBS News, The Economist y The Village Voice, está escribiendo un libro acerca del levantamiento contra Saddam Hussein en 1991. Recientemente estuvo en Qatar y Kuwait. El artículo tiene traducción libre.

Waiting for the Anti-Saddam Revolt: Where Is It?

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Why aren’t more Iraqis rising up against President Saddam Hussein? Most likely, many remember what happened the last time they followed U.S. instructions to rise up against him. As the Gulf War was concluding, then-President George H. W. Bush urged Iraqis “to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Two weeks later, so many Iraqis, in fact, heeded those words to fight their own government that the CIA predicted it would fall.

“Saddam Hussein faces his most serious political challenge in more than 20 years in power,” writes the CIA on March 16, 1991, in a secret report in the middle of the monthlong uprisings. “Time is not on his side.”

The revolt began on February 28, 1991, in Iraq’s southernmost city of Basra when a tank commander in a column of Iraqi troops retreating from previously U.S.-occupied Kuwait pulled away to stop in Sa’ad Square, near Basra’s ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters. In a scene that Pentagon planners now dream would repeat itself, the commander got out of his tank and denounced Saddam before he got back in and blew apart a building-size mural of his image.

The fighting spread to Basra’s old city before it reached the neighborhood of Jamoriya, where an Iraqi army private, Mohammad Honan, lived. He said Ba’ath Party paramilitaries were out in the streets.

“We all heard shooting coming from downtown,” Honan told me at the time. “‘It’s a revolution!’ someone shouted. They were demonstrating — shouting, shooting,” added Honan, who joined the anti-Saddam revolt.

Thousands of regular army soldiers, mostly Shiah Arabs, joined the civilians who overran the Ba’ath Party headquarters and emptied the city’s prisons. Within days the intifada, as countless Iraqis called the uprisings at the time, spread north along the Euphrates River engulfing first Nasiriyah and then Samawah before reaching the two holy Shiah cities of Najaf and Karbala, only 50 miles south of Baghdad. (These are the very same battlegrounds of the current conflict).

So far only the Kurdish part of the 1991 uprisings has ever gotten much press, but “the Shiah uprising in the south was far more dangerous to the regime than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” reads one contemporaneous, formerly classified State Department cable. Across Iraq, 14 of 17 cities were at least partly under anti-Saddam rebel control during the four-week-long uprisings, including every Shiah-dominated city in the south and every Kurdish-dominated city in the north.

The ’91 uprising even flared in Baghdad itself. A secret State Department report issued on March 24, 1991, said: “Discontent was not limited to the insurgencies in the north and south . . . three neighborhoods in Baghdad (one of them named ‘Saddam’) had been sealed off by the military for several days due to anti-regime activities.”

But just as the anti-Saddam intifada was getting under way, U.S. and Iraqi military officers were negotiating the cease-fire accord that formally ended the 1991 Gulf War.

After the first draft of the cease-fire accord, which restricted the flight of Iraqi “fixed-wing” aircraft, had already been printed, Saddam’s generals said they wanted to add a new point: that Iraq be allowed to fly helicopter gunships. Saddam’s generals told the American negotiators that Iraq still needed the helicopters for two reasons: to ferry themselves to the ongoing peace talks, and in order to transport Iraq’s own wounded soldiers.

By the time the uprisings were drowned in blood, the world knew the real intentions of Saddam’s regime were to use the helicopters to massacre the rebels in the north after hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians fled Iraq into neighboring Turkey or Iran in early April 1991. But until then, U.S. officials repeatedly told reporters that they did not know much about the fighting inside Iraq.

Turns out the Americans were also lying. Senior U.S. officials knew just 12 days into the monthlong uprisings that Saddam’s regime was already using his helicopters in violation of at least the spirit of the cease-fire accord. “Throughout Iraq, the military is relying on helicopters to battle the insurgents, often firing indiscriminately on civilian targets in areas of resistance activity,” reads a secret morning briefing paper prepared by the State Department for then-Secretary of State James W. Baker II on March 12, 1991. But the U.S. stood idly by and let the suffocation of the anti-Saddam revolt continue.

I experienced that betrayal at ground level. I can recall one of those days exactly 12 years ago in Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern Iraqi city that remains as coveted today as it was back then. Although Kurdish pesh merga, or “those who face death,” guerrillas managed to hold off Saddam?s elite forces for more than five hours on March 28, 1991, by midday Kirkuk was falling.

At a crossroads on the northern side of the city, thousands of people were walking fast on two roads out of town, as an occasional car, truck or bus packed with more people rushed by in the same direction. No one knew for how long they might be walking, and nearly everyone carried water. Many women wrapped in traditional Kurdish cloth were also carrying or leading children, many of whom were crying, in tow.

Fahdil was a thin, balding pesh merga who was an intelligence officer with the Kurdish wing of the Iraqi Communist Party. “Now it is time to leave Kirkuk,” he told a small group of journalists at the crossroads.

For hours that morning Saddam’s regime only deployed a handful of small helicopters, as pesh merga fired captured government anti-aircraft guns into the sky. But by noon the Soviet-made helicopter gunships suddenly appeared and spread out over the city. With multiple pods on each fixed wing, they fired exploding rockets. Soon everyone in sight began to run.

At the time, many Iraqis across the country were filled with hope. Several different pesh merga in northern Iraq in March 1991 told Western journalists about different Kurdish couples that had just given their newborns the first name “Bush.” But many Iraqi babies died of exposure just weeks later after their families went on the run. No wonder so few Iraqis are rising up alongside U.S.-led forces today.

Frank Smyth, who covered the 1991 Gulf War for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice, is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings.

Battle Cry of Freedom: A Review of Taking Liberties

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How many Americans take their rights for granted? Last month an impressive number of antiwar demonstrators converged on San Francisco and New York in chartered buses. Similarly, more than 30 years ago, various protest organizers chartered buses to bring anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators to Washington. After that peace demonstration, the largest of that war, FBI agents secretly asked private banks to open their proprietary records to identify the people who had signed the checks to pay for the buses. “We found out when a bank clerk called to alert us,” writes Aryeh Neier, who was then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “which allowed us to rush into federal court to halt the practice.”

Born in Nazi Germany to Jewish parents, Aryeh Neier is America’s foremost rights advocate. Today, at 65, he runs the Open Society Institute funded by the philanthropist financier George Soros. Neier previously founded and led Human Rights Watch, a once-small organization that has surpassed even Amnesty International as the world’s most authoritative voice on international human rights. Before that, Neier successfully guided the ACLU through some of its most challenging years, including the recovery of its prestige after the revelation that some previous leaders had secretly collaborated with the FBI during and after America’s “Red scare.”

Anyone looking to learn much more about Aryeh Neier himself will only be disappointed by this book. Instead of being a revealing personal memoir, Taking Liberties, as its subtitle suggests, reads more like an intellectual history of the rights movement in the United States and abroad, as told by a perhaps self-serving but no doubt highly effective protagonist.

Neier was executive director of the New York ACLU before he was elected to run the national organization, and the first issue he confronted was brutality by New York City police officers, including the practice of forced confessions. While at the ACLU, he also exposed abuses in prisons and mental-health asylums, and he was a pioneer in challenging the then-illegality of abortion. But his defense of the right of neo-Nazis to march through a Skokie, Ill., neighborhood whose residents included Holocaust survivors was even more controversial. Although many ACLU members resigned, as widely reported at the time, the drop was only short-lived, and the organization rebounded in the 1980s during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office.

By then, Neier had already left the ACLU to join with others, most notably Robert L. Bernstein, then chairman and chief executive officer of Random House, to form the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee “to protest repression against dissenters in the Soviet Union.” Neier writes that “as one who had followed closely accounts of resistance to Soviet repression since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 . . . I welcomed Bob Bernstein’s call.” Soon the founders of Helsinki Watch added America’s Watch, which battled President Ronald Reagan’s administration over the facts of human-rights cases, first in El Salvador and later elsewhere.

Taking Liberties reminds readers that defenders of rights are ironically indebted to the Reagan administration. Officials such as Elliott Abrams (White House director of Middle East policy today) erroneously argued that only communist regimes committed the worst offenses. When the Watch committees proved him and others wrong, together they established the tenet that human rights deserve a central place in U.S. foreign policy.

Along the way, Neier’s sometimes uncompromising style provoked more than a few internecine conflicts. In Taking Liberties, he avoids reopening old wounds over different strategic approaches. But the book does take some swings at, among others, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his allies on the Supreme Court, who Neier maintains have only eroded our rights.

Today, as director of the well-funded Open Society Institute, Neier has even more latitude to defend rights at home and abroad. He chronicles his own lead role in promoting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. He laments the loss of his friend Fred Cuny, who volunteered to go to Chechnya to help provide health and reconstruction services. “Every day,” writes Neier, “[I] rue my part in [his disappearance].”

But there is one area that this otherwise intrepid activist steps over. Watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch under Neier’s leadership sharply criticized U.S. military aid to many human-rights-abusing countries, but after the Cold War, Human Rights Watch, still under Neier, began to lobby for international military intervention to stop similar abuses by other non-U.S.-backed parties and regimes. Unfortunately, he papers over what he fails to mention was a watershed dispute among human-rights advocates over whether to back U.S. intervention in Somalia. (The last Bush administration began the intervention that the Clinton administration continued.) Aryeh Neier was among those hoping to use the African Horn intervention as a springboard to stopping both alleged and many already proven acts of genocide and other crimes throughout the 1990s in Bosnia and later in Rwanda and Kosovo.

Neier deserves credit for his lead role in helping establish the notion that the same standards that apply to international war crimes also apply to civil conflicts. In the early 1980s, he began promoting accountability for disappearances and other political crimes in Argentina. Two decades later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s ex-president Slobodan Milosevic was indicted at the Hague for humanitarian crimes he had allegedly ordered in his own nation’s southern province of Kosovo.

Taking Liberties tells us more about where we came from than where we are going. But it is a timely story told by one American who never took any right anywhere for granted. *

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has collaborated with many human-rights organizations. He is writing a book about the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Iraq: Telling the Left from the Right

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How many Americans who oppose the looming war know the left from the right when it comes to Iraq? The only two players on the field are not George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. For inside and outside the borders of Iraq there is a political opposition to Saddam — and while some of those opponents are now aligned with the White House, others remain on the political left.

But don’t expect to read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in the mainstream or even the “alternative” press.

In past U.S. foreign-policy conflicts, American activists frequently expressed their solidarity with and support of embattled leftists, whether in Chile, Nicaragua or El Salvador. But in this standoff with Iraq, American leftists seem woefully ignorant of their Iraqi counterparts and, consequently, of their views on the present conflict. And for these Iraqi leftists the current crisis transcends the prevailing American leftist view, which reduces the matter simply to either war or peace.

Today, Iraqi leftists play an important oppositional role against Saddam. Foremost among them is the Iraqi Communist Party, which at one time was that country’s biggest and broadest leftist mass movement, touching the lives of literally millions. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups.

The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement, cutting across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shias and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of Communists and other leftists have perished in Saddam’s gulags and are still actively targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi CP today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq that experts deem to be of significant scale and political potential.

That network provides some of the best and most detailed reporting on armed resistance and government repression within Iraq. Indeed, human-rights activists, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, rely heavily on the detailed reporting that comes out of Iraq via this network. “[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km southeast of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party Web site in an article about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities . . . unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.” The report concludes that 400 to 600 people died in this massacre. “The massacre culminated with security men firing their handguns at the [h]eads of their victims,” says the report. “The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.”

Today, Iraqi Communists, and most Iraqi leftists, firmly oppose the Bush administration’s war plans — but not necessarily war itself. Unlike many of their American counterparts, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative other than a vague call for “peace.” Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi leftists want the international community to back an Iraqi-led military uprising against Saddam.

Short of that, Iraqi leftists would most likely support a multilateral military intervention that would not only overthrow Saddam but also hand him over to an international tribunal that would try him on charges of crimes against humanity.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions routinely ignored by most American leftists, including vigorous U.N. human-rights monitoring inside Iraq. Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party and other Iraqi leftist groups refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally dumped the plan, backed by the Pentagon alone, to restore exiled former supporters of the Kingdom of Iraq, which prevailed for [37] years, to power as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party and Shi’a and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections inside a post-Saddam Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. publication, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with, so far, few if any so-called American progressives on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. The Iraqi CP blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraqi Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads an Iraqi CP declaration, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Any U.S. leftist who even remotely thinks that Saddam’s regime is — beside its heavy-handedness — some sort of socialist alternative had better think again. No matter how much Saddam relies on the Stalinist model for his security services, the Iraqi dictator has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a Communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first president of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraqi Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist principles, Saddam’s ruling Ba’athist ideology unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build a greater nation based on ethnicity. [The name of h]is Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes the one in every five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover, the Ba’athists’ Pan-Arab message is shaped mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their form of Arab nationalism has little appeal for Arab Muslims of the Shia faith, who constitute three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely replaced Iraq’s old rulers, who were Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad, with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, a University of London scholar and former Iraqi Communist Party newspaper editor, in a recent issue of the U.S. monthly The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq, in the north, enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias, in the south, still actively resist rule from Baghdad. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials routinely bring visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998. Undoubtedly true. But missing from that newsletter is that in that same year Saddam’s regime interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves in that same city, according to Iraqi Communist sources.

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is quite another. In the wake of the Gulf War, and after then-President Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up, mass armed rebellion swept Iraq in the spring of 1991. More than a dozen major cities fell into the hands of the Iraqi rebels. Yet, as American forces stood by with arms crossed, Saddam’s troops and attack helicopters drowned the rebellion in blood, taking at least 100,000 lives. The anti-Saddam opposition was openly and tragically betrayed by Washington.

American leftists and peace activists must not now repeat the same sin. Only a quintessentially American arrogance would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi socialists and leftists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq. And as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans, especially peace activists, should take the trouble to do the same.

Frank Smyth is finishing a book on the 1991 Iraqi uprisings, which he reported on for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice.

Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?

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“Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?” by Frank, Guerrilla News Network, January 13, 2003.

Not that long ago, when American progressives spoke about being in solidarity with the people of a foreign nation they were supporting leftist national liberation movements. Back in the 1980s, for instance, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador was allied with that Central American country’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front which included the El Salvador Communist Party. Not anymore, at least not when it comes to Iraq. How many anti-war activists like Sean Penn who recently visited Baghdad know their left from their right in Iraq?

Today Iraqi leftists still play roles inside and outside Iraq. But don’t expect to either read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in either the mainstream or even the so-called “alternative” press. After all, who knew that the most detailed reporting available anywhere about ongoing specific humanitarian crimes by Saddam’s regime is found at none other than the Iraqi Communist Party website, Iraqcp.org?

“[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km south east of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party website about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities…unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.

“The detainees, who were numbered in their hundreds, were then held at the detention centre of the Security Directorate of Basra governorate, in Al-Ashar district. They were subjected to barbaric torture over many days,” Iraqcp.org goes on. “Family members of security men who had been killed in the heroic revolt were brought to the scene, each was handed a machine gun, and they were told to avenge their dead by firing at the youths and men lined up before them. The massacre culminated with security men firing their hand guns at the [h]eads of their victims. The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.

“Our party sources have been able to compile the names of some of these victims (a list is attached to this statement). The authorities, as part of the policy of collective punishment, demolished their houses, and detained their families, including women and children. The fate of these innocent detainees is still unknown. Reliable sources in Basra have estimated the total number of victims of the campaign of mass executions, which followed the suppression of the popular revolt, to range from 400 to 600 people.”

The Iraqi Communist Party was once by far that oil-rich country’s broadest leftist movement. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups. The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement to cut across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shi’as and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of cadre have since perished in Saddam’s gulags, the Iraqi Communist Party today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq, despite still being targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime. Iraqcp.org reports not only ongoing human rights abuses, but ongoing armed civil resistance to the regime.

But how many American anti-war activists like Sean Penn have heard of it? Last month the Oscar-nominated actor said he was putting his conscience first when he visited Baghdad. Yet the 42-year-old star of many films including his latest one, “I Am Sam,” spoke in Baghdad like he knew he was on weak ground. “I’m afraid of saying something that might hurt somebody, and then find out I was wrong in the first place,” he told The New York Times. Sean Penn said he did not want to end up being outcast like Jane Fonda was after her 1972 trip to the communist North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi during the Vietnam war, or like his later father, Leo Penn, was during Washington’s “Red Scare” witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

It was unwittingly ironic for the younger Penn to bring up his father in the capital of Saddam’s Iraq. Leo Penn performed in plays like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men before migrating to the film industry. But Paramount studios refused to renew his contract in 1945 over his trade union activities, and continued to blacklist him afer he supported the Hollywood 10, or the first group of fellow actors and others who were jailed for refusing to answer questions about their alleged communist ties before Congress. (Leo Penn’s career suffered, too, until the advent of television where he became an Emmy-winning director of prime time dramas like the New York City detective series, “Kojak.”)

Today the Iraqi Communist Party firmly opposes the Bush administration’s war plans. “No to imperialism! No to war!” reads Iraqcp.org. Many of the administration’s so-called justifications for invading Iraq are indeed bogus — not least of all the claim that Saddam’s regime had anything to do with 9/11. Moreover, any unilateral military action against Iraq, especially at this time of extremely heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions, is certain to inflame anti-American sentiments throughout both the Arab and the Muslim worlds, only driving more recruits into Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network. In addition, the Bush administration has greatly exaggerated the current strategic threat posed by Saddam’s regime to the United States along with its allies led by Israel.

But that hardly makes the Iraqi despot any more likeable now than he ever was like back during the 1980s when Saddam was a secret ally (using chemical gas) of the U.S. administration led by President Ronald Reagan. Sean Penn at least once sagely called Saddam a “tyrant” guilty of “criminal viciousness” in a paid ad on a full page last fall of The Washington Post. Similarly, the noted anti-war critic, Noam Chomsky, once last summer on “Z-net” said about Saddam, “I think he is as evil as they come.” But too many other anti-war activists only downplay any criticism whatsoever against Saddam or his regime. Moreover, unlike most American leftists, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative. Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi communists, and others want the international community to back a broad military front against his regime.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions only ignored by most American leftists like U.N. human rights monitoring inside Iraq. And instead of a unilateral American invasion, many independent Iraqi groups support a multilateral one leading to not only Saddam’s overthrow but also him and others eventually facing humanitarian charges in an international tribunal. Nobody from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, does a better job, in fact, than the Iraqi Communist Party in documenting ongoing abuses by Saddam’s regime.

“Under [the] direct supervision of Qusay, the younger son of the dictator Saddam Hussein…15 political prisoners were executed, Nazi-style, in a poison gas chamber on 10 August 2001,” reads Iraqcp.org, relying in no small way on the Communist party’s underground cadre and sources inside Iraq. “The victims were placed inside a specially designed chamber and then a poisonous gas was released through vents. They were dead within 27 seconds. Their bodies were left there for one hour until the gas was extracted through a special vent.

“The Gas Chamber,” the Iraqcp.org report goes on, “and its operation began after approval by Qusay. It seems that this barbaric method was designed to facilitate mass physical liquidation of prisoners and detainees in a shorter time and with less effort. The dictatorial regime is continuing its notorious ‘Prison Cleanup’ campaign which has so far claimed the lives of more than 3000 prisoners and detainees.”

Last year, President Saddam Hussein emptied his prisons including his largest one, Abu Ghraib, right after he orchestrated an allegedly unanimous referendum on his rule. The listener-supported Pacifica Network’s “Democracy Now!” radio show in many large U.S. cities aired one Iraqi source after another including officials claiming it was a legitimate reflection of Saddam’s popularity without even suggesting that there might be any other Iraqi view; the Iraqi Communist Party called the referendum a farce, adding that “our people are too familiar with the deceit and manipulations practiced by the regime.” Countless political prisoners remain missing, according to not only the Iraqi Communist Party but also to other non-U.S.-backed Iraqi groups like the Shi’a-run al-Khoei Foundation based in London.

When it comes to internal security measures, Saddam copies a late communist, ironically, whom he admires, the former Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. Saddam’s independent biographer, the Palestinian author Said K. Aburish, wrote: “he has modeled himself after and adopted the ways of Joseph Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts.” But no matter how much he borrows from Stalin, Saddam has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

“I used to have a Communist friend at school,” Saddam told his own authorized biographer, the [Lebanese] writer Faoud Matar. “He’s dead now, God rest his soul. He spent most of his time reading communiques and declarations to us, his schoolmates. All we did was make fun of him,” added Saddam in the 1990 edition of his approved biography published in London. “[W]e knew his theories came from abroad; they had been introduced by a foreigner, not an Arab.” At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first President of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraq Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist ideology, Ba’athism unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build an ethnic-based greater nation. The [name of the] Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes every one in five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover the Ba’athists’ pan-Arab message is made mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their Sunni-based Arab nationalism also has little appeal with Arab Muslims of the Shi’a faith who comprise three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely displaced Iraq’s old rulers of Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, the University of London scholar and former Iraqi communist party newspaper editor, in the current issue of the Madison, Wisconsin-based monthly, The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq in the north enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias in the south still resist. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials have recently brought visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998; the same year Saddam’s regime there interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves, according to Iraqcp.org.

Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally just dumped the Pentagon-alone-backed plan to restore former supporters of the [3]7-year-reigning Kingdom of Iraq to power back from exile in London as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party, Shia and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections after Saddam inside Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. press, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with so far few if any so-called American “progressives” on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. Iraqcp.org blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraq Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from newly developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads Iraqcp.org, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is another. In Baghdad, Sean Penn said, “I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels.” Hopefully he and other antiwar Americans will take his own advice and read unconventional channels like Iraqcp.org. Only a quintessentially American sense of chauvinism would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi Marxists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq, and, as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans should too of course including anti-war activists.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who is writing a book at the 1991 Iraqi uprisings. He has covered leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, Iraq and Rwanda. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.”