On the ninth anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, it seems that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has moved on to killing the dead, writes Felicity Arbuthnot* In November 2010, Iraq's former foreign minister and deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, then under the shadow of execution, wrote to his lawyer requesting that he be buried in Jordan and be returned to his homeland "after Iraq is liberated." He feared his body would be desecrated or exhumed by Iraq's puppet government. Respect for anyone, let alone the dead, has not been an attribute that has shone from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's US shoe-in client government. In May 2006, Al-Arabiya TV broadcast a videotape it said showed the remains of a previous Iraqi prime minister (1991-1993), Mohamed Hamza Al-Zubaydi, being kicked and his head repeatedly stamped on by a group of men. Taken into custody by US forces on 21 April 2003, his death from a "heart attack" in an American military hospital was announced on 5 December 2005, although he had died three days earlier on 2 December. He was 67 years old. Iraq's litany of pogroms since the invasion and overthrow of former president Saddam Hussein in 2003, followed by the US occupation and the rule of the woeful "Governing Council" and then Al-Maliki's two predecessors, has equaled any that have taken place in the world up till now. "Pogrom" is not a word to be used lightly, with a pogrom being characterised by killings, the destruction of homes, properties, businesses and religious centres, along with arbitrary arrests and the establishment of concentration camps. After the destruction in 2006 of the golden dome of the Askari Mosque and Shrine in Samara, where the two imams Ali Al-Hadi and his son Hassan Al-Askari are believed to be entombed, mosques belonging to both Sunni and Shia Muslims, together with Christian churches and Yazidi and other minority temples and shrines, have been reduced to ashes in Iraq. The US-installed regime in Iraq has thus given rise to a very democratic series of pogroms, with no group or ethnicity excluded. Since the 2003 invasion, the spread of terrorism, whether for religious reasons or for ransom money, to settle scores or for other reasons, has been almost unfathomable, this taking place in a country where people have co-existed for countless generations. Overnight, Iraq changed from a land where the streets of towns and cities could be walked in alone safely late at night to a country which awoke to find whole families in morgues and bearing wounds indicating unimaginable torture. It awoke to find beheaded bodies chucked on rubbish dumps, and beheaded fathers and sons dumped on door steps or in front gardens. Iraq also awoke to kidnappings, extortion, the destruction of homes, premises, and businesses, or their takeover by force. The US, in the guise of bringing freedom, in fact created concentration camps at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, and there are an alleged 11,000 further gulags that have as yet not been fully unaccounted for. In the New Iraq, the violence goes beyond the grave. On March 29, Al-Maliki hosted the first Arab Summit meeting to take place in Baghdad for 20 years, spending a billion US dollars on it, replacing US-destroyed palm trees and providing a banquet featuring gold-wrapped dates. This took place as ordinary Iraqis struggled with a minimal electricity supply and a lack of clean water and basic services. Baghdad residents had their mobile phones disconnected for a week, and the security attending the summit meeting ensured that they were either stuck in traffic for hours, or were unable to get to work at all (if they had any), being captives in their "liberated" city. The day before this extravaganza took place, on Al-Maliki's instructions an official was dispatched to the Salahuddin governorate, where Saddam Hussein was born in the village of Al-Awja and where he was taken for burial after his US-backed lynching and the shocking subsequent treatment of his body. His two sons, gunned down by US troops in Mosul in July 2003, and his grandson are also buried there. Al-Maliki's envoy delivered an order to the head of Saddam's Al-Bu Nasir clan, Hassan Al-Nada, that the tomb be closed and the remains of the former president be transferred elsewhere. "To order the closure of the tomb was strange, especially since it also houses the bodies of Abdel-Rahman Arif and Abdel-Karim Kassem," commented Al-Nada. Arif, a passionate pan-Arabist, was president of Iraq from 1966 to 1968. A career soldier, he had supported the overthrow of the British-imposed monarchy in 1958. As president of Iraq, he sent troops to fight against Israel in the Six Day War in 1967. He died in exile in Amman, Jordan, in 2007, having left Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion. Kassem led the July 1958 Revolution in Iraq and became the first post-Revolution prime minister (1958- 1963). He closed the open-door policy that had facilitated the growth of monopolies in Iraq, these "plundering the country's oil wealth and tying Iraq into imperialist alliances." Iraq's history is now repeating itself, and "imperialist ties" and "plundering" are on the increase. Iraq is now ranked the third most corrupt country in the world. According to the website Ekurd.net, Al-Maliki was among the Iraqi politicians who returned to the country on US tanks, expecting to become billionaires within ten years. Meanwhile, most Iraqis deal with daily deprivation that makes even the grinding misery of the 1990s embargo look easy by comparison. Al-Maliki, in spite of being a Shia, indeed also being secretary-general of the Islamic Daawa Party and grandson of a Shia cleric, has embraced the US campaign in his country from the start, being interested in lining his own pockets and not respecting even the dead. "They ordered the bodies dug up, the tombs destroyed, and the dead men dragged out of their graves", wrote Thomas Asbridge in his authoritative history of the European Crusades. He was writing of events in 1098 CE. Iraq has not been taken back a hundred years by the invasion, a statement repeated by Iraqis, but by nearly a thousand, or so it seems. After Iraq fell to US troops, chillingly symbolised by the covering of the face of the statue of Saddam Hussein by a US flag on 9 April 2003, and then by its public toppling, Al-Maliki became deputy leader of the country's Debaathification Commission, which aimed to purge all former Baath Party members, in other words, supporters of pan-Arabism, from government employment. The tomb of the co-founder of pan-Arabism, the philosopher and sociologist Michel Aflaq (1910-1989), was also erased by US bulldozers. In 1991, after the massacre of Iraqi troops on the Basra Road following the US invasion of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, US General Norman Schwarzkopf said that there was "no one left to kill". With the ninth anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq upon us, followed by the destruction of the country, it seems that Al-Maliki has now outdone even Schwarzkopf. He has moved on to attacking the dead. This year's anniversary of the invasion fell on Easter weekend. Now more than ever, Iraqis and Iraq, the country where Abraham, the father of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, was born at Ur in the country's south, are also in need of a resurrection. * The writer was researcher for two award- winning documentaries on Iraq, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq , and Returns , the latter for the Irish broadcaster RTE.
