bet · GT01UU15 · 2006-03-16 00:00:00 — It is very demanding even for outsiders to deal with it. They would like to go through and they would like to deal with one government. Possibly they would like to deal with one politician. But the future of will be very complicated and demanding also to understand for outsiders. As I said it will also combine an idea of self-rule and shared rule for the communities involved. What is also important in what is emerging is that also has to deal with shared sovereignty. If you are centralist and think along those lines you might find this difficult, for example that the government of might sign, as they did recently, a contract with a Norwegian oil company. That is because they share some of that sovereignty over the national resources. If you want to help you also have to understand that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about what is emerging, and shared sovereignty is one of those ideas. It is also important that what we have seen in , despite all of its difficulties, is the fact that the country has to deal with its diversity. It has to accept that it is a very diverse country, maybe a very deeply divided country as well. For that you need a very specific political system. But also the notion of voluntary union is very important as far as the Kurds are concerned. They have stressed very much that if we want them to be part of we have to decide that they are part of that political arrangement and also that they will have their own distinct identities. It will also be important for Shiites to have their own Shiite identities. People might criticize this. will be very decentralized with a non-centralized political system based on the idea of a voluntary union combined with a specific formula for non-centralization rather than decentralization. From that perspective a future will be very complicated. This is what Iraqi groups are involved in. They are trying to patch together a piece of land with a constitution and institutions. They have to work together to finish the job, but they will also have to protect it together. Otherwise the work will not be finished and it will be quite demanding for them to stick to it. I would like to finish by one quote: "If I am permitted to dream, will develop into the of the Middle East." That is the dream of one of those who is now working in . He is the Chairman of the . He concludes with the idea that there is a great potential in in terms of population, in terms of national resources, in terms of its strategic location. There is a lot of potential in . But we need a functioning political system to materialize and realize that potential. : Thank you very much, , for a very interesting lecture. Now we have come to our fourth speaker, Yahia , who does not speak Swedish. But he speaks Czech as a Czech citizen. I extend a warm welcome. You usually work at , . The floor is yours. Yahia : I am the last, and I will try to be brief because everybody is very tired. Unfortunately the tenor of my presentation will be less optimistic than that of my predecessors. And it is not my fault! The Swedish Parliament has asked me to speak about security. If they had asked me to talk about economics maybe I would have been a bit more optimistic. The security situation in could be summed up in the graph you can see behind me, depicting the number of average daily attacks since the war. No matter what and his strategy for or other politicians would like you to believe, this graph speaks for itself. It is based on Pentagon data. It says that violence in is on the increase. It is not only political violence, and it is not only insurgent violence. It is all forms of violence - criminal, tribal and unfortunately also ethnic and sectarian. I went to a neighbourhood in called Amiriyah this October. I spoke to friends and relatives who live there. They depict a picture of citizens terrified from dangers coming from every direction. You could be killed as a result of a counterinsurgency raid by the US forces in crossfire. You could be killed by mysterious militias dressed as Iraqi special forces raiding houses, taking young people in the middle of the night to be found later shot and tied up. You could be killed by insurgents, terrorists close to , if you dare speak against or in favour of the regime. The worst of all is that people in these neighbourhoods, like Amiriyah, don't know who is who, apart from the Americans who are clearly separate and different from the others. All the other factions look the same. They can't tell who are Iraqi special forces units, who is and who are insurgents. For them life is back in a situation of fear, where people don't dare say what they think. Of course, Amiriyah is a special case. Many people would say that violence like what is seen in Amiriyah is limited to certain pockets. Indeed it is limited to three or four provinces in where about half of the population lives. That is just the political violence. If you go to other regions which are considered quiet, like in the south or the province you see other kinds of violence. not so political, maybe political changed with criminal. But there are other forms of violence, and the amount of criminal violence in these neighbourhoods is the same. The situation in is very dire. I will briefly go through a very strict security aspect of this situation, speaking about the various combatants, troops or groups with weapons in their hands. Then I will talk about the political elements of the violence in . Then I will speak briefly about what could be done and then speak about policies. Of course, the most visible part of the violence in is al-Qaeda in or al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia led by the Jordanian militant . This is a small group. By all estimates it could be anything from several hundred to at most 2 000-3 000 people. This group, or al-Qaeda, has operatives from and other places playing a critical role in it. But it has also a large number of Iraqi supporters. That was best demonstrated in the recent atrocities in , where they have managed to recruite a suicide cell comprised mostly of Iraqis to conduct their atrocities. They are clearly supported by some of 's henchmen, who have absolutely no stake in the future of and who would like to visit the same kind of chaos on that al-Qaeda is working towards. It is not true that al-Qaeda in needs financial support or weapons from outside. This is all abundantly available in . Some of it was stashed away by during his last days in power. Some of it was left unattended by Coalition forces through criminal negligence. I spoke to British officers operating in recently who say that the ammunition depots from the time of the war along the border of are still being raided by people who escavate artillery shells and sell them on the black market. These artillery shells comprise the weapons of choice for terrorists and insurgents. These artillery shells are what powers most of the car bombs and suicide attacks. This is happening under the noses of the Coalition forces. For al-Qaeda is not a goal in itself. Al-Qaeda does not want to liberate from US occupation. Al-Qaeda does not even want to create an Islamic republic in , an Islamic regime. In this respect they have learned the lessons from . A Taliban regime will provide an easy target and will prove unsustainable in the long term. What they are going for in is chaos. Their main declared strategy in is trying to forment sectarian strifes, specifically 'ah versus violence. Their rhetoric is virulently anti-Shi'ah. They call all Shiites heathens and infidels, and they say it is the duty and right of to kill them. They have attacked Shiites in hospitals, at funerals, in schools and when excercising their religious rights. This kind of spectacular, visual violence is aimed to provoke. The main goal of this violence is to provoke a reaction. By formenting civil war al-Qaeda hopes to create the ideal conditions for it to operate in . If you have civil war you have the situation of chaos, like the one we have in Amiriyah, where it is difficult to say who is who. Al-Qaeda can operate in the atmosphere of anonymity that is necessary for its work. In that situation, if descends into a chaos of civil war, then al-Qaeda will be able to use it as a base of operation. This is why the recent attacks in are so dangerous. They show that maybe al-Qaeda is succeeding in that goal. Unfortunately al-Qaeda's tactics seem to be working. There is evidence of increasing tit for tat sectarian attacks in . In response to al-Qaeda atrocities there have been retaliations, whether organized or disorganized, by some 'ah militias, both by the , the SCIRI, the or the Internal Ministry forces. There is evidence provided in reports by the US Government and the UN of ethnic cleansing in different pockets. In various neighbourhoods in , like Karradah or Amiriyah, which I spoke of, there is information of people, either 'ah minorities or minorities, moving out, creating ethnically homogeneous regions. The streets of , which represents a microcosm of all the communities living in , are rife with rumours about gruesome sectarian attacks by this or the other group, news about disapperances and the sort of war mongering that is very scary. In my latest trip to in October it was the first time in my there, in my life in that country, that everyone I spoke to was very keen to find out whether I was a 'ah or a . But al-Qaeda is not all of the insurgency. Indeed, al-Qaeda, if you like, is the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of the insurgents are islamist nationalist insurgents. According to statistics of attacks - I will show you another graph - we can see the following. Again, these are the number of attacks by target. The dark columns show attacks on the Coalition forces. The light columns show attacks on the Iraqi civilians. The darker bit of the graph shows attacks on Coalition forces, and the top of the graph shows attacks on Iraqi civilians and Iraqi military forces. Al-Qaeda specializes almost exclusively on attacking Iraqi targets. You see that the bulk of attacks are still conducted by what one could call national insurgents. Who are these groups? These are very splintered groups. There is no organizational structure. There is no political or even military organizational structure for these groups. They operate in small cells built usually around ex-military officers, some of them from the special forces. They usually take spiritual guidance from their local imam. Therefore groups like have some influence over these insurgents, but there is definitely no chain of command. 80 per cent of the attacks within the insurgency are on Coalition forces. However, due to the different levels of protection, 80 per cent of the causalties are Iraqi civilians. These groups, as you can see, the attacks by this part of the insurgency, have been on the increase. If the average number of daily attacks in 2003 was about 20 attacks a day, it went up to 50 attacks a day in 2004. And the average this year has been, so far, 100 attacks a day. It is very important to make a distinction. In the language you hear from the they distinguish this part of the insurgency from al-Qaeda. They call them Ba'athist insurgents. That is a very important fallacy. In many cases these are ex-military people who are very resentful of , of the wars he raged. As one of the previous speakers mentioned, the Iraqi military and the community has suffered a lot from 's repression as well. For many Iraqi ex-military this is the first real fight they have. This is the first war they have really believed in. Before, the wars against and were fools' errands. They didn't believe in those wars. This is the first time they are fighting an enemy they feel they have the right to fight as an enemy invading their lands. It is very important not to reduce that part of the insurgency to either Ba'athists being sore about losing power, or Sunnis sore about losing interest, although that is also present, of course, in the motivational scheme of that insurgency. A lot of it is also nationalist and Islamist. A good example in this case is, of course, . As a previous speaker mentioned, a lot of military came from . was the heartland of the resurgence of in . When the Iraqi army was dissolved, these people with military skills went back to these mosques. This is how in many ways the national insurgency was born. Although this group is distinct from al-Qaeda and other forms of violence happening in , this distinction is not clear cut. There is no Chinese wall between these groups. They have worked in the past. In many ways al-Qaeda and the terrorists have benefited from the national insurgency. They have used the atmospere of chaos and lawlessness that the insurgency has created. They have, if you like, latched themselves on to that insurgency. In some cases these groups have worked together, both the al-Qaeda, the criminals and the nationalists. But in recent months, and also over the last year, there has been an increasing chasm between the al-Qaeda and the nationalist insurgents. That is because the nationalist insurgents have realized that al-Qaeda is leading to chaos and because they refuse the virulent rhetoric and the virulent sectarian rhetoric that comes from al-Qaeda. The most recent example is the al-Qaeda assassination of the main imam in , who is considered a very senior figure in the national insurgency. The next force that is killing Iraqis is the Coalition forces. There are about 150 000 of them. There are still, unfortunately, no official figures of Iraqi civilian casualties. The numbers vary widely. The most realistic number varies between 30 000 and 70 000 civilians killed by Coalition forces in the last three years. Iraqis are killed both in terms of collateral damage, but also due to use of heavy military equipment like half tone bombs and artillery, as we heard recently phosphorus ammunition, in areas where it is bound to hit some civilians. If you drop a huge bomb in the middle of the you must know that some civilians are going to get hit. One could call it collateral damage. I am sure the Military Command tries to avoid civilian casualties, but clearly not enough is being done to prevent Iraqis from suffering from these attacks. The result is that the Coalition forces are highly mistrusted in . Previous speakers mentioned a recent poll conducted on behalf of the BBC by the . According to this poll the Coalition forces are the least trusted entity in . They are even behind, in terms of trust, Iraqi politicians, who are very mistrusted. About 45 per cent of Iraqis wanted the immediate withdrawal of Coalition forces. The withdrawal of Coalition forces comes only second to the improvement of the security situation in terms of the hierarchy of what Iraqis want. It comes ahead of reconstruction or even restoration of electricity. There was another poll conducted recently by the British . It found that about 45 to 65 per cent of Iraqis, depending on province, support attacks on Coalition forces. 67 per cent of the respondents in that poll felt less secure because of the presence of Coalition forces. Only 1 per cent felt that the Coalition forces are doing something to improve the security situation in the country. Of course, these positions vary from one part of to the other. But that is also a problem. Since the cease-fire with the , increasingly the bulk of the operations of Coalition forces has been concentrated in and mixed areas. When they operate in these areas alongside Iraqi military units and paramilitary structures comprised mainly of 'ah and Kurdish militias, this, of course, emphasizes the feeling of alienation, the feeling among the community that it is being targeted and that the Americans are siding, if you like, with the other groups in and the civil war that is emerging in the country. This, of course, has benefited and served the main goal of al-Qaeda in formenting civil strife. There are, on average, 20 000 Iraqi detainees any day in Coalition custody. The vast majority of them come from the western . This number has risen from an average of 10 000 last year. There have been great efforts done by various groups to release these detainees, but the numbers continue to be high. If we take into account that the highest estimate of the number of insurgents is 20 000 this means that inevitably the vast majority of those in prison are innocent or, what is worse, are political prisoners. There are about 200 000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi armed forces. There has been a great progress in this respect. Iraqis love their new army and . The Iraqi has the highest number in trust among Iraqis. They are as highly trusted among Iraqis as religious leaders. Iraqis take great pride in their new army. This is one area where there has been a significant progress. But there are also problems. Especially over the last year there has been an explosion in the paramilitary units and special forces units attached to the . Now they number about 10 000. These troups have been highly praised by the Coalition for being very effective and motivated, but they have been quite problematic. They have been engaged in human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings, torture and executions. I am sure you have heard about the recent discovery of dungeons operated by these troups in the Jadoroua district. Just last weekend Coalition forces acting upon a tip by the found and raided another jail where there have been instances of torture and abuse of detainees. It will be great to hear from the Minister about the Ministry's efforts to deal with this issue. The problem with the well documented human rights violations by these emerging paramilitary forces is that they have a sectarian nature. These paramilitary forces are comprised mostly from militias, particularly militias of the SCIRI, , the and militia which has a sectarian nature. Most of the victims have tended to be from areas and mixed areas. This brings us to the next issue which is related to this; the militias and the party militias, the proliferation of militias. What is most dangerous about that is the fact that these paramilitary units of the blur the border between party militias and regular armed forces. This is in many ways one of the most significant threats to the future of . When it is no longer clear who is wielding legitimate force and who is acting on behalf of a sect, a political party or a religious group the political system, the process of institution , collapses. There has been a change in policy on this matter over the last three years. At first the Americans came pursuing a very robust approach, a zero tolerance approach, to militias. They came with grand plans for demobilization and reintegration of militias. The first obstacle they stumbled upon was the Pesh . The Kurdish politicians have made it very clear that they will never continue the dissolution of the Pesh militias. They believe that the Pesh militias are a guarantee that the Kurds will never be subjected to the kind of atrocities that visited upon them in the past. The needed the support of the Kurdish Pesh in the war and in the immediate aftermath of the war, especially considering that they couldn't field troups in the north of the country because of 's position. But once you make an exception for one militia group the whole system starts to collapse. At the end, today, almost every political party in has its own militia. These militias are almost like an insurance policy. They participate in the political process, the elections, campaigning and so on, but in case it doesn't work they have their militias to act for them. We have seen that happening over and over again, both with the , al-Sadr, the SCIRI brigade and with smaller militias like Hizballah's militia in . This, of course, is part of the emerging situation of civil war. The citizens don't know anymore who represents legitimate violence in and who is a criminal. Apart from the violent factions involved in civil strife there is a political dimension. That political dimension has been pursued throughout the history of . As many mentioned before, has pursued sectarian and ethnic policies. He has visited genocide upon the Kurds. He has done untold atrocities upon the 'ah, deported hundreds of thousands under the pretext of Iranian dissent, murdered their religious leaders. Throughout 's history the Iraqi communities have been aware of the fact that political leaders for political ends will try to forment sectarian strife. If you like, the sectarian tensions have always remained in that political sphere, and were rarely allowed to trickle down to society level. What we, unfortunately, are seeing now, and is the result of three years of chaos and insecurity and three years of a political system that is built around sectarian identity, is that these issues are beginning to trickle down to the street level, to the average person. You hear that in the language, and we hear that in this room. Despite the fact that many felt that led a tyrannical regime and that he didn't really have any allegiance to anyone, whether it was Arabs or Sunnis, but rather only to himself, many people still find it comfortable to say that Sunnis dominated and in a way hold the Sunnis responsible for what did. This is a very convenient framework as it also exonerates the rest. It then means that none of the Shiites or the Kurds who have lived in over the last 30 to 40 years have any responsibility for what did. It is also a very convenient framework because it offers a claim to power. It says: "I am as a 'ah a representative of the victims of , and I have a claim to power." Ironically, of course, the system works also the other way around. When the was intent to address the balance that was created by the balk of the last elections, suddenly identity also became a claim to power. People suddenly discovered that they were Sunnis! The most tragic example of that is, of course, , who was one of the most secular, liberal Iraqi politicians who should be above that and who has suddenly decided that he is a , because that was the only way he could become vice president. Tragically for him he didn't even get that position, and he destroyed a long political career by this move. This sectarian dynamic, which is in part artificial, in part of course a reflection of a bitter past, has found its crystallization in the constitution that was passed on . This is a constitution which will make it very difficult to build a coherent Iraqi state. It is a club, a voluntary union, of diverse groups. This may be applicable or may be practicable for one of the groups that live in , particularly the Kurds, but if it is applied throughout the country and if it is applied to the Shiites and the Sunnis it will undoubtedly lead to the break-up of the country. There is a reason why stayed together over the last 80 years. We cannot say that was kept together for the last 80 years by blood and fire. It is impossible to sustain violence at this level for so long. There are objective reasons why stayed together. There is a need to share water resources. There is a need to share oil resources. There is an Iraqi identity. The same BBC poll that I mentioned before showed that 70 per cent of Iraqis believe that should be a unified central state. Only about 20 per cent supported the form of federalism proposed in the constitution. There was an Iraqi identity. It was not a reflection of the identity, and it was not . It was a mixture of many issues. It was a reflection of the Mosaic, of the Iraqi, reality. There are great Iraqis that everyone celebrate, poets, writers and leaders. Split-up, break-up, is not a necessary option. This is not the necessary, logical, conclusion that should go to. Moreover, a break-up of will have dire consequences.