Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il settarismo, in Iraq, lo hanno portato i colonialisti

Azmi Bishara e uno studioso, attivista, e politico Liberale
Palestinese, di orientamento
Liberale, Marxista e anti-religioso.
E´cittadino Israeliano, e deputato nel parlamento. e stato piu volte
arrestato, e minacciato di arresto,
per aver chiesto uguali diritti agli Arabi, e sostenuto la resistenza
in Libano.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/821/op57.htm
A selective memory
Sectarianism, writes Azmi Bishara, is hardly a new weapon in the
colonialist arsenal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Brooks, one of the most ardent advocates of the war against Iraq,
has turned into a history buff. In a recent column in The New York
Times (2 November 2006) he argues that if American policies in Iraq
fail, Iraq will not hold together as a state. Iraq just has too many
old and endemic demons. He has at hand a recently republished essay
(originally appeared in 2004) by his currently favourite historian,
Elie Kadourie, whom he proudly introduces as "an Iraqi Jew who was born
and grew up in Baghdad", and he advises decision-makers in Washington
to read it before taking any radical actions on Iraq.
Kadourie, and the author of the essay's preface, David Percy, happen to
believe that Arab and Islamic culture are inimical to democracy. But it
is pointless to tell Brooks that such studies are a dime a dozen and
that Kadourie is not alone in his views. In fact, this historian's
tedious and all-too-familiar theories regarding British colonial
policies in Iraq, which Brooks considers such a new and miraculous
find, began appearing long ago in periodicals only to be collated into
book form in 1970. Brooks, though, is set in his contempt for Arab
societies.
Beleaguered neo-conservatives are undoubtedly going to start accusing
Bush of having been naïve and simple-minded in applying their theories
-- interesting, when it was qualities like these that inspired them to
sing Ronald Reagan's praises, because were it not for these qualities
Reagan might have heeded his advisors and not have "done the right
thing against Communism". Some of these neo-cons might even admit that
the aim of invading Iraq was not originally to spread democracy but to
occupy the country, after which it was just "rollback", as Israel
referred to its shifting aims in its war on Lebanon. As for the aim
behind dragging out and dusting off Kadourie's essay, it is not
difficult to sniff out. British efforts, in the first half of the last
century, to forge an Iraqi state and identity were, he argues, that
doomed from the outset because the British were trying to piece
together something out of diverse and antagonistic groups -- the Shia,
Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs. He further points to the Shia and tribal
uprisings under the British as evidence that tribal and sectarian
affiliations are the only ones feasible in Iraq and as evidence of
these groups endemic hostility towards statehood due to "what they
imagined to be their interests".
Everyone calling for the dissolution of the Iraqi state, as though it
were some philanthropic society or political party or joint-stock
company, dredges up this study on Iraqi history. Needless to say,
Israeli scholars hit upon it well before American journalists. Asher
Susser referred to it in substantiation of his prediction that the
Iraqi state would disintegrate after the war and that its people would
revert to pre-state allegiances. He also expects the same of other Arab
states. ( Middle East Quarterly, Autumn 2003)
The identity crisis in the eastern Arab world is a modern phenomenon,
not the extension of a condition with deep historical roots. Nor are
nationalism and state- and nation-building concepts that conflict with
the existence of tribal and sectarian affiliations; they are answers to
the challenges of building a modern society. The problem in Iraq,
today, is that the country's tribal and sectarian structure is being
forced on Iraqis as a mold for political affiliation. People aren't
born as a nation; nations are built. And in order to build a nation you
don't go delving into history, when there was no state or nation and
when all that existed were tribes and sects, as some Orientalists do.
Proponents of the modern Arab nationalist project, by contrast, hoped
to forge a sense of Arab nationalist identity as a basis for a
political entity and citizenship and, perhaps, democratic government at
a later stage.
In Iraq, as they and other colonial powers did elsewhere in the Levant,
the British set about constructing a regional state, not as a means for
superseding tribal and sectarian affiliations but as a structure that
deliberately entrenched these divisions and aimed them against Arab
nationalism. Colonial authorities, we recall, depended primarily on
minorities -- or those they classified as minorities -- to build the
"national" army. Now, nearly a century after the Sykes-Picot agreement,
people are wringing their hands over the failure of that state, while
throughout the colonial powers and their successors fought the only
serious and feasible alternative, Arab nationalism. And now they are
scrambling for solutions, such as a loose federation or increasing the
number of troops in Iraq, as a last ditch attempt to preserve the unity
of the country before "bringing Iraq to an end". This is how Brooks put
it, and he was not speaking figuratively, like former US presidential
candidate John Kerry who called for the withdrawal of American forces
from Iraq in order to end that chapter in American history; he was
being literal.
The remedies that Brooks, who supported the war, has to offer in his 2
November article are to get rid of Rumsfeld, to increase troop numbers
in Baghdad alone to 30,000 and to do whatever it takes to restore
security. How curious. Contrary to what we had thought, Rumsfeld's
resignation or dismissal may herald a greater military involvement and
a tightening of the American grip in Iraq. Nor is this regarded at odds
with the appeal to talk to Syria and Iran over Iraq. But then, the
intelligent reader will recall that one of the most common criticisms
levied against Rumsfeld in the first week of the war was that he had
not committed enough ground forces to Iraq and that he was too slapdash
and overconfident, overly dependent on America's powerful state-of-the
art, high-tech military equipment, and the belief that with this
equipment America could intervene in several places in the world at
once at the press of a couple of buttons. Now the theory on Iraq is do
whatever it takes to win and impose a federal solution or let the
country fall apart.
Arab nationalists came under attack in the West, and in conservative
and neo-conservative circles in particular, because they believed that
the sub- regional states into which the colonial powers had carved up
the eastern Arab world would not fill the identity vacuum and serve to
build a nation in the proper sense. The result of this onslaught was
that the Arab nationalist movement was marginalised and increasingly
radicalised the more the Arab world fell into disunity and
fragmentation, especially following the 1967 war. By the time that the
Saddam regime had renamed its official gazette Babylon and begun to
stress a discrete Iraq identity and distinct Iraqi history, the
sub-regional state had come under the crosshairs of the very groups
that had formerly attacked Arab nationalism. Now, they proclaim, the
state has to be turned into a sectarian and denominationally based
federation, ie the state has to be deconstructed, or terminated. The
idea that Arab identity can serve as an overarching bond for the people
and simultaneously accommodate non-Arab minorities simply does not
occur to them.
After having identified Arab nationalism as enemy number one, they
co-opted Arab nationalist criticisms of the sub-regional state and its
dependence on tribal and sectarian groupings and then distorted and
turned these criticisms against both the state and Arab nationalism.
Now the Arabs are required to recognise tribal and sectarian divisions
as the only structural basis for a pluralistic society and to stop
thinking of these pre- modern allegiances as possible impediments to
statehood and nationalism, as Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries
concluded.
Today's Iraqi occupation ideologues have concocted three
super-simplistic myths to which they have reduced contemporary Iraq
history: a Sunni- based Baathist regime ruled over the Shia, the
oppressed Shia appealed to the US and Britain for help, and the
resistance to the occupation is really a sectarian war between the
Sunni and Shia. Their need to invent a fiction in order to cover up
their failure and to suggest that Iraq either has to go the way they
say or else, is not all that different from the fiction of weapons of
mass destruction, the major difference being that they are now
producing a real weapon of mass destruction aimed at Iraq and the
eastern Arab world.
The Arab nationalist and leftist parties were not sectarian or ethnic
allegiances. Iraq, together with its political elites and general
public, passed through periods in which non-sectarian ideas and
affiliations prevailed. Nor were previous Iraqi governments sectarian
in nature: they didn't even allow religious affiliations to appear on
identity papers and other official documents, and the use or
exploitation of sectarian allegiances was regarded as shameful, perhaps
criminal and certainly politically incorrect. If anything, it is the
suppression of sectarianism that is contributing to the vehemence of
today's sectarian chauvinists who are avenging past ills perpetrated by
the Saddam regime. But this regime was not "Sunni"; it was a monolithic
state apparatus shored up by a single party and state police and
intelligence agencies, all of which consisted of both Sunnis and Shias.
The same applied to the various opposition movements, which did not
begin with the Shaaban uprising following the war to liberate Kuwait.
Certainly, during the Iraq-Iran war, the regime concentrated its
oppressive practices more heavily on predominantly Shia areas and Shia
religious figures, operating on the assumption that any emphasis of
Shia identity was an expression of disloyalty to the state. However,
apart from some well-known exceptions, it was not discriminatory
pressure that made hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia soldiers fight
in the ranks of their national army against Iran.
Under previous Iraqi governments, officials did not like to have
sectarian tags affixed to them. Only now has this become the rule,
which is applied retroactively even to those who lived and died without
an ounce of sectarianism in their blood. Abdel Karim Qasem is now
labelled "Shia", Abdel-Salam Aref "Sunni"; the "Shia" Naji Taleb was
prime minister under Aref; the founder of the Baath Party was
originally "Christian", as was one of its most prominent members, Tareq
Aziz, while Fouad Al-Rukabi, the first national chief of the Baath
Party, was Shia. In 1963, in fact, all the civilian members of the
Regional Command were Shia. Over the period of Baath Party rule there
were three prime ministers: Ahmed Hussein Khudeir "Sunni", Saadoun
Hamadi "Shia" and Mohamed Hamza Al-Zubeidi "Shia" and of the two
speakers of the National Assembly, one -- Naim Haddad -- was Sunni and
the other -- Saadoun Hamadi -- was Shia.
It is no coincidence that people are now overlooking the fact that
former foreign minister and the last minister of information under
Saddam, Mohamed Said Al-Sahhaf, was Shia. Nor do those who are talking
of the Sunni-Shia political divide today care to be reminded of the
names of the many Shia political, intellectual and religious leaders
who dedicated their lives to realising Arab unity, such as the
Independence Party leader Sheikh Mohamed Mahdi Kubba, Taleb Shubeib,
Shamseddin Kazem, Hazem Jawwad, Muaz Abdul-Rahim, Ahmed Hububi, Ali
Abdul-Hussein, Amir Al-Halw, Rasem Al-Awadi, Mahmoud Al-Sheikh Radi,
Fadel Al-Ansari, Moussa Al-Husseini and Abdulillah Al-Nasrawi. But it
is pointless to cite this long list of names, not only because it will
do nothing to alter the current poisonous sectarian mood, nor because
it falls into the trap of imposing sectarian divisions on history, but
also because sectarian partisans, these days, will simply discard the
information on the grounds that the government official or political
leader of his sect did not have real authority.
It is probably also futile to point out that things weren't always as
monolithic and centralised as they were under Saddam Hussein, either in
the government or the Baath Party, and that even under Saddam the
monopoly on power was not a Sunni one wielded against the Shia but
rather a monopoly by a military junta whose sway in the party and the
state intersected with the regional and kinship ties of its
constituents.
Iraqi governments have clamped down brutally on all opposition and
everyone whose allegiance was suspect. The victims of repression are
legion, and of all sects. Mohamed Ayish, Adnan Hussein, General Mohamed
Mazloum Al-Dulaimi, Shaker Faza and Raji Al-Takriti were all Sunni.
The first religious figure to have died as the result of torture was
Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Badri Al-Samaraai, a Sunni. Mohamed Baqir Al-Sadr
was executed ten years later. Moreover, for those who care to remember,
the Sunni and Shia fundamentalist offensive was directed against the
"secularist regime" in Iraq and the Iranian media constantly reminded
its public that the two assassinations were connected and proof of the
Baathist regime's war against Islam, both Sunni and Shia. But does
anybody in the Iranian media mention Al-Badri today? Similarly
forgotten are the armed confrontations against the government in
Falluja in the 1970s (The so-called "Dervish Uprising") and the Ramadi
uprising during the funeral of Mohamed Mazloum.
Evidently, the rule of political sectarianism and the preparation of
the Arab world for the latest colonialist weapon, requires partial
collective memory alongside partial collective amnesia.

 Liberale, Marxista e anti-religioso.
Liberale *e* marxista?
E antireligioso che fa propaganda per Hezbollah durante la guerra con 
hezbollah?
ROTFL
Non so se sia scemo Bishara o Torrieri (propenderei per la seconda 
ipotesi). Ma quel che č chiaro č che solo in Israele, nel paese piů 
democratico del mondo, succedono cose del genere.
Tb

e stato piu volte arrestato
Come e' doveroso che avvenga.
-Stefano