VOICES NEWSLETTER (May/June 2004)

Download a PDF version of the newsletter (484kb)

introduction
enemies of democracy
arguing against the occupation
Fallujah
Amec & other corporate vultures
humanitarian situation - whats suace for the goose....
Jo Wilding’s report from Fallujah - from the heart of the siege
the UN fig leaf
killings, torture & missing people

plus protests update, resources list, details of forthcoming events, Voices actions...

Introduction


The front of the new Voices postcard to send to Downing Street - the picture shows the face of one of a number of children killed in the siege of Fallujah - contact the office for ordering.

Stop killing Iraqis
On 4 April a demonstration in Najaf turned into a three-hour gun battle. Twenty-two people – 20 Iraqis and two “coalition” soldiers - were killed and more than 210 were wounded (Telegraph, 5 April). The next day US forces used Apache helicopter gunships to attack targets in Baghdad for the first time since April 2003 and launched an assault on Fallujah (Guardian, 6 April) – an assault that was to claim hundreds of Iraqi lives over the following week as fighting also broke out in Ramadi, Karbala, Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Kut, Basra, Mosul and elsewhere. See more on Fallujah

Also see the Voices briefing Fallujah and Beyond and the powerful account by Jo Wilding who was in Fallujah recently.

take action!
Write to your MP to demand that they take a stand against the ongoing US/UK repression in Iraq. Ask them to sign up to EDM 990. You may like to use the information on the reverse of the covering letter accompanying this newsletter - also available on www.voicesuk.org. If you do not receive an adequate response consider occupying your MPs office during the week of action 26 June – 4 July

Humanitarian needs lose out to those of the occupiers
The few reports regarding the humanitar-ian situation in Iraq suggest that, despite the resources and free hand given to the “Coalition”, there is little, if any, overall improvement over the past year. A Christian Aid survey conducted last year provides evidence that the occupation has only added to the problems of daily living. Furthermore, money is now being diverted towards the needs of the Coalition rather than the population, including substantial funds destined for drinking water projects diverted towards the costs of the new ‘embassy’ in Baghdad from where the US will continue their occupation - see more

take action!
Write to Jack Straw at the Foreign Office, King Charles St, London SW1A 2AH to demand that all available resources are used to improve the humanitarian situation in Iraq.

3 years for Brian
Early June 2004 will mark 3 years since Brian Haw started his 24/7 protest opposite Parliament in opposition to the Government’s policies on Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. Brian has survived numer-ous attempts to remove him including a recent ‘ultimatum’ from the police for security (some might say political) reasons. Publicity and public pressure helped to counter the threat to remove him and his daily reminder of this government’s deadly actions in Iraq.

Articles

enemies of democracy

On 6 April – the same day that US war planes fired rockets into residential districts in Fallujah ‘killing 26 Iraqis, including women and children’ (Guardian, 7 April) and British troops killed 15 Iraqis in Amara (Times, 7 April) – Tony Blair denounced the ‘people who want to subvert the path of Iraq towards a proper democracy’ (Independent, 7 April). A few days later George Bush joined him, railing against the ‘enemies of democracy’ (AP, 11 April). Both men neglected to mention that they themselves were the main culprits in this regard.

Since our last newsletter US plans for Iraq’s political future have changed once again but the resistance to meaningful, free elections any time soon has remained a constant.

At stake is the ability to control a major part of the regions’ incomparable energy reserves, as well as US plans to privatise Iraq’s economy and establish a permanent military foothold in the country – matters the US clearly regards as far too important to be left to Iraqis.

Interestingly Jay Garner, the first US civilian administrator for Iraq, ‘says he fell out with the Bush circle [after he called for swift and] free elections and rejected an imposed programme of privatisation’ (Guardian, 18 March 2004). Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer in May 2003 and the US imposed new laws permitting the privatisation of Iraq four months later (see Voices briefing Iraq for Sale for details).

the dilemma
Put bluntly ‘[t]he dilemma facing the US … [is] the desire to control Iraq’s political transition while making it appear that it is driven by Iraqis,’ the FT’s Middle East editor, Roula Khalaf notes. ‘In reality the Bush administration cannot afford to let Iraqis exercise a free choice at this time’, she notes (17 January).

Whilst these simple truths are beyond the pale of respectable discussion here in the UK – where it is an article of faith that we are desperately struggling to promote freedom and democracy in Iraq – they appear to be well understood on the ground in Iraq. Thus a Baghdad poll last September found that only 5% of those polled believed the US invaded Iraq ‘to assist the Iraqi people’ and only 1% believed it was to establish democracy - whilst 43% of respondents believed that the US/UK had invaded primarily ‘to rob Iraq’s oil.’ (see JNV briefing The Hunger for Democracy - www.j-n-v.org).
‘ what do we do?’

The US Government’s fundamental problem was neatly formulated by Brent Scrowcroft, National Security Adviser under Bush Snr: “What’s going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq, and it turns out the radicals win?”, he asked. “What do we do? We’re surely not going to let them take over’ (NYT, 11 April 2003). Here, of course, ‘radical’ must be understood in its technical sense – basically, anyone insufficiently subservient to US power.

the role of the embassy
Scowcroft’s question found a recent echo in the testimony of US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Marc Grossman, before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-mittee: ‘Asked whether anti-American candidates would be allowed to run [in future elections in Iraq], Grossman responded: “That’s why we’re going to have an embassy there, and it’s going to have a lot of people and an ambassador. We have to make our views known in the way that we do around the world”’ (NYT, 23 April) – an answer very far from the simple ‘yes’ that a commitment to meaningful elections would require.
Likewise, asked what the Bush administration would do “if they [ie. Iraqis] start doing things that are in contradiction to what American foreign policy might be,” Grossman again responded that this is “why we want to have an American ambassador in Iraq.’ (NYT, 23 April) – a response the Independent described as ‘cryptic’, though its import will be abundantly clear to millions across the globe from Iran to Brazil, where US Embassies’ coup-fomenting tendencies are well-known.

sham sovereignty
Instead of handing over nominal power to a group of Iraqis selected by a completely undemocratic system of regional caucuses (the previous plan), the same sham ‘sovereignty’ will now be transferred to an Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) chosen by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi ‘in consultation with the U.S. occupation authority, the [US-appointed] Governing Council and other institutions’ (WP, 15 April).

Meanwhile the US/UK military occupation will continue and real power will remain in the hands of the US military and a new US “embassy”, initially housed – fittingly - in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces (see Voices briefing Why the Occupation Isn’t Ending) – facts which will almost certainly render any form of meaningful elections impossible.

demonstration elections
In a survey of the June 1966 ‘demonstration election’ in the US-occupied Dominican Republic, Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead note that ‘by removing history from the analysis … a free and fair election is defined as one in which people are allowed (or are forced) to vote, are not obviously coerced in casting their votes, and the ballot boxes are not stuffed. But these conditions can be met in elections which are meaningless in the sense of reflecting democratic choices. If massive power has been deployed the parameters of an election shift and the choices no longer reflect indigenous choices alone’ (Demonstration Elections: US-staged elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, 1984).

Thus in the case of Iraq it has been estimated that the movement led by Moqtadr al-Sadr would receive a third of the vote in Shi’ite areas if elections were held (see p5) – but of course this will not happen if, for example, this movement is driven underground by US military power.

In the case of the Domincan Republic Herman and Brodhead note that ‘the invasion-occupation made the United States a huge factor in Dominican politics.’ The US’ opponent Juan Bosch – the democratically elected president, deposed by a military coup, a popular revolt to reinstate who precipitated the US invasion - ‘could not promise voters that, if re-elected, he would not be removed by a further coup…nor could he promise that he could bargain effectively with the invader toward the end of occupation or economic aid.’ The parallels in today’s Iraq should be clear.

the interim constitution
The appointment of the IIG is the first step on a political roadmap outlined in the so-called Iraqi Interim Constitution (IIC) – a March 2004 document drafted under close US supervision, signed by the US-appointed Governing Council and hailed by George as ‘a historic milestone in the Iraqi people’s long journey from tyranny and violence to liberty and peace.’

Many ordinary Iraqis were less exultant about its contents. Indeed, no sooner had it been signed than an edict from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani – Iraq’s most senior Shi’ite cleric – ‘questioning the legitimacy of the interim constitution’ unleashed ‘a vociferous grass-roots campaign’ to ‘amend the constitution or discard it’, led by Sistani’s ‘vast network of … mosques, religious centres, foundations and community organisations’ (WP, 30 March). Meanwhile ‘Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi al-Modaresi, whose views are respected but commands a much smaller following than al-Sistani, said … that the interim charter’s adoption of a federalist system would be “a time bomb that will spark a civil war in Iraq if it goes off”’ (CBSNews.com, 10 March).

‘Useless’ elections
In a letter to UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, ‘Sistani’s warnings … were stark. The interim constitution, he said, “enjoys no support among most of the Iraqi people,” — meaning the Shiites who account for about 60 percent of the 25 million people — and “confiscates the rights” of the national assembly that is scheduled to be elected by Jan. 31 next year to draw up a permanent constitution. Because of that, he said, the elections he has persistently demanded — for the assembly, for the constitution it will draw up, and ultimately for a permanent government — “become useless.”’ (NYT, 23 March).

In the same letter Sistani explained that ‘unless the United Nations rejects the constitution, he would boycott a UN team expected to visit Iraq soon to advise on forming an interim government’ (Reuters, 22 March).

Dangerous consequences
‘“The [Shi’ite] religious establishment fears the occupation authorities will work to include this law in a new UN resolution to give it international legitimacy,” [Sistani] wrote. “We warn that any such step will not be acceptable to the majority of Iraqis and will have dangerous consequences”’ (Reuters, 22 March). Earlier this year one of Sistani’s representatives threatened ‘protests and strikes and civil disobedience if [the US] insists on its … plans to design the country’s politics for its own interests’ (AFP, 16 Jan)

Meanwhile tens of thousands of signatures were collected for a petition ‘denouncing the constitution’ – indeed, one of Sistani’s 200 religious represen-tatives in Baghdad, Sheikh Sahib Abdullah Warwar Qureishi, told the Post that in a single week his students and activists had collected ‘at least 6,000 petitions with 90,000 signatures’ (WP, 30 March).

Putting democracy on hold
At the heart of the matter, the Post explained, was the ‘question [of] who would decide Iraq’s political future and under what authority.’ Sistani has consistently demanded one-person-one-vote elections, whilst the US and Britain have done everything in their power to postpone these - ‘put[ting] democracy on hold until it can be safely managed’ in the words of Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until Autumn 2003 (Guardian, 13 April).

The Governing Council “doesn’t represent the majority of the people”, Qureishi told the Post. ‘“They must represent themselves … The coalition forces didn’t come for your interests or my interests, not at all. The solution is for you to vote, for me to vote, for him to vote,” he said, pointing to those gathered. “That’s the solution.”’

Fallujah

‘plenty tough’
“ We’re plenty tough”, George Bush explained. ‘What we are doing in Iraq is right”, he noted (Daily Telegraph, 12 April) later declaring that US forces would ‘take whatever action is necessary to secure Fallujah on behalf of the Iraqi people’ (AFP, 28 April, emphasis added) – apparently oblivious to the tidal wave of anger that was sweeping Iraq or, indeed, the nature of the forces that the US was attacking.

Troops on the ground, meanwhile, appeared to harbour fewer illusions. “We’re fighting the local population [in Falluja]”, a team from the 10th Mountain Division explained (FT, 24 April). ‘They hate us. But they know there’s no alternative,’ a senior officer told the New York Times (25 April). ‘They would like us to leave as soon as possible. But they’re willing to tolerate us,’ he claimed – though a poll conducted before the latest wave of “coalition” repression actually found that 57% of those polled wanted US and UK forces to leave ‘immediately’, despite the fact that 53% said they ‘would feel less secure’ as a result (USA Today, 28 April).

‘right and proper’
As ever Tony Blair was on hand to lend support, ‘den[ying] … heavy-handedness by US forces’ (Guardian, 20 April) and asserting that it was ‘perfectly right and proper that [the US] take action’ (BBC, 28 April). This posture reached its zenith of absurdity with his claim that ‘The people who have been killing civilians in Iraq are not the American soldiers but people who use car bombs and suicide bombs to attack innocent Iraqis as well as coalition forces’ (Hansard, 28 April, Column 886). Apparently Mr Blair is unaware of the estimated 541 civilian deaths that occurred in just one week in April (Independent on Sunday, 11 April) - the vast majority of which were surely the responsibility of US forces - not to mention the thousands of civilians killed in the three week invasion or the scores killed since in checkpoint shootings etc…

the first stone
On 9 April Jack Straw had taken to the airwaves to defend US tactics, explaining that ‘if British forces faced an insurgency in the south of Iraq … they would have to take similar action to the Americans’ (Telegraph, 10 April) - though to be fair British forces had not been entirely idle themselves, killing 12 Iraqis and wounding 27 in Amara during 5/6 April – in one instance ‘opening fire on people nearby’ after anti-tank rockets were fired at the headquarters of British forces in the city (AFP, 6 April).

According to Jack Straw ‘it was not the Americans who cast the first stone, either in Fallujah nor in the areas where they came under attack’ (Telegraph, 10 April) – a claim worth examining at some length.

Fallujah
The roots of the current resistance in Fallujah date back to April 2003, when US forces shot dead 15 unarmed demonstrators (see Chapter 22 of Regime Unchanged by Milan Rai and JNV briefing #47 ‘After Fallujah’, available on-line at www.j-n-v.org) – events in which only Iraqis were killed and so written out of history. Patrick Graham writes that US forces ‘killed at least 40 civilians and police in and around the city’ during the first six months of the occupation and that the ‘Americans have never regained the trust of the people following those deaths’ (Observer, 28 March).

Even the killing and mutilation of four US ‘security contractors’ on 31 March – the pretext for US the assault on Fallujah – was preceded by a ‘sweep’ through the city by US marines in which ‘at least six Iraqi civilians, including an 11-year-old boy, and a television cameraman’ were killed (Observer, 28 March).

‘False reports’
Meanwhile, the Shi’a uprisings in Sadr city and elsewhere were hardly unprovoked. Indeed it was the US’ 28 March decision to shut-down Shiite cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr’s newspaper on the grounds that it was inciting violence by publishing false reports, followed by the 3 April arrest of al-Sadr’s close aide Mustapha Yacoubi, that led to the demonstrations that became the uprising.

Significantly the letter ordering the closing of al-Sadr’s paper ‘did not say that [the paper] directly advocated violence’ (WP, 3 April). Surely, judged by the same standards – ‘inciting violence’ by spreading ‘false reports’ about Iraq - few if any West-ern media outlets would remain open.

“We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell … so of course he struck back in a very vicious way,’ a senior adviser to the US-led occupation authority in Baghdad told the Post (11 April 2004) – though in fact it is unclear who started the shooting in Najaf, in which ‘20 Iraqis were shot dead and some 210 wounded’ and two non-Iraqis - a Salvadoran and an American, both soldiers - were also killed (Telegraph, 5 April).

The nature of the battle
Nonetheless Straw’s remark that “the lid had come off the pressure cooker in Iraq” was apparently too much for Blair who ‘swiftly telephoned David Hill, his communications chief, in London [and] ordered a stop to any criticism, implied or overt, of Washington’ (Sunday Times, 18 April 2004). ‘[S]tung into action after criticism that no Ministers had commented on the deteriorating situation until Straw’s interview’ Blair himself penned an article for the Observer , in which he blasted the ‘threat’ of ‘our complacency’ from his holiday in Bermuda (11 April).

Raving that in Iraq, ‘we are locked in an historic struggle’ of good versus evil, in which failure ‘would defeat civilisation and democracy everywhere’, Blair went on to draw a stark picture of the ‘the nature of the battle inside Iraq itself’: ‘on the one side, outside terrorists, an extremist who has created his own militia, and remnants of a brutal dictatorship which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people and enslaved the rest. On the other … people of immense courage and humanity who dare to believe that basic human rights and liberty are not alien to Arab and Middle Eastern culture, but are their salvation’ – a picture so distorted as to be barely recognisable.

Remnants?
Indeed Robert Fisk reports the findings of an Iraqi academic and Fallujah resident, Sulieman Jumeili, who recently reported at a conference on Iraq held by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut ‘how he discovered that 80 per cent of all rebels killed were Iraqi Islamist activists. Only 13 per cent of the dead men were primarily nationalists and only 2 per cent had been Baathists’ (Independent, 10 April). The “coalition’s” ‘opponents are Iraqis and … this is an Iraqi insurgency’, he notes.
This is consistent with anecdotal reports on the ground. Last September Charles Clover reported that, ‘spend a little time with … anyone … from Fallujah, and they don’t work very hard to conceal the truth: which is that they do know the Mujahideen who are “patriots”, “nationalists”, “good Muslims” and very likely their neighbours and friends’ (FT, 25 Sep. 2003). Sami Obeidi - ‘no radical’, ‘a member of the 22-member city administrative council …[and] an upstanding member of the community whose salary as a member of the council is paid by the US-led coalition’ - told Clover that ‘We consider this resistance a religious duty, and a nationalist one as well.’

Likewise, Hamzi Hamadi, a member of the Fallujah Protection Force – a US backed militia which controlled the town - told Clover that the guerrillas were ‘not just former Ba’athists, as some US commanders have said’: “The whole city rejects the American occupation. The Mujahideen are inhabitants of the city, who have a strong belief in Islam, and reject the foreign presence.”

Sadr
Blair’s dismissal of Moqtadr Sadr as simply ‘an extremist who has created his own militia’ is also wide of the mark. Thus US Middle East expert Juan Cole notes that the Sadrist movement (named after Moqtadr al-Sadr’s father) is ‘a longstanding social movement, not just a fly by night militia’ with ‘lots of potential leaders besides Muqtada’ (juancole.com, 16 April, emphasis added). Prior to the recent escalation Cole had estimated that Sadr’s followers would obtain ‘a good third of the seats from the Shi’ite areas’ in free elections (DemocracyNow.org, 14 Jan).

Furthermore Cole notes ‘the decision to go after [Sadr] was wholly elective. His movement had been militant since the days of Saddam, and it is true that he was organizing a militia. But he had repeatedly instructed his people to avoid clashing with US troops, and seems mainly to have been organizing for the future … by attempting to arrest his key aides, the Coalition Provisional Authority telegraphed to him its determination to arrest and imprison him. Muqtada had seen his father killed after similar warnings from Saddam, and reacted by launching an insurgency throughout the south, making the point that he would not go quietly’ (testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 20 April).

‘Illegal and ferocious’
Meanwhile several of Blair’s ‘people of immense courage and humanity’ – an apparent reference to the US-appointed Governing Council and its “ministers” – were actually busy attacking US atrocities, albeit impotently because they lacked any real power.
Thus Council member Adnan Pachachi condemned the siege of Fallujah as “illegal, ferocious and completely unacceptable” calling it a mass punishment of its 200,000 residents (FT, 10 April) and noting that it “ma[de] clear that the council has no authority” (Independent, 12 April) - a reality that will continue after power is supposedly handed over to an Interim Government on 30 June.

Human rights minister, Abdul-Basit Turki, stepped down, and Abdul Kareem al-Mahamadwi - sole ally on the Council of Moqtadr al-Sadr - withdrew saying “I will not go back, because we have failed the Iraqi people” and the communications minister declared that “It’s as if the US army is out of control. Iraqis can no longer be seen to be seen siding with the Americans” (FT, 10 April).

The deafening silence.
Meanwhile in the House of Commons, protest was noticeable largely by its absence. Parliament was not recalled from its Easter break, only a tiny number of MPs spoke out against the carnage in Iraq and so far only a pitiful 38 MPs have signed Early Day Motion 990 (19 April) condemning the ‘killing of an estimated 600 people, many of them women, children and innocent civilians fleeing the conflict, by US forces in Fallujah during the first weeks of April’ as an ‘atrocity.’

In an impassioned piece in the Guardian novelist Ronan Bennett noted the ‘shameful and deafening silence’ from MPs, including such formerly ‘progressive’ MPs as Peter Hain, Chris Mullin, Joan Ruddock and Ann Clwyd (now Blair’s “human rights envoy to Iraq”). ‘What does it take to get a New Labour politician to speak out on Iraq?’ he writes, though the question applies equally to the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. To this day the question remains unanswered.

arguing against the occupation

As “coalition” repression increases in Iraq, many Voices have been raised in the media calling for more ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq and urging Bush and Blair to ‘stay the course’ – encouragement which, given the vast political and economic stakes, they hardly need but which does play an important role in shoring up public support for the occupation. Below we look at some of these arguments.

1. ‘Failure to turn [Iraq] into a prosperous democratic state will be a grave setback for peace in the Middle East … Washington and its allies must grit their teeth in Iraq and see it through.’ (Telegraph leader writer Simon Scott Plummer, Telegraph, 6 April)

Setting aside the Orwellism (we must escalate our repression in the cause of ‘peace’) it should be a matter of basic principle that the US and British governments have no business determining the political and economic future of Iraq. They had no legal or moral right to invade the country and they shouldn’t be there now.

Furthermore, they are not trying to turn Iraq into a ‘prosperous democratic state.’ Indeed, the US wants ‘to control Iraq’s political transition while making it appear that it is driven by Iraqis’(FT’ Middle East editor, Roula Khalaf), ‘put[ting] democracy on hold until it can be safely managed’ (Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until Autumn 2003) whilst ‘pushing Iraq towards an even more radical form of [economic] shock therapy than was pursued in the former Soviet world’ (Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate, 17 March).

Iraq expert and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, notes that since it’s creation in 1921, ‘Iraq’s problems have for the most part derived from the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a succession of minority cliques—a state of affairs that the Americans may be in the process of fostering once again by their extreme economic liberalization policies’ (The Nation, 11 March 2004).
continued on page 5

2. ‘[T]he terrorists have made Iraq the front line in their unholy war. In pursuit of their nihilistic agenda they are prepared to kill Westerners … The very few who advocate a cut-and-run policy clearly have not stopped to listen to the people who count most in this – the Iraqis themselves’ (Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, The Age, 13 April)

In reality, despite the fact that ‘US officials have for months publicly promoted the notion that foreign fighters and terrorists are playing a major role in the anti-American [sic] insurgency … foreigners play a tiny role’, according to ‘many military experts’ (AP, 3 May). In Baghdad, US Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey told AP that ‘foreigners account for just 1 per cent or so of guerillas’ and that the idea that ‘foreign fighters [a]re flooding Iraq [is] “a misconception”’ (note the standard fashion in which US, British and other “coalition” forces are not counted as “foreign fighters”).

Nonetheless if there are “foreign fighters” in Iraq fighting the “coalition”, they are most likely there because of the occupation - witness the recent offer, apparently from Osama bin Laden, to ‘call a truce in al-Qaida activity “north of the Mediterranean sea” if states pulled their troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan within three months’ (Guardian, 16 Feb, emphasis added) - rather than simply a ‘nihilistic agenda … to kill westerners.’ Hence the presence of “foreign fighters” – if such there be - is actually another argument for withdrawal not continued occupation.

In any event organisations such as “al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened,” by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, according to Richard Clarke, the former top ‘anti-terrorism’ adviser to Bush (CBSNews.com, 21 March). According to Clarke, “Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden’s propaganda.” Yet another reason to withdraw.

Finally, it would actually be a good idea to ‘listen … to Iraqis’ – though no-one should be under any illusions that British foreign policy is, or should be, driven by Iraqi opinion polls.

Though quite a few polls have been conducted since the end of the invasion, no-one knows for sure what Iraqis think. To be sure, there is no evidence that - with the possible exception of Iraq’s Kurdish minority - a significant number, let alone a majority, of Iraqis would prefer a US/UK occupation force to a genuinely neutral peacekeeping force that was not trying to determine Iraq’s political and economic future - indeed, quite the reverse.

However many, if not all, of the polls appear to offer such an option, instead posing a stark choice between the “coalition” or nothing – forcing Iraqis to make a choice between continued occupation and possibly increased insecurity following a withdrawal. Nonetheless in one recent poll – conducted before the massive escalation in coalition repression in April - 57% of respondents called for ‘immediate’ withdrawal of “coalition” forces despite the fact 53% said that this would make them feel less secure (USA Today, 28 April). cont on page 9

Amec & other corporate vultures

A UK company has finally won a significant slice of the corporate pie in Iraq. A joint venture between US-based Fluor and the UK construction company Amec has been awarded three contracts– in the sewage, water and electricity sectors - worth up to $1.6bn (www.amec.com). ‘[T]he work is potentially extremely lucrative. Amec will make a 2.5 percent basic return, with another 10 per cent if performance and quality criteria are met’ and ‘the contracts allow every escalation in budget to be passed on to the customer, in this case the US taxpayer’ (Observer, 2 May)

Locked out
Whilst Amec is set to make big bucks out of Iraq’s water sector, Sabah al-Ani - one of Iraq’s top experts in water treatment, ‘who kept the country’s systems up and running through countless floods and droughts, years of economic sanctions and three wars’ - has been ‘locked…out of the reconstruction process’ by US-regulations stipulating that ‘agencies and contractors should not acquire services or supplies from entities owned by the government of Iraq’ - a directive that rules out ‘practically every [Iraqi] company of significance’ from part-icipating in the reconstruction (WP, 27 Feb).

In February the general manager at the Sharkh Dijlah water treatment plant told the Washington Post that ‘if he had had a choice in the matter’ he would have rehired the Iraqi company al-Ani works for - the General Co. for Water Projects - to expand the plant, a project they used to run before the US put Bechtel in charge. The General Co’s workers ‘had made a great deal of progress and most likely would have been finished by now if they had been allowed to restart work immediately after the war’, the manager explained (WP, 27 Feb).

Instead Bechtel spent four months studying the General Co. plans before ‘basically d[oing] what was done before.’ In February Bechtel claimed that it was ‘still on schedule to begin operating the [plant] in June’ (emphasis added). Another illustration of economist Paul Krugman’s claim that the Bush administration has been ‘delaying Iraq’s recovery’ by ‘treating [reconstruction] contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends’ (New York Times, 30th September).

Making a killing
Amec - which has 100 - 150 people on the ground in Iraq - ‘will have to employ three times that number of security personnel to protect them’, the Observer notes. There are currently ‘an estimated 15,000 private bodyguards operating inside Iraq, of which about 6,000 are armed, making them the second biggest contributor to coalition forces after the Pentagon’ - figures which are ‘set to increase’ post- 30 June (Guardian, 17 April).

Among the mercenaries currently in Iraq are Chilean commandos ‘many of whom trained under the military govern-ment of Augusto Pinochet’ (Guardian, 5 March) and ‘soldiers from South Africa’s old apartheid government’ (NYT, 29 April). ‘By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 per cent of the $18 billion budgeted for recon-struction’ (NYT, 29 April). The Foreign Office and DfID have already spent nearly £25m of British taxpayers’ money on hiring ‘private bodyguards, armed escorts and security advisers to protect their civil servants’ (Independent on Sunday, 28 March).

Snouts in the trough
Amec – whose CEO Peter Mason is paid over £1mn a year – is not the only UK company hoping to make a killing in Iraq:

- Lord Bell, the public relations adviser who masterminded Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979, has been awarded a contract to ‘promote democracy’ in Iraq (Independent, 13 March). “There’s no Arab word for democracy. That’s one of the difficulties”, he explained, demonstrating the keen mind that has carried him to the giddy heights that he occupies today. “If you say, ‘Isn’t democracy wonderful?’ and they have no word for it, then it is not surprising that they do not have the same view.”

- Lord Butler of Brockwell – the man appointed to lead the government’s inquiry into intelligence on Iraq’s non-existent WMD – ‘is a director of … the banking group HSBC’ and ‘an adviser to Marsh and McLennan … the world’s biggest insurance broker’ which ‘advise[s] companies hoping to do business’ in Iraq (Sunday Times, 8 Feb). HSBC is one of the three foreign banks to have been granted a licence to operate in Iraq (Reuters, 31 Jan).

- Malcolm Rifkind - the former Tory Foreign Secretary who ‘was opposed [to the invasion of Iraq] from its outset’ and has demanded to know whether “incompetence or deception” lay behind Blair’s false claims in the run up to the war (Times, 22 March) - is also happy to profit from the increasingly brutal occupation. According to The Times, Rifkind has been made chairman of the private security company ArmourGroup, which has ‘650 employees in Iraq who are involved in guarding government personnel and staff from the American Bechtel corporation’ (13 April).

- Shell ‘intends “to establish a material and enduring presence in Iraq” in an attempt to rebuild the firm’s depleted reserves and foster the long term future of the country’s energy sector’ (Guardian, 4 May). “We are interested in building a long term relationship with Iraqis”, a spokesman told the paper.

Stealth privatisation?
Finally, what of the Bush administration’s grand plans – drafted by USAID before the war – for mass privatisation (see Voices briefing Iraq for Sale for background)? Only snippets are available:

- The FT reports that ‘MerchantBridge, a merchant banking advisory firm with offices in London, Bahrain and Baghdad, has been appointed lead adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals to lease factories to the private sector. The multimillion-dollar project will initially transfer 35 factories, ranging from cigarette manufac-turing facilities to an egg carton plant, from public- to private- sector hands’ (8 March).

- Meanwhile much of the recent work being done by Bechtel and Stevedoring Services of America at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr ‘has focused on making the state-owned port run like a modern business rather than the sluggish socialist entity it was, with an eye toward the day when it might be privatised in a newly capitalist Iraq’ (WP, 25 March, emphasis added).

- A secret deal has already ‘sold off 75 percent of the country’s air sector to a single family’ (iraqrevenuewatch.org, 9 Feb). George Soros’ Open Society Institute obtained a copy of ‘a contract to establish a joint venture named al Iraqiyya Air …signed by the Iraqi Ministry of Transport and three members of the powerful Khawwam al Abdul Abbas family, which, according to local news reports, had close ties with Saddam Hussein’s regime.’ The document, signed on 2 Dec 2003 had not been made public as of January 2004.

take action!
- Check out CorpWatch’s new web-site www.warprofiteers.com
- Get hold of Voices Stop the Corporate Invasion of Iraq campaign postcard
- Contact the office for details of a protest outside the Amec AGM on 19 May

what’s sauce for the goose …

The quality of life for Baghdad’s poorest residents may have deteriorated since the defeat of Saddam Hussein, according to a survey commissioned by Christian Aid (Press Release, 16 April).

The survey – conducted between July and October 2003 - interviewed around 1,000 families in eight of Baghdad’s poorest neighbourhoods and ‘present[ed] a stark picture of miserable living conditions … greatly exacerbated by insecurity, crime, economic uncertainty, unemployment, inadequate public services and poor housing’ in which ‘poor water supply affects most of the families interviewed, many of which now have no functioning sewerage system.’

In March the Washington Post reported that, almost one year after the invasion began, Iraq’s health care system ‘had been hit by a critical shortage of basic medications and equipment. Babies die of simple infections because they can’t get the proper antibiotics. Surgeries are delayed because there is no oxygen. And patients in critical condition are turned away because there isn’t enough equipment’ (5 March).

The previous month US civilian administrator Paul Bremer was ‘forced to admit that the coalition ha[d] failed to provide proper funding for the country’s health system’, though this did not stop him lying about Iraq’s pre-invasion health budget in order to make the “coalition” look better (AFP, 15 February). Bremer claimed that Iraq’s health budget for 2002 had been $13mn and that the US had increased this to $500mn. In reality, almost $400mn was budgeted for the health sector in 2002 (see information on the ‘Oil-For-Food’ website: www.un.org/depts/oip).

During the sanctions years the US and British governments reflexively attributed all shortages of medicines and medical equipment to Saddam Hussein’s malevo-lence - even when there were plausible explanations: ‘It is a scandal that [Iraqi] doctors can’t get the drugs they need. But the fault lies with the Iraqi government. They fail to order enough medicines ...playing politics with suffering’ (letter from the FCO, 28 March 2000). Today - with far more money at their disposal than Hussein could ever have dreamt of - surely they would wish us to apply the same standards to their own conduct?

Reconstruction?
As at 26 April less than 5% of the $18.4bn that George Bush requested from Congress last October for “reconstructing Iraq” has been spent and ‘occupation officials have begun shifting more than $300 million earmarked for reconstruction projects to administrative and security expenses’ (WP, 30 April). None of the $279mn earmarked for irrigation projects has been spent and ‘occupation officials have reassigned $184 million appropriated for drinking water projects to fund the operations of the US embassy after the provisional authority is dissolved June 30’ – an embassy ‘whose construction and operations could consume as much as $2.5 billion in fiscal 2005’ (WP, 30 April). US officials said that money had been taken from drinking-water projects because such projects had been allocated $2.8 billion through 2005, of which only $14 million has been channelled to projects’ (emphasis added).

Ironically, during the sanctions years, US and British officials used to cite the existence of monies ‘lying unspent’ in the oil-for-food account as proof that ‘Saddam alone [was] to blame for his people’s suffering’ (Robin Cook, Telegraph,
20 Feb 2001). Likewise the Foreign Office regularly denounced Saddam Hussein for ‘preferr[ing] to spend Iraq’s money on himself…buil[ding] numerous luxurious Presidential places’ (letter from FCO, 7 May 1998). No excuses were permitted.
Consider the facts. After two wars and 13 years of comprehensive economic sanc-tions the US and Britain must take the lion’s share of responsibility for Iraq’s devastated infrastructure and impoverish-ed population. Meanwhile, today, billions of “reconstruction” funds ‘lie unspent’ while Iraqi children continue to die of waterborne disease and the US spends billions on its new “embassy” – from which it hopes to control Iraq after 30 June (see p.2). By the Government’s own logic ‘the US/UK alone are to blame’ for the ongoing dire humanitarian situation in Iraq. The conclusion is not far from the truth.

From the heart of the siege

Several international activists – including former Voices delegate Jo Wilding – were able to get into Fallujah during the siege. Their experiences corroborate refugee testimonies alleging war crimes on the part of US forces. In the following extract from an 11 April article, Jo describes her experi-ence riding in an ambulance in Fallujah:

‘ We wash the blood off our hands and get in the ambulance. There are people trapped in the other hospital who need to go to Baghdad. Siren screaming, lights flashing, we huddle on the floor of the ambulance, passports and ID cards held out the windows. We pack it with people, one with his chest taped together and a drip, one on a stretcher, legs jerking violently so I have to hold them down as we wheel him out, lifting him over steps.

‘The hospital is better able to treat them than the clinic but hasn’t got enough of anything to sort them out properly and the only way to get them to Baghdad is on our bus, which means they have to go to the clinic. We’re crammed on the floor of the ambulance in case it’s shot at. Nisareen, a woman doctor about my age, can’t stop a few tears once we’re out.

‘The doctor rushes out to meet me: “Can you go to fetch a lady, she is pregnant and she is delivering the baby too soon?”

‘Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.

‘We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

‘I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?

‘How dare you?

‘Azzam grabs the gear stick and gets the ambulance into reverse, another tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road , the shots still coming as we flee around the corner. I carry on singing. The wheels are scraping, burst rubber burning on the road.

‘The men run for a stretcher as we arrive and I shake my head. They spot the new bullet holes and run to see if we’re OK. Is there any other way to get to her, I want to know. La, maaku tarieq. There is no other way. They say we did the right thing. They say they’ve fixed the ambulance four times already and they’ll fix it again but the radiator’s gone and the wheels are buckled and she’s still at home in the dark giving birth alone. I let her down.

‘We can’t go out again. For one thing there’s no ambulance and besides it’s dark now and that means our foreign faces can’t protect the people who go out with us or the people we pick up. Maki is the acting director of the place. He says he hated Saddam but now he hates the Americans more.’

Jo Wilding’s ongoing series of reports from Iraq can be read on-line at www.wildfirejo.org.uk. US activist Rahul Mahajan – recently returned from Fallujah – has also been writing a highly informative web-log: www.empirenotes.org.

Clean it up Tony!

In the run up to Mother’s Day 2004, Mothers Against War ran a postcard campaign calling on Tony Blair to clean up depleted uranium and cluster bombs left behind in Iraq. To mark the end of this campaign, a group of mothers, grandmothers, 4 children and other supporters gathered opposite Downing St on Mother’s Day, a year and a day after the war began.

We decorated the barriers with Mother’s Day messages “Make Mother’s Day Special – Clean up Iraq”, “Remember the Mothers of Iraq”, “Cluster Bombs Kill” “Depleted Uranium is Dangerous”. We also signed cards to send to women’s groups in Iraq.

Tips on cleaning
Halfway through the vigil, a small contingent, some dressed in aprons and carrying mops, crossed Whitehall to Downing St. We carried a banner depicting a map of Iraq, saying “Iraq is a Mess. Clean it up Tony!”. We discovered an appreciative audience of tourists who took photos and asked us questions. We chanted “clean up cluster bombs”, “clean up depleted uranium”, “mothers against war”. The mops, being highly dangerous weapons, were eventually deemed too much of a security risk, so we had to leave them behind. We took the banner anyway and posed outside the front door before handing it in and asking that Mr Blair listened to our message.

As we left Downing St, somebody noticed John Prescott passing by. Two of us pursued him down Whitehall, discon-certing his minders somewhat with our mops. We asked him to urge the Prime Minister to clean up depleted uranium and cluster bombs in Iraq. He replied they were trying their best, but declined the mop to help.

Satisfied that our attempts to speak to the government had had such success we went back to finish off our vigil.

Virginia Moffatt, Mothers Against War
Photo: Ellen Teague
Please send in accounts of your actions for the newsletter.

Reports from recent Voices actions can be found here

the UN fig leaf

The Interim Constitution (see p 2) did not spell out how the Interim Govern-ment was to be chosen, so George Bush’s 16 April announcement that its composition was “going to be decided by [UN Envoy Lahkdar] Brahimi” was a significant development (WP, 17 April) – representing a temporary ascendancy for the State Department ‘doves’ over the Pentagon ‘hawks.’

However the significance of Brahimi’s contribution should not be overstated: his choice will be severely constrained by what is acceptable to the occupying powers and the body he is choosing will have little or no power once appointed. As Naomi Klein observes the UN is re-entering Iraq ‘not as an independent broker but as a glorified US subcontractor, the political arm of the continued US occupation’ (Guardian, 1 May).

‘A mere appendage’
According to British Iraq expert Toby Dodge, ‘It seems very likely that Mr Brahimi will be forced to choose the president and prime minister from the core of the 25 members of the [US-appointed] Governing Council. If he does succumb to this temptation, then all the problems that dogged the Council – it’s lack of legitimacy, it’s inability to forge meaningful links with the population and criticisms of it being appointed and not elected – will resurface’ (Independent on Sunday, 25 April). Furthermore ‘because [he] is working under the auspices of the [US], he risks looking like a mere appendage to the occupation.’

The right & the power
Once appointed the IIG will have little real power: it will have no control over the US forces that will continue to occupy Iraq and it will be unable to alter the laws – such as those on privatisation - already passed by the US.

Asked whether the new Iraqi govern-ment ‘would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders’, US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman replied that the US “as we are doing today... we would do [our] very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account,’ but that American commanders would retain “the right, and the power, and the obligation” to decide (NYT, 23 April) – remarks that sharply contradict Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi’s claim that the Council was “never told about the attack” on Fallujah (Independent, 12 April).

Taking the blame.
Since the US government also wants to deny the IIG the ability to pass new laws, ‘has set up a host of unelected bodies, whose members [Bremer] will appoint for up to four years, to oversee various affairs of state’ (Economist, 3 April) and it is even unclear whether the IIG will control Iraq’s oil revenues (UN Resolution 1483 stipulates that the proceeds from Iraq’s oil sales are to be paid into a US-controlled Development Fund ‘until such time as an internationally recognised, representative government of Iraq is properly constituted’) one could be forgiven for asking what role the IIG will actually play.

The Economist suggests one possibility. Noting that the health ministry – which has already been granted independence – has ‘no landline access to [Iraq’s] hospitals’ and that the ‘centralised distribution of medicines is faltering [with] drugs … in short supply’ the magazine observes that ‘[i]f there are epidemics this summer, [health minister Khudair] Abbas, not Mr Bremer, will be blamed.’

Why the un?
Bush and Blair are now hoping for a new UN ‘mega-resolution’ on Iraq, confirming the continuing military presence in Iraq that they have already granted themselves in the Interim Constitution.

This current turn to the UN is largely a matter of expedience and public relations - spurred by ‘anxieties in the White House about the security situation in Iraq and the impression it was making on American voters’ (Telegraph, 17 April, emphasis added). Nonetheless it has infuriated Pentagon-protégé Ahmed Chalabi – who is likely to be sidelined under the current proposal – as well as elements of the right in both the US and UK – forces which are now con-ducting a hysterical smear campaign against the UN centering on allegations of corrup-tion in the ‘oil-for-food’ programme.

British officials recently told the FT that ‘[a] defined UN role – backed by a Security Council resolution – would do much to allay the British public’s sullen disenchantment with the daily flow of news from Iraq’ (15 April, emphasis added).

This new attempt to use the UN as a fig-leaf for the occupation must be resisted.

Killings, torture & missing people

On 18 March Amnesty International published a report stating that ‘Coalition Forces appear in many cases to be using the climate of violence to justify violat-ing the very human rights standards they are supposed to be upholding.’

‘ They have shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations. They have tortured and ill-treated prisoners and detainees. They have arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely without charge and without access to a lawyer. They have demolished houses and other property in acts of revenge and collective punishment. And they are operating in a legal framework that offers no mechanism in Iraq for bringing members of the Coalition Forces to justice for such acts’ (Iraq: One year on the human rights situation remains dire).

Killings
According to the report ‘scores’ of civilians have been killed ‘apparently as a result of excessive use of force by US troops or have been shot dead in disputed circumstances’, with US soldiers operating ‘in effect … with total impunity.’

For example: ‘the 25-year-old daughter of an influential tribal chief’ shot dead by a US soldier while ‘minding sheep near the northern city of Kirkuk’ – the soldier claiming that ‘he opened fire in the belief that she was a suspect’ (Telegraph, 19 April); or the four Iraqi children ‘shot dead by US troops firing at random’ in Baghdad after a US soldier was killed in an explosion on Canal Street (Independent, 4 April).

Unlike the deaths of “coalition” forces, Iraqi deaths at the hands of these forces usually receive little or no publicity – except, as in Fallujah, when they occur in such numbers that attention cannot be avoided. No one seems to be counting with the exception of groups like Iraqbodycount.org.

Missing people & collective punishment
AI notes the creation of a ‘new generation of missing people in Iraq … lost to their families – held somewhere in the system of detention centres being run by the occupying forces in Iraq.’ No one knows how many are currently being detained, although Human Rights Watch estimates ‘some 10,000 civilians’ many of whom ‘have been held for months with-out knowing why’ (press release, 22 April).

AI also reports at least 15 house demolitions by US forces in Tikrit since last November: ‘in one case, a family … was given just five minutes to leave their house before it was razed to the ground by US tanks and helicopter gunfire.’ Meanwhile ‘AI continues to receive many reports of Coalition Forces damaging and destroying property without justification during house searches… smash[ing] their way into cars, houses and cupboards after owners have offered keys and begged that they be used’, in numerous cases ‘“confiscat[ing]”…large sums of money’ during an arrest that are ‘not returned when the person is released.’

Torture
AI had also ‘received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition forces during the past year’ (press release, 30 April) – including beatings, prolonged restraint in painful positions, electric shocks and prolonged sleep deprivation.

According to a 53-page internal army report – leaked to The New Yorker and not meant for public consumption – numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” took place at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Autumn 2003, including ‘beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape…sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom-stick, and using military dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee’ (New Yorker, 10 May).
Evidence supporting these allegations included ‘detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence’ – some os which was broadcast on CBS “60 Minutes 2”, generating major media coverage around the world.

According to the report, Army intellig-ence officers, CIA agents, and private contract-ors ‘actively requested that [Military Police] guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.’
the british role

As we go to press controversy surrounds the photographs purporting to show UK soldiers beating and urinating on an Iraqi detainee. Nonetheless, according to AI, many detainees have alleged ‘that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation’ (30 April press release, emphasis added). Seven Iraqis have died whilst in British custody – including one man apparently beaten to death by members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and another ‘seen being beaten with rifle butts as he was led away by British troops’ – though as yet not a single soldier has been charged (Independent on Sunday, 2 May). According to the Sunday Times, the MoD ‘refuses to discuss “tactical questions” such as the use of white sound to disorient captives, sleep deprivation and verbal intimidation’ (2 May).

Meanwhile Blair’s “human rights envoy to Iraq”, Ann Clwyd, claimed to be “shocked” by the CBS broadcasts. “I was told by a very senior person there, ‘We don’t do this kind of thing’”, she told AP. “Clearly the people in charge did not know this was going on” (30 April). Dare we suggest that one so gullible shouldn’t hold such a position?

take action!
- Get hold of the Amnesty report on-line at www.amnesty.org
- Write to Ann Clwyd, demanding that she take a public stand against human rights abuses by US and UK forces and that she take immediate and effective action to bring them to an end.

protests update

Kathy Kelly - Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of Voices US – is in prison for an act of non-violent civil disobedience (crossing onto the property of Ft Benning military base). She will be there until at least 2 July. Please send her a card: Kathy Kelly, #04971-045, FPC Pekin, PO Box 5000, Pekin, IL 61555-500, USA.

The Fairford Five – five peace activists who tried – and in two cases succeeded - to disarm B-52s and their support vehicles at USAF Fairford in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq were in court in April. The judge ruled that, ‘The legality of the war in Iraq cannot be examined or ruled upon in English crown courts’ (PA, 29 April). Two of the five - Toby Olditch and Philip Pritchard – expect to be tried in July. More info. at www.b52two.org.uk.

IP 2004 - Four activists were arrested during protests outside the business conference Iraq Procurement 2004 in April (see p.7). Two entered the conference with a banner and intend to defend themselves on the basis that the conference was engaged in unlawful activity. A third was arrested during the protest on 27 April. They will be appearing in Highbury Magistrates Court on 19 May (see p12).

Support the troops - two US soldiers have deserted, claiming asylum in Canada rather than serve in Iraq. Brandon Hughey (18) told the Guardian, “We plan to argue that the war in Iraq is illegal under international law and that I have a right not to choose to participate” (13 April)

Resources

Future of Iraq Portal
www.justinalexander.net/iraq
Fantastic set of links to Iraq-related sites.

Occupation Watch
www.occupationwatch.org - An essential web-site. Includes reports by members of the OW team itself as well as an excellent selection of media articles.

Women-focused
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have an excellent web portal for news and initiatives relating to women in Iraq
www.peacewomen.org/news/Iraq/news.html

UNIFEM have developed a very useful Iraq resource as part of their portal on Women, Peace and Security, with lots of background and legislative information as well as analysis - www.womenwarpeace.org/iraq/iraq.htm

Empire Notes
www.empirenotes.com -Excellent web-log by US activist and author Rahul Mahajan, who was in Fallujah in April during the siege.

A more extensive list of resources can be found here