Thursday, March 5, 2009

Life under occupation

Iraqi women tell their stories

This weekend, five Iraqi women arrived in New York City for a speaking tour to tell Americans about the true extent of their government crimes in Iraq and meet with UN and U.S. officials to call for a peace plan. Speaking on Democracy Now, two of them, Faiza Al Araji is a civil engineer and blogger, whose family has just fled to Jordan after her son was temporarily kidnapped, and Eman Ahmed Khamas, a journalist, translator and human rights activist, describe their lives under the occupation of the U.S. and its war allies who claim they went to Iraq to bring prosperity, "democracy" and "freedom" and clear up the devastation inflicted upon the Iraqis as a result of the "brutal regime" of Saddam Hussein.
AMY GOODMAN: "Back in Washington, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, was asked by Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press how things are going in Iraq."
TIM RUSSERT: "If you were to be asked whether things in Iraq are going well or badly, what would you say? How would you answer?"
GEN. PETER PACE: "I’d certainly say they are going well. I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they are going very, very well."
AMY GOODMAN: "General Pace's comments come as Amnesty International releases a new report condemning what it calls the "arbitrary" detention of tens of thousands of people in Iraq. In this new report, the human rights group says the situation has become "a recipe for abuse." Amnesty International’s UK Director, Kate Allen, said, "As long as U.S. and UK forces hold prisoners in secret detention conditions, torture is much more likely to occur, to go undetected and to go unpunished."
"Today, we will talk about Iraq with Iraqis. This weekend, seven Iraqi women arrived in New York City, or at least were supposed to, to begin a speaking tour to educate Americans about the reality in Iraq and meet with UN and U.S. officials to call for a peace plan. We will be joined by two of them, but before we go to them, I wanted to turn to Medea Benjamin, who is organizing this tour around the country, founder of Code Pink Women for Peace. Medea, I said seven women came into the country or were supposed to, because, in fact, only five made it."
MEDEA BENJAMIN: "Two of the women who we wanted to bring here were women whose entire families were killed by the U.S. military. As they were driving in their cars to get away from the violence, the tanks came and shot into their cars. One woman talks about her little boy on her lap and seeing the bullet go right through his forehead, her other two children killed, her husband killed, and her left in the car with the bloody bodies. We thought it was important to bring these women to meet with Cindy Sheehan, other U.S. mothers who have lost their children. And yet, when these women went to apply for their visas, they were denied. When I called the State Department to find out why, they said they had no compelling family ties left in Iraq that would ensure that they would return home, so they were at risk of staying in the United States."
AMY GOODMAN: "So, they were denied entry into the United States because the U.S. military had killed their families?"
MEDEA BENJAMIN: "They could not prove that they would want to go home. So, yes, we killed their families and then denied them the right to come to the United States to tell what the U.S. had done to their families."
AMY GOODMAN: "So, the five women who are here, what are your plans? Where are you going starting today?"
MEDEA BENJAMIN: "This is part of Code Pink's campaign called "Women Say No to War." And we have a rally today at noon in front of the United Nations. We are calling on the UN to stand up and do something, to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and send in UN peacekeepers. Any New Yorkers listening please join us at noon, and then on Wednesday, International Women's Day, we will be meeting with Congress, we’ll be doing briefings at Congress, and we will be marching from the Iraqi embassy to the White House with our call for peace. Our call for peace has so far been signed by tens and tens of thousands of women and men around the world."
AMY GOODMAN: "About 70,000?"
MEDEA BENJAMIN: "About 70,000 to date, and if there’s one thing I’d ask your listeners, Amy, to do is get online now, go to WomenSayNoToWar.org, whether you’re a woman or a man, and sign up so we can count you in with us when we march to the Iraqi embassy, to the White House, and go through the halls of Congress, turning in our urgent call for peace. "
AMY GOODMAN: "Well, we are also joined by Faiza Al-Araji, who has just come into the United States as part of this tour. She did make it, and you came from Amman, is that right?"
FAIZA AL-ARAJI: "Yes."
AMY GOODMAN: "You just heard the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, when asked how things are going, saying they were going very well, but he wouldn't put a smiley face on it, but that things are going very well. What is your response?"
FAIZA AL-ARAJI: "I'm watching the documentary on the TV now. I’m Iraqi. I left Iraq because of the kidnapping of my son in the last summer and stay in Jordan as refugee. You know, the story went out; living there is different. It’s completely different about the story your media is sending you or the message the media is sending you. When somebody telling you those things is going on in Iraq well and everything is fine, please ask him, "What is your evidence? What is your proof? What is your clue? Give me. Give me something on the ground."
"I can make a kind of debate. I'm ready to have a debate with the American leaders, to sit with them in front of the American people. I want to hear from them, and I will give them the answers for everything they are talking about, because we have the real story on the ground. After three years of evaluation, I think Iraqis have the right to talk about the evolution of the war, not the American leaders, because we are who are suffering here and we are -- we lost the money of Iraq, we lost the souls of Iraqis, we lost the souls of loved ones in Iraq. We have -- our kids have been kidnapped. Our neighbors have been killed. We lost everything. But what about the leaders? They are sitting in their chairs, and they have the power. And they did nothing for the Iraqi people to help the Iraqi people. I'm not telling this from my mind. It is facts on the ground."
AMY GOODMAN: "What happened to your son?"
FAIZA AL-ARAJI: "My son was in the college. My son is not the only story. It is a familiar story for the Iraqi families nowadays. My son was going to the college in the morning. He finished his exam, and he went to continue his operation in their office, you know, in the college. The security man faced him, and he was a new one. And that’s a new government, you know, how the style of security man. He asked him, "Where are you going?" My son was not very friendly. He asked him, "It is not your work. I'm going to finish my work in there. I’m familiar here, and this is my college." When he finished his work with the employee, and he went out, the security man stopped him, and he said, "I want to open your wallet, and I want to check your identity." He said, "Let me see your boss." Khalid asked him. And he said, "Okay. You have to wait here." He was sitting to wait, and they got a bag. "
"They put it on his head, and they arrested him and put him in the pickup and get him out of the college to the Interior Ministry, put him in the seventh floor, like this is the zone of the terrorist people. And he saw the people who were there. There were about 50 or 60 people sitting in that floor. Nobody -- they have been there in this room since three or four months. Their families don't know about them, if they are alive or they are dead. They have no right to contact their families. They have no right to have a lawyer. They are just suspected people. And after that, they told him that "You are innocent. We have nothing against you, but you have to tell your parents to pay money." We have to pay money to get your innocent son from their hands. I will pay a thousand of dollars and get our son out of Iraq, and the whole family went out of Iraq. We closed the house. And this is the familiar story in Iraq now. "
"Every day, stories of horrible – the life is horrible for Iraqis now. Iraq now is the hell. It is the land of hell. There is nothing. There's no electricity. There’s no water. There's no security. You can’t send your boy to the school, because you are scared. You have to change the priority of your life. What is the priority? The education of my son or the life of him? Yes, sure. The life of my son. So the people are putting their son in the houses. They will never send them to the schools or to the universities. And you can imagine what kind of life, if you want to move to your job or to your school, and there’s curfew or there is blocks of concrete barriers for the occupation and checkpoints everywhere. It is a kind of hell. You can’t go out for shopping. You can’t go for the hospital. Everything is -- everything is destroyed in Iraq now. And this is for the services or the conditions on the ground."
"And what about the civil war? Somebody is pushing the country to, you know, to get the option of civil war. Why? Who is the benefit? Iraqis are against civil war. If you have the chance to go to move in the streets of Iraqis and asking everyone, "Are you with the civil war?" they will say, "No." Okay, if you have like official meeting with the leaders of religion and political parties and social parties and everything, they will say, "No." So the question is: Who is pushing the country to choose civil war? It’s just to taunt the society and to destroy the race of Iraq. This is strange point, but the people thought that. The only one who will benefit from this civil war is the occupation force, because it will give them the justification to stay forever in Iraq. They are building army bases to stay in Iraq. So, we have no other explanation. "
Most of the news reports circulating among Western media outlets, yet not all of them, are filtered by politicians and are presented in a way that doesn’t give people the true extent of devastation and brutality going in Iraq. Most of them fail to send the true image and the sufferings the Iraqis are facing. But today, to get the true picture is either through clean journalism, very rare though, or through the Iraqis themselves, via online journals or blogs.
Before the war in Iraq, the world had only heard of one blogger, who went by his online name of Salam Pax. Now many Iraqis joined Salam Pax, among them is Faiza Al-Araji.
Al-Araji started keeping an off-line diary just before the war started.
"I feel it is two things in one," she said. "Just to clean my soul, and to get the pain out of my heart. And number two, to show people in the world, how is our daily life."

Source: AlJazeera