[lit-ideas] Re: FW: Read and pass...Fwd. 'Stay the Course!' is not enough
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 19:25:41 EST
Hi,
That was interesting. We'll see what will happen or if anyone, really, will
pay attention. He's no longer the 'voice' he used to be--he's not
Religiously Right enough, actually. But, he is a conservative Republican, in
many
respects, and I do think there are many moderate Republicans played the game
with
Bush over the election (Sen Bond in Missouri comes to mind) and who are a
tad worried about a number of decisions that have been made...
But, I read these two pieces today and they really did make me wonder how
"Democracy" as envisioned by Pres Bush and cohorts can happen in Iraq.
The Fallujah piece--well, for a country whose war has ended, this simply
defies my imagination. I just imagine what would happen were the same thing
to
happen here.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a mom there. It just hurts
too much to imagine that the USA would have decided to completely
annihilate the living situation of so many---when they had stated that
there were what? only 3000 insurgents in the entire city. How many, again,
were living in that city before we (ie. the USA troops) decided it had to be
flattened--starting with the hospitals?
Is this what we do after a war is *over*?
And then I read the piece about the Christians in Iraq and wondered where
the voices were who would speak up for them? Perhaps the USA inadvertently
does, indeed, want an Islamic nation to exist--as long as the government is
(theoretically or for a time) in favor of its policies?
I don't know. I admit to being a bit at a loss about the whole situation
right now...
I always thing about how I can so easily weep with Rachel (and other moms)
for her (their) children--and then wish for a Goddess Kali to come to the
rescue,
Marlena in Missouri
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=44904
IRAQ: Death toll in Fallujah rising, doctors say
© IRIN
An IRCS convoy going to Fallujah, as needs are still not being met.
FALLUJAH, 4 Jan 2005 (IRIN) - "It was really distressing picking up
dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children. It is the most
depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started," Dr
Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah city, some
60 km west of Baghdad, told IRIN.
The hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies
from rubble where houses and shops once stood, according to al-
Iyssaue.
He added that more than 550 were women and children. He said a
very small number of men were found in these places and most were
elderly.
Doctors at the hospital claim that many bodies had been found in a
mutilated condition, some without legs or arms. Two babies were found
at their homes and are believed to have died from malnutrition,
according to a specialist at the hospital.
Al-Iyssaue added these numbers were only from nine neighbourhoods
of the city and that 18 others had not yet been reached, as they were
waiting for help from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) to make it
easier for them to enter.
He explained that many of the dead had been already buried by
civilians from the Garma and Amirya districts of Fallujah after approval
from US-led forces nearly three weeks ago, and those bodies had not
been counted.
IRCS officials told IRIN they needed more time to give an accurate
death toll, adding that the city was completely uninhabitable.
Ministry of Health officials told IRIN they were in the process of
investigating the number of deaths, but claimed that a very small
number of women and children were killed, contrary to what doctors in
Fallujah had said. They added they were working together with the US-
led forces to rehabilitate the health system inside the city.
Residents who have returned to their homes after waiting for hours to
enter the city found that most of their homes had been totally destroyed
by the fighting which started nearly a month ago between the US-led
forces and insurgents who are said to be under the control of Abu-
Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist wanted by the Iraqi
government.
"I've been here for more than six hours and until now could not enter
the city, even after the fighting finished in our area. There is no respect
for civilians," Samirah al-Jumaili, a mother of seven, told IRIN.
The situation in Fallujah was still not clear. According to Col. Clark
Mathew, spokesman for the US Marines, night time attacks continued
in some areas of the city. US forces have informed residents not to
leave their homes after the imposed curfew of 1800 to 0600.
Mathew explained that most attacks were in areas where US troops
have bases in order to secure the city, but added that by the end of this
month the situation should be under control and that the reconstruction
of Fallujah would then begin. "We hope that very soon reconstruction
of Fallujah will start and families will feel a new life," Mathew added.
"The US troops are saying that soon Fallujah will be rebuilt. I believe
that this city won't offer a minimum of living conditions until another
year has passed. I am still searching for what they have been calling
democracy," Muhammad Kubaissy, a civilian from Fallujah, told IRIN.
His home and two shops were destroyed in the fighting.
"They came to bring us freedom, but all Iraqis are now prisoners in
their own homes," he added.
"It is impossible to live in Fallujah. There is no water, electricity or
sewage treatment. Even hospitals cannot afford the minimum of
security for all families of the city. We don't have enough medicine and
you can feel the bad smell of bodies in the air," al-Iyssaue added.
Residents of Fallujah have been asking the Iraqi government to allow
journalists and TV reporters to enter the city in order to show the
reality.
The government will only allow journalists to visit with a special identity
card, saying it is for their own safety. Many journalists have been
turned away from Fallujah after not receiving authorisation from US-
troops guarding
the city.
"We need someone here to show the reality of Fallujah. Even when
some journalists are here they are being followed by the Marines. We
need someone to help us. The world should see the real picture of
Fallujah," Sheikh Abbas al-Zubeiny told IRIN.
MB (again): and then there is this:
>January 06, 2005, 7:30 a.m.
>Christian Crisis
>ChaldoAssyrian Christians may soon leave Iraq en masse.
>
>by Nina Shea & James Y. Rayis
>
>Iraq's Christian minority is being driven out of its ancestral
>homeland by a wave of persecution as devastating as any tsunami. In
>less than four weeks, a pivotal election will take place in Iraq
>that represents this community's best hope for finding a secure home
>there, yet they find themselves marginalized and pushed aside in the
>electoral process ÷ not only by their tormentors but, perhaps
>inadvertently, by the U.S. government. These Christians, who are
>both pro-Western and pro-democracy, need our help so that they can
>build a future in their native land with a modicum of security and
>freedom. Without it, they will leave, and U.S. Iraq policy will be
>dealt a setback so severe it may never recover.
>
>Tens of thousands of Iraq's nearly one million ChaldoAssyrians, as
>this indigenous cultural and linguistic ethnic group is called under
>Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law, have fled into exile over
>the past few months. Their leaders fear that, like the Iraqi Jews ÷
>who accounted for a third of Iraq's population until facing
>relentless persecution in the middle of the last century ÷ they may
>leave en masse. Though many Iraqis, particularly moderates, suffer
>violence, the ChaldoAssyrians, along with the smaller non-Muslim
>minorities of Sabean Mandeans and Yizidis, may be as a group all but
>eradicated from Iraq. Their exodus began in earnest in August after
>the start of a terrorist bombing campaign against their churches.
>With additional church bombings right before Christmas, hundreds
>more Christian families escaped in fear to Jordan and Syria.
>
>In the run up to elections, Sunni terrorists and insurgents have
>targeted the ChaldoAssyrians with particular ferocity, linking them
>to the West. The main Assyrian Christian news agency
><http://aina.org/>AINA.org reported last week that the kidnapping
>tally for Christians now ranges in the thousands, with ransom
>payments averaging $100,000 each. One who could not afford the
>payment, 29-year-old Laith Antar Khanno, was found beheaded in Mosul
>on December 2, two weeks after his kidnapping. Cold-blooded
>assassinations of Christians are also on the rise. Prominent
>Assyrian surgeon and professor Ra'aad Augustine Qoryaqos was shot
>dead by three terrorists while making his rounds in a Ramadi clinic
>on December 8. That same week two other Christian businessmen from
>Baghdad, Fawzi Luqa and Haitham Saka, were abducted from work and
>murdered.
>
>Both Sunni and Shiite extremists who seek to impose their codes of
>behavior have been ruthless toward the Christians, throwing acid in
>the faces of women without the hijab (veil) and gunning down the
>salesclerks at video and liquor stores. In the north, Kurdish
>administrators have withheld U.S. reconstruction funds from
>ChaldoAssyrian areas, and, together with local peshmerga forces,
>have confiscated some Christian farms and villages. Of the $20
>billion that American taxpayers generously provided for the
>reconstruction of Iraq two years ago, none so far has gone to
>rebuild ChaldoAssyrian communities. The State Department is
>distributing these funds exclusively to the Arab- and Kurdish-run
>governorates ÷ the old Saddam Hussein power structure ÷ who fail to
>pass on the ChaldoAssyrian share.
>
>Though Iraq's president, prime minister, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani
>have all denounced the attacks against the Christians, the
>persecution has not abated. The ChaldoAssyrians have endured much
>throughout the last century in Iraq, including brutal Arabization
>and Islamization campaigns. But this current period may see their
>last stand as a cohesive community.
>
>Should the ChaldoAssyrian community disappear from Iraq, it would
>mean the end of their Aramaic language (spoken by Jesus), and their
>customs, rites, and culture. A unique part of Christian patrimony
>would disappear along with this first-century church. The United
>States would have presided over the destruction of one of the
>world's oldest Christian communities. Its reverberations would be
>keenly felt just beyond Iraq's borders. As Christian scholar Habib
>Malik wrote last month in the daily press of his native Lebanon, if
>the democratic project of Iraq ends in dismal failure for the
>ChaldoAssyrians, the future will be bleak for all the historic
>churches of the Middle East. No wonder Pope John Paul II used his
>public appearances on both Christmas and New Year's to express
>"great apprehension" and "profound regret" about the situation in
>Iraq.
>
>Further loss of ChaldoAssyrian influence in Iraq would also have
>dire implications for Iraq itself and for American policy. The
>ChaldoAssyrians are a disproportionately skilled and educated group,
>and they also possess that increasingly scarce trait in the Middle
>East: the virtue of toleration. They are a natural political bloc
>for building a democracy with minority protections and individual
>rights. Their presence bolsters Muslim moderates who claim religious
>pluralism as a rationale for staving off governance by Islamic
>sharia law.
>
>The ChaldoAssyrians who continue to tough it out in Iraq do so
>desperately clinging to the hope that liberal democracy will take
>root there. They and their communities in the American diaspora,
>numbering around 450,000, are stirring with activity in preparation
>for the elections at the end of January. These elections will choose
>a National Assembly that will draft the country's permanent
>constitution. They are eager to see individual rights to religious
>freedom and all fundamental freedoms carried over from the interim
>constitution into the permanent government.
>
>It is in the direct political interest of the United States to keep
>the ChaldoAssyrians in Iraq and ensure they have a voice in the
>political process unfolding over the next year. Yet U.S. policy
>toward Iraq's valuable ChaldoAssyrian allies seems to be one of
>utter indifference.
>
>While Iraq's hard-line Shiite parties are heavily financed by Iran,
>Kurdish leaders have long been bankrolled by the U.S., and Sunni
>insurgents are funded by Syria, the pro-democracy ChaldoAssyrians
>have no sponsors. The U.S. policy of providing democracy-building
>funds to political parties in emerging democracies, made legendary
>with Solidarity in Poland, ended a decade ago. The U.S. government
>is taking steps to compensate one religious minority that might fare
>poorly in the election. According to press reports, the U.S.
>administration has called for assembly seats to be set aside for the
>Sunni minority, which is boycotting the elections after warnings by
>extremist Sunni leaders. But no provisions have been made for
>ChaldoAssyrian Christians, who, unlike many insurgent Sunnis, work
>for the Coalition rather than build roadside bombs against it.
>
>In short, ChaldoAssyrian candidates and parties are alone and
>without funds. If these Christians fail to win seats in the
>assembly, they will have no direct say in the critical drafting of
>the country's permanent constitution. Don't expect the United States
>to speak up for them ÷ or for other moderates.
>
>The same lackadaisical approach to individual and minority rights is
>shown in America's approach to the drafting of Iraq's permanent
>constitution, where it has adopted de facto a policy of strict
>neutrality. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for
>International Development are funding programs to provide outside
>legal and expert advice to assist in this drafting. These
>"independent" contractors are not supposed to exert any influence to
>ensure constitutional protections for individual rights to religious
>freedom, women's equality, or any other basic human right. As one
>such U.S.-funded advisor explained in an L.A. Times op-ed last
>month: "Outsiders should not... seek to prevent Shiite parties from
>advancing models for an Islamic republic." The only such existent
>model, of course, is the Islamic Republic of Iran ÷ a country so
>devoid of individual human rights that its dissidents are sentenced
>to death for blasphemy, the "crime of thinking," and whose governing
>ideology is explicitly hostile to American interests.
>
>The rationale for this is that the focus should be on "process," not
>on "imposing values" ÷ that is they are not concerned about the
>outcome, only how it is achieved. A lesson of apartheid South Africa
>is that the rule of law only goes so far in providing for a fair and
>humane society. The U.S. Commission on International Religious
>Freedom, an independent federal agency, wrote an urgent letter on
>Iraq's religious minorities to President Bush last month, protesting
>this approach and recommending that the administration "give clear
>directives to American officials and recipients of U.S.
>democracy-building grants" to advocate the inclusion of religious
>freedom and other fundamental human rights in the permanent
>constitution.
>
>Over 1,300 American soldiers have given their lives so far in Iraq.
>We owe it to them and to Iraqis ÷ many of whom have also paid with
>their lives supporting the Coalition ÷ to take our policy goal of
>democratizing Iraq seriously. One way is to level the playing field
>in the political arena for the ChaldoAssyrian community. We should
>be helping all candidates whose political ideology is based on an
>acceptance of liberal democracy and individual religious freedom and
>other fundamental human rights ÷ even if they are Christian.
>
>There is an urgent need for immediate private funding to help
>pro-democracy ChaldoAssyrian candidates and voters in the January 30
>elections. The private response to southeast Asia's tsunami victims
>proves that concerned individuals can make a critical difference.
>Only a small fraction of that generous outpouring is needed to keep
>the ChaldoAssyrians politically competitive ÷ through voter
>education, candidate spots on television and radio, campaign
>literature, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other election essentials.
>Tax-deductible donations for this purpose can be sent to: Iraq
>Freedom Account, <http://www.aanf.org/>Assyrian American National
>Federation, 5550 North Ashland, Chicago, IL 60640.
>
>÷ Nina Shea is the director of Freedom House's
_http://www.freedomhouse.org/religion/>Center_
(http://www.freedomhouse.org/religion/>Center) for
Religious Freedom.
>James Y. Rayis, an Atlanta lawyer, is vice chair of the
Chicago-based ChaldoAssyrian American Advocacy Council.
>
> This article appeared in NRO on Jan. 6, 2005
>
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