WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No 1

WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 01, March 3, 2003

Amid a crisis of momentous import, and endless media debate, Iraqi voices have been conspicuous largely by their absence - especially in the Western media. IWPR's Iraqi Crisis Report aims provide a platform for these voices, and others particularly from the region, to debate, inform and analyse key issues of war, peace and beyond in Iraq. IWPR's central aim is to strengthen Iraqi debate, which may in time include additional development and training initiatives in line with IWPR's educational activities in other areas. For that, we will hope for your interest and support. Comments are welcome; please contact Anthony Borden at tony@iwpr.net, or visit www.iwpr.net.

INTRODUCTION: A PLATFORM FOR IRAQI VOICES IWPR's project seeks to strengthen Iraqi debate over the risks and prospects of potential conflict. By Julie Flint in Beirut.

REPORT: BAGHDAD READIES FOR WAR The Iraqi government highlights international support for peace, while declaring itself well prepared for war. By Anthony Borden in Baghdad.

COMMENT: THE SHIA FACTOR Although previously betrayed by the West, ordinary Iraqis still look for the removal of Saddam Hussein. By Yousif Al-Khoei In London.

ANALYSIS: NEO-COLONIAL AMBITIONS Few in the Middle East believe Washington seeks to intervene in Iraq for anything but self-interested reasons. By David Hirst in Beirut.

COMMENT: NO PROTEST IN MY NAME! A victim of Saddam's regime puts her case for war. By Freshta Raper in London.

INTERVIEW: BEYOND REGIME CHANGE Opposition leaders in Northern Iraq believe the US has moved closer towards supporting fundamental political regime changes, including de-Ba'athification. With Kanan Makiya in Salahuddin, Northern Iraq.

ANALYSIS: TOWARDS A NEW IRAQI POLITICS Iraqi civil society activists want to get rid of old style top-down politics of exclusivity and intrigue. By Rend Rahim Francke in Washington.

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INTRODUCTION: A PLATFORM FOR IRAQI VOICES

IWPR's project seeks to strengthen Iraqi debate over the risks and prospects of potential conflict.

By Julie Flint in Beirut

It is impossible to exaggerate the momentousness of the coming weeks and months for the Arab world. The United States, backed by Britain, is poised to occupy an Arab nation - Iraq - in order to remove the man it did so much, for so long, to maintain in power: President Saddam Hussein. To justify this quasi-colonial enterprise, Washington invokes the name of the people it betrayed in 1991: the Iraqis who rose up against Saddam, at America's urging, and were then crushed by Saddam as America and its allies stood by.

One senior American officer has already said he believes the US will need to remain in Iraq for five years, with substantial military power, "to establish and exploit the peace" America says it will bring.

Most Arabs believe war will not bring peace, but greater conflict and instability that will stretch far outside Iraq's own borders. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has warned that it will light a "gigantic fire" of terror and violence. Iraqis question whether an American client regime in their country will fulfil their dream of a genuine, Iraqi democracy - or whether those who do not accept the American diktat will, once again, be elbowed aside.

In the administration of President George Bush, most Arabs see not a champion of democracy and human rights but an administration implacably wedded to their historic enemy - Israel - and its viscerally anti-Arab prime minister, Ariel Sharon. How, they ask, can America intervene against Saddam while tolerating - nay abetting - Sharon?

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, whose roots go back to the first Allied war against Saddam of 1991, has until now focused on the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan. From today it will be giving a voice to Iraqis - those inside Iraq and the several million exiles outside - to highlight their hopes and fears as American troops prepare to become the neighbours of 300 million Arabs.

In the Western media at least, Iraqi voices have been conspicuous largely by their absence so far. Debate, and comment, have been dominated by Western politicians and Western commentators - many of whom have never set foot in Iraq.

Iraqi Crisis Report will also give space to other, non-Iraqi voices - Arab, American and European, to provide unique viewpoints on key issues of the moment - the repercussions of an American protectorate in the heart of the Arab world; the demise of the "Arab nation" and its failure even to meet to discuss the imminent occupation of one of its own; Western double standards and the credibility of the United Nations.

IWPR's central aim is to strengthen Iraqi debate, which may in time include additional development and training activities in line with IWPR's educational activities in other areas. For that, we will hope for your interest and support.

But at this urgent moment, the project seeks to give a platform for the views of Iraqis caught between fear of Saddam and the great uncertainty of what removing him may mean.

Julie Flint, a long-time correspondent from the Middle East and a former IWPR trustee, is coordinating editor of the Iraqi Crisis Report.

REPORT: BAGHDAD READIES FOR WAR

The Iraqi government highlights international support for peace, while declaring itself well prepared for war.

By Anthony Borden in Baghdad

The main market in the centre of town is packed with shoppers bargaining for everything from Syrian soap to Chinese hardware to Iraqi lemon tea. But according to the salesman at one of the countless cramped outdoor stalls, sales of hurricane lanterns are up considerably, at more than 20 per day.

Construction is rampant - roads and small buildings under repair, the towering concrete pillars for an enormous mosque. But the work also seems oddly frozen: a glistening new telephone exchange on the Tigris sports and yet another rifle-bearing statute of President Saddam Hussein. It is covered by a cloth and as yet unveiled. Will any of it be completed before much more construction is needed?

A theatre group is preparing a fresh production of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. An artist at a local gallery applies the final touches to a bright Cubist-style painting already hung on the wall for a new exhibition. Cinemas are busy, with colourfully advertised Asian films such as "Struggle for Freedom" mixed with new Western productions, including "Two Week's Notice".

Yet amid the normality, two weeks is almost exactly what everyone expects before war.

"People have been used to this since the Iran-Iraq war and they got used to the situation which developed in 1990," said Wadhmi Nadhmi, a professor in politics at Baghdad University. "We are still holding classes and having exams, and I am keeping to my normal programme." On campus, students loll around in the warm mid-day air, clustered in small groups gossiping and chatting during class breaks, and looking much like students anywhere.

"This does not mean there is no anxiety," the professor continued. "People are very worried. . . But most Iraqis feel their destiny is being arranged for them and they have no say in it. So they have some kind of spiritual surrender to the outcome."

According to the Iraqi media, firmly state controlled, the entire world - George Bush, Tony Blair and Israel aside - supports the Iraqi people, and the Iraqi News Agency pumps out an endless stream of reports on the anti-war movement. "Bulgarian Green Party Opposes US Plans," declares a recent item. "Two Thousand Students Demonstrate in Cairo," says another. Jacques Chirac, US campaigner Ramsey Clark, and British politicians Tony Benn and George Galloway are heroes.

Numerous international "human shields" and other solidarity delegations shuffle through hospitals that Iraqis say are desperately short of medicines. In front of the state TV cameras, parading in dreadlocks and sandals, the shields hold extensive if fractious strategy meetings and organise marches in the city. While making no comment about human rights in Iraq, they call for George W. Bush to be indicted for war crimes.

"Everything America is doing is against the world order, against international law, and against democracy and human rights," said Dr. A. K. al-Hushimi, a former minister and president of the official Organization of Friendship, Peace and Solidarity, which is providing accommodation, food and logistical support for the activists. "The entire world is against this war."

Greeted by officials clapping and chanting praises from scripted notes, the paramount leader himself gave a long speech on television, encouraging Iraqis to resist and recommending protective measures. "Even in your backyard you should build a shelter. If it is deep enough, God willing, it will protect you," he said.

Military officers have been appointed as governors of local provinces, and while not commented on locally, international media reported significant recent moves by Iraqi military, the filling of trenches with oil for smoke screens and other defensive measures.

The underlying media message is one of crisis and mobilization against an impending "imperialist aggression". Extensive footage of Palestinians in the West Bank being attacked by Israeli troops are interspliced with coverage of Iraqi army generals in urgent meetings with the president, and with extensive clips from previous wars. One long and ominous spot highlights the effects of depleted uranium - dubbed in heavy lettering "America's Death Weapon" - which Iraqis say has caused a significant increase in the case of leukaemia, deformities and other serious heath problems, especially among children.

The government protests its full compliance with UN resolution 1441, pointing to access provided to suspected weapons sites, the agreement to destroy its al-Samoud II missiles and its invitation to a South African team to share experiences on the process.

The crisis, according to Baghdad, is not about arms, or even human rights, but about oil, and the carve-up of the country to serve US corporate interests. Much is made of American proposals for a military governorship, and of the close ties between Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the US oil industry. Previous international protectorates, as in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the arrangement in Afghanistan, are derided in very general terms as examples of disastrous Western interventions. Territorial designs of Turkey and meddling by Iran are emphasised.

"This will be different from 1991," said one official with the Ministry of Information. "If your home is attacked, you will fight, and everyone here will defend Iraq against invasion." He is planning to relocate his family out of the city, and then return.

Almost every adult male has had military experience, and there is much talk among official contacts of street-by-street defence. An afternoon football match, which seemed a perfect antidote to inescapable debate over the crisis, turned into an extravagant two and a half hour war rally. It was complete with banners, international speakers, "spontaneous" chanting and raucous Arab music to mobilise the crowd.

"Bush, send your boys to die," shouted one Iraqi comedian to much applause. The enormous image atop the stadium of Saddam as Che Guevara seemed grimly appropriate. The subsequent match was excellent, but it felt almost an afterthought.

Privately, however, people are desperate. With the economy shattered by 12 years of sanctions, and the infrastructure weak, there is great concern over the humanitarian consequences.

Many families -impoverished or with scant savings in Iraqi dinar worth little elsewhere -face agonising decisions. Depart too early, and they will lose their jobs, run out of money, and risk having their property ransacked; leave it too late and they may not be able to leave at all.

As Baghdad prepares for war, the obvious question is, Would Iraqis stand together, or would the entire government edifice crumble? Iraqi officials deny there is any such "Republic of Fear" and say the people will rally. The US predicts that as the regime is weakened, people will become emboldened to support forcible change of a hated regime.

Strolling down the street, I snatch a brief conversation with a tailor who plans to leave soon to avoid the war, but looks forward eagerly to a post-Saddam Iraq. "If the country is ruled differently, we will have many more freedoms, and I will definitely come back," he says furtively, before my minder catches up with me.

Anthony Borden is executive director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

COMMENT: THE SHIA FACTOR

Although previously betrayed by the West, ordinary Iraqis still look for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

By Yousif Al-Khoei In London

For most of Saddam Hussein's iniquitous rule, the Iraqi people have been caught between a rock and a hard place - the rock of Western support for Saddam, and the hard place of the Arabs' silence about his atrocities. The West and the Arabs both bear responsibility for Iraq's suffering. Both bear a measure of responsibility for the current calamity - the likelihood of fresh military action - in face of which the Iraqi people are quite powerless.

As Iraq once again braces itself for war, the mood of many Iraqis - even in Iraq itself - is not the same as the mood in the Arab and Muslim street. The Iraqi people have suffered so much at the hands of Saddam Hussein. They do not have the luxury of saying an unqualified "no" to war.

Nobody likes war. It would surely have been possible, if it were not for Western blunders, to get rid of Saddam without war. Military action will represent the failure of Western diplomacy and the West's "civilised" institutions. But if Saddam stays in power, if he is let off another time, the damage would be enormous.

Ever since the creation of the modern state of Iraq, the Shias, who form the majority of Iraq's population, have been marginalised. The marja'iyya - the highest acknowledged authorities of Shias worldwide - enjoy great influence among the Shias of southern Iraq, and in the Baghdad slums where Shias live in appalling conditions, but play no direct part in the running of government.

This has been the exclusive preserve of the Ba'ath party, through which Saddam rose to power, for the past 35 years. After its successful coup in 1968, the Ba'ath moved quickly to secure sole control of the country and lost no time in putting into practice a well-thought-out plan to weaken the Shia establishment. Some tribal leaders were lured with oil money and the infrastructure of Shia theological schools was destroyed. In the first of many blows to the spiritual leadership, Mehdi al-Hakim, son of Grand Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim, was accused of being a spy. In the following years, thousands of clerics said to be of Iranian origin were expelled to Iran.

The regime put its hand on Shi'ism's most significant celebrations. It took vigorous measures to control Ashura, the re-enactment of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson Hussein, by setting up roadblocks that interfered with pilgrims and penalising even government employees who visited the shrines.

In the Iraqi media, which is officially controlled, the Shias were conspicuous only by their absence. You could see a whole programme on Najaf - site of one of the two most famous theological colleges in the Shia world - without seeing a turban. Clerics were edited out of every clip unless they were there to praise the government.

In 1973, the Ba'ath broke new ground in its persecution of the Shias by executing five Shia clerics accused of belonging to al-Da'wa, the largest of the Shias' underground political organisations. In 1975, the regime closed the handful of private schools owned by Shias in the name of "nationalisation". Shi'ism has never been recognised in the educational system of Iraq. The national curriculum teaches only Sunni Islam.

Persecution escalated with the Iranian revolution of 1979, reaching a shocking climax with the execution of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr el-Sadr and his sister, Bint Huda, in 1980. Thousands of Shias were rounded up and any young person going to a mosque was immediately accused of belonging to al-Da'wa. Even Shias who became secular to avoid this persecution were targeted. Some were killed; others were expelled to Iran - among them the virtual entirety of the Shia merchants who dominated Baghdad's central bazaar.

In the 1980s, Iraqi Shias found themselves fighting their co-religionists across the border in Iraq. When Grand Ayatollah abu al-Qasm al-Khoei refused to lend his support to the war, many of his closest associates were arrested. Saddam's fight against his own Shias was cleverly confused with the fight against Iran: to oppose the war was unpatriotic, Saddam said, conscripting huge numbers of Shia youth.

After Saddam's defeat in Kuwait in 1991, the suppression of the popular uprising against the regime in southern Iraq made clear, once and for all, Saddam's hatred of the Shias. The tanks that crushed the uprising carried the slogan "No Shias after today." Shia shrines were destroyed and the integrity of the Shia faith questioned. The old town of Kerbala was razed - homes, shops, shrines and religious centres. More than 100 of the Grand Ayatollah's staff were arrested. The Grand Ayatollah himself was detained, at age 92, and taken by force to military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

Three months after the uprising, when calm had been restored, a historic Shia mosque in the northern city of Samarra was bulldozed. Saddam was attempting to erase all traces of Shia identity - in every part of the country.

Today the number of Shia clerics in Iraqi jails almost certainly exceeds the number of clerics of any faith jailed anywhere in the world. More than 200 have been executed since the Ba'ath took power. Yet Saddam depicts himself as an Islamic leader. His son Odey Saddam Hussein, at the time when he was being touted as his father's successor, went as far as to claim that he himself was Shia, in a transparent attempt to ingratiate himself with this potentially powerful group.

In 1991, President George Bush the father urged the Iraqi people to rise against the tyrant - and they did, both in the Kurdish north and Shia south. But after asking Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, America permitted Saddam to use his helicopters to crush them in the no-fly zone designed to protect them. It allowed him to kill the Marsh Arabs with his tanks after telling him he could not kill them with his planes. It watched, without reacting, the draining of the marshes and the destruction of their unique ecology.

Despite this terrible betrayal, most Iraqis will welcome the removal of Saddam Hussein. The Shias will certainly welcome the chance to play, at last, the role they should be playing in Iraqi national life. The Shias are frustrated and angry, but should not direct any of their anger towards Sunnis: in post-Saddam Iraq, Sunni and Shia must live, and work, together.

In 1991, the Shias showed maturity. They directed their anger not towards other ethnic or religious groups, but towards the regime. They did not kill Sunnis; they killed those who had worked with the regime.

Iraq lies at the very heart of the Arab world. Stability in Iraq is key to stability in the wider region. To this end Iraq needs a Marshall Plan to reconstruct the county and provide economic stability. It also needs to take control of its own political life. Iraq has many talented people and a strong middle class who will keep the country running. America will not be able to control Iraq by military means for long.

We will be grateful for the removal of Saddam Hussein. But our gratitude will not last if America wants to stay long.

Yousif Al-Khoei is director of the Khoei Foundation in London.

ANALYSIS: NEO-COLONIAL AMBITIONS

Few in the Middle East believe Washington seeks to intervene in Iraq for anything but self-interested reasons.

By David Hirst in Beirut

In March 1988, I was in the first party of journalists to visit the Iraqi border town of Halabja, just conquered by the Iranian Army, and report on the terrible vengeance which Saddam Hussein wrought on its Kurdish inhabitants. He had gassed them all.

Shock at this grisly scene was quickly followed by disbelief at the official American comment on it. It might, Washington said, have been Iranian, not Iraqi, handiwork. A few months later, in eastern Turkey, I saw the thousands who had fled across the frontier in the wake of Operation Anfal, Saddam's bid to subjugate Iraq's Kurdish citizens by gassing at least 100,000 of them. The American, indeed the wider Western, response to this genocidal act was minimal.

It is now known that this was deliberate. In a policy of which Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and other neo-conservative members of the current administration were key executives, the US had aligned itself behind Saddam in his war on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fundamentalist Iran, and in the aftermath of Halabja officials were instructed to lie and obfuscate on his behalf.

So it will be hard to credit the American-led war on Iraq with any of the disinterested purposes that the administration ascribes to it, like "liberating" the Iraqi people and replacing Saddam's despotism with a "democratic" new order. It is easier to agree with those who discern only a self-interested agenda - one which the neo-conservatives hardly bother to disguise themselves.

The Middle East stands on the brink of geopolitical upheavals unlike anything since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The US is embarking on a quasi-colonial enterprise, involving direct, physical conquest and occupation, comparable to the one it opposed 80 years ago when Britain and France were doing the colonizing. The basic idea is to install a client regime in Iraq, then turn this potentially rich and strategically pivotal country into the fulcrum of a wider design that will bring the entire region firmly under Israeli-influenced American control.

The Palestinians, completely bereft of any Arab support, will be forced to acquiesce in the formalized apartheid that is Ariel Sharon's idea of a final settlement. America will secure the high hand over a denationalised Iraqi oil industry, and, from that position of strength, set production, supply and pricing policies for the whole region, undermining the traditional ascendancy of Saudi Arabia, emasculating OPEC, and ushering in an era of cheaper and more abundant oil.

Such quasi-colonial ambitions are good reasons for the Arabs to oppose the war. The trouble is that in doing so, they oppose the wishes of those Arabs, the Iraqis themselves, most directly concerned and with greatest right to the decisive voice in their own future. The Iraqis want to be rid of Saddam Hussein. For the Iraqi opposition, the rationale for war - dismantling Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - is the wrong one, or at least a subsidiary, one. They believe that what counts is Saddam's uniquely evil regime, with or without those weapons. For the opposition, the key UN resolution was never 687, which calls for Iraqi disarmament, but 688, which calls for an end to the "repression" of the Iraqi people.

For the opposition, too there is no other means to fulfil that resolution than an international military intervention. And if that turns out to be mainly, or even exclusively, American, then so be it. They have tried everything down the years: assassination, military putsch, terrorist insurgency, popular uprising. The 1991 rebellion came closest to success. It only failed because - in a shameful betrayal - the administration of George Bush the father withheld the international backing which, with troops in southern Iraq, it could so very easily have furnished.

To be sure, some of the main opposition factions have had misgivings about an American intervention. Not for the reasons that other Arabs do, but because they needed to be convinced that America was truly serious at last - first about getting rid of Saddam; secondly, about installing an acceptable new order in his place. They still have misgivings about the second of these things.

Such is the gulf between Iraqi and Arab positions on the coming war that some Arab newspapers call Iraqi opposition leaders traitors, because they are ready to enlist the services of a foreign devil against their own. But these accusations only dramatize the moral and political confusion into which, over this momentous question, the Arabs have fallen. They consider that the coming onslaught will be directed against the entire Arab world, not just Iraq.

But they would not be facing this calamity if, in the past 20 years, they had recognized Saddam for what he is, the most villainous and destructive of Arab leaders, the worst manifestation of a sickness that afflicts almost all Arab societies; and if, having recognized this, they sympathized with the Iraqis, who had to endure it, and helped them end it.

When Saddam gassed the Kurds, he may have earned unconscionably little reproach from the West. But that little was enough for the Arab regimes, via the Arab League, to volunteer their "total solidarity" with him.

However valid the reasons for war, disarming Iraq or bringing about regime change will still be seen as the supreme expression of those double standards which are the single most important reason why Arab hostility to the US has reached the intensity it has. It will be wreaking punishment on an Arab country for its acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and its violations of UN resolutions even as the US continues to indulge an Israeli protégé which has a far longer, no less deceitful, illegitimate and ultimately dangerous record of doing the same.

David Hirst is a Middle East writer and analyst based in Beirut.

COMMENT: NO PROTEST IN MY NAME!

A victim of Saddam's regime puts her case for war.

By Freshta Raper in London

Do the anti-war protestors who have been filling the streets and parks of the civilized, comfortable West have any idea what they are protesting about? I watched with dismay this week as Greenpeace supporters chained themselves to fuel pumps. I could not believe the naiveté of the protestors in Hyde Park a few weeks ago. They wouldn't survive a month if dropped into Baghdad and forced to live as Iraqis live. They would be arrested and tortured as soon as they started complaining about the lack of basic rights - among them, free speech.

What is more moral? Freeing an oppressed, brutalized people from a vicious tyrant or allowing millions to continue suffering indefinitely? Speaking as one of millions of Iraqis who have suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, I would pay any price to get rid of this monster.

I have been imprisoned, tortured and gassed. I know life in Saddam's Iraq.

I was born in Halabja, close to the Iranian border in the northern Kurdish region. I went to school and graduated in Halabja, then became a mathematics teacher. In the mid-1980s, a law was passed decreeing that all teaching must be done in Arabic. No more would we be allowed to teach in Kurdish. There were demonstrations. Courageous students burned books in protest.

When this happened in Halabja, the ringleaders came to my school to escape from the Iraqi mukhabarat - intelligence officers - who were looking for them. I helped hide them in the physics lab and they remained undetected. But someone must have informed the authorities, for I was arrested the following day and held for three days. During this time I was forced to sit in ice-cold water. I, like so many other Iraqi women, endured many humiliations. All this for hiding two 16-year-old children who had burnt a few books!

After I was released, men from the mukhabarat followed me everywhere. No-one was allowed to speak to me. I was fired soon after, told not to go anywhere near the school or the children, and re-assigned to the education department of the regional government in the city of Suleimaniyah.

In 1987, I received a memo from the director calling me to a meeting. I arrived at the appointed time and found the hall packed with friends and colleagues. Mukhabarat surrounded the building and arrested us all. They loaded us onto a lorry and said: "Bring your men folk who are peshmergas [anti-Saddam Kurdish guerrillas] or bring divorce papers!"

I did neither. I joined the peshmergas and stayed in the mountains living the life of guerrilla - a life of hell, under constant threat of chemical attack.

In 1988, 21 members of my family - aunts, nephews and nieces - died of suffocation when Saddam attacked Halabja with chemical weapons. In many ways I was lucky: my mother, brothers and sisters were in Suleimaniyah and survived. When the planes came, I was in Kanyto, a small village in the mountains. Again I was lucky: I survived the chemical attack. Badly injured, though, I spent three months in hospital recovering from the chemical burns that covered my body, blistering it from head to foot.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait I decided to leave my homeland: still suffering from the chemicals, I felt vulnerable - helpless and hopeless. I fled to England and resumed my teaching career in a London boys' school. Today the most dangerous thing I have to deal with is disruptive, swearing teenagers. This is the world the protestors know - not Saddam's world of chemical weapons, of arbitrary terror and rape.

How many protestors have spoken to an Iraqi woman who has been raped - in front of her father and son - by Saddam's thugs? How many have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being executed - and then ordered to pay for the bullet that killed him? How many know that these mothers had to applaud as their sons died - or be executed themselves? I saw this in Suleimaniyah. I heard the clapping. I hear it still.

In the 12 years since I arrived in England I have been back to Northern Iraq four times to visit family and friends. Thankfully, because of the no-fly zone imposed by the Western allies, life there has improved: the Iraqi army is no longer on our land. But Kurds outside the liberated area still live in fear that they may be picked up by Iraqi soldiers, conscripted into the Iraqi army or forced to sign papers declaring that they are not Kurds - but Arabs.

I have spoken to many people in northern Iraq over the last few weeks - to Kurdish officials, journalists, old friends, my brother. They all agree that this war proposed by George Bush and Tony Blair may be the one chance to rid Iraq of the disease that is Saddam Hussein. They, like me, believe that anti-war protests will be taken as a sign of weakness by Saddam and exploited by him to the full.

Giving the UN inspectors more time is a sad, bad joke. Saddam will never disarm. He will lie, cheat and bluff his way out. He always has and always will.

Freshta Raper is head of mathematics at a London comprehensive school.

INTERVIEW: BEYOND REGIME CHANGE

Opposition leaders in Northern Iraq believe the US has moved closer towards supporting fundamental political regime changes, including de-Ba'athification.

With Kanan Makiya in Salahuddin, Northern Iraq

Representatives of four US-backed Iraqi opposition parties and Iraqi independents sympathetic to them met this week in the liberated Kurdish area of northern Iraq to give structure and leadership to a 65-member Consultative Council elected last year by the so-called Group of Six - or G6. The meeting opened on Wednesday attended by a US government delegation led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis".

A key issue was the desire of many opposition figures for a provisional government, seen by them as the only way to avert an American occupation of Iraq or a takeover by remnants of President Saddam Hussein's Ba'thist regime. The United States is adamantly opposed to the declaration of such a government, fearing it will lessen opposition to Saddam within Iraq itself.

IWPR coodinating editor Julie Flint spoke to Kanan Makiya, author of "Republic of Fear: Saddam's Iraq", professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, and one of the delegates gathered within range of Saddam's guns just outside the liberated area.

Q: What does the meeting in Salahuddin say about the state of the Iraqi opposition today, on the eve of probable war against Saddam Hussein?

A: Fifty-three delegates out of an original 65 braved the elements, travel difficulties and the dangers of the area to come. I think that is very impressive. The Iraqi National Accord of Ayad Allawi and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement of Sharif Ali have stayed away unfortunately, but their places are being kept open. Prior to the opening, we had three days of "informal" talks among ourselves in Suleimaniyah. People used the occasion to air their views, to ventilate grievances and to criticize some of the bad practices of the London conference of August 2002 (when the G6 met to discuss Iraq's future in a post-Saddam period). Some people are saying this is the most transparent and candid conference the Iraqi opposition has ever had.

Q: When Saddam's forces crossed the 32nd parallel in 1996 and entered Erbil, targeting the leaders and the cadres of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) broke ranks with the INC and a deep rift opened between these two key opposition players. How damaging to the opposition is that rift today?

A: Relations between Ahmad Chalabi and Massoud have been restored. The reconciliation started several months ago and has been cemented during our trip. Ahmad spoke very warmly of Massoud in his speech at the opening session of the conference today

Q: The United States has criticised reported opposition plans for a provisional government the minute war starts. Has this caused the opposition to modify its plans?

A: Neither the INC nor the coordinating committee of the conference plans to announce a provisional government. We are, however, talking through what it might look like in some detail. The United States is clearly and unambiguously against it.

Q: What relevance would a provisional government have for Iraqis inside Iraq?

A: The crucial relevance of a transitional government is that it would take us away from the paradigm of a military occupation and join the Iraqi opposition to the US enterprise at the hip, so to speak. At present there is no Iraqi partner for what the US is about to do. The US does not have the knowledge or experience of Iraq to pull this off without Iraqi participation. It cannot and should not work through Iraqi American amateurs with no real inside experience of the country, by-passing those elements of Iraqi society that have struggled for years and paid a heavy price in fighting Saddam.

Q: The US is embarking on a quasi-colonial enterprise in Iraq involving direct, physical conquest and occupation. Some senior US officials have recently had very harsh words for the Iraqi opposition. How great is US support for this meeting?

A: Before the arrival of the US delegation, I was worried about US support for this meeting of the opposition. I now realize that Turkish behaviour caused the US delegation real and quite remarkable problems getting here.

In the end, because the Turks would not let them through, the US delegation came without their whole "protection package", as it has been called - with barely a dozen security people. The Turks would not relent and let them in. US security is therefore essentially being provided by the KDP.

In spite of all these obstacles, the US delegation insisted on coming. That suggests seriousness. I am reassured. But there is nothing concrete yet in terms of defining the type of relationship that might emerge with the Americans. All that remains to be discussed.

Q: Many Arabs are calling Iraqi opposition leaders traitors because of their cooperation with a United States that espouses a clear and generally uncritical pro-Israeli agenda.

A: Arabs who call the Iraqi opposition traitors are themselves guilty of collaboration with tyranny and of silence over the gross violations that have been committed against the people of Iraq by their own leaders. I say they are guilty of perpetuating the war that Saddam Hussein has been waging on his own people since the installation of his fascist regime.

Q: There is mounting concern in the Arab world, and among Iraqis themselves, over US plans for the post-Saddam era. Many doubt the quality of a "democracy" imposed by an external superpower. Can Washington be influenced, at this late stage, by these small voices of protest?

A: I do not believe it a lost cause. Everything depends on their commitment to a real democratic and structural transformation of Iraq. If they stay this difficult course, they will change the face of the Middle East for the better.

I feel the criticism directed at Washington - by myself and Ahmad Chalabi - has had a big effect. In his opening remarks, Zalmay Khalilzad bent over backwards to emphasize America's commitment to democracy and compared what the US was about to do to in Iraq with what was done in post-war Germany and Japan. The US is now most reassuringly talking about de-Ba'athification, dismantling Saddam's repressive institutions and thorough-going democratisation. Washington's language has clearly changed. There is no more talk of "military government". In its place is American administration. In spite of American attempts to obstruct its emergence, a leadership was formed at this meeting.

Q: What is the mood among Kurds in the liberated area, knowing as they do Saddam's hatred of them, as opposition figures and foreign troops descend on them?

A: People are anxious and expectant at the same time. I keep getting asked if Saddam will attack Kurdistan with chemical weapons.

Q: How do you believe Saddam is going to fight this war?

A: He is going to dig in. He is going to try to draw US troops into cities and then do his worst. However I truly think the Iraqi army is not going to fight - or rather it will fight less than it did last time.

Q: Can the war be won without massive civilian casualties?

A: I suspect we will see fewer casualties than in the last war. The single greatest danger is Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He would then attempt then to blame the US for the deaths.

ANALYSIS: TOWARDS A NEW IRAQI POLITICS

Iraqi civil society activists want to get rid of old style top-down politics of exclusivity and intrigue.

By Rend Rahim Francke in Washington

As a new era dawns for Iraq, one way or another, a growing number of Iraqis in exile are clamouring for a new type of opposition politics - not the abstractions of ideology superimposed on Iraqi reality, but pragmatic politics that arise from Iraqi particularity. After the demise of Saddam Hussein and his regime, Iraqis may tolerate the politics of personality and cliques for a while, but they will not be won over by old political models.

In August 2002, senior officials in the US government held high-profile meetings with representatives of six Iraqi opposition groups to discuss Iraq's future in the event of the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The group of six, or G6 as it came to be called, comprised the two Kurdish parties, the PUK and KDP, the Shia Islamist movement SCIRI, the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi National Accord and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement. One of the goals of the meeting was to create greater unity within the ranks of the Iraqi opposition and to that end the G6 agreed with the US recommendation to hold a large and representative conference to bring the Iraqi opposition together.

After several postponements, and amid a great deal of bickering, the conference was finally held in London in December. Although attendance was high, with more than 400 Iraqis present, many considered that the outcome was far from satisfactory.

At the time, a good deal was written about disagreements within the G6 and the causes of the delay in holding the conference. News reports focused on rivalries, partisan dissentions and jockeying for personal advantage, and debates about the "independents", the amorphous multitude of Iraqis who wanted a presence at the conference

What did not receive enough attention from the press -or from US policy-makers- is a deeper, and far more important, disagreement within the Iraqi opposition about the fundamental politics of Iraq's future. This disagreement is not confined to the G6 but encompasses all Iraqis who take an interest in politics.

As early as September, in response to reports that the G6 was contemplating a conference of no more than 80 people, some 200 independent Iraqis in Europe, the United States and the Middle East signed a memorandum calling for the conference to be much larger in order to represent all Iraqi opposition forces. In a letter later that month, a small group of Iraqis again called for broad representation of independents.

The letter broke new ground in describing Iraqi expatriates, for the first time, as an "Iraqi civil society", inclusive of professionals and professional associations, human rights groups, NGOs, artists, authors, activists, community leaders and others. Drafted by Ali Allawi, Muwafaq el-Rubaei and myself, it asserted that the G6 represented narrow political views and could not possibly encompass the variety of political thinking that had developed among the several million Iraqis living outside Iraq.

The memorandum and the letter, and other similar writings from the Iraqi grassroots, revealed a fault line within the Iraqi opposition, between a broad Iraqi public and the leaders of the G6, that was quite different to the fault line within the group itself.

What was the source of this protest against the G6? Simply described, it was an outcry against the conventional top-down politics of exclusivity and intrigue, a call for more inclusion and transparency. It was a contest between an old and a new politics, between those who look back to Iraq's past for their convictions and modes of operation, and those who wish to look to Iraq's future for political inspiration.

Most of the criticism arises from the belief that the major Iraqi political groups today are embodiments of Iraq's past politics. They are rooted in the ideological conflicts of the mid-century, from the 1940s to the 1960s, when the notions of struggle, nationalism, and liberation from colonialism (European, Arab, and so on) became the cornerstones of Iraqi politics.

Arab nationalist groups and their Kurdish counterparts, the Kurdish parties active today, are outgrowths of these national liberation movements. Shia Islamist parties (also a movement of liberation from cultural colonialism, a return to "authenticity") took shape in Iraq during that period, although repression forced them underground and they thrived in the underground politics of the Iraq of the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever their current manifestations, the core beliefs of these parties retain the sense of siege that characterized politics in the mid-century. As a result, their methods are still those of subterranean movements operating in hostile environments. They manoeuvre warily and in secrecy. Their leaderships exercise centralized control. Their structures, decision-making processes and objectives are opaque - not only to other political groups, but also to their own constituencies.

The ideologies of the major nationalist, Islamist and socialist groups view Iraq as part of a larger whole, rather than as an end in itself, and at least on the face of it their agendas are extra-territorial. Arab nationalism defines Iraq by its role within a larger Arab qawmiya - nation - even if the dream of Arab political unity has been set aside. The Kurdish parties consider Iraqi Kurdistan part of a greater whole, and the region is referred to as Southern Kurdistan. Only recently have Kurdish parties begun to talk about their role in Iraqi politics. For Islamists, the platonic ideal of the polity is the Islamic umma, not the state.

These issues are not merely academic. Such extra-territorial ideologies dilute the notion of citizenship and detach policy-making from the specific needs of Iraq as a country.

The Arab Iraqi opposition in particular has failed to create parties or institutions along modern lines. Most of the groups are small cliques of individuals with shared interest, who rely on ad hoc arrangements and improvisation. There are no parties with a recognizable structure, a base of popular support, a declared political agenda, and an accountable governing body. With the single, long-standing exception of the Iraqi Communist Party, the opposition has also failed to build political organizations that cross ethnic lines.

It would be premature to require such political sophistication if it were not for the fact that the opposition has been active for at least 20 years - and has been basking in international recognition and support for 12 years.

The major problem faced by the Iraqi opposition is that Iraqi political consciousness has changed dramatically in the past decade. Interpreting Iraq through nationalist, ethnic and religious prisms is no longer acceptable to most Iraqis. Secretive and exclusionary politics that do not rest on a constituent mandate are also an anachronism, particularly to Iraqis outside Iraq, at a time when democracy and participation are the common coin of all politics.

Hence the overwhelming majority of Iraqis outside Iraq classify themselves as independents, resisting association with the political groups.

The Gulf war of 1991 was a watershed for Iraqis, both inside Iraq and in the Diaspora. In order to become politically engaged, they will need to see a new type of politics when Saddam Hussein's regime ends. For most Iraqis now, politics is intensely local: Iraq is a finite and complete entity, and its interests alone should be considered. Iraqi Arabs in particular have replaced nationalism with patriotism, and have adopted an attitude of "Iraq first, Iraq only".

Rend Rahim Francke is executive director of the Washington-based Iraq Foundation.

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IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 01