Thoughts from London

One year on, Iraq is burning even more
No excuse is needed to return to the war on Iraq and its dangerous and explosive aftermath. It was one year ago that the bombing of Iraq by the joint forces of America and Britain began in earnest as their armour and ground troops prepared to invade the country.

One year later as the security situation in occupied Iraq deteriorates daily and the post-war death toll of troops and civilians keep rising, thousands of miles away a terrorism alert adds new worries to a local population. An attack on London is inevitable, warns the capital's police chief.

Meanwhile, a group of Iraqi journalists, media teachers and technicians are visiting Britain at the invitation of the British Council and the BBC on a two-week training course.

No doubt they would be lectured and hectored on media freedom and western media values to titillate their professional taste buds, jaded under the state-controlled media culture of the Saddam regime.

Interestingly, the visit coincides with the anniversary of the invasion of their country. For a people who, we are told by American and British media, have been liberated by a humanitarian-minded West from decades of repression by a tyrant, they did not appear particularly overjoyed when I met the group at a reception last week.

Oh yes, they are enjoying their visit to London. However, both men and women media professionals I spoke to had one observation running like the common thread through the various conversations I had. What is the use of freedom, they asked, if there is no security? Asked to explain, many of them talked of their fears of continuing suicide attacks and bombs, fear for themselves as they went to work, fear for their families.

Briefly put, freedom without security was an empty shell. Under the Saddam regime there was no freedom, but there was security. People could move around, go about their daily business without being blown up. It was the other way round now. One journalist told me he did not expect the security situation to return to normal for another five years or more.

That is not all. The cost of living has gone up though items such as TV sets and satellite dishes are now available. It seems the priorities have been stood on their head. Satellite television might bring western-controlled newscasts and programmes to those who can afford TV and have homes to watch them in.

But television cannot fill the stomachs of Iraqis who have no jobs and whose places of work and businesses have been bombed back into the Stone Age. Consider the prices of some basic items. These are statistics supplied by the Foreign Office. Cooking gas that was 500 dinars a canister before the war is now 5,000 dinars. Beef/Lamb that was selling at 3,000 dinars a kilo is now more than double at 7,000 dinars. Fish which cost 5,000 dinars a kilo is now three times the price at 15,000 dinars. Tomatoes that sold at 150 dinars a kilo before the war is now 500 dinars.

Electricity before the war cost 15,000 dinars a month. Now it is free, if you can get it. Most families prefer to connect to a local generator which can cost up to 50,000 dinars a month. Some 1,900 schools have been rehabilitated, 90 percent of schools have been provided with revised textbooks, some 30 million vaccines provided, refrigerators are available at half the pre-war price as are flat screen TVs.

What is not mentioned, of course, who has benefited from the opening up of the market. Are they American-British companies? Most of the infrastructure development is going to American firms and even the British are unhappy with the way the reconstruction/rehabilitation cake is being cut.

President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair continue to insist that the Iraqi people are better off today without the tyrant who repressed them for decades and invaded his neighbours.

It might well be argued that the fall of a dictator or an authoritarian and repressive regime calls for rejoicing. Whether this has improved the overall situation of the Iraqi people is still in dispute and is likely to continue for a long time. As it is today, civil unrest, killings, bombings and attacks on occupation forces have become virtually a daily occurrence. The civic institutions are not functioning properly one year after the invasion.

The liberators said they would bring democracy and human rights to a country long deprived of them. Yet Iraq's family law, perhaps the most progressive in the Middle East, is now under threat from the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).

Iraqi-born novelist and painter Haifa Zangana argues that if IGC Resolution 137 becomes a reality, it will eliminate the idea of civil marriage and transfer several aspects of family law such as divorce and inheritance rights, directly under the control of religious authorities.

Curiously, those who preach human rights and equality are undermining Iraqi secularism and introducing theocratic controls just as the Taliban did, in the extreme, of course. Even if the jury is still out on whether the Iraqis in general believe their situation has improved after their "liberation" as Bush, Blair and their neo-conservative allies claim, regime change is only an afterthought constructed to divert attention from the illegality of the war and the abandoning of the UN process.

The reason adduced by the American-British coalition was that Iraq had consistently ignored UN Security Council resolutions and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a real and immediate threat to the region and the world. Therefore that threat had to be eliminated.

Last week on a special BBC "Panorama" programme Hilary Benn, the minister in charge of international development, said Britain went to war because Iraq did not comply with the UN resolutions. What his audience and the moderator, the usually combative Jeremy Paxman, failed to ask is what gave the US and Britain the right to go to war because of this failure to comply. If they were UN resolutions only the UN Security Council had the legal right to decide on the action to follow.

Minister Benn also tried to cloud the issue by citing NATO intervention in Kosovo without a UN resolution. But that was in entirely different circumstances when systematic genocide was being carried out and the intervention was on humanitarian grounds.

The question that needs to be addressed is whether the Bush-Blair war on terror with its military actions, lack of respect for basic human rights as exemplified by the arbitrary detention of thousands of persons in Guantanamo, Belmarsh and camps in Afghanistan generally without an iota of evidence, the abandonment of the rule of law for detainees and the increasing curtailment of civil liberties, have only provided an impetus for Islamic militants.

The injustices that have occurred in the name of fighting terrorism have served as a rallying call for those who have harboured grievances against the west. The attacks in Iraq and elsewhere are proof enough that the war on terror has only helped unleash more terror across the globe. It is the civilian population that must bear the brunt of that horrendous violence.

The Christian fundamentalism that has driven Bush and Blair has brought terrorism to our doorstep. What is even more dangerous is that terrorism is now determining the course of democratic politics as we saw in Spain this month. Bush and Blair must accept a major share of the blame for this phenomenon.

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