Category Archives: Dispatches

Election Day

Posted on by
19

BAGHDAD–Almost one hour since the polls opened here, I’ve only heard one faint boom, and it was far away. So far, so good, knock on wood. I’ll be head­ing out shortly after we’ve had our secu­rity guys make an assess­ment of the safety situation.

But one thing is dif­fer­ent. Before, as a West­erner, I felt a bull’s-eye on me when­ever I left com­pound. Today, I think the kid­nap­ping threat is less (the insur­gents have bet­ter things to do today) so every­one on the street is a tar­get. This gives me a feel­ing of sol­i­dar­ity and respon­si­bil­ity. If the Iraqis can go out there and risk their lives in the lines to vote, then the least I can do is the same to cover them doing it.

More later today as things develop. Let’s hope the wor­ries of vio­lence prove overblown.

8:39:11 AM (All times local Bagh­dad time): We have our first sui­cide bomb­ing out­side a polling place in Mosul. No word yet on casu­al­ties. Explo­sions in the Green Zone, prob­a­bly mor­tars. Police report a car bomb in west Bagh­dad, with some casualties.

9:34:37 AM So far, not as much vio­lence as every­body feared. The ques­tion is why? Is the insur­gency tak­ing a pass on this one? (It’s pos­si­ble. Our sources in the insur­gency say the elec­tion will make no dif­fer­ence to them, so why expend a lot of energy?) Is the insur­gency much weaker than pre­vi­ously thought? Or is the level of secu­rity suf­fi­cient to keep it in check? If that’s the case, then that is dis­cour­ag­ing, too, because the mea­sures that have kept today safe (so far) are truly dra­con­ian. No dri­ving, dusk to dawn cur­fews, states of emer­gency. If that’s what it takes to pro­vide secu­rity in Iraq, why erase one police state only to replace it with another?

9:43:33 AM Interim Prime Min­is­ter Iyad Allawi just voted, and didn’t even bother to put on a tie. Casual-vote Sunday?

10:40:11 AM Just got back from the local vot­ing sta­tion in my ‘hood, Karada, which is a heav­ily Shi’a neigh­bor­hood. The polling took place in the Muham­mad Baqr al-Hakim High School, named for the for­mer leader of the Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq. The secu­rity for the neigh­bor­hood is being han­dled by Iraqi Police, New Iraqi Army and Badr/SCIRI mili­ti­a­men. And–quelle surprise!–the list topped by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the cur­rent leader of SCIRI and the brother of Muham­mad Baqr al-Hakim, is the favored list. Almost every­one is vot­ing for that one in this area. But for all that, there were a lot of women, and every­one looked hap­pier than I’ve seen them in months.

There were no Amer­i­cans in sight, except for the Apache chop­pers cir­cling above.

This is a safe neigh­bor­hood and turnout seems pretty good. I can’t speak for the other parts of the city or the coun­try how­ever, because despite assur­ances from the Min­istry of Inte­rior, press cars are being stopped at check­points and turned away. We’re all walk­ing today, looks like.

11:32:34 AM Four sui­cide bomb­ings, all in west Bagh­dad. Seven dead and sev­eral wounded. We can’t get to them because the bridges are blocked off and west Bagh­dad is on the other side of the Tigris River.

12:22:58 PM Sixth sui­cide bomb kills six peo­ple at a polling cen­ter in Bagh­dad. Unsure on where it is. Some of our other staff are our on the streets right now, and I’ll be head­ing out again when they get back. (We only have so much security.)

12:29:48 PM Inter­est­ing. I’m watch­ing CNN Inter­na­tional, and the shots of long lines and happy vot­ers are almost all com­ing from Iraqi Kur­dis­tan where the vot­ers are moti­vated and the envi­ron­ment is (rel­a­tively) safe. The rub is that CNNi is not iden­ti­fy­ing the images as com­ing from Kur­dis­tan; the only way I knew it was from up north was the sin­gle shot of some­one wav­ing a Kur­dish flag. But if you don’t know what the flag looks like (red, white and green bars with a yel­low star­burst in the cen­ter), as I sus­pect most Amer­i­cans don’t, you wouldn’t know the con­text of these images. Shi’ites are also com­ing out in droves in the south. But Sun­nis are stay­ing home. I will be sur­prised if the Sunni vote hits dou­ble dig­its at this point.

1:03:55 PM The Iraqi Army and Police have been very polite and even friendly at the polling sta­tions, but sev­eral reporters have been shot at as they go about in their cars. (Which is why I’m walk­ing around as soon as my secu­rity guys get back.)

1:15:38 PM Nine sui­cide bombs in Bagh­dad alone, with at least 20 dead. A bomb went off near the home of the Jus­tice Min­is­ter. There are a num­ber of out­go­ing mor­tars from my neigh­bor­hood in the last 10 minutes.

4:56:55 PM Just got back from a cou­ple of polling sta­tions. Things have gone very smoothly, all things con­sid­ered. Every­one out on the streets is happy, even the Iraqi secu­rity forces who will laugh and joke with journalists–the first time they’ve done it in months. I saw one Amer­i­can con­voy patrolling around, but that was it. A few Amer­i­can chop­pers. But the promise to put the Iraqis front and cen­ter seemed to have been kept.

Inter­est­ing results from the two polling places I to: the Al-Amil Pri­mary School and the Ara­biya Preschool. Almost every­one vot­ing is Shi’a, and the rush came around mid-day. By 2 p.m. when I was out, there weren’t a lot of vot­ers. Most peo­ple are vot­ing for Sistani’s list, No. 169, but a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of women are vot­ing for Allawi. They worry about the influ­ence of the reli­gious par­ties such as SCIRI and Dawa, which dom­i­nate No. 169.

The men, how­ever, all voted for No. 169, because they felt it rep­re­sented them and the peo­ple on it would act in the best inter­ests of Iraq. Also because of the tacit sup­port of Grand Aya­tol­lah Ali al-Sistani. “It’s a patri­otic list and it has the sup­port of the mar­jariya,” said Hamid al-Mousawi, 39, an agri­cul­tural engi­neer. His six-year-old daugh­ter, Abrar, also said she sup­ported the Sis­tani list and said her father vot­ing was “good” and that she wants to vote, too, when she’s old enough. One word: adorable.

“It’s the first time for the Iraqis to express their opin­ions,” her father said. “It’s the great­est national eid (hol­i­day) for us.“

“It’s the future, in one word,” said Abdel Karim Ahmed, 51, an agent for the Min­istry of Trade in charge of dis­trib­ut­ing food under the ration-card sys­tem. “We are going to elect who will rep­re­sent us in the National Assembly.“

He declined to say who he was sup­port­ing, say­ing it was a secret bal­lot, which was com­pletely under­stand­able. But he did say he would wait­ing anx­iously to see who if his list would get seats in the Assembly.

The polling sta­tions were housed in schools, by and large, and sev­eral rooms were taken over for the bal­lot­ing. In each, the card­board screens were held together with red tape, and then the bal­lot was dropped in those plas­tic bins you see on tele­vi­sion. The ones I saw were all about three-quarters full.

It was a marked depar­ture from Iraq’s elec­tions in the past, which Sad­dam won hand­ily, of course.

“I feel like a free man,” said Muham­mad Abad al-Badawi, a shop­keeper who had just fin­ished vot­ing. “For the last 35 years, we were elect­ing noth­ing. They were fake elec­tions.” He’s sup­port­ing Allawi, “because he’s a decent man” and he will fix the secu­rity situation.

But I have to say, it seems like he’s already fixed it, at least for today. Today’s highly restric­tive mea­sures are unten­able, of course, and no one can live like this for long, but for a day, the insur­gency was kept at bay.

Which is why, sev­eral of us jour­nal­ists here are going to call this elec­tions for the Iraqis. My friend Mitch and I were dis­cussing this and regard­less of who wins in the polls, the Iraqis won here and proved themselves–for a day, at least–stronger than the insur­gency. And that’s a very big sym­bolic vic­tory. A huge one, in fact, and Iraqis should take great pride in them­selves. When they had the oppor­tu­nity, they stood up and were counted. The real losers were the Sun­nis who didn’t par­tic­i­pate. They missed a golden oppor­tu­nity to take part in a process that, while flawed, were the only game in town. I don’t know what’s going to hap­pen next, and a civil war may still erupt, but if it does, the elected government–one elected by Shi’a and Kurds, for the most part–will have the moral high ground in it.

Off on an embed

Posted on by
Reply

Well, hell. I thought I’d have time to work up some more stuff on Iraqi pol­i­tics, but an embed I’ve been want­ing to get in on has just come through, and it looks like I’m leav­ing for it tomor­row. I expect to be gone a week and it’s unlikely I’ll be blog­ging while away. My apologies.

But when I come back, I hope to have some good stuff to put up. Until then… stay safe.

Back in Baghdad

Posted on by
4

BAGHDAD — I returned to Bagh­dad on Mon­day. The city is as chaotic and choked as ever, but the level of vio­lence in the last few days has been less than I expected. I’ve only heard two explo­sions near my house in east­ern Bagh­dad, and they were far away. I get the impres­sion that the Green Zone is not attacked as much. Per­haps I was wrong to pooh-pooh the Fal­lu­jah offen­sive… Or per­haps the insur­gency has just gone to ground for a while.
For the aver­age cit­i­zen of Bagh­dad, how­ever, things are not great. Queues for petrol are hun­dreds of cars long — up to five or six kilo­me­ters in some places. The wait is hours long because of the cold weather that is set­tling in, made all the worse by a wors­en­ing elec­tric­ity sit­u­a­tion.
In Octo­ber, when I left, most peo­ple I spoke with said it was up to a four-hours-on, two-hours-off sched­ule. Now we’re back to one– or two-hours-on, five– to six-hours off. And gen­er­a­tors can only run for six hours or so at a time before hav­ing to sit idle for a lit­tle while. It’s unclear why the elec­tric­ity is so bad after it seemed to be improv­ing for a while. The elec­tri­cal heaters that more peo­ple are run­ning use more juice than air con­di­tion­ing, so per­haps that’s the rea­son.
The mobile net­work is col­laps­ing, too, but every­one knows the rea­son for that: Insur­gents are tar­get­ing the trans­mit­ters. Half the time, the phones don’t work at all, forc­ing us to rely on our satel­lite phones. Of course, the aver­age Iraqi doesn’t have one of these, so they get an unre­li­able land­line or noth­ing.
Yes­ter­day was my first full day back in the city, and I started out by plan­ning to take a ride-along with the min­is­ter of Hous­ing and Con­struc­tion, Dr. Omar al-Damluji. Things didn’t quite work out as planned.
My pho­tog­ra­pher and I got to the min­istry at about 10:30 a.m., later than I wanted. Traf­fic (izdi­ham, in Iraqi Ara­bic) has become so bad that it takes 90 min­utes to two hours to go any­where, whereas before, dur­ing the sum­mer, one could get any­where in the city in half an hour, tops. Any­way, we got there, and didn’t get to see the min­is­ter. We were kept wait­ing for 30 min­utes or so until armed guards and other aides sud­denly rushed into the foyer and hus­tled us out the door into a court­yard. “Yella! Yella!” (“Let’s go! Let’s go!”)
We were bun­dled into one of the cars in the con­voy — a fleet of white SUVs which might as well have “SHOOT ME” in big red let­ters on them — and took off. Within the first few hun­dred meters the SUV behind us rear-ended us caus­ing our dri­ver to swear into his radio at his col­league behind him. It was not some­thing that inspired con­fi­dence. Nor did their behav­ior in traf­fic. It was ama­teur hour. The dri­vers tried to sur­round the minister’s vehi­cle, which was con­ve­niently a dif­fer­ent color than the oth­ers for easy spot­ting through RPG sights, but they con­sis­tently left large gaps between vehi­cles wide enough for the prover­bial large truck. This is very bad dri­ving when it comes to pro­tec­tive con­voys. They seemed to think high rates of speed and lib­eral use of the horn would pro­tect them. I sat in the back and fret­ted about an ambush.
This was not part of the plan. The plan was to fol­low along at a dis­creet dis­tance in our own cars so that if some­thing hap­pened, we wouldn’t be part of the con­voy. Now, I was in one of the vehi­cles — the unarmed one. I also imag­ined big irony arrows point­ing at my vehi­cle. I had just arrived the day before. My pho­tog­ra­pher was leav­ing the next day. If fate has a sense of humor — and it often has a demented one — we were the per­fect kid­nap­ping tar­gets.
But we made it to the inspec­tion site with­out inci­dent, although not with­out some hair-raising moments of reck­less dri­ving. But the “inspec­tion site” was actu­ally the al-Hamourabi Con­struc­tion Co., which is fully owned by the Min­istry. Again, we had to wait. Again, I didn’t get to see the min­is­ter as I was promised and again, I fumed out in the lobby.
Finally, a flunky brought me and my pho­tog­ra­pher into the room to behold His Excel­lency. He was hold­ing a meet­ing and didn’t bother look­ing up as we came in. For 90 min­utes he lis­tened to his sub­or­di­nates and answered their ques­tions about con­crete and tar fac­to­ries. Then he told them he wanted all the fac­to­ries prof­itable so they could be pri­va­tized and sold on the Bagh­dad Stock Exchange, not­ing approv­ingly of Mar­garet Thatcher’s actions in Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. Later, in the few min­utes I had with him after the meet­ing, he admit­ted that he also wanted for­eign invest­ment but that he wor­ried that if the com­pa­nies weren’t prof­itable, there wouldn’t be any buy­ers.
Now, this is a big issue in Iraq. Many Iraqis point to for­mer Iraqi Pro­con­sul Paul Bremer’s eco­nomic pro­gram — such as it was — as a source of resent­ment, which fuels the insur­gency. His poli­cies led to wide­spread unem­ploy­ment as Ba’athists of every stripe were kicked out of their jobs and the Army was shut down. Now, unem­ploy­ment is bad enough that even a few hun­dred dol­lars to shoot an RPG at an Amer­i­can humvee is worth the risk of being attacked by sol­diers’ .50-cal, which does ter­ri­ble things to human flesh.
“The insur­gency is fueled by unem­ploy­ment,” al-Damluji said. “The work­ers need good salaries, dig­nity. Oth­er­wise, some­one from the out­side will pay them $300 to attack here and there. And they will do it.“
But con­sid­er­ing the role the state has played in Iraq’s econ­omy for the last sev­eral decades, a pro­gram of pri­va­ti­za­tion is likely to be unpop­u­lar. I’ve not had time to do any deep report­ing on this, but I sus­pect there’s a good story there.
After this con­ver­sa­tion, we decided to leave early, but because of the lack of phones and our own trans­porta­tion, I sent my trans­la­tor to go back to the Min­istry, get our phones and send our dri­vers back to get us. We would all meet at the house. Unfor­tu­nately, some time after my trans­la­tor left, His Excel­lency tired of inspect­ing the al-Hamourabi Con­struc­tion Co. and decided to go home. The Min­istry was clos­ing up. We couldn’t return to the Hous­ing Min­istry with him because by now, my trans­la­tor was already on his way home and our dri­vers were on their way to pick us up. And we couldn’t wait for the dri­vers because, we were told, we couldn’t wait in the company’s com­pound. Every­one wanted to go home. It was 2 p.m.: Quit­ting time in Bagh­dad. We were wel­come to wait on the street out­side the metal gates, how­ever.
That didn’t seem too smart, and the irony arrows glowed ever brighter. So, after dis­card­ing my mother’s advice to never get into a car with strange men, we ended up tak­ing a ride with some guy who worked at the com­pany. He was named Ali, and he was nice enough, but I was very wor­ried that at any minute we would learn that we had, actu­ally, been kid­napped. How­ever, fate’s sense of humor was oth­er­wise engaged and we returned home all right, and Ali even tried to refuse the small pay­ment I offered him. (He ulti­mately accepted when I insisted.)
Bul­let dodged.
It was an inter­est­ing day. It reaf­firmed my belief — sorely tested over the last few months — that kind­ness and honor isn’t dead in Iraq, even toward hap­less foreign-looking guys like myself. It also caused me to won­der whether things might now be get­ting bet­ter in the realm of secu­rity, while infra­struc­ture again takes a down­ward turn. Of course, I may be fool­ing myself about the secu­rity, for as I wrote this, I heard more explo­sions and nearby gun­fire. It’s prob­a­bly noth­ing seri­ous, but it’s wor­ry­ing nonethe­less.
Ah, wel­come to Baghdad.

The Death of Arafat

Posted on by
Reply
DSC01137.jpg
*Pales­tini­ans in Lebanon grieved for Yasser Arafat Fri­day at a sym­bolic funeral.* (© 2004 Christo­pher Allbritton)

BEIRUT  — Among the Pales­tin­ian refugees packed into the 13 camps scat­tered around Lebanon, the mood in the days before their leader’s death was one of anx­ious wait­ing. They were wait­ing for word of the death of _khatiab_ — “The Old Man” — as Yasser Arafat was affec­tion­ately known among his peo­ple.
In the tan­gled alley­ways that thread between the poorly con­structed con­crete shel­ters of Sabraa and Shatila in south Beirut — the site of the Sep­tem­ber 1982 mas­sacre of Pales­tini­ans by Chris­t­ian Pha­langes mili­tia mem­bers allied with the Israeli Defense Force under the com­mand of then-Defense Min­is­ter Ariel Sharon — chil­dren now play under memo­ri­als to the dead and the soon-to-be dead. Posters of Pales­tin­ian youths killed in the strug­gle against Israel, _shaheed_ (“mar­tyrs”) to the refugees, adorn the walls made of care­lessly stacked cin­derblocks. They are almost as numer­ous as the posters of Arafat, all of which pro­claim him the sym­bol of Pales­tine, a father to his peo­ple. He smiles down from build­ings three sto­ries high and intended to be tem­po­rary when this camp was estab­lished in 1948. He sur­veys the dirt tracks that turn to lakes of open sewage when it rains. He over­looks the stalls of the souk, sell­ing every­thing from sweets to shoes, veg­eta­bles from the Bekaa Val­ley and children’s clothes. Tables groan­ing under coconuts, toys, jack­ets, radishes and pota­toes serve as defen­sive posi­tions for the ubiq­ui­tous chil­dren, all of who seem to be clutch­ing toy pis­tols and Kalash­nikovs, shoot­ing at imag­i­nary Israeli sol­diers.
While Arafat lay on his deathbed in Paris, res­i­dents of Shatila expressed prayers for his recov­ery while admit­ting that the sym­bol of their strug­gle was soon to be gone. “We hope he gets bet­ter quickly,” said Mah­moud Zurouri, 38, who was born in Shatila. “After all, he is our pres­i­dent. But he wasn’t the first or the last per­son to die. We’ll be sorry, of course, to see him go, but the cause remains.“
“May God make him bet­ter,” prayed Has­san Mustafa, who said he fought with Arafat in Jor­dan and Lebanon in the 1970s. “He is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He is a great mind. An Israeli jour­nal­ist once described him as the man who couldn’t be con­trolled. After Abu Ammar,” he con­tin­ued, using Arafat’s _nom de guerre_, “there is no one per­son.“
But the next day, Arafat died, and the mood in Rashidiyah, out­side of Tyre, was somber and quiet, with none of the wail­ing or gun­fire seen in the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries. Instead, quiet men filed into a recep­tion hall fes­tooned with green, black and white bunting and posters of Arafat in his youth. There, they worked their way down a recep­tion line, shak­ing hands with the Fat­tah lead­er­ship in Lebanon, for Rashidiyah is a Fat­tah camp. Par­lia­ment mem­bers from Sidon, Nasserites and even mem­bers of the al-Qaf Islamic group came by to pay their respects.
Sul­tan Abu Aynayn, the head of Fat­tah in Lebanon, sat in his grief, and accepted hand­shake after hand­shake of well wish­ers.
“I can’t express my feel­ings at this moment,” he said. “Death is a right, but when it becomes a real­ity, you can’t believe God’s will has actu­ally been car­ried out. The sym­bol­ism of Arafat for 40 years, no other Pales­tin­ian can take that sym­bol­ism.“
Arafat’s death hit the younger gen­er­a­tion of Pales­tini­ans hard. “It is the worst day for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple because we lost our pres­i­dent,” said Hisham Sharari, 20, a mem­ber of the Fat­tah Youth Move­ment.
“It was the biggest shock to us,” said his friend Ali Ramadan, also 20. “It was worse than the day of _nekbah_.” The _nekbah_, which means “cat­a­stro­phe,” is the day Israel was founded.
Arafat’s death leaves a power vac­uum in the region, with many look­ing to fill it. The exist­ing Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship, which includes the new PLO leader Mah­moud Abbas, wants to main­tain sta­bil­ity, some­thing neigh­bor­ing gov­ern­ments want as well. Lebanon’s Karami gov­ern­ment, a Syr­ian client, is tak­ing a wait-and-see atti­tude to the post-Arafat era. “The Pales­tini­ans know very well they need a lead­er­ship that is able to make a dia­logue with the United States,” said Elie Fir­zli, Lebanon’s new Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion.
The new gov­ern­ment has good rea­son to be guarded in its response: this tiny coun­try suf­fered two Israeli inva­sions in the 1980s aimed at destroy­ing Arafat and his PLO, all while it fought a civil war that many Lebanese say started because of Pales­tin­ian exac­er­ba­tion of exist­ing reli­gious ten­sions. By the time the 15-year war ended in 1990, hun­dreds of thou­sands were dead and many more wounded. Lebanon was occu­pied by Syria and is still con­sid­ered a vas­sal state to Dam­as­cus. Beirut, the “Paris of the Mid­dle East” was ruined.
The Pales­tini­ans suf­fered their own hor­ror in the Civil War. The Sabraa-Shatila mas­sacre was one of the worst, in which a Pha­langist mili­tia, Chris­t­ian allies of the Israelis, entered the refugee camps and slaugh­ters hun­dreds of men, women and chil­dren while Israeli troops stood by and did noth­ing. Today, the crime is memo­ri­al­ized by an empty field in the Sabraa camp, with the words “So we shall never for­get” over the gate.
It is the bur­den of such his­tory that any new lead­er­ship of the Pales­tini­ans must labor under. It will be dif­fi­cult for Fat­tah, Arafat’s group and a nucleus of the PLO, to find a new leader who can hold all the dif­fer­ent parts of the Pales­tin­ian move­ment together.
“Arafat was able,” said Fathi Abu Ardat, a Fat­tah com­man­der in Rashidiyah who fought with Arafat in Jor­dan and Lebanon, “to trans­form the refugees of the camps from a peo­ple who were suf­fer­ing, peo­ple who were lost, just wait­ing for hand­outs into peo­ple with a national iden­tity, a cause. He turned them into rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.“
*The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary*
One such rev­o­lu­tion­ary is Munir Muq­dah, 44, who founded the Al-Aqsa Brigade after the start of the sec­ond _intifada_ in 2000. He had his quar­rels with Arafat, mainly over money going to Fat­tah mem­bers in Ein al-Helweh, the densely packed camp out­side of Sidon, instead of the Aqsa Brigades in the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries. But now, he empha­sizes the unity of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple: “We can guar­an­tee that all the Pales­tin­ian insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tion are work­ing in close coop­er­a­tion to find the alter­na­tive to Abu Ammar, and to fur­ther the Pales­tin­ian cause.“
Muq­dah is a wanted man, how­ever; he can­not leave the Ein al-Helweh camp because of sev­eral con­vic­tions for mur­der hang­ing over his head. He is the ide­o­log­i­cal leader and founder of the Al-Aqsa Brigades and has allegedly recruited an unknown num­ber of young men to blow them­selves up in sui­cide oper­a­tions. He is adept at guerilla war­fare and he is pre­pared to keep the cause alive — against who­ever would betray it.
“These are prin­ci­ples that the _intifada_ and al-Aqsa unan­i­mously adopted and that all fac­tions agreed upon,” he said. “And there are red lines that nobody can cross.“
Those “red lines” are these: An inde­pen­dent state in Pales­tine and a return of the refugees to their homes. “This revolt will not be put down until every sin­gle last Pales­tin­ian refugee is able to return to his land and coun­try,” Muq­dah said. “That is the school of Yasser Arafat.“
Muqdah’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary state­ments are a warn­ing sign to Abbas not to give ground on the right of return. Any sign of con­ces­sion on the part of the new Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship could trig­ger unrest in the refugee camps around the region, with men like Muq­dah using their skills honed in the fight against the Israelis against the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship.
This is a very real con­cern, because there are about 350,000 Pales­tin­ian refugees in Lebanon alone — about 10 per­cent of the country’s pop­u­la­tion. They have no right to work nor are they allowed to become cit­i­zens. They sub­sist on for­eign aid and what money they can make mainly as day labor­ers. The camps are dens of squalor and the sit­u­a­tion is des­per­ate. Any sense of betrayal by the new lead­er­ship has the poten­tial to send refugees into the arms of oth­ers who say they will advance the cause. These seduc­ers whis­per, _if nation­al­ism and pan-Arabism have failed you, Islam will not._
*The Islamists*
Arafat’s death is an oppor­tu­nity for Islamic hard­lin­ers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other fun­da­men­tal­ist groups. Amer­i­cans are warned by the Lebanese gov­ern­ment not to enter Ein al-Helweh, Lebanon’s largest camp, because Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists who fol­low the wah­habist sect of Islam are recruit­ing among the 90,000 refugees packed into six square kilo­me­ters. Groups affil­i­ated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida and Abu Mas­soud al-Zarqawi’s allied group in Iraq are said to be jock­ey­ing for influ­ence against the more estab­lished Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Arafat’s nation­al­ist and sec­u­lar Fat­tah fac­tion.
Abu Ardat warned that the vac­uum of Arafat’s per­son­al­ity would leave an open­ing for other groups to try to gain influ­ence. “He had his spe­cial meth­ods to keep con­trol,” he said obliquely. But he blamed any rise in Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism on the fail­ure of the peace process and the Israelis. “When you have a peace process and it stale­mates, the more extreme forces become stronger,” he said.
These Islamist groups have two assets, said Soheil al-Natour, a cen­tral com­mit­tee mem­ber of the Demo­c­ra­tic Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine. They have a cul­ture of vendetta and revenge, and they have a lot of money. If Mah­moud Abbas fails in the eyes of the refugees, the Islamists will be there wait­ing to exert their influ­ence, said al-Natour. Camps such as Ein al-Helweh har­bor the fun­da­men­tal­ists, he said, and that men like Muq­dah work with them for oper­a­tion inside Israel. If Pales­tini­ans feel their national cause is not being advanced by the new PLO lead­er­ship, they will turn to the Islamic cause to return them home. And men like Muq­dah are ready to work with the Islamist groups.
“The Pales­tin­ian issue is an Islamic issue for all,” Muq­dah told me and added that he has good rela­tions with the wahab­bist groups in Ein al-Helweh.
*A Ques­tion of Money*
Moham­mad Salam, a news ana­lyst in Beirut, who has reported on the Pales­tini­ans since 1970, warned that the Islamists are ready to buy the Pales­tini­ans’ loy­alty.
It’s a ques­tion of money. As the head of the PLO, the pres­i­dent of the Pales­tin­ian National Author­ity and of Fat­tah, the dom­i­nant fac­tion within the PLO, Arafat con­trolled a vast for­tune that has been esti­mated in the bil­lions and includes funds from for­eign aid, Israeli tax trans­fers and rev­enues from com­pa­nies con­trolled by the PLO. His per­sonal net worth has been esti­mated at any­where from $200 mil­lion to $1.3 bil­lion. He sup­pos­edly had dozens of bank accounts around the world — in Switzer­land, Malaysia, the Cay­man Islands, just to name a few. He had both num­bered accounts and in his own name. He allegedly held stakes in hotels, mobile phone com­pa­nies and an air­line.
This money went to buy­ing friend­ships. Over the years, Arafat was able to pull funds from a vari­ety of sources to pay off ene­mies and reward friends. He kept the frac­tious PLO together this way. And he paid the salaries of thou­sands of refugees who belonged to Fat­tah in the camps scat­tered around the region.
There is real worry that with the death of Arafat, Fattah’s finances will be tied up and the money won’t go out. Arafat for many Pales­tini­ans “is sim­ply a job,” said Salam. “If Arafat ceases to exist, they would sign with who­ever would sign the check.“
And those peo­ple include Islamists who base them­selves in the law­less camps. Ein al-Helweh is home to the Al-Ansar League and the Ashan Sol­diers, who sub­scribe to Osama bin Laden’s severe wah­habist inter­pre­ta­tion of Islam. And these Islamists have money. Beirut is a pop­u­lar sum­mer spot for vaca­tion­ing Gulf Arabs, and it’s not uncom­mon for them to arrive with a trunk of cash for dis­burse­ment to wah­habists in the camps, Salam said.
“They will start work­ing for the Islamists, plant­ing bombs,” said Salam. “It’s going to be bad. It’s _jihad_ for hire, just like in Iraq. And some Pales­tin­ian extrem­ists try to go to Iraq to join the insur­gency there.“
Salam said he knew of sev­eral Pales­tini­ans from Ein al-Helweh who tried to get into Iraq to com­mit sui­cide bomb­ings, but were turned back and returned to the camp. The Pales­tini­ans are a pow­derkeg that has been kept under con­trol because of Arafat’s patron­age, Salam said.
Salam’s fears are echoed by the Lebanese gov­ern­ment. Fir­zli, Lebanon’s Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion, acknowl­edges that Arafat’s pass­ing will leave a power vac­uum that would be only par­tially filled by his suc­ces­sors — an open­ing Islamic groups would likely exploit. “The Islamic groups found him a real obsta­cle,” said Fir­zli. “When he’s not there, the job is much eas­ier for them.“
Fun­da­men­tal­ists will ini­tially sup­port who­ever suc­ceeds Arafat, but on the bet that the suc­ces­sors will fail and lose sup­port of the Pales­tin­ian masses, he said. “Then they will then be jus­ti­fied.“
“I think the Arab gov­ern­ments and George Bush will miss Arafat,” mused Salam. “Who will con­trol the Pales­tini­ans after he’s gone? Islamists are steal­ing the Palestinians.”

My Friend, the Kidnap Victim

Posted on by
9

My friend, John Mar­tinkus, was the one kid­napped Sat­ur­day and held for 24 hours. He was very lucky to be freed. I had to be cir­cum­spect yes­ter­day because of secu­rity con­cerns, but John is now out of the coun­try and the embargo has been lifted. Here’s the story as he related it to us:
Sat­ur­day around 2 p.m or so, John was picked up about 500m from our hotel com­pound. He turned out of the front gate, took the first right — as most of us do — and a car stopped in front of him and a tail­ing car pulled in behind him. Four men with pis­tols jumped out and three of them man­aged to force their way into the car, putting guns to the heads of John, his dri­ver and his trans­la­tor. They then took him to west­ern Bagh­dad, held him overnight and inter­ro­gated him.
We’re not sure what all hap­pened dur­ing his cap­tiv­ity, but he was able to per­suade his cap­tors that he was an Aus­tralian and a friend to the resis­tance and not to the Amer­i­cans. It appears, by the kid­nap­pers’ state­ments and ques­tions, that they were nation­al­ists and not jihadis, lucky for John. Also, he was lucky for not being Amer­i­can, because the kid­nap­pers said if he had been, they’d have killed him quickly. They had tracked him for three days, they said, and proved it by ask­ing him why he had gone to the Green Zone and to the Pales­tine on two sep­a­rate days. This was how they were able to pick him up so eas­ily.
At one point, one man dis­ap­peared, say­ing he would check out John’s story. He came back after about 15 min­utes, John said, con­vinced John was who he said he was. We sus­pect they Googled John, because they ref­er­enced pre­vi­ous sto­ries he had cov­ered.
After some hours, his cap­tors relaxed and said that he would be released in the morn­ing. But before he was released, a sheikh from a vil­lage near Fal­lu­jah arrived. He again inter­ro­gated John, but this time it was much more aggres­sive ques­tion­ing, John said. Finally, the sheikh said that while they were con­vinced he was a man of good heart and a jour­nal­ist, he would not be freed Sun­day as promised because Aus­tralia was a mem­ber of the Coali­tion and thus, a “war­ring nation” as Zar­qawi has said. Instead, the sheikh would con­sult with his super­vi­sors in Fal­lu­jah on what to do.
Now, this was seri­ous. There’s no doubt the sheikh would return to fetch John and turn him over to al-Tahwid w’al-Jihad. So, in a fit of human­ity, after the sheikh left, the nation­al­ist cap­tors took John and released him. We’re unsure of the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this act at this point and if there will be any retal­i­a­tion within the Sunni resis­tance or against us. It’s pos­si­ble.
As fright­en­ing as John’s expe­ri­ence was for him, it shows that jour­nal­ists’ plans for “secu­rity through obscu­rity” has been blown out the win­dow. John’s cap­tors said they received a phone call that he was on the move and that the time for tak­ing him was now. This fits in with our intel­li­gence that there are kid­nap teams up and down Jadirya Street look­ing for us. His cap­tors said they had pen­e­trated the staff at the Hamra Hotel, where many of us live. They have peo­ple in the com­pound watch­ing us. They know who we are and they’re look­ing for “soft targets” — reporters mov­ing around with lit­tle secu­rity or few pre­cau­tions.
John was lucky — very lucky. He was picked up by nation­al­ists who, we hear, are get­ting out of the kid­nap­ping and behead­ing busi­ness. He wasn’t an Amer­i­can. He had a pedi­gree of lefty, anti-war reporter. And he fell in with a (more or less) kind-hearted bunch who were just doing their job as national resis­tance fight­ers. (He said they expressed con­cern that he wasn’t mar­ried and that his liv­ing arrange­ments in the Hamra weren’t safe. Bizarrely, they offered to let him stay with them the next time he came to Iraq — I’m sure.)
John’s story is indica­tive of the sit­u­a­tion fac­ing reporters — and other West­ern­ers — in Iraq. They told him they were really look­ing for secu­rity con­trac­tor or CIA staffer. I haven’t left the com­pound since I returned from Beirut; I haven’t had a spe­cific rea­son to. And now, with­out a spe­cific rea­son, I won’t be going out. This is why you won’t be see­ing any “Iraqi on the street” sto­ries here. They’re too hos­tile; the pop­u­la­tion has turned against West­ern­ers and the press. While they may not be actively assist­ing the resis­tance, I fear they would stand by idly if I were dragged into a car and taken away. The police won’t be much help either. Once, when John was being trans­ported from one house to another, his kid­nap­pers let him take off his blind­fold. A cop car was cruis­ing by just as he did so, mak­ing no move to stop a car car­ry­ing a blind­folded West­erner.
My options are lim­ited but they seem to be go north to Kur­dis­tan for a while. I’m warm­ing to this idea as it’s been an under-covered region, as usual, and it would allow me to keep work­ing. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do, but I have to be care­ful with what I say. I can’t assume any poten­tial kid­nap­pers don’t know about this blog.