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Conditions and horrors
Iraq 05/05/2024
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Documentation is a necessary element in building memory, and a full, living, awake memory is the condition for creating experience, and experience is an integral part of the formation of the mind and its removal from instinct to acquisition (the mind is two minds; the mind is instinct and acquisition) and its transformation from acquisition to the realm of action and effectiveness, especially when it comes to life. Peoples and their national affairs.
I do not believe that the period between 1990 and 2003 AD witnessed a horrific event that was harsher and more severe for Iraqis than the siege and its horrors, with the exception of the war itself, which was accompanied by the siege twice. Once at its beginning in the first month of 1991 AD, which was a starting signal and a bad omen for its launch, and another time at its end in late March 2003 AD to be a herald of its demise, may God not bring it back, and protect the people of Iraq from the evils whose owners today seemed as if they were longing to restore that horrific moment, and recall Their tragedies again as they risk the country's security and stability.
Without generalization; It is as if the Iraqi has indifference, bordering on hostility, toward documentation. Hence, the exceptional importance of the Baghdadi magazine’s file on the siege (Riwaq) appeared to us (the entire tenth issue, from its first page to the last; 258 large pages). The editorial began mourning the Iraqi memory and urging it not to die, as it moved from tragic scenes and images, to an even more tragic result, due to the absence of documentation, and the reluctance of most Iraqi memory projects, at the level of the state and national institutions.
In the words of the editorial writer: “We are the ones who tasted the bitterness of brown bread, and heard the revolving, condescending voices of the vendors in the morning and evening: dry bread, bran, unemployment (bottles) for sale; We alone have a special memory, sweetened by Pepsi bottled locally with artificial colors and compressed with a gas we do not even know about; Only we know how to fill our stomachs with eggplant and potatoes fried in thick cooking oil that clings to the bottom of the mouth. We also know how home furniture can be sold so that the family can live on the land in order to secure a living.”
But the result, unfortunately, and despite the harvest of pain, is, according to our colleague Abbas Al-Anbouri: “We (the contemporary nation of Iraq) are not accustomed to documentation, so thousands of incidents are lost to us without being recorded, and our memory is eroded day after day.” (Editor of Al-Rawaq magazine file, p. 4 - 5).
Thus, major incidents such as the Eight Years' War, the draining of the marshes, the invasion of Kuwait, the Shaabani uprising, and the horrors of the siege were absent from the current youth generation, due to the absence of documentation, the emptiness of memory, the dominance of quite a bit of superficiality in political thinking, and the decline in professionalism and professionalism in the practice of politics itself.
For all this reason, the title of the article did not come out of reverence or arbitrariness from Pardon Al-Khater. Rather, we actually placed the file (Al-Riwaq) in front of the broadest documentary work on the diaries of the siege, its misery, misery and tragedies, in a complex coverage that combined documentation to analysis, moved from describing the phenomenon to explanation, and cast its attention to the complex extents. For: “The Long Road of Death”, which addresses the political, economic, social and psychological dimensions that have burdened society, while it is still suffering from the effects of the siege and its consequences, and its effects on the psychological and emotional formation of the Iraqi person, his ethics and behaviour, on development and its path, and on the state and its rise. , politics and its practice, science and its achievement, and so on, especially with the absence or near absence of in-depth educational, family and scientific treatments for these devastating consequences, effects and residues.
A sweeping panoramic view
In successive scenes in which the former paves the way for the later, and within a coherent logical structure between the introductions and the results, the political and the practical, and the decision and its consequences. The researcher specializing in the sociology of politics, Ali Jawad and Tut, presents us with a general panoramic view of the siege incident. In a study that is the most extensive within the file (pp. 7-41), the researcher draws attention to the absence or scantness of objective documentation of the years of the siege, even though it is the worst and darkest in the history of Iraqi society, and the most dangerous is that its results changed society forever, as the text records.
With graceful, drawn-out writing and an eloquent graphic style, the researcher presents to us the logical context for the birth of the siege, episode after episode, through political introductions. Only four days after the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, UN Security Council Resolution (661) was issued on August 6, 1990, to be the cornerstone of the blockade through the strict economic sanctions it imposed against Iraq. In the context of building the political story of the introductions to the siege, it covers the incident of the occupation and the official annexation of Kuwait to Iraq, the process of systematic looting and theft, and the launch of “showcases” and even “buffoonery” that reveal the naivety of the ruling political mind in Baghdad, through the slogans of “the return of the branch to the origin” or “ The link between the regime’s withdrawal from Kuwait” and “Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and from Lebanon and the Golan” and other superficial thinking of the Arab revolutionary regimes, and the shameful and trivialities of ignorant militarism, which repeat the mistakes of each other, starting from the author of the 1967 defeat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, until the author of the “defeats.” Saddam Hussein; This is if the reason is really superficial thinking, and not premeditated treasonous intentions and pre-destructive plans for people and nations.
The important thing is that the pretext is complete and everything is ready for systematic, organized destruction with dirty hands from inside and outside. From the oppressive regime and the brutal political West, when the Iraqis woke up to the beginning of the destruction of their cities and buildings, on the morning of Thursday, January 17, 1991 AD, and the face of Iraq changed completely, as a person, architecture, and country. After the tragic end of the war to destroy Iraq; “Desert Storm,” according to the Americans, and “the mother of all battles,” according to Saddam. The dawn resulted in countless losses and atrocities that have not yet been documented. The “road of death” and the shameful withdrawal were just one of its episodes.
The massive popular uprising began in 1991 AD. The Uprising of Dignity and Revenge. The researcher excelled in presenting vivid pictures from her diary and its bitterness as he lived through it, especially in Diwaniyah, to then provide us with documentation through direct but conscious experience of what Iraqi life went through, such as the recovery of agriculture under the brutal siege, the launch of the “Faith Campaign” and how It intentionally turned against the regime, and it paved the way for the rise of political Islam, in its Sunni-Wahhabi and Shiite-Sadrist aspects, and the results of some of these seeds appeared later. Later the fall.
Survival by food
The siege did not punish the officials of the fallen regime, but rather it was the people who paid the price, as the researcher rightly records, and he presents pictures filled with suffering and pain of the fate of mankind, who has turned into an entity searching for food while remaining present and continuing in life, devoid of any Meanings for the purposes of existence, emptied of any philosophy of life whatever it may be. As it became: “Thinking about filling one’s stomach was one of the daily concerns, and the large families lived in terrifying hardship, and providing daily living became a major concern” (p. 27).
Yes, the life of a human being is designed in such a way that it adapts to hardships, if this happens naturally. Under the siege, the former regime was complicit through its backwardness, stubbornness, foolishness, ignorance, and primitiveness, or with prior intent. In increasing human suffering and preventing any step taken to ease the siege on them. The research provides us with deeply painful, suggestive images of the reality of this suffering, and how river water, for example, turned into a direct source to meet the Iraqi’s need for water for drinking and washing utensils, clothes, and bodies, and how gas bottles began to be opened after it was rumored that the liquid remaining inside them was suitable as fuel for cars. And the bitter Iraqi story with sugar after the authorities issued a decision to execute those who used it to make sweets. Likewise, suffering with runny flour deliberately mixed with date pits, bird droppings, and dead rat carcasses. The suffering of housewives with rice filled with pebbles, peels, and other dirt; tea saturated with sawdust remains; Manipulating the food ration by changing the scale, substituting it, and sometimes stealing.
Generalizing the deterioration
with skill that encourages you to continue reading on, with descriptions emerging from direct field experience, and with pain that bursts from the depths, the researcher takes you from one scene to another, as he turns those harsh pages, so he stayed with education and what happened to the study, the teachers and the students, the decline of the curricula, the collapse of the buildings, and getting away from the path. The profound impact of education in the region and the world, in addition to the horrific spread of the phenomenon of dropping out or not enrolling in schools at all, after Iraqi children turned to selling “alalik” (nylon bags) and even to begging and begging.
Selling what is possible just for the sake of survival is another manifestation of the siege. It started with gold jewelry and precious ammunition, passed through mattresses, furniture, and electrical appliances, and reached the last thing that could be sold, such as parts of the house itself, such as doors and windows. Alongside this, and as a result of it, the phenomenon of “bastiyat” and the sale of single items arose, and the profession of “auctioneers” became widespread, and the sale sometimes changed to “fines” after it had been in kilos, amid a general inability to buy entire boxes of paste, vegetable ghee, or kilograms of sugar. Even cigarettes. The fraud industry and the culture of fraud have flourished, and it is no longer a surprise for the buyer to discover that he was deceived by potato puree instead of fat, salt instead of sugar, and plaster instead of flour, amidst the intensification of the nets of fraud, manipulation, and fraud. One of the results of this was: “the annihilation of traditions and customs.” An authentic Iraqi woman in cooperation and altruism, due to the harshness of the internal and external siege” (p. 30).
Not only this, the market for “bales” and used clothes has flourished, with old clothes being re-sewn and turned over more than once, military “blankets” being converted into rags, and so on. In addition to all of this, theft, crime, bribery, and corruption flourished and became a culture in the country and a general trend for its institutions, contributing as a result to the expansion of: “social violence, high crime rates, bribery, suicide, theft, smuggling, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, and other social phenomena that confirm the serious defect in the structure of society.” In Iraq” (p. 30).
In a parallel line, the keen researcher followed the change in tastes that afflicted Iraqi society and struck the value system to the core. As: “Not only did customs, morals, and values change, but lifestyles also changed, deepening the manifestations of decline and slackness to the extent that Iraqi society lost the characteristics of the cohesive, civilized society - even if superficially - that it had before the recovery of Kuwait” (p. 32).
Destruction of the middle class:
Nothing sound remained apart from this general moral and ethical obstacle, after the succession of decline struck everything, until it affected the way of life and public taste, and penetrated architecture and the style of construction. Forced migration and emptying the country of its elite and vital energies was one of the results of the siege. However, the path of migration and travel was not easy and open, but it often cost a person his own life, not only in the exorbitant travel tax (400 thousand Iraqi dinars), but also in the consequences of the disintegration of the fabric of families and the dispersion of their unity, security risks at times, and the harms of alienation and confrontation with societies and situations. New abroad.
Political sociologists state that the middle class is the pillar of stability in society. One of the harsh results of the siege was the collapse, decline, and disappearance of this class, in favor of a large increase in the poor classes, with an extremely wealthy class at the top of the authoritarian pyramid and those surrounding it from the kinship, regional, and regional few. All of this is done by striking the three prominent foundations that establish the middle class and build upon it: I mean education, specialization, and employment. This collapse had and continues to have a serious impact and devastating consequences on Iraq and Iraqi society.
The researcher did well and concluded his study with this note, as he wrote a text: “But what was most important during the siege was the collapse of the middle class and its disappearance from the societal fabric, this class that represented a criterion for national identity. It is not easy to rebuild an alternative and cohesive middle class, as this disappearance was the beginning of the shift towards sectarian and ethnic identities since the 1990s, and this became clear after 2003 AD” (p. 37).
Three notes:
1- I do not personally know the author of the study, Dr. Ali Jawad and Tut, although I am honored to know him. But I hope that he will not leave this study incomplete despite the difficulty of research and the trouble of documenting and writing down. Rather, I hope that he will continue to complete it and turn it into a large book with a number of parts, so that the project turns into an encyclopedia that we need in Iraq.
In parallel, I also aspire to transform the project at the “Rawaq Baghdad Center for General Studies” from a mere file in a special issue of its magazine (Al-Rawaq) into a comprehensive documentary-analytical encyclopedia.
The file, despite its dual importance as documentation and analysis, is only one step on the long path of documentation. The matter of the siege, its documentation and study, requires a complete encyclopedia to which all types of knowledge contribute and extends to dozens of volumes. This is an urgent task before its raw material disappears and its features disappear completely, with the change of generations.
2- I should not give a false impression arising from my focus on this study alone, as I admit that I did not even fulfill the merits of this study; How, when the file extended to more than twenty research papers and articles after that, the researchers exerted their effort to intensify the spotlight on the phenomenon of siege, from multiple aspects and dimensions.
What I want to say is that the review, even if it extends over a larger area, will never be an alternative to returning to the file itself, and reading it directly and in its entirety, so that the reader and interested person can immerse himself in the depths and horrors of those years, and live them without a veil. If I had an audible word, I would turn the file into a document and a source in... Universities, institutions and the media.
3- Whoever believes that the siege ended with the demise of the humiliated Saddam regime is living a complex illusion (similar to the term: complex ignorance). What has ended are his external objects. Otherwise, it has not disappeared and will remain for a long time, continuing its effects on the moral formation, psychological and emotional structure, and its dangerous repercussions on behavior. Quite a few of the problems of the present, the behaviors of the Iraqi person, his ethics, and his individual and collective tendencies, go deep into the experience of the years of siege, his barren ground, and his dark, desolate environment.
last word; Will the siege return? Yes, it could return practically and effectively and be more cruel and more afflicting than it was, if its preludes return to the ground, especially since some seem today as if they long for Iraq and its people to return to the siege, under the pretext of endangering its security and stability, and acting on behalf of others, east, west and north. And south, far from the national compass, and the interest of the vast majority of the country’s people. To God we belong and to Him we shall return.
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