Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch
November 24, 2003
Basra, Iraq

This week in British Occupied Basra

Wednesday November 19 a credible witness reported that at 10.30am a British Army jeep was blown up by a roadside bomb on the road to Zafwan, near the Basra Health Governorate. He reported seeing soldiers injured, with one definitely killed as his head injuries were too severe to warrant survival. He was convinced of that, pointedly and still-shocked by what he saw, describing the soldiers head as smashed through the temple. This witness showed me the damage to his car caused by the attack (the force of the explosion blew off his inside rear-view mirror). Local television reported the attack, mentioning injuries but failing to report any deaths. Perhaps the British will release the news, quickly, quietly, in a weeks time, like before, hoping the facts will sink unheld through the daily quagmire of American deaths, CPA outrages, urban guerrilla war manouvres, and the blunders, bribes and inefficacy of the national puppet show, the Governing Council.

On the same day, a Syrian woman was arrested by Iraqi police outside the Iraqi Port Authority in Maqal. She was found to be in possession of a detonator. It is suspected that another individual was set to arrive with the actual incendiary device shortly. Security at the IPA is now so tight that all electric equipment (cameras, mobile phones) and IDs are confiscated at the front desk and female security guards searching women pour through everything, even opening lipsticks from make-up bags and pen tops for possible devices/lethal substances.

Friday (Jerusalem Day - as decreed by the late former Iranian Shia cleric The Ayatolla Khomeini) saw a 5000 strong demonstration in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist Occupation, organized by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Glossy posters and graphic bearing banners of the gold-domed Al Aqsa mosque, Kiffaya masked fighters, stone-hurling boy heroes, the Palestinian white, black, red and green, and the Ayatollah Khomeini– SCIRI’s spiritual-political inspiration - adorned every wall in town. Some protesters reportedly beat themselves with iron bars and slashed themselves in self-castigation and solidarity suffering with the Palestinian people, similar to traditional Shia demonstrations mourning the preventable deaths of Imams Ali and Hussein and Abbas. Iraqi police patrolled the demonstration which remained placid. British troops did not come anywhere near it, depriving plucky young anti-occupation kids and resisters of all ages the opportunity to pelt them with rocks and stones, in solidarity and identical sentiment, with those pelted upon the British Mandate cultivated Israeli troops invading and occupying Palestinian communities in West Bank and Gaza bantustans.

Most people I spoke to dismissed the demonstration as a typical party prostitution of the Palestinian struggle and a SCIRI recruitment ploy. The Palestinian struggle is admired, lauded, fetishized, adopted, co-opted and exploited by many leaders and parties all over the world - a win-all issue, noone but the ignorant, Zionist or propaganda-swallowing can contest, and always wheeled out and skewed to represent whichever political flavour of struggle is desired by whichever party in charge or hungry for support, for radical credentials. The Palestinians are Qds Islamic warriors, walking the Islamic path in the case of SCIRI, and were a pan-Arab, Aqsa army of martyrs for the Iraqi Baath Party and a crowd pleaser rant subject for Saddam’s national lectures.

Last week bombs were found in Jumouriya and Jneyna boys schools, and one in a school in Khamse Mill, according to local people. All were diffused by British Occupation Forces.

The streets of Basra are heavily patrolled by camouflage uniformed, and by night, balaclava wearing Iraqi police, packed into white open-air trucks, 5 in the back, each holding up heavy arms. They all look like frustrated ex-military men, and they probably all are.

Fijian Occuaption Forces patrol the streets in the same white pick-ups as the Iraqi cops, no armour plating, and no military gear except for their uniforms, a mounted, unstable heavy gun in the back, and their own machine guns. They look less secure than their Iraqi cohorts and are by far the worst protected and vulnerable looking occupation troops to be seen in the whole of Iraq.

The Brits occasionally grind up the asphalt in mini 3-man-exposed speed-tanks and the odd dessert-coloured, light APC, but mostly stick to Israeli-similar old Nazi-looking dark green/black Land Rovers (Land Rover supply both the British Occupation and Israeli Occupation with military vehicles). They ride with their doors open, guns at the ready, pointing, tracking the receding road behind them, just like in Nablus, but here, two stand with their upper bodies poking out of the roof hatch, back-to-back, weapons cocked. Large Merkava-style tanks (Israeli Golan Heights popular tanks) guard one of main sand-bagged airport bases.

Choppers thud through the sky at night, frequently circling poor ‘trouble’ neighbourhoods like Hayaniya. I’m told they search houses, but only if they’ve heard any gunfire nearby. On the whole, people are afraid to say anything negative at all about them, but when the subject unravels and people relax, start to explore their own opinions, their revulsion and defiance at the occupation becomes apparent and more outspoken. Part of the fear comes from the fact that the British are using their traditional colonial tactic of recycling and protecting past authorities (used in post-Nazi Germany)and making deals with srong forces in the region, in Basra’s case, the Daawa Party. The Daawa control the streets of Basra and hold a ‘leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone’ relationship with the Occupiers. A friend’s husband told me many people here refer to the the Baath dictatorship as ‘a death’, and the Occupation by comparison, as ‘a fever’. Still sick, but relatively, a headache to be suffered, tolerated and if persistant, eliminated by force.

The Israelis learned how to occupy from the British. When the Brits, Occupying Palestine, declared martial law in 1936 in response to a six-month solid armed General Strike and general anti-occupation insurrection, they unleashed a wave of repressive legislation and counter-insurgence tactics, including the demolition, through explosion, of militants’ homes. 6000 people were made homeless in the city of Jaffa when the British levelled an entire neighbourhood. Israeli Defence law recycles and extends British Emergency Defence Laws imposed from 1936 onwards which remained on the statute books when the illegal state of Israel was declared. For example unlimited detentions and imprisonment without trail (Article 11) (alive and kicking in the UK itself now since Britain derogated from the European Convention on Human Rights and re-activated its Northern Ireland occupation policy of internment by abolishing Habeas Corpus and imprisoning people without trial under the new Crime, Security and Terrorism Act 2002). British Mandate Emergency laws also allowed for the destruction of any property for any reason, empowering the military to expel a family from their home and then destroy that home with little more than a fee minutes notice (Article 119), expulsion of any individual living in the territories and prohibition of their return (Article 112) and declaration of an area of any size closed and to restrict movement in or out of that area (Article 125).

It’s no secret that US military officials have been meeting with Israeli Occupation Force leaders since the beginning of the multinational occupation of Iraq, consulting on house to house searches, home and tree demolitions, checkpoint procedure and neighbourhood raids. Commanders which participated in the attacks on Jenin refugee camp helped train US commanders in attacking closed, tightly populated areas defended by fighters.

British authorities are consulting with the CPA on legal infrastructure, maybe explaining the similarity of the CPA’s Freedom of Assembly order to British public order law in terms of language and intent, focusing on multiple pickets and public assemblies, obstructing ‘public thoroughfares’ etc

Back to Basra

A British businessman working for the British NGO the Recovery Infrastructure Group, awarded a 6,700,000 pounds (approx $10m dollars) contract for ‘designing and implementing recovery and infrastructure projects to assist the CPA in its programme of post-conflict recovery’, received a death threat , in Arabic, in the lobby of the Al Diafa Hotel, by members of The Independent Party (Al Hizb Istiklall), in front of his paid machine-gun wielding guard. The guard, unable to understand what was happening stood by as party members told the businessman that if members were not given contracts by RIG, then he would be killed.

The Hotel Diafa is home to an assortment of British reconstruction executives, local CPA-controlled television mangers–nearly all ex- high ranking special ops US military men, and corporate security guards. Roads leading up to it are blocked with large concrete cubes and armed guards flank its doors. Despite this apparent tight security, noone has their bags searched when they enter. This could be because most of the ‘Big Fry’ corporate operations mangers are locked up in the British army compound inside the Basra Baath Republican Palace or stay outside the country altogether in Kuwait, entering by armed convoy in the mornings and leaving before sunset for the border. Armed exec protecting guards and locals have told me KBR and Bechtel cars have been shot at and bombed by insurgents a number of times, ever since the corporate invasion moved in from the south, hot on the heels of the army, post regime fall.

For more info see www.occupationwatch.org