Beneath the Liberation Monument all that is Solid Vanishes into Air

This work is licensed under the “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License”.To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/

Beneath the Liberation Monument all that is Solid Vanishes into AirBy Saad Salloum

Saad Salloum is an Iraqi journalist and civil society activists based in Baghdad. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Masarat that focuses on culture and religious dialogue, and has directed several films, including documentaries on Iraqi Christians and media freedoms.

Saad Salloum gives a personal account of the motives and dynamics of the Iraqi protest movement that found inspiration in the Arab revolutions, but faces suppression by the Iraqi government and is moreover largely ne-glected by the international press.

Saad Salloum: Beneath the Liberation Monument all that is Solid Vanishes into Air

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung - Middle East Office, 20122

My friend, the civil activist Fayan al-Sheikh, said, “It’s alive; like it’s moving and talking.” We were holding up a sign reading Reform the regime

directly beneath it. It had never before occurred to us to take a closer look at the fourteen bronze mouldings that told the story of Iraq from the dawn of history.

“Maybe,” Fayan commented, “because until now it has been so silent and neglected.”

I gazed up at the monument, the creation of sculptor Jawad Salim, as though gripped by an irresistible attraction, a prisoner to its ancient spell. The weather and the reverberations from Baghdad’s daily bombings had begun to erode it, but now it resembled someo-ne who had awoken from a long slumber. It was like an artwork cut off from time and place, an assembly of symbols abused or misinterpreted by successive political regimes, or as Fayan put it, “It’s as though those symbols have waited all this time to derive a new meaning from the masses that gather beneath it and reinterpret it.” Strolling among the demonstrators congregated beneath the monument I listened with fascination to Noman Muna, an architect resident in the UK who returned to Iraq’s capital city to participate in the protest movement.

“Their ardour breathes life into this immortal monument.”

I felt as though I was looking at the same place through two windows, that of memory and that of the present. Through the window of memory I gazed out on the last mass rally that was held in this square. Like now it was a time of great upheaval. On January the 27th, 1969 the Baath government that had seized power in a military coup hung nine Jews, amongst them a sixteen year-old boy, convicted of spying for Israel and put their corpses on display with a gory triumphalism. To the outside world this was a declaration of the new regime’s commitment to a hardline foreign policy; the message to the Iraqi people was that the Baath would not hesitate to publicly execute any citizen who dared challenge it. This gruesome celebration initiated the country into an era of radical ideology that peddled hatred and confrontation with the outside world, and which only came to an end with the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Today, the square bears witness to

a new confrontation between a population yearning for reform and a government that hangs back, warily observing developments. Even as the demonstrators were coming up with new slogans, swapping text messages and using Facebook pages to coordinate their movements, military units, anti-riot squads, the Federal Police and the emergency and traffic police directorates of the Interior Ministry were finalizing their preparations to field a force of unprecedented size and power. It was as though the city were under siege. My gaze moved over the slogans and Iraqi flags: there were no American or Israeli flags being burnt, just the desire to rebuild the country after decades of delusive conflict designed to cover up the regime’s failure to mount internal reform and endlessly defer discussion of democratic rule. From the Jews dangling in Tahrir Square to the demonstrators setting out to free them-selves from the curse of ideology some forty two years later lies more than a quick transition from memory to present. There is history: three wars (the war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003), the thirteen-year long economic embargo between 1990 and 2003, then the civil war between Sunni and Shia that broke out in 2006 against the backdrop of an American occupation, the obliteration of civil society and the middle classes and the disseveration of the country’s social fabric. Just to see the living flame of these young faces, flickering amidst the ashes of war and destruction was enough to fill me with joy, a joy I expressed by dancing and singing with my friends. But before we go on we must ask: What world have these young people been living in? Why do they want to change it?

Baghdad will not be another Kandahar Efforts to restrict public freedoms were going unchallen-ged. Whenever civil activists tried to organize protests they were told they needed a license to march, a questio-nable interpretation of the law given that article 38 of the constitution (which charges the state with safeguarding freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate) only talks about giving prior notification. It is not only public freedoms. Moves are afoot to transform Iraq into a religious state along the lines of Iran or Afghanistan. The Babel provincial government blocked the staging of Babel Festival for the Folkloric Arts after religious


Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung - Middle East Office, 2012 3

leaders expressed unhappiness with elements of the festival program (in particular, folk dances), which, they claimed, contravened religious custom. In Basra people were prevented from demonstrating against the provincial leadership’s decision to stop a French circus performing after religious leaders objected that it flouted Islamic law, and there was public outcry at the similarly religiously motivated decisions to enforce gender segregation at primary schools and close the sports clubs that provided the only outlet for many young people in the conservative southern city. In Baghdad province bars and nightclubs were shut down. Around the country demonstrators took to the streets, inspired by their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt to defend their freedoms. Their chants and slogans expressed solidarity with revolutions throughout the Arab world and warned of their consequences for the authorities. Notable among them was the slogan, “Baghdad will not be another Kandahar”, a defiant response to attempts to forcibly Islamize society, which later became the slogan on the protest movement’s main Facebook page after they began using the website to call for protests against the wave of reactionary local government decrees. And it was via Facebook, too, that they showed their solidarity when the Arab revolutions were at their peak. Bassam Abdel Razzaq is one of the founders of this Facebook page. A 28 year-old graduate of Baghdad’s College of Fine Art he talks about their achievements with pride and passion:

“The older generation did nothing to rid of these regimes, so the time had come for us to take action and rebel.”

Full of life and energy the man known to his friends as Bassam Cinema learned important lessons by closely following developments in other Arab countries.

“I would stay awake until dawn following the news of the Arab Spring and go to sleep with the television on. I was utterly captivated by the new youth-driven consciousness being expressed through these re-volutions.”

He acquired knowledge of techniques of confrontation by communicating via Facebook with protestors from around the region:

“From the Syrians we learnt to deal with tear-gas using cloth soaked in vinegar. When we go out to demonstrate now we take towels and a bottle of vinegar with us.”

Describing the mutual admiration and support between the Iraqis and their comrades in Egypt, he adds:

“We were in phone contact with representatives of the popular front in Tahrir Square and we’d send them declarations of solidarity, released to coincide with their actions. Prior to that we organized a demons-tration outside the Tunisian Embassy in support of the uprising there.”

His friend Shakir al-Daghestani is 24 and studying computer science. Like Bassam he followed every second of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. “We marched from Mutanabbi Street to Tahrir Square in support of Egypt and Tunisia,” he says. A turning point came with the decision to plan a march on February 14, Valentine’s Day, a public holiday selected for its political and religious neutrality. Their demonstration called for love in an uncaring world: “We have no love, no peace and no rights,” says a frowning Shaker.

Alongside their demands for brotherly love the youth issued a statement listing their immediate demands, including firing the city’s mayor for his ineffectiveness. But for now, they went no further. At this stage, Reform the regime was a banner headline for a widespread anti-corruption sentiment and was yet to be linked to specific demands. It was after the Valentine’s Day march, after they had reached Tahrir Square and issued demands in the name of love, that they began to call themselves the February 14 Movement. Tapping his spectacles, Shaker talks of the critical moment of transition:

“We felt that we were entering a new world. It was the first march with prearranged chants and slogans and proper organization. We sensed that we had to think bigger, and so we started planning for February 25.”

They took to the streets, going from neighborhood to neighborhood knocking on doors and meeting with young people. Unlike Bassam, Shaker downplays the role played by Facebook in recruiting:



“Facebook was just a tool for communication; a means of publishing propaganda and statements and making contact with other groups. Most of the recruitment for the march was fieldwork.”

At that time, Baghdad was seething with rage and the first sparks began to fly in the impoverished and neglected neighborhoods of North Baghdad such as Husseiniya and Kariaat where hundreds of residents assembled to demand the resignation of local officials and improved service delivery. In Boub al-Sham protestors carried a coffin on which was written.

In oil-rich Basra voices were raised calling for a war on corruption, and demonstrators waved yellow cards like football referees signaling a final warning to the governor and officials. Discontent at poor service delivery was on the rise in working class districts throughout the land. February brought major demonstrations in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Basra, and al-Anbar, in addition to numerous smaller protests in other towns. The criticisms of shrinking civil liberties, corruption and gargantuan parliamentary wages that had hitherto been confined to casual gossip were transmuted into slogans, chants and signs. Most importantly these protests defied the legal requirement to obtain a license, the condition that had blocked hundreds of demonstrations from taking place in previous years.

From the rapid political maneuvering that followed it was possible to discern a concerted attempt to first understand then coopt this grass-roots mobilization. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a directive cutting his monthly salary by half and restoring the balance to the state treasury, to take effect from February 2011. Though this was an admission of the vast gulf that existed between the wages of parliamentarians and senior officials and those of minor public servants and the poor, it failed to defuse widespread anger at poor living conditions and government incompetence. The leader of parliament, political parties and prominent parliamentarians offered a number of suggestions for reexamining the salaries of senior state officials and reducing the budget of the president, the prime minister and the speaker of parliament, which together accounted for a large proportion of the state budget. The Friday of Rage was rapidly approaching, and with

it mounting fears and hopes. Twenty-four hours before the demonstration was due to begin I received a call from Jamal al-Jawhari, from the Al-Amal Association, who told me that the prime minister had asked to meet with civil society leaders. I refused:

“He can find out our demands when we get to Tahrir Square and I can’t go to a televised meeting with the prime minister at a critical juncture like this. Given their deep aversion to any politician my colleagues would view it in a negative light.”

For my part I was certain that my colleagues from the Civil Initiative to Safeguard the Constitution and other civil society leaders would take this opportunity to deliver a strong message to al-Maliki, and so it turned out. Their demands were clear and unambiguous, they quoted statistics on poverty, unemployment and government corruption, and he listened politely before offering a few answers. Not to be put off they responded by insisting on a comprehensive, long-term program of reforms. The Iraqi street, they said, had grown tired of improvised policies, blunders and poor planning. It was a message that reflected their self-confidence: In terms of consciousness civil society leadership is streets ahead of a political elite that has lost its way. We offer a comprehensive program for reform while the government has nothing but a collection of confused policies. Thrusting his head forward, with its broad brow and unsmiling face, the prime minister asked if they were planning to participate in the protests the following day. “Of course we are!” they said as one, an answer that so enraged him he forgot his manners: “I’ve no respect for those who demonstrate!”

This same lack of respect, this fear and needless provo-cation, had a counterpart in the government’s response to the demonstrations. The security forces raised the alert level to 3, reserved for definite or highly probable threats, and maintained themselves in a state of high readiness. The confrontation between the government and the people that these events set in motion, has continued ever since. On the Friday of Dignity I headed to Tahrir Square in the company of reformist thinker Diya al-Shakarji, a member of the committee that drafted the constitution and the only politician brave enough to have resigned from the prime minister’s Islamic Dawa party



to pursue his own secular path. Al-Sharkaji talked of his reaction to the meeting between al-Maliki and the representatives of civil society:

“I responded to the unfortunate outburst by my for-mer friend the prime minister in an article entitled You don’t respect us, Prime Minister… and we don’t respect you!”

Icons of the RevolutionWhen the Egyptian police in Alexandria murdered Khalid Saeed I was at a journalists’ dinner in Germany with colleagues from all over the Arab world: Egyptians, Syrians, Tunisians, Algerians and Iraqis. The Egyptian journalist Mohammed al-Tawfiq led us off to hold a sit-in outside the Egyptian Embassy in Berlin. It was a demonstration that transcended political boundaries, made up of young men from nations that had all known tyranny in their time, but it never occurred to us then that one year on we would all be living in a different world; that Khalid Saeed would be transformed in to an icon of the Egyptian revolution. Bouazizi was just the spark that fell onto a huge pile of straw that stretched the length of the Middle East. There have been many others like Bouazizi before and since; people who chose to turn their back on the world by immolating their bodies. There have been many Khalid Saeeds as well, paying with their lives for uncovering the truth. One of our numbers, a young Kurdish journalist called Sardasht Uthman, wrote a series of courageous articles criticizing the corruption of the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan. His last article was particularly biting. Sardasht was abducted outside the university where he studied and shot in the mouth. Absurdly, the official inquiry concluded that he was a member of an extremist Islamic organization that had purged him for attempting a coup against the group’s leaders. During the filming of my documentary, Conditional freedom, I went to his house in a poor neighborhood of Irbil, to find out what his friends and family thought of the investigation into his death. His brother led me upstairs to his study, which was full of world literature and other texts of an obviously liberal nature; completely contradicting the claims made by the investigators. Niyaz Abdallah, a colleague of his who acted as an interpreter in my conversations with his family, told me that Kurdistan

had begun to change since Sardasht was killed; that there are now two icons of Iraqi Kurdistan: legendary freedom fighter Mustafa Barzani whose tomb is visited by politicians, Sardasht Uthman, a symbol of freedom of expression for a younger generation. Writing his final article, it never occurred to Sardasht that he would be changing an entire generation; that his words would ring with such prophetic force and resolution:

“I shall write until the day my life comes to an end. I shall place a full stop at the end of the line and it will be up to my friends to pen the one that follows.”

And not only did they write the next line, they began collaborating on The Book of Change.

In Baghdad, demonstrations in solidarity with the poet Ahmed Abdel Hussein were held in Mutanabbi Street, a street famous for its booksellers and as a meeting place for intellectuals of all ages. Ahmed had received threats following the publication of an article implicating political groups in the commission of a robbery at a local bank in which many innocent Iraqis lost their lives and millions of dollars were stolen. The response to these threats was a highly vocal protest dubbed “the greatest demonstration for freedom of expression in the history of modern Iraq”. Following the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution, Friday marches in Mutanabbi Street became a regular event, with Ahmed Abdel Hussein and his young comrades from the February Movement leading the crowds through historic Rashid Street and into Tahrir Square where they joined forces with the demonstrators massed beneath the Liberation Monument.

We called it the Broom Protest. We would buy brooms from street vendors and carry them like lances, brushes pointing to the sky. When we reached some neglected corner, yet to receive the attentions of the local council, we would set about sweeping it clean. But the symbolism of the brooms targeted more than poor service delivery: we are determined to sweep corrupt officials from the streets. It was a declaration that brought all the clichés about our post-modern generation crashing down. We were not superficial, sunk in idleness and political apathy, our knowledge of globalization limited to its culture of consumerism while we remain powerless to control its



potential for change. Nor were we a generation trapped by our local ethnic and sectarian identities, eternal prisoners of cultural regionalism; little more than fuel to the fire of civil war and political unrest. These lazy assumptions were rocked to their foundations when we managed to transcend our supposed indifference and showed evidence of a fertile political imagination. In over half a century of trying, nationalist governments have failed to do what the young demonstrators managed to achieve in a few days. From the Atlantic to the shores of the Arabian Gulf these young people think with one mind; united by common goals they chant slogans and songs that reflect an alternative vision of the future: it is not Arabism that brings them together, but the desire for change. For the first time since the birth of the post-independence nation state the Arab world is united, following a new breed of leaders who hold sway in the streets and squares. They have not drawn their inspi-ration from the books of Michel Aflaq or the speeches of Gamal Abdel Nasser, nor learnt the art of revolution from the writings of Marx and Lenin. They have simply followed the example of their comrades elsewhere in the Arab world. If Wael Ghonim were to write a book it would outsell Das Kapital; Bouazizi is the new Che Guevara. They were watching and learning, taking their influences from Tunisia and, most particularly, Egypt. Just as in Egypt, where the prevailing wisdom that only the Muslim Brotherhood had the capability to mobilize the street and field mass demonstrations was shatte-red by the reality of the youth-led revolution, the Iraqi protests put paid to claims that the Sadrists were the only political force powerful enough to bring thousands out onto to the streets and that their involvement was vital if the movement were to succeed.

Worshipping Change in a Digital NationThe revolutionaries of Iraq created a digital nation that refused to recognize political divisions or classify its citizens along ethnic, religious or sectarian lines. It offered a nationality one could adopt and cast off with equal ease. At its centre lay the Liberation Monument, its virtual Kaaba: a centre of pilgrimage for Facebook’s young devotees where they might receive the blessings they needed to grant them entry into the paradise of political change.

And this digital nation had its own post-modern religi-on, whose worship and rituals were, like marching to the protest sites, determinedly traditional in form. One eighteen year-old I spoke with compared the zeal and pure intentions of the protestors with the Shia practice of walking on foot to visit the tombs of the righteous and the holy Imams during their religious festivals. “This is our holy place,” he said, pointing to Tahrir Square. And he was right: the square was thronged with pilgrims who had trekked long distances to wave their signs, like prayers to the government. Their expressive symbolism evinced a revolutionary sensibility of the highest order, an almost religious ecstasy and a celebratory pride in their iconography of imprisoned comrades not unlike the fervent love of the saints.

Iraq was a latecomer to globalization. Prior to the American occupation it knew nothing of mobile phone networks, satellite dishes were illegal and Internet use was limited to select regime circles. But post-2003 the younger generations began to play catch-up and in no time possessed a technological proficiency that far outstripped the understanding of their elders. Politici-ans tried to ride this technological wave, incorporating it into their electoral propaganda to appeal to the youth, but they were unable to penetrate their hidden virtual worlds. In a last ditch attempt to win voters the politicians took to the Web. Facebook accounts in the names of candidates proliferated and websites did a roaring trade, with some receiving vast sums of money to promote campaigns and disparage opponents. Par-ticularly popular sites like kitabat.com became battle-fields for Iraq’s competing parties, providing a hitherto non-existent space for freedom of expression where political scandals, documents and statistics could be posted without fear of the censorship and interventions that hamstrung a moribund printed press. The February Movement used all these technological tools in their rebellion against the old order.

Peoples Learn from one Another... and Governments, too

Taking inspiration from the populations of Egypt and Tunisia the citizenry had begun their march to freedom, using the youth as a bridge for communication with out-side world as they learned how to express themselves



using the tools of globalization. But they were not alone. Governments were copying techniques of oppression, generating innumerable customized reproductions of the police state model. The thugs that attacked demons-trators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square turned up in squares throughout the Arab world. Their first appearance in Iraq came a few days prior to the Friday of Rage when the government attempted to nip the coming protests in the bud by setting goons on demonstrators who had gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square in solidarity with their Egyptian comrades. Isolated in the camp they had set up inside the square, the young men and women faced down plainclothes security forces wielding elec-tric batons and knives in an attack that lasted over an hour (between 1 and 2am). Some were wounded and others abducted. The government has also perfected its smear tactics, accusing opponents of being foreign agents and traitors and trying to recast the confrontation between a population calling for reform and a corrupt government as a battle between pro- and anti- govern-ment forces. Most damaging of all is the claim that while each protest movement may have its own unique stamp they are all cut from same cloth. Having failed to move the demonstrations out of Tahrir Square and faced with the demonstrators’ determination to return to the square every Friday the government tried to colonizing the space with its supporters, packing them into the square at the end of the hundred day period it had set for implementing its reforms. Counter demonstrations were mounted to quash popular discontent and the isolated encampment was subjected to an assault by government loyalists armed with clubs and knives. Decision Friday, which the demonstrators intended as a response to the government’s failure to imple-ment genuine reform, was met by Execution Friday, a government initiative which called for the execution of those involved in the horrific killings of the sectarian war. Worryingly, the participation of one of the accused in the Tahrir Square demonstrations was exploited to cast doubt on the peaceful nature of the protests and distract attention from the government’s shortcomings.

Zahra al-Adad is twenty-five years old. She had come from France to take part in the protests and witnessed the clash first hand. In the months before she arrived she followed news of the demonstrations on Facebook. She had been to Cairo a month after Mubarak’s fall,

meeting Egyptian women activists as part of her doctoral research, and having visited that city’s famous Tahrir Square she was keen to see its counterpart in Baghdad. French-born Zahra comes from a family of Islamists opposed to Saddam’s regime, and embodies the aspi-rations of a new generation that has turned away from its parents’ ideological preoccupations. Life in France has given her complete freedom to engage in protests against anti-Muslim discrimination and other forms of activism. Since the age of fifteen she has taken to the streets for and against a number of causes, including sexual discrimination, rights for the elderly and improved service delivery. As she approached the Liberation Monument, Zahra kept a wary eye on the tribesmen who had been duped by government propaganda and were assaulting peaceful protestors believing them to be terrorists and murderers.

“I saw a women wearing a black abaya and carrying a sign demanding to know what had happened to her sons, who had been missing since 2003. She was surrounded by tribesmen who were beating the protestors with sticks.”

Her attention was drawn to the men in suits scattered among the tribesmen, and she quickly concluded that they must be government employees bussed into the square. Then she caught sight of Abdel Amir al-Rakabi, a leftist writer who lives in France. Taking her hand he led her away from the raging battle in the square and took her to Mutanabbi Street, where hundreds of intellectuals had gathered to see what would become of the government’s declaration of war against the demonstrators.

A Dictatorship in Democracy’s ClothingGovernments are prepared to burn the law books. They have no qualms about using illegal means to hang onto power and in doing so they expose the dictatorial mindset of Arab ruling elites and the hypocrisy of their discourse about political representation and protecting citizens’ rights. Not content with tarring demonstrators with the brush of terrorism and betrayal they are more than ready to use force if circumstances demand it, imprisoning and torturing their opponents.



I had lunch with Hossam al-Saray, Ali al-Sumeri and Ali Abdel Sada at al-Taraf, the very restaurant in the cen-tral Baghdad neighborhood of Karada where the three former detainees were arrested. Alternately laughing and shivering with fear they recounted their terrifying experience. First to speak was Hossam, a poet who a year ago won a poetry prize in Italy:

“About eighteen of us were eating lunch here having just come back from Tahrir Square. The security forces came in led by a lieutenant who picked out the youngest in the group: myself, Hadi al-Mahdi, Ali Abdel Sada and Ali al-Sumeri. They loaded us into some Humvees and emptied our pockets, and then the Humvees took off for Abu Nuwas Street. They dropped us off in a deserted street and began abusing and beating us.”

Ali Abdel Sada, a journalist for the al-Mada newspaper, takes up the story:

“They got a call telling them to go to Tahrir Square and drove off. When we got there the area around the Liberation Monument was empty and the de-monstrators had pulled back to the al-Umma Garden behind the monument. Then officer said something to the soldier manning the gun mounted on the top of the truck that made me fear the worst. ‘Fire live rounds at them,’ he said. ‘Try for flesh wounds without killing them.’”

The firing went on for four minutes and the detainees could hear the screams of wounded demonstrators. Ten minutes passed and then the Humvees took them to an undisclosed location where they were kicked and threatened. Abdel Sada was told his tongue would cut out with a shaving razor. He shivers as he describes the moment he entered the cell: “After I had been roughly pushed into the cell I heard Hadi al-Mahdi’s voice, saying, ‘I’m not a member of the Baath party,’ even though he fled from the Baath to Denmark and only came back to Iraq to work as a journalist. They started beating me with pieces of wood taken from the demonstrators’ signs because the officer had said, ‘Why isn’t he screaming? I want to hear him scream.’”

The interrogation that followed the torture was even worse, a list of accusations framed as questions:

“Why do you want to destroy the country? Why are you against the prime minister and his state?”

Film director Ali al-Sumeri recounts how his captors grabbed him by his long hair and kicked him, saying, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda? What’s with the long hair, Osama Bin Laden?” The charges against them included pulling down concrete barriers on the Jumhuriya Bridge and throwing chunks of masonry at Baghdad’s head of security operations, even though they had been trying to prevent clashes between protestors and the security forces. Before they were released they were blindfolded and forced to sign pledges whose content was never revealed to them. Muayyad al-Tayyib, Ahmed al-Baghdadi, Ali al-Jaf and Jihad Jalil are four February Movement activists who were detained at the end of the hundred-day period the government set for implementing reforms. They were not arrested with a warrant but kidnapped in an ambulance in broad daylight. Muayyad al-Tayyib is a twenty-nine year-old drama student at the Institute of Arts.

“They put me in an ambulance with my comrades,” he says, “and our pockets were turned out. The ambulance took us the military intelligence prison at Muthanna Airport. They took our possessions, removed our shoes and covered our faces with a thick fabric they call ‘the mask’. We were made to stand under the burning sun in a courtyard, and we stayed there until five o’clock the following morning. After that they took us to the cells.”

They called up for interrogation, manacled and masked, then put back in the courtyard until the following morning. It was when they were shown identity cards that bore their pictures alongside false personal data that they realized they were to be accused of forgery.

“You’re in big trouble, now,” their captors told them, “and we can help you out of it.”

In the days that followed their interrogators tried to bargain with them, a process led by Colonel Qasim Atta, official spokesman for Baghdad’s operational



command, or as young Baghdadis like to call him, “the liar of Baghdad”. The deal he offered them was as follows: You will be released and the charge of forgery dropped on condition you attend a press conference in which you say you have been arrested for forging your papers and publicly denounce the demonstrations. They were eventually released after their fellow activists and international rights organizations put pressure on the government, and their experience has only strengthened their belief in their cause.

Ahmed al-Baghdadi is a thin young man who was twel-ve years old when the American forces occupied Iraq. He insists his participation in the demonstrations is a personal choice and that he has no political affiliations. He is thumbing through a book entitled The Dictator-ship of Capital and questioned about his communist sympathies he replies,

“I don’t hide my political beliefs but these demons-trations are bigger than any party: they have been started by the youth. I don’t know why the politicians are so scared of them. It isn’t an attempt to seize power by force, it’s a demand for reform coming from the people themselves.”

Ali al-Jaf’s explanation of his involvement is brief and to the point. “I went out to demonstrate for reform,” say the twenty-four year-old IT student. “To me, reform means change.” These stories and others like them map out the features of the contest between the people’s desire for freedom and the government’s attempts to hold on to power. These opposing aims have reached the point of open conflict and a final reckoning between Tahrir Square and the rulers’ palaces is not far off.

When Religion Stands alongside the StateThe popular protests have revealed another truth: that religion institutions in the Arab world are an intrinsic part of dictatorial regimes and are either directly controlled by these regimes or fall within their sphere of influence. This link between religion and state is used to reinforce tyranny and lend legitimacy to regimes centered on the person of the leader.

Unlike Eastern European countries such as Poland, where the church played a positive role in the transi-tion to democracy, the position of religious institutions in the Arab world is contradictory and ambiguous, as with case of Youssef al-Qaradawi who supported the Egyptian uprising while condemning its counterpart in Bahrain as sectarian. A similar approach was adopted by religious figures in Iraq, especially the Shia, who showed solidarity with the Bahraini protests but were equivocal in their treatment of the demonstrations in Iraq. However it must be emphasized that the situation is more complex than it appears, given Iraq’s religious and sectarian plurality, not to mention the presence of numerous religious authorities. The highest ranked au-thority of the Shia, Ali al-Sistani was typically cautious, concerned that the demonstrations may spin out of control or be penetrated by “those with particular aims and agendas,” to quote from the statement he released to his followers. This is the reasoning behind his call for caution, a call that is in its essence the same as asking citizens not to participate.

The head of the Sadrist movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, was in favor of allowing the government six months to implement reforms and respond to the people’s de-mands, twice as long as the hundred-day grace period the government gave itself. Al-Sadr’s hasty return from Iran on the eve of the Friday of Rage was viewed with suspicion by the demonstrators, who saw in it Iran’s ambition to destablise al-Maliki’s government, an ambition amply documented in comments left on pro-protest Facebook pages. This non-committal approach was shared by the rest of Iraq’s religious leaders, like the spiritual head of the Fadila Party, Mohammed al-Yacoubi, while a few, notable among them Ayatollah Kazhim al-Haeri, explicitly forbad participation.

Ahmed Hassan Maktouf, a lecturer in human rights at Baghdad’s Institute of Technology, had first-hand experience of the powerful effect of such edicts when he tried to encourage his students to take part in the demonstrations.

“My students were arguing with me, saying, ‘we’ve read leaflets and watched the news on al-Iraqiya and all the religious authorities forbid participation.”



This is true: the state-owned satellite channels did mount a campaign to convince people not to take part in the demonstrations, using statements by Iraq’s spiritual leaders to make their point.

“Just yesterday,” says Maktouf, “they were encoura-ging people to support their candidates by claiming they had the support of the religious authorities, and today they’re doing the same thing to prevent people exercising their right to protest.”

Politics on the Revolutionary BandwagonJust as the uprising in Bahrain bore the brunt of the po-wer struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were fears that, following the withdrawal of American forces and the readiness of neighboring countries, foremost amongst them Iran, to fill the resulting vacuum, Iraq’s protests would be fall victim to the mantra of stability. We viewed the slogan of the Bahraini demonstrations, “No Sunni, no Shia, just national unity,” as an attempt to prevent the protests turning into a conflict between a Shia majority and a ruling Sunni minority. In Iraq, the same slogan was used by demonstrators to tran-scend the political sectarianism that paralyzed the political process stymied its ability to produce reform. Even as the February Movement was following the example of Tunisia and Egypt, in the sectarian world of Iraqi politics the parties making political capital out of Bahrain’s revolution. The head of Supreme Council, al-Sayyid Amer al-Hakim called on his supporters to demonstrate in Baghdad’s Khalani Square in support of the Bahraini people, yet he had never given his sup-port to protests against rampant corruption against the political elite, despite his avowed sympathy with their demands. Muqatada al-Sadr organized a demonstration in Baghdad in support of what he called “the revolution by our brothers and Muslim kin in the state of Bahrain to rid themselves of oppression and injustice”, and condemned the sending of Saudi troops to put down the uprising as “the subjugation of the will of the Bahraini people.” But it was Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraq Conference Party, who really stole the show, appointing himself as “President of the General Conference for the Popular Committee in Support of the Bahraini People” and making the necessary arrangements to dispatch

a cargo of humanitarian aid to Bahrain’s opposition in a ship he christened al-Mukhtar. Prime Minister al-Maliki attempted to avoid a crisis with Gulf leaders by refusing to allow Chalabi’s ship to set sail without the prior permission of the Bahraini authorities.

The session of parliament held on March 17, 2011, turned into a contest over who could express the gre-atest amount of support for the Bahrain uprising. The demonstrators regarded this as inexcusable: parliamen-tarians spoke out against a clampdown on Bahrain’s protests yet were silent when the Iraqi government moved against the demonstrations in Baghdad and the provinces. As the leader of the National Reform party Ibrahim al-Jaafari made a speech condemning the suppression of freedoms in Bahrain, Iraqi protestors a few hundred meters from where he stood where being beaten with clubs and dispersed with gunfire and water cannon. Then, without explanation or clarification, the speaker’s office announced that parliament would be suspended for ten days. Was it in solidarity with the uprising in Bahrain, or perhaps in honor of the Kurds who were getting ready to celebrate the festival of Nowruz? Was it both? It merely served to enrage the public. Shamkhi Jabr, an official from the Movement of the Hungry screamed that it was unacceptable that all institutions of state should shut down in support of an uprising in Bahrain instead of supplying more services to their own people.

“The MPs get unbelievable salaries and exaggerated bonuses for doing nothing,” he says angrily. “We have the least productive parliament in the world. There are hundreds of draft laws that still haven’t been passed and we need them to be, and quickly.”

Before turning back to the text of the statement he is drawing up with his colleagues Jabr adds bitterly, “A parliament that doesn’t watch over its government is as much a parliament as a monkey is a human being!”

Saddam is not just a Statue, he’s a Ghost as wellComparing peoples, governments and religious institutions in the Arab world has led young people to start thinking of their place in the wider world: where do they stand in



relation to the Arab revolutions? What advantages do they hold over them, and where do they lag behind? They looked on aghast as the Libyan government started a civil war against the revolutionaries and observing how events in Syria were heading in the same direction, they remembered what happened in Iraq following the Second Gulf War of 1991 and the withdrawal of the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Two uprisings started, one in Kurdistan, which was able to establish an independent Kurdish entity with the help of the allied forces, and a second in the south that was brutally suppressed by a Republican Guard trained in counter-revolutionary warfare. Their concern over Libya stemmed from their own experience of NATO’s priorities. NATO gave no support to the popular revolt in the south, preferring a weakened Saddam to the unknown quantity of a region without his presence. What was the case yesterday is unlikely to change today, whatever the Americans say about freedom. All that really concerns them is getting consent for their forces to remain in Iraq, regardless of the current Iraqi government’s position on civil liberties. “They would deal with the devil if it served their interests,” says Alaa Hamid, a freelance journalist who took part in the Friday of Rage. “Interests come before freedoms on their list of priorities.” For the duration of the Cold War the US dealt with dictatorships in the Middle East in order to counter the threat of communism, then in the 1990s, against Islamic terrorist organizations. Now they are unwilling to abandon their strategy, unwilling to let the oilfields of the gulf turn into wellsprings of democracy.

For the young protestors, the battle lines are clear and have nothing to do with the equations of geopolitical interest. It is an internal matter. They took to the streets to ensure that Saddam’s police state would not return in a different guise or regenerate itself in the form of new dictatorships. In doing so they are fighting a government paranoid about the possible return of the Baathists, whose constant refrain is, “whatever the faults of the current regime it is better than Saddam? Would you have dreamed of demonstrating when he was in power?” The demonstrators’ response is to say that the new regime in the process of becoming a police state that places no value on freedom of expression. The statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled by the American

war machine but his ghost still walks abroad. Only the demonstrators possess the spell that can exorcise this phantom: No to Dictatorship! Yes to Liberty!

Fashioning DemocracyBut their work will not end with expelling the ghosts of tyranny; they must lay the foundations for a new school of democracy. The occupation of the Liberation Monument was the spark that lit the flame: devising new avenues of communication, the ingenious formulation of catchphrases and slogans and a creative political imagination that found expression in artwork, sculpture and theatrical performances, all generated by participants of every age and walk of life imbued with the vitality of the virtual age. A young man walked past me, carving a piece of wood in the shape of the football World Cup, across which was written The World Corruption Trophy. I asked him what he was doing and pointing at the cup he answered that he was waiting for a politician to show up so he could hand him his prize. Another young man passed me wearing a tight T-shirt on the back of which was printed The government is corrupt. Please call the cops. The simplicity and power of the slogan brought a laugh to my lips as a group of people dressed for a graduation ceremony surrounded me, singing and celebrating the victory of life over death. Their outfits contained a dual message: they had graduated from university and could find no work, but at the same time their robes signified that they were learning how to change the world, not through dry theory and dull lectures but from the force of footsteps firmly striking the ground and throats calling out with one voice and one desire, liberating their world from its paralysis. We needed to fly, to climb high, to get capture an image of the human sea that filled the square, an image that could take its place next to the pictures of all those other Arab squares taken, as a friend described it, “from the vantage point of the Creator”. We searched for a spot from where we could look down on the whole scene, for the television broadcast vans blocked our entry into the square and cameras and recording equipment was being confiscated at checkpoints set up around its edge. In the end, it was a government official who was granted the honor of a Creator’s eye-view of the masses. On the Friday of Rage he appeared on an



upper floor of the Turkish restaurant overlooking the square, surrounded by officers speaking into walkie-talkies and directing security troops in the street. When the helicopter descended to hover a few meters above the crowd, whipping up a cloud of dust and attempting to break up the demonstration, the protestors respon-ded by holding their shoes up and pointing them at the restaurant. Everyone was gambling on the “purity” of the protestors, and we managed it: purging ourselves of our fears and breaking open our inhibitions in an upwelling of true revolutionary joy. The worry was that this purity might be compromised by attempts to hijack the demonstrations, redirecting the untainted com-munalism of our protest into an open war against the authorities. Certain elements, both within government and from outside the political process, tried to do just this. Yet, in an affirmation of their revolutionary integrity, the protestors outlawed the use of signs or slogans be-longing to specific political movements, expelling MPs and other politicians who tried hitching a ride on the demonstration bandwagon and preventing them from making speeches in Tahrir Square. Karim Hansh, owner of the al-Hansh bookstore in Mutannabi Street, made it his business to ferret out any politician who entered the square. With his Kut accent still strong despite years living in Baghdad, Karim moves among the crowds, an invisible broom clutched in his hands, screaming with rage against these false politicians and throwing them out left and right. Karim has spent decades making cheap copies of books for impecunious intellectuals, but now he feels he has a greater role to play than being a mere publisher to the poor. There are many more like Karim who have started to think anew about their identity and the purpose of their existence. For me, the demonstra-tors had no identity. I saw sarcastic slogans and signs and felt that I, too, had no name; that we were all part of a larger, nameless entity, whose thousand-headed progress imbued the desire for change with irresistible force. It was a child growing in the square’s womb, its features as yet unclear. Yet what was clear, to me at least, was that I was in the presence of a new school for democracy whose entrances multiplied with every passing Friday. This made it difficult for the young pro-testors to leave: the place had become a stronghold for democracy; a canvas for their stirring communal masterpiece. Here, the revolutionary imagination has effected a geographical transference, freighted with

highly symbolic code: moving the demonstrations from Fardous Square, where in 2003 the Americans pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein, to Tahrir Square where the Liberation Monument has stood ever since its construction (between 1958 and 1963) in the days of the First Republic, and in close proximity to the Green Zone from where the country’s current political dispensation is run. The democratic transition apparently faltering, the young protestors have sought to lay siege to this zone and probe its weak points. Their presence on the ground at this symbolic site sends a clear message, delineating the frontlines in the decisive confrontation between those beneath the banner of peaceful civil disobedience and those who fire the guns. The government’s response to this siege has been to dismantle the high concrete barriers o the Jumhuriya Bridge that leads to the Green Zone and issue directives defining the permitted geographical limits of protest, such as their attempt to relocate the demonstrators to the al-Shaab football stadium. There, they hope, the contest between the people and the government can be played out away from the regime’s Green Zone stronghold.

The Ideas FactoryThe demonstrations triggered an unprecedented dynamism. From the womb of Tahrir Square sprang numerous organizations and groupings such as the Kafa (“Enough”) collective that opposed any move towards a new dictatorship, or the Committee for Mass Demonstrations that started issuing a regular publica-tion entitled Diaries of the Uprising, which contained declarations of the protestors demands and analyses of the protest movement’s progress. A group of young people, intellectuals, university professors, media pro-fessionals and civil activists issued a statement calling for a demonstration on February 25, and once in Tahrir Square this collective organized itself into the Move-ment of the Hungry, whose avowed aim was “to satisfy society’s hunger for liberty, self-respect and a dignified life and fulfill the yearning for social peace.” A variety of different organizations were formed with the aim of coordinating the demonstrations or agreeing on com-mon goals. The Ain Haqqi organization and the Peace and Solidarity Council together laid the foundations of the Body for Coordinating Popular Mobilization, which



brought together a large number of youth groups and civil society organizations active in the demonstrations. The political groupings that joined the protest movement were mainly comprised of pro-democratic forces such as the Communist Party, the Arab Socialist Movement and National Democratic Party, both in its first incar-nation under Majid Hadib, and then again following its reconstitution by new leader Nasir al-Jardiji.

Amer Hassan Fayad, a member of the democratic forces’ coordination committee points out that many of their slogans (such as “No democracy without social justice”) were adopted in provinces with significant protest activity. Amer, who is also head of the faculty of political science at Baghdad University, that the man-tras and aims of the protests can be divided into two distinct approaches, the first concerned with achieving democracy and public liberties, and the second with realizing social justice, which in his view is inextricably linked to the triumvirate of poverty, unemployment and corruption. These two approaches are given impetus by the protests, and though their progress may be slow, they have forced the government to respond.The demonstrations have also been joined by groups that operate outside the political process and have no electoral presence such as the Communist Party and affiliated organizations like the Organization for the Freedom of the Woman, which is headed by activist Yanar Mohammed. The heavy presence of these groups in the square was supplemented by limited numbers of independent politicians. A few religious figures have also been in attendance at the demonstrations. Amongst these “turbans”, as the young protestors call them, is Shia marja Qasem al-Taei who sent representatives to Tahrir Square. Al-Taei is unique in being the only religious leader to issue a statement in support of the demonstrations. His representative, Sheikh Hussein al-Jabouri, led prayers in a corner of the square, after which he read out a statement detailing the demonst-rators’ demands. Women’s rights activist Hena Adour walks through the crowds of young protestors signing their songs and chanting their slogans. Those close to her call her the Mother Teresa of Iraq. She was born in Basra in 1946 to a Roman Catholic family with a long history of anti-colonial activism. By the early 1970s she was the Iraqi Women’s League representative at the

secretariat of the International Democratic Women’s Union. In the 1980s she became involved in guerrilla warfare against Saddam’s regime and spent three years living the life of Che Guevara in the mountains along the border with Iran. And now here she is, throwing herself behind a new generation’s dream to change the world. One of the most memorable and powerful images of recent times is the picture of Hena standing before the prime minister, showing him photographs of February Movement activists who had been snat-ched off the street in broad daylight. Face to face with al-Maliki she decried the rejection of civil society and denounced the fact that people were being duped with an insincere discourse of human rights even as the constitution was being trampled under the jackboots of the security troops.

The author Zuhair al-Jazaeri came to Tahrir Square from Irbil. He and his friends linked themselves together with a long white strip of fabric and entered the square, first surrounding the praying crowds before moving off to form a barrier between the angry demonstrators and the security forces. Zuhair has experience of war: the battle of Ghour al-Safi between Israelis and Palestinians in 1969, the confrontation between the Jordanian army and Palestinian organizations in September 1971, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, the Lebanese civil war that raged from 1975 to 1982, the desert conflict between the forces of Polisario and the Moroccan army bet-ween 1980 and 1983 and the war between the Kurds and Baghdad from 1982 to 1984. Now he looks on as a new conflict begins. As a journalist he has lived through much: his senses and his storytelling instincts are fused. He has seen things reach their peak and fall apart, and this is the point at which writing begins: the point of breakdown and defeat. Defeat, he believes, is the most dramatic moment of all.

“People believe in an idea and they want to realize it,” he says. “Then it falls apart and they become its victims.”

The idea these young people believe in is blooming before his eyes, spreading out from beneath the Li-beration Monument. I find it hard to believe he can remain a cold, dispassionate observer; as I watch him,



he seems to me to be reexamining all that he wrote in in his memoir The helpless man’s war.

The square was a carnival, packed with students and the unemployed, religious scholars and dramatists, actors, singers and women, some veiled, some with their hair loose. The intellectuals of Mutanabbi Street, who could be fairly considered a minority in society, have gained great confidence in their ability to effect change, taking to heart Marx’s claim that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it.” Or as a friend put it: “We are now more aware than ever that change is created by the active, effective minority, not the silent majority.”

“Firing off volleys of verse to reduce the world to rubble isn’t enough,” replies another friend. “Our critical conscience has to evolve and engage with people’s problems.”

With their defiant insistence on their right to information, independent journalists have been hugely effective in taking on corruption, even as the government bodies responsible for oversight have been rendered impotent by the prevailing political culture and the horse-trading that accompanies the allocation of senior positions. Civil society activists have also been at the forefront of efforts in the square, confronting a calcified political culture with the vigor of their own civic values. The younger generation, inclined to political apathy, were stung into action by the government’s violent response to the first Friday demonstration. Together with the cur-few and the plethora of official and religious injunctions against participation, this harsh response drew in those who had never shown any interest in politics. On the second Friday of demonstrations I was standing in the street with a young man who turned to me and told me that this was the first time in his life that he had joined a demonstration.

Wasam is 28. He works in shop that supplies Internet services and until recently his life revolved around writing a fantasy novel, which he described as being a million miles away from the ugly realities of life in Iraq. But the images he saw on TV showing the brutalization of the protestors in Tahrir Square changed his mind. Sweeping his long hair from his eyes he said,

“I abandoned my novel and swore an oath that I would only write again once things had changed in this country.”

Wasam’s story, and that of many others like him, is evidence of the impact the protests had in attracting people who regard mainstream politics with dark sus-picion. “Politics just brings problems and pollutes the soul,” as Wasam puts it.

More than just a SongLike their counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world, the Iraqi protestors also had their watershed moment. The Friday of Rage was followed by a sequence of Friday demonstrations, each with its own label to reflect the changing nature of the conflict: the Friday of Dignity, the Friday of Resignation and Reckoning, Decision Friday, and so on. The mantra of the Tunisian revolution, The people demand the fall of the regime, became the logo of Arab revolutions everywhere, though in Iraq it started on a less ambitious footing. Reform the regime was a slogan that spoke of the demonstrators’ desire to distance themselves from the struggle for power, since calling for the fall of the regime was already the preserve of factions opposed to the post-2003 political dispensation. Batil, or “No to”, is the title of the anthem sung by demonstrators the length and breadth of Iraq. In essence a list of one-line slogans and chants, it first appeared during the build-up to the protests in Muta-nabbi Street, when angry young activists crossed the street calling:

“Intellectuals, come! Join your oppressed people!”

The poet Ibrahim al-Khayyat had the idea of composing Batil, which he wrote as a homage to Egyptian musician Sheikh Imam’s famous song Baqarat Haha (“Haha’s cow”), addressing the challenges facing the protest movement with brevity and clarity. It’s opening lines, for instance, repudiate accusations that the demons-trators are members of the Baath Party or affiliated with terrorists:

No to… calling demonstrators terrorists!No to… The Baath rising from the grave!No to…Dictatorship!



The anthem then lists everything the demonstrators stand against:

No to… restricting liberty! No to… a state made up of sects!No to… partitioning the state! No to… shredding the constitution!No to… centralizing power!No to… too many ministers!No to… the Baghdad government!No to… fighting for the throne! The song turns to the Arab dictators:No to… Saddam and his gang! No to… Gaddafi the butcher! No to… Zein the runaway … and Hosni after him

Then addresses the way in which these police-states confront revolution:

No to… horses and camels! No to… one color!No to… one thought! No to… one party!

It describes the many forms of corruption and daily difficulties faced by Iraqis:

No to… insecurity! No to… humiliation! No to… poverty and disease!No to… high illiteracy!No to… electricity cuts!No to… mud-brick schools! No to…unemployment!No to… stopping aid! No to… piles of rubbish! No to… emigration and displacement!No to… a sea of corruption! No to… bribes and backhanders!No to… permitting forgery! No to… hijacking and robbery!

It talks of the restrictions of the right to demonstrate and celebrates the martyrs of the protest movement who fell in the towns and cities of Iraq:

No to… throttling freedom! No to… stifling voices! No to… hands over mouths! No to… the bullets of Kut! No to… the bullets of Basra!No to… the bullets of Hamza!

It criticizes the policies of economic privatization and the separation of the sexes in schools:

No to… selling factories! No to… separating students and boys from girls!

It ends with a roll-call of the groups and classes that make up society:

No to… silencing the students! No to… marginalizing women! No to… abandoning children! No to… mistreating workers! No to… robbing the poor!

Before long it was being sung everywhere, spreading around the country like wildfire. By the evening of the Friday of rage it had its own Facebook page, accom-panied by a video clip of its words being bellowed out in Tahrir Square.

Divisions and ChallengesThe massed rallies in the Arab world were the public’s angry response to the failure of the nation state model in the Middle East: dynastic tyrannies reproducing static authoritarian structures like Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Saleh in Yemen, Mubarak in Egypt and last but not least, Syria’s Assad family. In all the above-mentioned countries, protests took place in the shadow of political regimes that ruled and represented the nation state. Iraq is very different. There, the poli-tical elite preside over what can only be described as a non-state. Any analysis of Iraq’s protests that does not take into account their desire to hasten the state-building process and direct current political groupings to participate in that project, will inevitably draw the wrong conclusions. The reform they seek centers around the creation of a civil state by means other than those



employed by the political elites, who espouse such a state themselves in their manifestos and speeches, but do nothing to create it. Iraq’s elites state that they have been elected to their positions and so cannot be compared with the dynastic regimes of the Arab world that fight shy of implementing democratic mechanisms. “We are not Tunisia or Egypt,” they say. It is the claim of an illusory special status that crops up in speeches of many other Arab leaders and which talks of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia as if they were some kind of illness to which they are immune. Yet democracy cannot be reduced to mere mechanisms. It is values and institutions as well. Mechanism is merely a mean to an end, and they cannot achieve this end unless democratic values have first taken root. In democracy, as Amin Maalouf has stated, “the values rather than the mechanisms are sacred to it.”

Political Islam, for instance, has used elections as a means to achieve power. There is nothing simpler for the enemies of democracy to seize control through elections. In Iraq, the clichéd phrase “democracy without democrats” is no metaphor: it is reality. Likewise, values cannot be integrated into the framework of a prevailing culture and its patterns of behavior in the absence of democratic institutions. The simplest definition of democracy is “the institution of freedom”. This is not a contest between political regimes and the public, nor some Manichean duality of angelic demonstrators and demonic governments. It is rather a series of contested encounters with the aim of creating a balanced relati-onship between state and society.

We demand a state of institutions, not of leaders and parties.

We demand a democratic culture to replace the pre-vailing culture of political horse-trading and division.

We demand manifestos in place of arbitrary policies and hollow electoral slogans.

We demand a state that thinks, because our current state is mindless.

We demand that the state participate in civil society, rather than view its potential partner as a competitor.

The adoption of the “consensual democratic” model just clothed sectarian horse-trading in the vocabulary of the social sciences. What has consensual democracy ever achieved besides a repeat of Lebanon’s failure? What future can Iraq hope to have if it is destined to follow Lebanon: a country divided against itself, still stuck on the starting line? In my view, protests alone are incapable of producing a vision that can transcend the drawbacks of the consensual model and force the elites to offer an alternative. It will do no more, in fact, than reproduce superficial and easily erodible reforms that will leave the roots of the current status quo un-touched. It is clear to me, therefore, that the greatest challenge facing these demonstrations is to put pres-sure on the current regime and force an evolution of “consciousness and practice” that will leave it more open to the people’s demands. It must be freed from its culture of sectarianism self-interest and start on the task of building a state.

On the Philosophy of ChangeThe toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue by the US forces in 2003 was the fulfillment of a post-modern West’s desire to change our traditional societies by force, and from that point onwards the logic of “change from without” held sway over the process of democratic transition. However, the demonstrations in Tahrir Square was a clear expression of the Iraqis’ desire for a new rationale of progress based on “change from within” and their desire to safeguard the freedoms they had gained since 2003, or reacquire those they had lost. On 9 April 2003 the Iraq’s nascent democracy set out from the station, its course determined by the post-invasion political elite. It took the mass rallies to get it back on track, pitting the desire for “change from within” against the model of “change from without” Alternatively, one could view the demonstrations as a mechanism for enacting “bottom-up” as opposed to “top-down” change. This “top-down” re-engineering of a new Iraqi state created a failed model of change that frustrated Iraqi hopes for a genuine transition away from the legacy of dictatorship and tyranny towards plurality and freedom. It was a process detached from the true values and interests of wider society. Politicians divided the spoils amongst themselves, pursuing policies driven by ethnic and sectarian strategies whose goal was the acquisition



and maintenance of power and whose effect was to further unravel the country’s social fabric. Pondering this process of “change from above” I recalled several powerful personal experiences that represented the alternative model of change from below: Myself and a group of young men and women in Tahrir Square went around picking up plastic bottles and other rubbish from the street and packing them into plastic bags, an activity that was the polar opposite of the everyday sight of an arm extending out of a car window and throwing litter to the kerb. Women, veiled and unveiled, moved through the throngs of demonstrators with complete freedom, free of the fear of harassment. In a culture of male he-gemony where women are humiliated and degraded on a daily basis, the creation of a space for equality and mutual respect was particularly impressive. Passing beneath the Liberation Monument and entering the al-Umma Garden you found Sunni and Shia praying side by side in a spontaneous display of solidarity that owed nothing to any politician’s or party’s call for brotherhood and national unity. They were united by their common desire for reform and an end to sectarian differences. The demonstrators had achieved what politicians and religious leaders could not. One of my most beautiful memories is of protestors who were blocked from entering the square on the Friday of Dignity. When they were eventually let in a few hours later the rest of the demonstrators welcomed them with warmth and enthusiasm; a comradeship between fellow Iraqis that we believed had vanished after all these blood-soaked years of mistrust and hatred. This was the “change from below”: a burgeoning civic consciousness that crossed ethnic and sectarian fault lines, of a unity that repudiated a top-down political culture that exploited and profited from division. This was a spontaneous expression of a new national identity that challenged the regional and religious identities that prevailed under the American occupation Just as these spontaneous acts broke down barriers, the slogans raised by from Kurdistan to Baghdad bound the demonstrators together and encouraged activists and intellectuals to go looking for a common discourse and consensus over the need to raise their voices as one. Intellectuals in Kurdistan issued a statement entitled “Together”, let us silence the drums of dictatorship, which brought the wall that separates Arab and Kurd Iraq crashing down. The

statement was signed by 113 Kurdish intellectuals and activists, foremost amongst them the renowned poet Sherko Bekas, head of one the most important official cultural institutions in the Kurdish region, the Sardam Foundation, and a former minister of culture for the region. The statement comprised an unambiguous denunciation of dictatorship and its tools of repression, as deployed against demonstrations throughout Iraq, but especially those in Baghdad, where the peaceful protestors of Tahrir Square were assaulted by tribesmen. It condemned the restrictions placed on the freedom to demonstrate, the banning of live media coverage of the protests and the harassment and detention of civil activists and intellectuals. It was the first time since the occupation that Kurdish intellectuals had reached out to their Arab counterparts, outside the politicized realm of official cultural events and festivals. A brave step, it broke down the illusory barriers partitioning Iraq and emphasized the shared desire to build a plural, democratic Iraq:

“The experience that those working in the cultural field in Kurdistan have had with the authorities of the Kurdish region, who used brutal force to silence the protests that have been running continuously since February, has motivated us to reach across sectarian and ethnic barriers and extend our hand to the forces of civil society throughout Iraq, affirming our shared struggle for democracy, social justice and human rights.”

And so the walls began to crumble before this emerging consciousness, this profound awareness of the need to pool resources in the fight for democracy, embodied in the cry Reform the regime! Change from within; change from below: it is a new philosophy with which to build a new Iraq, a land where all that was once solid vanishes into thin air.

The Road to HopeBut all this optimism and faith in a new philosophy of change notwithstanding, we must still take a dispas-sionate look at the options before us. As elsewhere in the Arab world, Iraq’s protest movement faces grave challenges, complicated still further by the country’s



deep sectarian polarization, the memory of the 2006 civil war and the influence of the country’s religious institutions over a population in thrall to the instructions of religious authorities. These factors stand in the way of wider public acceptance of the demonstrations and their demands for reform. To start with, there is a Kurdish street and an Arab, and each of these divide further: the Arab street into Sunni and Shia, and from there into further alleyways and runs each with its own sectarian, party, class or regional affiliations.Yet while undoubtedly a huge obstacle to progress, it is from this very complexity that awareness of a pressing need for unity first arose among the protestors. The success of these revolutions will vary from one country to the next. Some will require time for an alternative political culture to crystallize: it could take years to change the sectarian balance of power in Iraq and decades to rid ourselves of the legacy left behind by a culture of tyranny. February 25 was just a start: a start down the road of hope. That day I walked tens of kilometers to Tahrir Square in the company of young men in track-suits. Every now and then a military vehicle or police car would drive up and keep pace with us for a while before leaving. Quite by chance I found myself walking alongside a man on crutches. Neither of us spoke. At first I was wary of admitting where I was going because of government propaganda that portrayed the demons-trators as enemies, but it seemed absurd to imagine that he might do me any harm just for going to a protest.

“I must have been hard for you to get out of the house, today,” I said.

He turned a tired face towards me and gave an am-biguous smile. “He’s as worried as me,” I thought to myself. Then he spoke:

“I’m going to the demonstration.”

Every half hour or I had to stop to let him take a break, and as he rested he told me his story. He had fought in every one of his country’s wars and now he was trekking this huge distance on a single leg in order to cry, “this world must change” in Tahrir Square. On the route

from south Baghdad to the city centre sits the al-Rasid Barracks, a huge military base built by the British in the early years of the twentieth century. We walked past it and came to a crossroads dominated by a destroyed building that was once a military hospital. As we sat on the pavement sipping from the bottle of water I had brought with me, the man noticed me glancing at my watch and realized I must be late.

“Go and join your friends in the square, my boy,” he said. “I’ll join you later.”

Guiltily walking on ahead, my feet pounding the pa-vement, I suddenly remembered the first time I had walked this stretch of road. It was back in April 2003, when the US forces entered Baghdad. I was looking at the graffiti sprayed on the walls (“The Dictator is gone forever!”), surrounded by an apocalypse of burnt out cars and jeeps, rusted tanks and hastily dug graves lining the route, all marked by boards reading “Here lies the martyr…”, followed by a name that might allow their families to find them and give them a proper burial. The street was an endless chaos, a chaos that spoke of years of disorder to come. Years that changed me utterly, so much so that I scarcely knew myself, my selfhood erased in a blizzard of murderous identities. And here I was once more, but now the road looked different. I felt the horizons split and part to reveal a road that led to hope. But hope for what? At the time I had no idea, but as I stood beneath the Liberation Monument I felt myself become part of something greater: a new understanding, a new awareness. The old world was crumbing and giving way to the new. I was reborn. My generation has lived through three wars, an embargo and an occupation, and now it is being confronted with new and unfamiliar sensations. For the first time in my life I truly feel young; for the first time, I am alive; and, I might add, free.

I did not meet the man on crutches in Tahrir Square. Perhaps he did not have the strength to make it all the way. I never knew his name, but I am certain that the road we walked together will lead us in the end to a new dawn.

Beneath the Liberation Monument all that is Solid Vanishes into Air

Documents