Iraq: Their next massacre

by BRussells Tribunal

"The Green Zone government and its militias are attacking civilians across Iraq to halt the resistance

The US and all occupying forces are legally and morally responsible for protecting all Iraqi civilians

No level of atrocity can break the geopolitical unity and sovereignty of Iraq

The human community must wake up. The sufferings of the Iraqi people are tragic and criminal. Whole cities are under siege: Fallujah, Sammara, Kirkuk, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi. Latifiyah, Tarmiyah, Baaquba, Moqdadiyah, Buhruz, Madaen, Abualkhasib, Al-Zubeir, Fahamma, Tel Afar, Husaiba …

Entire suburbs of Baghdad are attacked by the militias and police of the sectarian government: Adhamiyah, Al-Jihad, Ghazaliyah, Al-Amiriyah, Al-Huriyah, Al-Suleikh, Al-Saidiyah, Haifa Street, Al-Baladiyat, Al-Durah, Palestine Street …

The attacks aim to stop the spreading resistance to occupation. Now the resistance is everywhere: in the north, middle and the south. It encompasses all the Iraqi populations: Arabs, Shias, Sunnis, Turkomen, seculars, Kurds, Assyrians and other Christians, and Sabbits and Yaziids.

The occupation has no future in Iraq. Though defeated, the occupation refuses to accept its defeat until it has tried all. It seems the US administration thinks a civil war will save its reputation and plans.

US strategists try to forget that killing civilians is a political and moral crime and banned under international law, whoever the doer and whatever the cause. Qualifying civilian deaths as civil war does not lift the responsibility of the local, regional or international forces that are responsible before law for stopping it.

The genocidal killings, the collective punishments, and the crimes against humanity committed over recent days in Baghdad by the sectarian militias participating in the government, and with the participation of the government’s police and the complicity of the occupation, must be stopped.

The US, instead of accepting the evident reality that only the national popular resistance — armed, political and civil — has the power and the legitimacy to bring stability, democracy and peace to Iraq, is trying to escape this reality by diverting eyes from the tragic situation to its diplomatic moves with Syria and Iran.

The US cannot escape the reality of its responsibility in the destruction of Iraq as a nation and state. It is the US that tried to build, since the invasion, an artificial Iraqi state based not on citizenship — the guiding attribute of all modern states, including Iraq since 1925 — but a state based on ethnic and sectarian principles.

The US forgot that Iraq cannot be divided; that its Arabo-Muslim identity is a cultural and geopolitical reality, and that a modern state cannot be built but on the principle of citizenship free from all discrimination. Its talk of civil war is hypocritical. It does everything to ignite it.

The entire international community, and especially the neighbours of Iraq, have a moral, political and economic interest in yielding Iraq to Iraqis, in defending its unity and integrity, and helping Iraq rid itself of the occupation and realise the sovereignty of its land, resources and destiny.

Urgent action!

We call on all institutions, governmental and non-governmental, the world over to oppose the escalating terror confronting the Iraqi people.

Trade unions, educational institutions, parliaments, rights groups and ordinary people can raise their voices to stop the gathering tragedy as the occupation and its local clients wager the life of Iraqis for their political skins.

Only the end of occupation can end these atrocities. End it now!

(28 November 2006)

Abdul Ilah Albayaty (BRussells Tribunal Advisory Committee)

Hana Albayaty (BRussells Tribunal Executive Committee)

Ian Douglas (BRussells Tribunal Advisory Committee)

Dirk Adriaensens (BRussells Tribunal Executive Committee)"