The Iraqi Lady Turns

Iraq Asks The UN To Revoke Troops Immunity - The Backstory

Everyone is talking about reports that the Iraqi government are to ask the UN to revoke the immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops that was imposed upon them as one of the last acts of Bremer's Provisional Authority - an act that may finally signal a beginning to Iraqi assertions of true sovereignty which are the only hope for eventual peace and stability. Regular Newshog reader Rudi has the backstory of where the move originated and the startling insight it gives us into the way that prominent Iraqi figures who once toed the neocon line are beginning to realise how they were scammed. I will let Rudi tell the story

At the beginning of July a terrible story broke in Mahmoudiya Iraq, the alleged rape of a young girl and the killing of her family by US Marines. This crime occurred in the same area where two US Marines were brutally murdered; the US press and public denounced the Marines murder as barbaric. Now, although generally desensitized by the brutality of the situation in Iraq, many Iraqis are outraged about this rape and murder. One Iraqi MP in particular has been instumental in creating a stong movement calling for action from the Iraqi and US governments. Safiya Suhail is well known to the US public and press, but this time she is not the subject of praise from Bush and the old and new media. A look into her background and history shows how even Iraqi support for the occupation has created a new critic.

Safiya Suhail was featured on the US State Department "Iraqi's Voices of Freedom" in 2002 before the war. She married Bakhtyar Amin, a Kurdish, a Kurdish political activist who founded the US group "Iraqi Democracy" in the US and became Iraq's first Minister of Human Rights. In 2003 she returned to Iraq as part of the neocon backed contingent of politicians headed by Ahmed Chalabi and became the new government's first Ambassador to Egypt, later going on to be a member of parliament on the National Iraqi List ticket. She sat next to Laura Bush during the 2005 SOTU speech and gained fame for her hug of Janet Norland, a mother of a fallen Marine. Suhail was lauded By George W. Bush in his speech as someone who returned from exile to vote and lead the new Iraqi democracy and was quoted in the speech as having thanked America for giving her nation its liberation. She became a darling of the MSM and the extreme Right as a shining example of the success of Bush's adventure.

Suhail gained power in Iraq as part of the pro-American group supported by the Bush administration and U.S. neocons. But allegations of an atrocity in Mahmudiyah appear to have been the catalyst for a rapid change of stance. An article by the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman (trans. by Juan Cole of Informed Comment) explains:

Al-Zaman/ AFP say that a firestorm of protest is building in Iraq over the alleged rape and killing of a 15 year old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah, and the murder of her family, by a US GI. MP Safiyah Suhail, a woman representative from the National Iraqi List in parliament, demanded that PM Nuri al-Maliki and Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani present themselves to parliament for questioning in the matter. She demanded that the Iraqi government be involved in the investigation. She said that this was a matter that touched on the honor of the Iraqi nation and the female MPs had a special role to play in demanding an accounting.

Suhail is former ambassador to Egypt of the new Iraqi government and stood against the imposition of Islamic law on Iraqi women. That a secular person is so stirred up about this suggests to you what the Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists are thinking. For most Iraqis, honor is bound up in the chastity of their women, at least in public, and a foreigner raping an Iraqi girl is a profound humiliation for the entire country. This matter is not going to go away quietly and if the Bush administration thinks it is just a matter of disciplining unruly troops, it has another think coming. Entire colonial empires have been shaken by such incidents in the past.

So here we have a movement begun and led by prominent Iraqi women, in some cases those who have been very sympathetic towards the Bush administration in the past, who have decided that they can no longer support a situation which creates such iniquities and then keeps the perpetrators from the justice of the Iraqi nation. Now that she has made this decision, Suhail is no longer the Right's darling and you will look in vain for an article in the MSM pointing out that the dissenter who is leading a popular movement against the occupation and the once-lauded friend of the Bush's are one and the same. How, then, can Clifford May or George Bush try to tell us how we are winning the minds of the average Iraqi? I guess this can’t be claimed as “Mission Accomplished” after all.

Rudi also draws my attention to the tale of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who at the close of Gulf War One crossed Saddam's lines at great personal risk to ask Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to entreat the U.S. to support the Iraqi Shiite uprising that was so brutally put down by Saddam. The meeting he hoped for never took place and he instead went into exile where he became another of the members of the Chalabi led pro-occupation grouping who gained neocon approval and backing. He returned to Iraq in April 2003 after the fall of Saddam. Though assigned American protection, the protective unit could not follow him into the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf on April 12, 2003. Here he was attacked and hacked to death. You will search in vain for the rightwing pundits who care to remember moderate Shiite al-Khoei - he was forgotten by them as soon as he was no longer useful.