Baghdad’s activists enjoying the fruits of a toppled regime

by Rami al-Abed

December 2003

AMMAN - Foreign and Arab activists pride themselves for what they perceive as the heroic activity they have been pursuing in Iraq. Arab youth usually head to Baghdad with foreign activists, and entrust themselves to building the nation the way they see fit.

When you ask these activists why Iraq, they say that they have a historic mission of fighting imperial America and that they do so by making sure that human rights of the Iraqi people are not violated. “America calls itself a democracy, but in fact it violates human rights in Iraq,” one activist who was taking a taxi from Amman to Baghdad told me.

Hell yes it is undemocratic. For the first time in Iraq’s history, activists are allowed to enter the country. During the days of the deposed dictator, only a select few of Arabs were allowed to enter Iraq. I was one of these few.

Once we reached Baghdad and settled in the Rashid Palace, it took us no time before we noticed that we were followed. A couple of intelligence men were everywhere following us, and as usual reading a newspaper.

No one of our delegation was allowed to take a tour without our escorts. We were not allowed to talk to people. Otherwise, we could have put these people’s safety on risk.

All these years, no single activists could be found in Baghdad.

After Saddam’s downfall, activists entered Baghdad for the first time and now, they became the ones following the ruling power, in this case the Americans. How many activists did the Americans kill, I doubt they killed any.

This piece does not aim at comparing Saddam to American practices on human rights. It only aims at proving that those activists, whose anti-American prejudices on thousands of issues that have nothing to do with Iraqi interests, are now living in the luxury of the American presence in Iraq.

I ask again: Why Iraq? Why Saudi Arabia where fornicators heads are chopped off their bodies and where women driving cars are imprisoned? Where are human rights violated more? Are they violated in the chaotic Iraq living without a central authority or in Saudi Arabia that is not currently occupied?

I believe activists would wait until the US, or any other power, topple the archaic Saudi regime and its obsolete system that violates, big time, every human right more than any nation on the face of earth.

Iraq currently has so many problems. The least of the Iraqi concern is the way American troops or the Iraqi police arrest one of the hundreds of criminals roaming the streets of Baghdad and sponsoring a terrorizing wave of organized crime.

Under Saddam, human rights in Iraq were non-existent. Americans, indeed an occupation, can do nothing to reach the brutality and shrewdness in violating human rights the way Saddam did. The scale of human rights in Iraq after Saddam might not be currently the best, but it certainly improved since Saddam was deposed.

Rami al-Abed is a senior student of philosophy at the Jordanian University. He wrote this article for Alternative