No Protest in My Name!

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

I can not vouch for the authenticity of this but .. Djf


------ Forwarded Message
From: Matt Oristano <Matt () Oristano net>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 08:43:12 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: No Protest in My Name!

Dave:
 From the website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a different
view.

http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/irq/irq_01_5_eng.txt

By the way, it's gotten to the point where I check your list every morning
before I check the newspapers.  Thanks.
Regards
Matt



Comment: No Protest In My Name!

A victim of Saddam's regime puts her case for war.

By Freshta Raper in London (ICR No. 01, 28-Feb-03)

Do the anti-war protestors who have been filling the streets and parks of
the civilized, comfortable West have any idea what they are protesting
about? I watched with dismay this week as Greenpeace supporters chained
themselves to fuel pumps. I could not believe the naiveté of the protestors
in Hyde Park a few weeks ago. They wouldn't survive a month if dropped into
Baghdad and forced to live as Iraqis live. They would be arrested and
tortured as soon as they started complaining about the lack of basic rights
- among them, free speech.

What is more moral? Freeing an oppressed, brutalized people from a vicious
tyrant or allowing millions to continue suffering indefinitely? Speaking as
one of millions of Iraqis who have suffered at the hands of Saddam
Hussein's brutal regime, I would pay any price to get rid of this monster.

I have been imprisoned, tortured and gassed. I know life in Saddam's Iraq.

I was born in Halabja, close to the Iranian border in the northern Kurdish
region. I went to school and graduated in Halabja, then became a
mathematics teacher. In the mid-1980s, a law was passed decreeing that all
teaching must be done in Arabic. No more would we be allowed to teach in
Kurdish. There were demonstrations. Courageous students burned books in
protest.

When this happened in Halabja, the ringleaders came to my school to escape
from the Iraqi mukhabarat - intelligence officers - who were looking for
them. I helped hide them in the physics lab and they remained undetected.
But someone must have informed the authorities, for I was arrested the
following day and held for three days. During this time I was forced to sit
in ice-cold water. I, like so many other Iraqi women, endured many
humiliations. All this for hiding two 16-year-old children who had burnt a
few books!

After I was released, men from the mukhabarat followed me everywhere.
No-one was allowed to speak to me. I was fired soon after, told not to go
anywhere near the school or the children, and re-assigned to the education
department of the regional government in the city of Suleimaniyah.

In 1987, I received a memo from the director calling me to a meeting. I
arrived at the appointed time and found the hall packed with friends and
colleagues. Mukhabarat surrounded the building and arrested us all. They
loaded us onto a lorry and said: "Bring your men folk who are peshmergas
[anti-Saddam Kurdish guerrillas] or bring divorce papers!"

I did neither. I joined the peshmergas and stayed in the mountains living
the life of guerrilla - a life of hell, under constant threat of chemical
attack.

In 1988, 21 members of my family - aunts, nephews and nieces - died of
suffocation when Saddam attacked Halabja with chemical weapons. In many
ways I was lucky: my mother, brothers and sisters were in Suleimaniyah and
survived. When the planes came, I was in Kanyto, a small village in the
mountains. Again I was lucky: I survived the chemical attack. Badly
injured, though, I spent three months in hospital recovering from the
chemical burns that covered my body, blistering it from head to foot.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait I decided to leave my homeland: still suffering
from the chemicals, I felt vulnerable - helpless and hopeless. I fled to
England and resumed my teaching career in a London boys' school. Today the
most dangerous thing I have to deal with is disruptive, swearing teenagers.
This is the world the protestors know - not Saddam's world of chemical
weapons, of arbitrary terror and rape.

How many protestors have spoken to an Iraqi woman who has been raped - in
front of her father and son - by Saddam's thugs? How many have asked an
Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being
executed - and then ordered to pay for the bullet that killed him? How many
know that these mothers had to applaud as their sons died - or be executed
themselves? I saw this in Suleimaniyah. I heard the clapping. I hear it
still.

In the 12 years since I arrived in England I have been back to Northern
Iraq four times to visit family and friends. Thankfully, because of the
no-fly zone imposed by the Western allies, life there has improved: the
Iraqi army is no longer on our land. But Kurds outside the liberated area
still live in fear that they may be picked up by Iraqi soldiers,
conscripted into the Iraqi army or forced to sign papers declaring that
they are not Kurds - but Arabs.

I have spoken to many people in northern Iraq over the last few weeks - to
Kurdish officials, journalists, old friends, my brother. They all agree
that this war proposed by George Bush and Tony Blair may be the one chance
to rid Iraq of the disease that is Saddam Hussein. They, like me, believe
that anti-war protests will be taken as a sign of weakness by Saddam and
exploited by him to the full.

Giving the UN inspectors more time is a sad, bad joke. Saddam will never
disarm. He will lie, cheat and bluff his way out. He always has and always
will.

Freshta Raper is head of mathematics at a London comprehensive school.




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