Post by Anwaar on Nov 26, 2006 15:46:26 GMT 4
The following piece was written in March 2003. Only the wilfully blind could not see then what is happening today.
From Kabul to Baghdad: Dead Men Dancing
Anwaar Hussain
ABDUL ALI Mazari, the warlord who commanded the Hizb-i-Wahdat group of Northern Alliance invented the monstrous ritual known as 'dead men dancing'.
The victims were usually Taliban prisoners but occasionally innocent bystanders caught up in the chaos. First, their heads would be chopped off. Petrol would then be poured down the holes in their necks. A torch would be applied to the fuel-blood mixture. Dancing to the tunes of Rubab (Afghan Guitar), Mazari's troops would then cheer as the bodies burned and jerked in a macabre dance of death.
Mazari is now dead. Back in 1997, when the Taliban rose to power they avenged themselves by capturing him alive and throwing him out of a helicopter. Abdul Ali Mazari's Northern Alliance, however, rode on American tanks into Kabul after the recent fall of Taliban. The cycle of vengeance re-started.
To millions of Afghans, the revengeful Northern Alliance is even more frightening than the Taliban. In their previous brief rule from 1992 to 1996, tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children died at their hands in Kabul alone. Women were raped and young girls had their breasts mutilated. By careful estimates, the Northern Alliance troops slaughtered upward of 50,000 Pashto-speaking people before they were driven out of Kabul in 1996.
This time too, blinded by hate and guided by revenge, the Northern Alliance is exacting a terrifying retribution from Pathans. They invented newer and more efficient methods, like the "Container Killing", of mass slaughter. Mazari's ghoulish ritual also was revived with additional refinements. For inspiring beats, Rubabs were replaced with drums. Many dead Taliban danced in Qalai Jangi for the pleasure of an enthralled select group of General Rashid Dostum's troops. Somewhere in the background, American GIs feigned ignorance as the ghastly dramas continued well past midnights.
Human history is replete with grisly reprisals of Hitlers, Pol Pots, Milosovics, Dostums and the likes. Mass murder, rape, mutilation and torture routinely became the favorite instruments of the avengers. The vanquished become the victors and then vanquished again. The rule of the vengeful victors is blotched with the blood of the vanquished. The defeated Germans of the First World War exacted their reprisal in the next one. Muslims in Bosnia were punished for their long forgotten past. Tutsis and Hutus put their machetes to brutal use against each other in deadly cycles in Rwanda. From Sierra Leone to Democratic Republic of Congo to East Timor, the victors have exacted fierce vengeance from the vanquished. From Royalists to Communists to Mujahideen to Northern Alliance to Taliban and then back to Northern Alliance, Afghanistan's history is packed with gruesome revenge sequences.
Enter Iraq. The United States has gone to war with a country already impoverished by more than 20 years of war and UN-imposed sanctions. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the outcome of which is daylight clear, the traumatized Iraqi society would be without a recognized head of state or a working administration. Well over 70 opposition parties, highly fragmented even now, would be further disjointed. In the north, two organizations, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), fight for the loyalty of the Kurds and are often at loggerheads with each other.
Many of the Shias in the south have no political loyalties. Two political organizations, however, the Al-Da'wa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq function there. Some of the Shias, especially those in Al-Da'wa, are interested in alliance with Iran. Others are not. The Sunnis in the middle of the country (who have supplied the present ruling organization with its members) would not want a government controlled by the Shias, who are the majority group in Iraq.
Whichever homegrown faction/group controls a postwar Iraq will only be able to do that, if at all, with the extensive support of both American arms and money. The US is shying away from a similar promise in Afghanistan. Armed and police forces will have to be formed. That will need time. The war will annihilate the present Iraqi leadership. Saddam Hussein's inner circle from Tikrit will be eliminated in the aftermath of the war. The real loyalties of the new leadership will not be known. A situation a la Afghanistan will emerge where Hamid Karzai, the leader of the country, cannot even find a loyal Afghan bodyguard, but must rely on Western Forces for his personal safety. More than a year after the U.S. military triumph in Afghanistan, power still flows from the barrel of a gun and the government's writ barely reaches to the outskirts of Kabul.
Competing tribal factions too would want to pull Iraq apart. The system of law and order will break down. There will be no law enforcement, no justice structure, no civil services, and no answerability. In this confusion, people will be inclined to take justice into their own hands. Other than the murders of whole Kurdish communities with chemical and biological weapons, Saddam's rule has been responsible for innumerable political killings. His cronies in the ruling Ba’ath Party, who routinely made miserable the lives of fellow citizens right down to the street level, would be the foremost targets for settling of scores. Other brutalized sections of the society, clamoring for revenge, would join the killing spree.
With all these fluid dynamics, the United States would be unable to take complete control of the situation. In the absence of an effective, and recognized, central leadership a fragmented Iraq is likely to emerge. The Kurds would endeavor to form a shadow state in the north to realize their decades old dream. The Shias would strive for the same in the south. The center would struggle to remain under the Sunni influence but with the old leadership decimated, it will be a hard task. Iraq's bordering countries would be alarmed by this development and are likely to start upping the ante through proxies. In fact, every one of Iraq's neighbors has an agenda of its own for the country. In the ensuing melee, the avengers will have a field day.
Post-war Iraq would be treacherous, baffling, and complicated for everyone involved. A recent working paper from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the James A. Baker Institute at Rice University about summed up the situation when it said: "The United States may lose the peace, even if it wins the war". According to the report, the immediate aftermath of fighting will find American troops trying to stop "anarchy, revenge, and score-settling".
None of the Kurd leaders exclude the possibility of "personal revenge, because they (Saddam's regime) are responsible for the killing of at least a quarter million people." A "bloodbath" is being threatened when the central government falls. "There will be an explosion in Baghdad. Nobody will be able to control it," declares a KDP military chief. The leader of a large Kurdish tribe has claimed: "I can tell you that in Tikrit and in a number of places marked by Saddam Hussein's power, not even the foundations of the houses will remain." Lists of people deemed responsible for Ba’ath regime's brutality have already been drawn.
That Iraq will plunge into complete chaos is almost a foregone conclusion. With no infusion of money, no central leadership, no overseeing bureaucracy, no firm American commitment for rebuilding, and no self-sustaining industry, Iraq will plunge into an almost certain civil war. Retribution killings are expected to sweep the country. Settling scores after Saddam's brutal 33-year rule would be the order of the day.
Soon, another set of Northern Alliance actors will be riding into Baghdad on American tanks. Dead men will dance again in the streets of Baghdad, Tikrit and other Iraqi cities, but with a difference. Not very far away this time, American GIs singing the Star-Spangled Banner will replace the Afghan Rubabs and drums. The dead men, though, will not be able to tell the difference. For dead men may dance but they cannot hear.
Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain
From Kabul to Baghdad: Dead Men Dancing
Anwaar Hussain
ABDUL ALI Mazari, the warlord who commanded the Hizb-i-Wahdat group of Northern Alliance invented the monstrous ritual known as 'dead men dancing'.
The victims were usually Taliban prisoners but occasionally innocent bystanders caught up in the chaos. First, their heads would be chopped off. Petrol would then be poured down the holes in their necks. A torch would be applied to the fuel-blood mixture. Dancing to the tunes of Rubab (Afghan Guitar), Mazari's troops would then cheer as the bodies burned and jerked in a macabre dance of death.
Mazari is now dead. Back in 1997, when the Taliban rose to power they avenged themselves by capturing him alive and throwing him out of a helicopter. Abdul Ali Mazari's Northern Alliance, however, rode on American tanks into Kabul after the recent fall of Taliban. The cycle of vengeance re-started.
To millions of Afghans, the revengeful Northern Alliance is even more frightening than the Taliban. In their previous brief rule from 1992 to 1996, tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children died at their hands in Kabul alone. Women were raped and young girls had their breasts mutilated. By careful estimates, the Northern Alliance troops slaughtered upward of 50,000 Pashto-speaking people before they were driven out of Kabul in 1996.
This time too, blinded by hate and guided by revenge, the Northern Alliance is exacting a terrifying retribution from Pathans. They invented newer and more efficient methods, like the "Container Killing", of mass slaughter. Mazari's ghoulish ritual also was revived with additional refinements. For inspiring beats, Rubabs were replaced with drums. Many dead Taliban danced in Qalai Jangi for the pleasure of an enthralled select group of General Rashid Dostum's troops. Somewhere in the background, American GIs feigned ignorance as the ghastly dramas continued well past midnights.
Human history is replete with grisly reprisals of Hitlers, Pol Pots, Milosovics, Dostums and the likes. Mass murder, rape, mutilation and torture routinely became the favorite instruments of the avengers. The vanquished become the victors and then vanquished again. The rule of the vengeful victors is blotched with the blood of the vanquished. The defeated Germans of the First World War exacted their reprisal in the next one. Muslims in Bosnia were punished for their long forgotten past. Tutsis and Hutus put their machetes to brutal use against each other in deadly cycles in Rwanda. From Sierra Leone to Democratic Republic of Congo to East Timor, the victors have exacted fierce vengeance from the vanquished. From Royalists to Communists to Mujahideen to Northern Alliance to Taliban and then back to Northern Alliance, Afghanistan's history is packed with gruesome revenge sequences.
Enter Iraq. The United States has gone to war with a country already impoverished by more than 20 years of war and UN-imposed sanctions. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the outcome of which is daylight clear, the traumatized Iraqi society would be without a recognized head of state or a working administration. Well over 70 opposition parties, highly fragmented even now, would be further disjointed. In the north, two organizations, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), fight for the loyalty of the Kurds and are often at loggerheads with each other.
Many of the Shias in the south have no political loyalties. Two political organizations, however, the Al-Da'wa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq function there. Some of the Shias, especially those in Al-Da'wa, are interested in alliance with Iran. Others are not. The Sunnis in the middle of the country (who have supplied the present ruling organization with its members) would not want a government controlled by the Shias, who are the majority group in Iraq.
Whichever homegrown faction/group controls a postwar Iraq will only be able to do that, if at all, with the extensive support of both American arms and money. The US is shying away from a similar promise in Afghanistan. Armed and police forces will have to be formed. That will need time. The war will annihilate the present Iraqi leadership. Saddam Hussein's inner circle from Tikrit will be eliminated in the aftermath of the war. The real loyalties of the new leadership will not be known. A situation a la Afghanistan will emerge where Hamid Karzai, the leader of the country, cannot even find a loyal Afghan bodyguard, but must rely on Western Forces for his personal safety. More than a year after the U.S. military triumph in Afghanistan, power still flows from the barrel of a gun and the government's writ barely reaches to the outskirts of Kabul.
Competing tribal factions too would want to pull Iraq apart. The system of law and order will break down. There will be no law enforcement, no justice structure, no civil services, and no answerability. In this confusion, people will be inclined to take justice into their own hands. Other than the murders of whole Kurdish communities with chemical and biological weapons, Saddam's rule has been responsible for innumerable political killings. His cronies in the ruling Ba’ath Party, who routinely made miserable the lives of fellow citizens right down to the street level, would be the foremost targets for settling of scores. Other brutalized sections of the society, clamoring for revenge, would join the killing spree.
With all these fluid dynamics, the United States would be unable to take complete control of the situation. In the absence of an effective, and recognized, central leadership a fragmented Iraq is likely to emerge. The Kurds would endeavor to form a shadow state in the north to realize their decades old dream. The Shias would strive for the same in the south. The center would struggle to remain under the Sunni influence but with the old leadership decimated, it will be a hard task. Iraq's bordering countries would be alarmed by this development and are likely to start upping the ante through proxies. In fact, every one of Iraq's neighbors has an agenda of its own for the country. In the ensuing melee, the avengers will have a field day.
Post-war Iraq would be treacherous, baffling, and complicated for everyone involved. A recent working paper from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the James A. Baker Institute at Rice University about summed up the situation when it said: "The United States may lose the peace, even if it wins the war". According to the report, the immediate aftermath of fighting will find American troops trying to stop "anarchy, revenge, and score-settling".
None of the Kurd leaders exclude the possibility of "personal revenge, because they (Saddam's regime) are responsible for the killing of at least a quarter million people." A "bloodbath" is being threatened when the central government falls. "There will be an explosion in Baghdad. Nobody will be able to control it," declares a KDP military chief. The leader of a large Kurdish tribe has claimed: "I can tell you that in Tikrit and in a number of places marked by Saddam Hussein's power, not even the foundations of the houses will remain." Lists of people deemed responsible for Ba’ath regime's brutality have already been drawn.
That Iraq will plunge into complete chaos is almost a foregone conclusion. With no infusion of money, no central leadership, no overseeing bureaucracy, no firm American commitment for rebuilding, and no self-sustaining industry, Iraq will plunge into an almost certain civil war. Retribution killings are expected to sweep the country. Settling scores after Saddam's brutal 33-year rule would be the order of the day.
Soon, another set of Northern Alliance actors will be riding into Baghdad on American tanks. Dead men will dance again in the streets of Baghdad, Tikrit and other Iraqi cities, but with a difference. Not very far away this time, American GIs singing the Star-Spangled Banner will replace the Afghan Rubabs and drums. The dead men, though, will not be able to tell the difference. For dead men may dance but they cannot hear.
Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain