          | |||||
      
| |||||
|
Back Cover Letter from Karbala
March 18th, 2004 -- There was a dull thud and the blank look of fear on people’s faces. Then another. Then a wall of flame so high it licked the tiles of four-storey hotels. People, thousands of them, ran in panic. Some crouched behind market stalls. Some fled to the mosques. In one surreal image two pilgrims, bloodied from the tatbir ritual in which Shi’ites lacerate their heads with swords, stood amid a pool of fresher blood and torn limbs next to a coach garlanded with flowers. It was not the only moment in Karbala on 2 March when the present seemed to fuse irredeemably with the past. Five explosions struck Karbala that day, leaving over 100 dead and 200 wounded, many of them Iranians. Karbala is the holiest Shi’ite city in Iraq after Najaf. The second of March was the climax of Ashura, ten days of ritual observance in which Shi’ites re-enact the martyrdom of Imam Hussein and his 72 companions, the epitome of Shi’ite persecution at the hands of Islam’s Sunni majority. For the last 36 years the Ashura rites had marked a muted assertion of the Shi’ites’ religious and political identity against Saddam Hussein’s regime and its attempts to muzzle both. This year, post-Saddam, they were supposed to be free. But there was always a sense of foreboding over this year’s events. A month before, on the first day of Id al-Adha, suicide bombs ripped through Kurdish political offices in Arbil, leaving over 100 people dead. Many Shi’ites felt their turn would be next. “There is a saying among us,” said a pilgrim down from Baghdad, the night before the bombings, “every dawn is an Ashura and every place is Karbala”. He was among thousands surging, unlit and unchecked, against the walls of Karbala’s Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas mosques. Most people in Kabala blamed al-Qa’ida or Iraqi surrogates for the attacks, aimed at sowing inter-communal mayhem between Shi’ites and Sunnis, the way Arbil was intended to set Arab against Kurd. For an awful moment it appeared the bait might be taken. In the bombings’ aftermath, terrified locals assaulted “outsiders”, including foreign journalists. One Iranian pilgrim, wounded from the blast, was abducted from an ambulance by a mob convinced he was somehow in league with the bombers. Iraqi police and militiamen had to use force to rescue him. Then the fear subsided, calmed by Iraq’s other confessional and national leaders, including those on the Iraqi Governing Council. They condemned the carnage in Karbala and elsewhere not as an attack by Sunnis on Shi’ites but as attack on “Islam, Iraq and Iraqi unity”. Karbala’s religious leaders used the minarets’ loudspeakers to call for blood for the victims, Iraqi and foreign. The Ashura ceremonies recommenced, led by black-shirted youths running through the streets, shepherding people back to the mosques. But there was still anger. A statement from Iraq’s leading Shi’ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, “held the occupying forces responsible for being unwilling to control the borders of Iraq and stop intruders”. As the funerals made their way to Karbala’s ancient burial sites the cry was: “No, no Americans! No, no Israel! No, no terrorists!” At Baghdad’s Kadhemiya mosque – previously attacked by suicide bombers — worshippers threw stones at US patrols. Whatever the bombers’ intentions, the fractures they opened up have not been between Shi’ites and Sunnis but between Shi’ites and the occupation. Those rifts were there before the attacks in Karbala and Baghdad. They have become deeper since, says Hussein Shahristani, an Iraqi aid worker in Karbala. The US must act to bridge them, and not only in the realm of security. “Shi’ites see the Americans dragging their feet on elections and laws passed by unelected bodies. For now people have not taken things into their own hands. The religious leadership has been very careful about steering all protests away from any form of violence. But the Americans should hear what the Shi’ites on the streets of Karbala are demanding. It is not for a Shi’ite-dominated state. It is for a national government to be elected sooner rather than later, so that the Shi’ites — for the first time — can exercise their right to participate as equal citizens in a country in which they form the majority.” |
| ||||
|
WHAT'S NEW? | ABOUT MEI | WHO'S WHO? | SUBSCRIPTIONS GET NEWS BY E-MAIL | FOR WEBMASTERS | LINKS | CONTACT MEI
All content ©1971-2004 Middle East International. Middle East International magazine, 1 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE, UK. Tel: +44-207-832-1330 | Fax:+44-207-832-1339 | E-mail  | |||||
