Saturday, April 3, 2004
Zeyad has a post concerning the Fallujah mutilations (what else can you call it?) that goes along with my feeling that what happened has more to do with tribalism and mob madness than Islam, although Zeyad feels it was something uniquely Iraqi, I tend to doubt that. Interesting post, though.
However, I believe that this is an exclusive Iraqi trait, and we have examples from our own recent history to prove it. For Iraqis who deny that, go here and here (warning: gruesome images), I got these historical pictures from my late grandfather. In the 1958 coup which overthrew the monarchy, the bodies of members of the royal Hashemite family together along with Noori Al-Saeed, prime minister under King Faisal II, were mutilated, dragged around the streets of Baghdad, and then hung to rot for days. Communists committed similar atrocities in Mosul and Kirkuk in 1959, ironically against Pan-Arabs, Ba'athists, and their supporters. Some Ba'athists did the same to Communists during their short lived coup in 1963. And again the Ba'athists after 1968, when they assumed power in Iraq for good, with a long list of atrocities against political adversaries, 'enemies of the people', 'traitors', 'Zionist spies', etc. Now they have resurfaced again it seems.
All the images of a long history of violence above have become deeply ingrained in Iraqi society, and I'm afraid we have become desensitized to such scenes a long time ago. As disgusting and horrible the Fallujah images were, you could see bystanders children there watching casually, if not cheering, without blinking an eye. I would not call those children evil, because sadly they do not realise what they have become. The people that defiled the dead bodies were not technically terrorists, Ba'athists, or insurgents, they were common folk which makes it even more depressing. All respect for humanity has long been lost in a large section of Iraqis. I admit this concept is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to a western audience...