TWO MORE THINGS ABOUT SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: In yesterday’s post– right below here, I waxed fairly admiring of the political smarts that Hizbullah has shown over the year, in Lebanon, and suggested that much of what Hizbullah has learned through that experience there will inform the actions of their Shi-ite co-religionists inside Iraq.
I want to add two quick points. One, inevitably, has to do with the whole issue of “terrorism”, and the extent to which the discourse of “terrorism” is used and abused in order to vilify and exclude political opponents.
I have, of course, just been in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, even Desmond Tutu, were for many decades routinely described by the apartheid rulers as “terrorists”. And in Mozambique, where the Frelimo government for many long years refused to talk to their Renamo opponents on the grounds that the latter were merely “bandidos” (bandits). Now, they are valued members of the national parliament…
So people do generally know how these discursive strategies of exclusion work. And that they are, at the end of the day, strategies that are always manipulated for political purposes.
Lebanon’s Hizbullah occupies a position on the US State Department’s formal list of “foreign terrorist organizations”. That is due mainly, I believe, to actions that people associated with Hizbullah took against Americans and other westerners in the 1982-85 period– the period before Hizbullah’s actual establishment as a unified organization, and when Lebanon was still reeling from the brutal campaign Israel sustained during the summer of 1982, in the course of which an estimated 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people lost their lives. A majority of them, most likely, noncombatants.
Which is not to excuse any of the brutal acts that local Shi-ite-based grouplets carried out during the years that immediately followed. The murder of AUB President Malcolm Kerr stands out as one particularly horrifying and tragic incident.
But other actions taken by Shi-ite grouplets in those years that were also described as “terrorism” really were not terrorism at all. In particular, the spectacularly bloody attacks against the US Marines barracks and a large French caserne in Beirut, in October 1983 that killed 241 Marines and 57 of their French counterparts, and scores of others wounded was not terrorism by any recognizable definition of the word at all.
It was horrifying for the survivors of the attacks, for the family members of the 300 soldiers killed, and for the amour-propre of the US and French governments of the day. But it was not “terrorism”. Those who lost their lives were active members of the uniformed military who had taken the oath of military office whereby a person is, in essence, given a license to kill if ordered to do so and also to accept the fact he or she may be killed while in the line of duty.
Which perhaps goes to show that the discourse of “terrorism” is less useful and all-encomapssing than some of its practicioners take it to be. But certainly, it helps to indicate that accusations of “terrorism” always need to be given careful examination. In fact, the discourse of “terrorism” turns out to be far less useful, in practice, than the traditional distinctions that international humanitarian law has always sought to make, between what can be done to active-duty “combatants” and what can be done to “noncombatants”, a class that includes wounded soldiers and prisoners-of-war, along with all civilians.
Those distinctions have been spelled out in a score of international treaties and conventions since the late 1800s. The discourse of “terrorism”, by contrast, remains a slippery eel, subject always to political abuse and manipulation…
Which brings me back to Hizbullah. Once it had been established, Hizbullah’s leaders were generally very careful and disciplined in the approach they took to targeting. The vast majority of their military attacks were against Israel’s soldiers doing occupation duty inside Lebanon. This counts as allowable “resistance to occupation” under international law. certainly not “terrorism”– though of course the Israelis always tried to paint it as such.
On some occasions, however, Hizbullah did launch some fairly low-tech, low-yield rockets against civilian population centers in northern Israel. Hizbullah leaders always claimed they did this in response to Israeli attacks against population centers in Lebanon that lay outside the mutually-agreed “zone of operations” in the south of the country.
Of course, once people get into tit-for-tat retaliation mode, it becomes very hard to see “who started it” regarding any such move toward escalation. (That was why the question of getting a reliable and credible monitoring presence in on the ground became very important.) But it’s certainly true that Israeli commanders themselves sometimes admitted that it had been their side that started an escalation. And then, there were hige-scale Israeli escalations like the big punitive raids of 1993 and 1996 that were preceded by nothing like a “justifiable” trigger on the behalf of Hizbullah– and that did not provoke any Hizbullah “retaliation” against Israeli civilians on anything like the scale of the punishment that the IDF inflicted on Lebanese civilians during those raids.
Once again, the discourse of “terrorism” then dominant in western circles proved totally unhelpful in explaining what was going on, or in informing further actions on behalf of Western governments. The discourse of international humanitarian law (Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions) proved considerably more informative and helpful.
… Well, that’s one quick take on a matter that probably needs much more discussion. The other thing I wanted to note re the current emergence of Shi-ite political power in Iraq is the whole issue of women’s rights inside Iraq.
This, to me, is a much stronger reason to feel wary about the rise of organized Shi-ism than the whole badly-abused question of allegations of “terrorism”.
I know woefully little about the role of women, or women’s issues, throughout Hizbullah’s many years of experience in Lebanon. I don’t doubt but what the party has women members and women activists who must, presumably, play some kind of a role in planning and implementing the party’s many grassroots-level social and economic programs. But I sure haven’t seen any women referred to among the party’s leadership.
The party’s strong advocacy of veiling I do not, necessarily, take to mean that it favors total submission of women and their exclusion from public life. I know for a fact that in many Arab societies, many of the women who veil do so precisely so that they can go out into public life, jobs, academia, etc., without having their honorable-ness questioned at every turn…
But one thing I think we all have to take note of in Iraq is the terrible battering that women’s role in society seems to have taken in the aftermath of the US/UK invasion. This is NOT a case, like that in Afghanistan, where the authors of the invasion/occupation could claim that one of their “goals”, or at least one of the effects of their action, had been to strengthen the ability of women to take part in public life.
In Afghanistan that goal has been met only very partially, and very “modestly”. And in most parts of the country, not at all.
In Iraq, we have to recognize openly that systematic misogyny of the type practised in Afghanistan by the Taliban was not a problem at all under Saddam Hussein. Sure, women suffered under his rule. But they did not suffer any worse than the men in their same families. They weren’t denied an education or the means to make a living. Far from it! Iraq under the Baathists gave women a prominent and respected role in many fields of public endeavor.
I mean, how many other countries have women in charge of their biological-weapons programs??
But it was not just “Dr. Germ.” Under Saddam, women were prominently present in all sectors of public life.
And now, in many places, they dare not even leave their homes, or send their daughters to school.
Where is the outrage amongst western feminists about that?
Where is the questioning in the western press about the huge and much-celebrated soccer match (a recent, American-organized ‘showcase’ in Iraq of how good Iraqi-American relations were) , with a turnout of scores of thousands of fans– none of whom appear from the news pictures to be women?
Where is the questioning about the patheticly small number of women involved in all these much-heralded “consultations” the American gauleiters are holding regarding Iraq’s political future. A measly total of SIX women were all there were at the most recent “consultation” in Baghdad– along with TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR men.
Gimme a break! Where’s the outrage??
So anyway, what I wonder about, is what role the Iraqi Shi-ite organizations (as well as all the other emerging political groupings there) are going to play in Iraq in the future regarding the woman question. It could be a good role. For starters, anyone who can increase basic public security can transform the lives of women and girls completely, simply by allowing them to exit their houses and go to schools, job, and markets. But beyond that, there’s no reason we can’t hope that the Shi-ite organizations will also give active support to women taking leadership roles inside and outside their respective political parties…
Well, maybe I’m unrealistic. But I do like to look beyond the whole “veiling” issue that so many other western feminists seemto get so badly hung up on.
Actually, it was in Iraq, back in 1980, that I had my first experience of veil-wearing as possibly being a liberating experience. One of my Iraqi “minders”, a very good-hearted woman called Asea, agreed to take me to Najaf and Karbala. But being a Christian gringa, the only way I could possibly get into the shrines there was by donning the whole black abaya. So that’s how I spent my whole day there– going into the shrines, wandering with Asea around the markets, etc.
I wore the abaya. I spoke pretty good Lebanese Arabic at the time. People we met just assumed I was a visiting Lebanese Shi-ite. They were friendly. But we didn’t stick around any one place long enough for the flaws in my Arabic to become too evident.
I have to say that that point, having spent six years living in Beirut and traveling around the Arab countries as a western woman, that day was the first one in which I had not felt trapped in the gender complications of my public role.
In “liberated” Beirut and the other Arab countries I visited, I always dressed modestly. I learned to keep my eyes on the ground– simple eye-contact from a gringa could frequently be seen as a come-on. I walked the streets the same way I see my daughter walk New York now: fast, purposeful, alert.
But despite practising all those defensive precautions, I would still– just by virtue of my mid-brown hair, or whatever; I really don’t know– have young boys running after me in the street shouting “prostitute!” In some places– Damascus comes to mind, but there were portions of all other Arab cities I worked in where it would also happen– the crowds of young men on the street would seem to compete in trying to do painful jostling right into my chest as I walked by. I could never NOT be aware of the fact that I was a woman walking on an Arab street–
Until I went to Najaf and donned the abaya.
What can I say?
I can say Damascus has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, and maybe the other cities have, too.
I can say that the right to walk on a public street without suffering constant sexual harrassment is one that all people, women and men, should be able to enjoy, and that should be enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights.
I can say that the terrible harrassment that women are reportedly suffering on the public streets of many Iraqi cities these days is simply unconscionable.
I can note that when I was in South Africa, I learned that when South African blacks and whites were negotiating their final transition to democratization, all sides agreed that each party would field a negotiating team of five members– AT LEAST TWO OF WHOM WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. That in the “front bench” of two members of that team, AT LEAST ONE MEMBER WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. And that as the role of chairing those proceedings rotated amongst the parties, EVERY OTHER CHAIR WOULD HAVE TO BE A WOMAN.
That was in “deepest Africa”, back in the 20th century.
But how about “the new Iraq”, today??