IRAQ: Muslim Paradoxes Exposed as Regime is Collapsing

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 11 2003 (IPS) - For how long will Muslims across Asia, like their co-religionists in the Arab world, live in denial? That is the question looms ahead in the wake of the jubilation spilling onto Iraq’s streets as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapses.

Rather than respond to this evocative celebration of freedom by Iraqi citizens after 24 years of Saddam’s oppressive rule, some of the vocal shapers of Muslim opinion in the region are flogging their favourite nemesis the U.S. government.

Two newspapers in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, reflected this state of denial. ‘Republika,’ known as a Muslim newspaper, ran a headline on its front page Thursday that declared, ”Colonising soldiers hold Baghdad.” It also had a picture of a U.S. soldier covering a statue of Saddam with a U.S. flag.

The more popular ‘Media Indonesia,’ a broadsheet, revealed its blind spot by refusing to admit in its Thursday coverage that the Saddam Hussein regime had been ousted by the U.S.-led invasion on Iraq.

These reactions from Indonesia reveal one of the few paradoxes coursing through the Muslim world at the moment.

That is because Indonesians, like the Iraqis, also had to endure more than 30 years of oppression under the dictatorship of Suharto. And when the Suharto regime collapsed in 1998 – due to public pressure from within than due to an invading force from without – Indonesians marked the moment with the same joy as the Iraqis today.

Religious leaders in another Muslim-majority country, Pakistan, are also sticking to the same slant ignoring the sight of celebrating Iraqis for a steady bout of bashing Washington.

The U.S.-led invasion on Iraq resulted in ”thousands of innocent people losing their lives,” Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani, who heads the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a six party religious alliance, told reporters this week in Islamabad.

The MMA plans to hold a ”million-people march” on Monday in the southwestern city of Hyderabad to vent further anger at the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

It was only in Tehran that there were early signs of jubilation at the demise of the Saddam dictatorship. But here, too, the ones elated were a small group from among the tens of thousands of Iraqis living in the Iranian capital.

On Friday morning, close to 200 Iraqis charged into the Iraqi embassy in Tehran and smashed pictures of Saddam Hussein and chanted slogans against him and the possible U.S.-influenced government that will sit in Baghdad soon.

Currently, Iran is home to nearly 200,000 Iraqis, majority of them Shiite Muslims who sought refuge in Iran after the failed Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War.

Iraq’s Shiite majority were among those who experienced the worst excesses of Saddam’s brutal regime, which clearly favoured the country’s Sunni Muslim minority. The minority Kurdish community in northern Iraq, who have been rejoicing this week, also endured Saddam’s savagery.

This lack of regard for the first flush of freedom Iraqi civilians are enjoying is also a fact among Muslim governments in the region. In Bangladesh, the government is placing more attention on the United Nations having a role in the post-war Iraqi administration.

”Bangladesh will not support any interim administration in post-war Iraq without the United Nation’s approval,” Morshed Khan, Bangladeshi foreign minister, was quoted as saying in ‘The Daily Star” newspaper on Wednesday.

The issue of governance in Iraq is also giving rise to another paradox – that of Muslim leaders suddenly discovering the virtues of democracy after the invasion of Iraq.

Among those calling on the U.S. government to ensure that democracy in all its forms prevails in a post-Saddam Iraq are leaders of governments who see little merit in genuine democracy in their own countries.

Typical among them is Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, acting prime minister of Malaysia, a country that clamps down on political dissent. On Friday, he was quoted in the English-language newspaper ‘The Star’, as saying the next government in Iraq ”must reflect the genuine will of the Iraqi people”.

From the Arab world, countries like Saudi Arabia, which rank among the most repressive in the world, are singing the same tune. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal was quoted Friday as having said Riyadh will only deal with a government in Baghdad ”chosen by Iraqi people”.

Currently, only three countries out of some 47 countries with majority Muslim populations Indonesia and Bangladesh in Asia, and Mali, in Africa respect the rights of its people to freely choose their governments out.

The rest have authoritarian features, like Malaysia and Pakistan, or have regimes and monarchies, like in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, where oppression has been criticised as pervasive.

For human rights activists, Saddam’s regime was among the most brutal of the governments in the Muslim world, given his record of gassing the Muslim minority Kurds and his massacre of close to 180,000 non-Arabs in the 1980s.

Little wonder why Iraqi government was named by the U.S.-based rights watchdog Freedom House as being among the ‘World’s Most Repressive Regimes’ in its annual list, released Tuesday.

In this list, the other Muslim countries sharing Saddam Hussein’s company are the governments of Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.