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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 22, 2004
issue of Workers World newspaper
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THE REVOLT OF 1920 AND IRAQI RESISTANCE TODAY
By Richard Becker
"Give us the signal and we will resume the 1920 revolt," chanted
supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr at a demonstration in Baghdad on April 1.
If the U.S. military commanders in Iraq didn't shudder at hearing that
chant, their British co-occupiers surely did. It was in the year 1920
that the people of Iraq rose up together after learning that they had
become colonial subjects of the British Empire.
The April 1 demonstration came at the midway point in a week that
transformed the occupation of Iraq into a crisis of the first magnitude
for Washington. The previous Sunday, March 28, the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) headed by U.S. dictator L. Paul Bremer had ignited the
crisis by shutting down a newspaper reflecting the views of al-Sadr, a
Shia religious leader. The shutdown led to a series of mass protests.
When the U.S. attempted to crush the protests with brutal force, a
popular uprising erupted in many Iraqi cities beginning on April 4.
At the same time, the U.S. occupation forces were preparing an all-out
assault on Falluja, an industrial city of about 300,000 located west of
Baghdad, which has been a center of the Iraqi resistance since the
beginning of the occupation a year ago.
Falluja is a working-class city whose population is predominantly, but
not exclusively, Sunni Muslim. Sunnis constitute about 85 percent of the
world's Muslims, and are divided into four major branches. In Iraq,
Shiites (the other major branch of Islam) constitute around 60 percent
of the population.
WHO IS THE IRAQI RESISTANCE?
While it may not be possible to answer this question exhaustively at
present, it is clear that the resistance in Falluja and throughout Iraq
is very diverse in its political makeup. In a Jan. 31 interview by the
Anti-Imperialist Camp with resistance activist Jabbar al-Kubaysi, who
identified himself as a "left Baathist," a question was asked about the
components of the resistance that might form a common political front.
Al-Kubaysi replied: "There are four main currents spread throughout the
country. There is ourselves, Iraqi Patriotic Alliance, which I can
roughly describe as anti-imperialist, Arab nationalist, striving for
democracy and social justice as well as respecting and defending our
Islamic heritage.
"There is the Sunni Islamic Committee which regroups the main Islamic
leaders being strongly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood which is
collaborating with the enemy. They are ready to work with everybody who
is resisting including Christians and Communists.
"The third force is the Nasserites who are about to reorganize. And
finally there are the anti-imperialist communists of the Central Command
who are long-term friends of us who we are hoping to be able to
convince." [The Central Command is a split from the official Iraqi
Communist Party, which is collaborating with the occupation and is a
member of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council.]
When asked about Shia participation in the resistance, al-Kubaysi
answered: "First of all Shiite people are well represented in most of
the forces named, in some they are even the majority. You have to
overcome the idea spread by the Americans that the Shia society is its
own, fully separated entity. Most of the Shia people consider themselves
Arab Iraqis and participate as such in political life."
It is worth noting that this interview was done two months prior to the
current uprising.
Al-Kubaysi's comments point to a reality about Iraq that has been left
out of most of the corporate media coverage: Iraq, especially urban Iraq
where more than 60 percent of the population today resides, is not
neatly divided by religion or nationality. The process of capitalist
development in Iraq, like in so many other countries, has led to a
breakdown in the old feudal structures and a massive rural-to-urban
migration over the past century.
Washington's depiction of Iraq, echoed in the mainstream media, features
a Kurdish north, a Shia south and a "Sunni Triangle" in the center.
The term "Sunni Triangle" is, in fact, a recent propaganda fabrication.
Included in the "Triangle" is Baghdad, although it is at least one-third
Shiite and also is home to large numbers of Kurds, Assyrians, Turcomens
and others. Excluded from the "Triangle" is the north of Iraq, despite
the fact that a big majority of Arabs, Kurds and Turcomens are Sunnis.
WASHINGTON SEEKS WEAK AND DIVIDED IRAQ
The falsification of Iraqi reality by U.S. leaders and their complicit
media is neither accidental nor benign. The occupiers are relying on a
divide-and-conquer tactic to maintain control, a strategy of pitting
Iraqi against Iraqi.
Under the new U.S.-drafted "constitution," Iraq would become a
federative state with a weak central government. The long-term aim is to
transform the entire oil-rich and strategic Gulf area into a region of
weak states that can be easily dominated by U.S. imperialism.
While it would be a mistake to ignore the religious aspect of the
resistance, the capitalist media's relentless characterization of the
resistance in religious terms must be seen as part of the larger divide-
and-rule strategy.
Commenting on the differences in reporting on Iraq by most U.S. media as
compared to Arab sources such as Al-Jazeera TV, Nabil Dajani, professor
of communications at the American University in Beirut, said: "Every
reporter is influenced by his or her cultural background. They still
look at what is going on in Iraq as terrorists. They still look at it as
a Sunni triangle or as Shiites. They can't see Iraqis as Iraqis...
"Americans have the right to look at it in terms of the Sunni-Shiite and
Al-Jazeera has the right to see it as resistance to occupation."
An April 9 Washington Post article reported that, "The Sunni-Shiite
divide, already narrower in Iraq than in some parts of the Muslim world,
is by all accounts shrinking each day that Iraqis agree their most
immediate problem is the occupation."
The same article quoted Mohammed Najem Mausoumi, as he donated blood
for
Falluja in the predominantly Shia Kadhimiya community of Baghdad. "We
don't need a call from the mosque."
"Like others in the cheerfully crowded tent," the Post article
continued, "he bristled at being asked whether he was Shiite or Sunni."
Falluja has emerged as a symbol of national resistance and pride for
Iraqis across the political and religious spectrum. Thousands of Baghdad
residents in cars, buses and on foot formed a giant relief convoy into
the besieged city on April 8, defying U.S. armor to enter.
Sunni and Shia mosques in the Iraqi capital organized many of the
participants. This conscious and increasing coordination poses a
potentially insoluble problem for the occupation, just as it did when it
first emerged 84 years ago in the Revolt of 1920.
REVOLT OF 1920
In May 1920, the Arabs of Iraq, Syria and Palestine rose in mass revolt
when they discovered that rather than achieving independence after
hundreds of years of Ottoman (Turkish) rule, they had instead been
incorporated into the largest colonial empires of the day, the British
and French.
Syria and Lebanon became French colonies, according to the agreement
signed in San Remo, Italy, on April 24, 1920. Iraq, Palestine and Jordan
were taken over by Britain. All of this was done under the cover of
"mandates" from the League of Nations--forerunner to the United Nations.
As part of this backroom deal, U.S. oil companies were given a 23.75
percent share of Iraq's oil, with equal amounts awarded to Britain,
France and the Netherlands. Iraq owned exactly zero percent of its vast
oil resources.
The British approach in Iraq, which it militarily occupied in 1918, was
similar to that employed throughout its empire; i.e., to secure its
control by pitting different sectors of the colonized people against
each other, while seeking to co-opt the elites of each community or
nationality. In Iraq, this meant fomenting antagonism between Shia and
Sunni, and between Arab and Kurd.
But to the surprise of the British something very unusual for the time
took place. Marxist historian Hanna Batatu wrote of the 1920 revolt:
"For the first time in many centuries, Shias joined politically with
Sunnis, and townsmen from Baghdad and tribesmen from the Euphrates
made
common cause.
"Unprecedented joint Shia-Sunni celebrations, ostensibly religious but
in reality political, were held in all the Shia and Sunni mosques in
turn ... the proceedings culminating in patriotic oratory and poetic
thundering against the English.
"Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that with the events of
1919-20, and more particularly with the bond, however tender, that was
created between Sunnis and Shias, a new process set in: the painful, now
gradual, now spasmodic growth of an Iraqi national community." ("The Old
Social Classes and Revolu tionary Movements of Iraq," Princeton
University Press, 1978)
It took the powerful British military several months to put down the
Revolt of 1920. More than 10,000 Iraqis were killed, as well as 2,000
British troops, including their commander. Tens of thousands more were
wounded, at a time when the population was barely 3 million people.
Winston Churchill, then in the British colonial office, ordered the
development of poison gas bombs to be used against the revolt, and in
1925 dropped those bombs on rebelling Kurds in northern Iraq.
The history of Iraq under British rule from 1920-1958 was the history of
one rebellion after another, rebellions in which the people of all
communities and religious affiliations joined.
That tradition of determined opposition to foreign occupation and
domination is emerging once more in the new Iraqi resistance.
- END -
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