CounterVortex

INSURGENT SYRIA, 1925

Occupied Iraq’s Not-So-Distant Mirror

by Bill Weinberg, Middle East Policy

Book Review:

The Great Syrian Revolt
and the Rise of Arab Nationalism
by Michael Provence
University of Texas, Austin, 2005

The comparison is nowhere made explicitly, but the subtext for most readers of Michael Provence’s The Great Syrian Revolt will inevitably be the current situation in Iraq—even if it was not the author’s intention. The irony is that Provence poses the 1925 revolt against French Mandate rule in Syria as the watershed event in the emergence of Arab nationalism. In Iraq, where Ba’athism is rapidly being superceded by Islamism in the vanguard of resistance to the occupation, we may be witnessing its death throes.

The revolt also represented a watershed in counter-insurgency and clinical mass killing. It culminated in French aerial bombardment of Damascus—predating by 12 years the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Guernica, which claimed an equal number of lives but is far better remembered.

The revolt began in July 1925, when Druze farmers in the Jabal Hawran, a rugged frontier zone some 50 miles southeast of Damascus, shot down a French surveillance plane. Provence chronicles how the revolt quickly evolved from a local Druze rebellion to a Syrian revolution with a nascent Arab nationalist consciousness.

The Druze had been deported to the harsh Hawran from Lebanon by a joint French-Ottoman force following a civil war with their Maronite Christian neighbors in the 1860s. There they established their dominance over Bedouin raiders and developed a “frontier warrior ethos.” Provence writes: “They sought to preserve their independence both from the state and from provincial elites and would-be landlords.” The initial leader of the revolt, and its eventual military commander, Sultan al-Atrash, was an heir to this long struggle. In 1910, his father, Dhuqan al-Atrash, had been hanged by the Ottoman authorities on charges of insurrection. Sultan al-Atrash was then serving with the Ottoman military in the Balkans—experience which would serve him well back home.

Al-Atrash was involved in the early resistance to the French when they took over Syria in 1920 under the terms of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, ousting the recently-installed Hashemite King Faisal with reluctant British connivance. Faisal’s loyalists put up a struggle before the king was enticed by Britain to accept the throne of Iraq as a consolation prize. Druze villagers took up arms for Faisal on a pledge of regional autonomy for the Jabal, and many fought at the battle of Maysalun, the brief war’s most significant engagement.

The 1925 revolt would prove a greater challenge. The French cast their colonial project in anti-feudal terms, and the armed resistance that exploded that year as sectarian, not nationalist: the work of local chiefs whose power was threatened by the Mandate’s reforms. Provence writes: “Sectarian conflict was a theoretical necessity for French colonialism in Syria, since the entire colonial mission was based on the idea of protecting one sectarian community, the Maronite Christians, from the predations of others. Without sectarian conflict, colonial justification evaporates.” The French encouraged such conflicts by imposing territorial divisions based on religious and ethnic lines. The rebels were immediately labeled “bandits,” “extremists” and “feudalists.”

From the start, Provence dismisses France’s self-serving “narrative” of a civilizing anti-feudal mission. He informs us that Druze village sheikhs were not absentee landlords, and in fact served to protect village interests in dealings with Damascus merchants who purchased their grain. But the village political orders they oversaw seem to have been fairly authoritarian, and the Bedouin were made to pay tribute to the sheikhs for access to pasture and water.

Paradoxically, trouble started brewing with the Druze when the old-guard military administrators—who were of a “right-wing, pro-Catholic political bent”—were cycled out under a new high commissioner for Syria, Gen. Maurice Sarrail, “a republican anticlericalist freethinker and a darling of the French Left.” Sarrail appointed as governor of the Jabal Hawran one Capt. Gabriel Carbillet, who zealously sought to break the grip of Druze “feudalism” in the region. Carbillet conscripted the sheikhs for forced labor (officially in lieu of taxes) on modernizing projects such as road-building. Protests were met with repression, villages raised militia, and the regional capital Suwayda was besieged.

As always, the forces of “civilization” quickly resorted to barbarism. France responded to the rebellion with aerial bombardment of villages and “collective punishment” measures: wholesale executions, public hangings, house demolitions, forced removal of the populace from disloyal regions. There were rebel claims of poison gas used against Jabal villages. Meanwhile, leaflets air-dropped on the Jabal read: “Only France can give you wheat, running water, roads, and the national liberty you desire.”

At its inception, the revolt used the “language of Druze honor and Druze particularism,” and French counter-insurgency measures sought to encourage this. The French used Christians—especially Armenian and Circassian refugees from Ottoman rule—as shock troops against the rebel Druze villages. “Irregular troops” were also conscripted from the lumpen, who committed some of the worst atrocities—an echo of the “Salvador Option” apparently now being employed by the Pentagon in Iraq.

Yet the rebellion also exhibited the beginnings of a national consciousness from the start. In defiance of the divide-and-conquer strategy, al-Atrash wrote the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Damascus apologizing for rebel reprisals against Christians, pledging reparations, and calling for mutual solidarity against the French.

The real turning point came when the rebel leadership, following ties already established through trade, made contact with the prominent Arabs of Damascus who supported independence. The Hizb al-Shab (People’s Party), whose leader Shahbandar had already been imprisoned and seems to have been operating in semi-clandestinity, embraced the Jabal revolt and called for a general revolution. At this point, the rhetoric of Druze particularism was decisively abandoned in favor of an Arab nationalism that was at least tentatively secular.

In an August call “To Arms!” addressed to all Syrians and distributed in Damascus by the People’s Party, al-Atrash (now “Commander of the Syrian Revolutionary Armies”) delineated French crimes, including: “The imperialists have stolen what is yours. They have laid hands on the very sources of your wealth and raised barriers and divided your indivisible homeland. They have separated the nation into religious sects and states. They have strangled freedom of religion, thought, conscience, speech and action. We are no longer even allowed to move about freely in our own country.”

Rebel propaganda emphasized that Druze, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Allawis and Christians alike were “sons of the Syrian Arab nation.” As the Druze rebel army (now swelled with volunteers from Bedouin tribes) advanced on Damascus in October, and urban militants erected street barricades in preparation for the coordinated uprising, brigades were organized to protect the Christian and Jewish quarters of the city from potential mob violence. “These Moslem interventions assured the Christian quarters against pillage. In other words it was Islam and not the ‘Protectrice des Chrétiens en Orient’ which protected the Christians in those critical days,” wrote the British consul in Damascus (arguably not the most objective source).

On the other hand, al-Atrash apparently called for the amputation of the hands of informers (albeit with anesthesia and under a doctor’s supervision, a touching nod to modernity). Captured Circassian fighters were summarily killed and mutilated. Rebel demands that prominent Christians and Jews provide taxes and conscripts for the independence struggle were often made under explicit threat of retaliation—which can be read as either embrace or persecution. And in a grim harbinger of a generations-long ethnic struggle to follow in both Syria and Iraq, there were episodes of internecine violence between Arab and Kurdish rebel bands.

As guerillas besieged the city and the uprising broke out, Sarrail approved the bombardment of Damascus. Nearly 1,500 were killed as the bombs fell for two days. Then, in a gesture of stupendous arrogance, the French demanded a large fine be paid by leaders of the rebellion in the city. It was eventually paid by the Mandate’s own puppet president, Subhi Barakat, in a bid to buy peace.

In the aftermath, when the guerillas had withdrawn, the pro-independence forces once again mobilized brigades to protect the city’s Christians from reprisals. Interestingly, the leader of this effort was Said al-Jazairi, grandson of Amir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, the famous Sufi warrior who was exiled to Ottoman Damascus after a failed 1856 uprising against the French in Algeria.

The post-bombardment peace was illusory. France had regained control of the capital, but guerilla control of the countryside around Damascus was nearly total. Paris realized a change of direction was called for. Sarrail and Barakat were both removed, and the more popular Taj al-Din al-Hasani, son of Damascus’ leading Islamic scholar, was installed as president. Moves towards greater self-government were pledged. These measures weakened the links between the urban movement and guerillas. In the summer of 1926, a French counteroffensive drove al-Atrash first into the mountains and then, the following year, into Transjordan, where the British authorities expelled him and his followers across the border to the new Saudi Kingdom.

Al-Atrash and his comrades spent the next ten years in exile and under sentence of death. They continued to agitate for Syrian independence from their refugee encampment at Wadi al-Sirhan oasis. In Jerusalem, their supporters launched the newspaper Jamiat al-Arabiyya (Arab Federation), which protested Zionist designs on Palestine as well as the continuance of Mandate rule in the Fertile Crescent. In an early example of anti-imperialist solidarity, one issue protested the US intervention in Nicaragua, where Marines dispatched by President Calvin Coolidge were also pioneering the use of the airplane to deliver terror and death to peasant villages.

In Syria, a new party called al-Kutla al-Wataniyya (National Bloc) displaced the pro-independence leadership of 1925, and pursued a course of “honorable cooperation” with the French. They called for establishment of a constituent assembly to draft a constitution, and a timetable for self-rule. Full independence, of course, did not come until a full 20 years after al-Atrash’s revolt had been put down.

Provence writes that the history of resistance to French rule in Syria has been “recolonized” by the Ba’athist regimes that have held power since 1963. As the Allawi minority holds sway in the regime, the new version favors the Allawi revolt in Latakia, led by Salih al-Ali, which Provence downplays as one of a “series of uncoordinated resistance movements” that followed the transition to French rule, lacking the significance of the later 1925 revolt in terms of emerging national consciousness.

Given Provence’s thesis, it is an irony as well as a testament to the continuing efficacy of imperial divide-and-rule strategies that the Druze today have been pitted against Arab nationalists. The relatively favored status of the Druze under Zionist rule, and their widespread use in the security forces against their Palestinian neighbors, dates at least to 1948. In Lebanon, the Druze political patriarch Walid Jumblatt is one of the harshest opponents of Syria—and recently called openly for US military intervention against Damascus. (Druze in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights continue to wage an anti-colonial struggle.)

Provence makes only the most cautious and tentative references to the obvious contemporary analogue to the 1925 Syrian revolt. “Resistance against occupation remains a potent theme in the Middle East,” he states rather obviously. “Few scholars today would use words like ‘bandit’ or ‘extremist’ to describe insurgents against colonial rule, though ‘terrorist’ is perhaps one equivalent.”

The US makes no blatant claims to be protecting one minority in Iraq, as France did with the Maronites in Syria and Lebanon, but does purport to be defending secularism against sectarian fanaticism. Groups such as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia play into the self-serving propaganda of Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to a far greater degree than the petty authoritarianism of the Druze sheikhs ever could have with French auto-justifications for their colonial venture. If the trajectory of the Syrian revolt was from sectarian particularism to secular nationalism, in Iraq since 2003 it has all been in the reverse direction.

Independent Syria would degenerate into the ugly Ba’athist regme of Hafez Assad—due, in no small part, to ongoing US attempts to subvert the more moderate nationalist regimes which preceded it. The world will be lucky if Iraq now manages to avoid a far greater disaster.

——

This piece first appeared in the Spring 2006 edition of Middle East Policy Journal
http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol13/0603_weinberg.asp

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

ROMA FACE COERCIVE STERILIZATION

“Verging on Genocide” in the Czech Republic?

by Gwendolyn Albert, WW4 REPORT

PRAGUE — For almost two decades now it has been possible for just about anyone from the outside world, including people from the formerly taboo democracies of the “West,” to freely visit countries which were once satellites of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, has quickly become a favorite European tourist destination due to its millennium of preserved architecture. Former dissident Vaclav Havel, the playwright and one-time president, continues to be the main personality on the international stage associated with the country’s peaceful transition to democracy.

But NATO and EU memberships notwithstanding, the “transition,” as it is referred to here, has failed to correct a grim human rights legacy with regard to the Roma minority—a record which includes the still-unredressed crime of coercive sterilization.

The Roma minority, originally from India and visibly quite different from ethnic Czechs and other “white” Europeans, has been living on European territory for almost a thousand years. Their history is one of intense persecution, including a period of being owned as chattel slavery in what is now Romania from the 14th century through the mid-19th century. During the Nazi era, Czech Roma were 95% exterminated from the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” which covered roughly the same geographical area as today’s Czech Republic. Today, open and proud “anti-Gypsyism,” manifested by political leaders and the ordinary people who elect them is a fact of life in the Czech Republic which human rights advocates have been attempting to address for more than a decade now.

Where the Roma are concerned, “democratization” has yet to reach social welfare, child welfare or the housing policies of hundreds of towns across the country. Discriminated against in almost every area of life and all but completely sidelined from the prosperity the country enjoys, members of this community more than any other find themselves dependent on the state and on local authorities—which continue to subject them to the kind of invasive control of their personal lives for which totalitarian Czechoslovakia and other Soviet bloc states were once infamous. Tthe transition to democracy and a market economy has brought Roma in the Czech Republic little but further degradation. The 1990s saw a rush of Czech Roma emigration to Canada and the UK as a result.

Roma in the Czech Republic face pervasive racism—racially segregated housing and forced evictions; segregated education in which Romani children are disproportionately sent to schools for the mentally disabled, resulting in high illiteracy levels; and the disproportionate placement of Romani children into state care. Romani parents who are deprived of their parental rights, purportedly due to poverty, are still paradoxically required to bear the costs of maintaining their children in institutional care and can face prosecution for failing to meet their parental responsibilities. Roma face an exclusion from most employment even should they attain education, and are a frequent target of skinhead violence. Despite these abuses, there is no anti-discrimination legislation in place—for which the European Commission may soon sanction the Czech Republic.

This is the context for an ongoing campaign of coercive sterilizations of Romani women, which has been in place for decades—starting in the late 1950s, and with cases reported as recently as 2004.

Since the late 1970s, human rights advocates have been sounding the alarm that doctors in both the former Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic have been sterilizing Romani women without their informed consent. It was not until the year 2005 that an in-depth investigation into specific cases was conducted by the Czech Health Ministry. The results of the investigation were reviewed by the country’s human rights oversight body, the Czech Public Defender of Rights (also known as the Ombusman), after coercive sterilization survivors complained to the body. On Dec. 29, 2005, the Public Defender issued its “Final Statement of the Czech Public Defender of Rights on the Matter of Sterilizations Performed in Contravention of the Law and Proposed Remedial Measures,” which concluded that “the problem of sexual sterilization carried out in the Czech Republic either with improper motivation or illegally, exists, and Czech society has to come to terms with this.”

Despite the Public Defender’s ground-breaking acknowledgement of these human rights violations, Czech officials have yet to make any public statements on the matter.

Since the 1970s, when the practice was official policy in what was then totalitarian Czechoslovakia, hundreds of Romani women have been coercively sterilized. In some cases, the patient’s consent was never provided to the sterilization at any time. There are also cases in which signed “consent” was obtained from a patient who was in an advanced stage of labor or shortly before Caesarian delivery of a child—i.e., under circumstances in which the patient was under intense stress. There are cases in which “consent” was provided without a real understanding of the terminology used, or absent explanations of the permanent consequences of sterilization. There are cases in which social workers pressured Romani women to undergo sterilization either by offering financial incentives or threatening sanctions (withholding of benefits, taking children into state care, etc.).

In short, the sterilizations have occurred either entirely without the consent of the person concerned, or by applying standards of consent divergent from those required under international law as “fully informed.” The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (ECHRB), Article 10 (2), states that “Everyone is entitled to know any information collected about his or her health.” This right is reinforced in the World Health Organization (WHO) Declaration on Patients’ Rights, Article 4 (4), which states that “Patients have the right of access to their medical records and technical records and to any other files and records pertaining to their diagnosis, treatment and care and to receive a copy of their own files and records or parts thereof.”

As the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) noted in its March 2007 “Shadow Report” on the issue to the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: “These practices potentially implicate the Genocide Convention and are to be regarded with the utmost gravity.” Article 2 of the Genocide Convention states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:… (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Under the Communist regime, the sterilization of Romani women in order to bring their rate of reproduction to parity with the Czech birth rate was part of a larger state policy promoting sterilization as a birth control method. Following the termination of this policy in 1991, a number of doctors have apparently acted illegally to continue the practice. At a press conference releasing the Ombudsman’s Final Statement, Deputy Ombudsman Anna Sabatová, (herself a Charter 77 signatory and former dissident who was periodically imprisoned by the communist regime along with most of her family members) said the investigation had revealed “fully deformed praxis in the Czech medical community” with regard to these procedures.

With only rare exceptions, all of the persons who have come forward to complain of this treatment so far have been Romani women. Pages 23-58 of the Ombudsman’s Final Statement note that “a group of Charter 77 signatories had pointed out the use of sterilization…as early as 1978, at the time of the most active implementation of the state assimilation policy towards the Romani minority, labeling it without hesitation as a technique on the verge of meeting the attributes of genocide.”

The Statement also notes: “It would be wrong to believe that the relation of the pre-November [1989] Czechoslovakian state [policy on the] Roma was random, uncontrolled, and lacking co-ordination.” Further: “What should be primarily condemned … is that the state-controlled social services set itself controlled birth rate curbing in the Romani community as one of its socio-prophylactic and unconcealed eugenic measures (see the constant references to improving the quality of population) and that for this purpose it developed practical administrative procedures leading in individual cases as far as the legally and morally dubious persuading of women to undergo sterilization, i.e. a virtually irreversible intervention…”

So far the perpetrators of these crimes have enjoyed total impunity. This is due both to the high level of contempt for the Roma in the Czech Republic and to the fact that Czech officials have failed to adopt necessary safeguards for patients’ rights in general.

The Ombudsman also requested criminal investigations into the coercive sterilization complaints. To date most of the criminal charges filed have been dismissed by the police out of hand—including cases which require no particular “expertise” in order to decipher the nature of the illegality concerned. After all, when the law requires a hospital sterilization commission to pre-approve sterilizations, and a sterilization is performed before approval, there should be no doubt that the law has been broken. The Czech police, however, can’t quite see it that way.

In another case, an “expert” on medical procedure who was contacted by the police to evaluate the evidence characterized the victims as having been “irresponsible” for not voluntarily agreeing to the sterilization.

The Ombudsman recommended the state institute a reparations procedure for persons who were sterilized up until 1991, when the state policy promoting sterilization was rescinded, and that those sterilized since 1991 try to access justice through the courts (this in a country with no state-supported legal aid system).

Most human rights advocates see the matter differently and believe all of the victims, regardless of the point in time at which they were sterilized, should be apologized to and compensated by the state—and at least one UN committee agrees with them.

In August 2006, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women issued the following recommendations as part of its regular periodic review of the Czech Republic’s compliance with the CEDAW Convention:

Recommendation 23: The Committee is particularly concerned about the report, of December 2005, by the Ombudsman (Public Defender) regarding uninformed and involuntary sterilization of Roma women and the lack of urgent Government action to implement the recommendations contained in the Ombudsman’s report and to adopt legislative changes on informed consent to sterilization as well as to provide justice for victims of such acts undertaken without consent.

Recommendation 24: The Committee urges the State party to take urgent action to implement the recommendations of the Ombudsman/Public Defender with regard to involuntary or coercive sterilization, and adopt without delay legislative changes with regard to sterilization, including a clear definition of informed, free and qualified consent in cases of sterilization in line with the Committee’s general recommendation 24 and article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine; provide ongoing and mandatory training of medical professionals and social workers on patients’ rights; and elaborate measures of compensation to victims of involuntary or coercive sterilization. It also calls on the State party to provide redress to Roma women victims of involuntary or coercive sterilization and prevent further involuntary or coercive sterilizations. The Committee requests the State party to report on the situation of Roma women pertaining to issue of coercive or involuntary sterilization, in its next periodic report, including a detailed assessment of the impact of measures taken and results achieved.

The UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which reviewed the Czech Republic in March 2007 issued its own recommendation:

The State party should take strong action, without further delay, to acknowledge the harm done to the victims, whether committed before or after 1991, and recognize the particular situation of Roma women in this regard. It should take all necessary steps to facilitate victims’ access to justice and reparation, including through the establishment of criminal responsibilities and the creation of a fund to assist victims in bringing their claims. The Committee urges the State party to establish clear and compulsory criteria for the informed consent of women prior to sterilization and ensure that criteria and procedures to be followed are well known to practitioners and the public.

Despite the urgent tone of these communications and the relatively large media impact in the Czech Republic of the CEDAW recommendations in particular—which were preceded by testimony at the UN from one of the victims—the Czech government has maintained silence on this issue. There is therefore no guarantee whatsoever that right now, in some medical facility in the middle of Bohemia or Moravia, another Romani woman is not being subjected to this very same treatment at the hands of the medical professionals to whom she has entrusted her health.

It is tempting, when trying to place this disturbing information in context, to associate this behavior on the part of the Czech medical profession with the legacy of the Nazi era and the country’s communist past, but this would be an oversimplification. The fact is that state-sanctioned sterilizations of minorities (whether based on ethnicity or disability) are not unique to the Czech Republic. In the post-WW II era, complaints of such practices have been made in Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, India, Japan, Norway, Panama, Peru, Slovakia, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and 33 of the United States of America.

In other words, regardless of political regime, culture, or geographical location, the medical profession itself seems to have regularly become the willing instrument of what can only be considered eugenics of the crudest sort. In the context of the “fourth world,” such practices have had a profound impact on indigenous and minority communities worldwide.

International recognition of the global reach of these crimes, performed upon anaesthetized victims in the silence of the operating theater and leaving no easily discernible traces, has yet to be properly achieved. Coercive sterilization victims have rarely if ever been compensated, and the perpetrators of these crimes have been punished even less frequently. To date, only Norway and Sweden have instituted reparations programs for coercive sterilization victims.

The human rights community needs to review the facts of the last 60 years, recognize the worldwide scope of this ongoing practice, and hold medical practitioners and the states that oversee them accountable for these violations of human dignity.

———

Gwendolyn Albert, a US citizen, is a permanent resident of the Czech Republic, a member of the Czech Government Human Rights Council representing civil society, and Director of the Women’s Initiatives Network at the Peacework Development Fund.

http://www.peacework.org

See also:

RESISTING THE NEW EURO-MISSILES
Czech Dissidents Stand Up Again—This Time to the Pentagon!
by Gwendolyn Albert
WW4 REPORT, June 1, 2007
/node/3977

From our weblog:

China detains lawyers for peasant advocate
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 19, 2006
/node/2349

Mexico: “dirty war” files reveal “genocide plan”
WW4 REPORT, March 8, 2006
/node/1712

Speaking of Nuremberg laws…
WW4 REPORT, Aug. 3, 2005
/node/871#comment-1189

From our archive:

UNQUIET EARTH IN ABENAKI COUNTRY
by Bill Weinberg
reprinted from Native Americas, Spring/Summer 2002
/static/abenaki.html

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution

IRAN: THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST CASE AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER

by Reza Fiyouzat, Dissident Voice

Those in the Iranian socialist opposition arguing for a nuclear-free Iran have either been absent from the Western left’s discourse—or have been getting the short end of the stick from some in the US left. Trapped in a mentality as simplistic as that of George Bush, a good part of the US left has been repeating a similar logic, saying that either you can go along with the imperialists’ plans and support Bush or else find excuses to support the Iranian government’s pursuit of nuclear energy.

This in spite of the fact that the same American left-leaning activists and writers have a strong tradition of taking an anti-nuclear stance when it has come to the US society. May EP Thompson’s soul rest in eternal peace, but his spirit must be spinning in his grave.

The point of discussion here is not nuclear weapons, but the use of nuclear power for the peaceful purpose of producing energy.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a disaster to awaken people’s deadened responses. The US left has recently had the opportunity to be re-sensitized to the dangers of nuclear power as a result of the recent earthquake in Japan, which caused the shut-down of a nuclear power plant. We have consequently seen many insightful articles questioning the wisdom of pursuing the nuclear route for providing energy, most notably by Ralph Nader and Harvey Wasserman, to name only two.

The disaster that gave everybody a wake-up nudge was the earthquake that rocked the western coast of Honshu Island on July 16, causing the shut down of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, in the Niigata prefecture. More earthquakes as well as several aftershocks kept the area trembling well into the day and night. The resultant shutdown of the power plant has attracted the critical attention of many observers—exposing many problems worrying the government officials, energy-producing company officials, experts, pundits, and ordinary citizens alike.

Increasing numbers of reports have focused on both the attempted cover-ups by company officials in the immediate aftermath of the quake, as well as the understatements regarding the real and potential dangers of the radioactive leakage into the atmosphere and the surrounding water, and the its potential impacts.

The fact that Japan sits atop a very active earthquake zone has meant that over the centuries and especially over the last century, measures have been taken to design and implement high earthquake-proofing standards for buildings—and particularly for nuclear power plants, which provide for some 30 percent of Japan’s energy needs.

We know that it is customary for capital to wish to save costs. Since safety measures cost money, nuclear energy providers are likely to meet building requirements not maximally, but just barely adequately. To make things worse, even if and when standards are devised, enforced and followed, earthquakes have dynamics of their own and may not necessarily limit themselves to the scope wished for by human-made regulations. For example, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was built to withstand earthquakes of up to 6.5 magnitude. Unfortunately, the July 16 quake measured 6.8; hence, the problems that arose.

This particular quake scenario has not escalated to the worst-case scenario—but it very easily could have.

The same occurrence in Iran, however, almost definitely would have turned into a huge disaster. If an earthquake of such magnitude had erupted in the tectonically active south-southwestern coastal plains of Iran, with the Bushehr reactor having gone live, you can bet your house that cover-up and evasion would have been the only “aid” sent by the government to the people affected there; plus some troops to make sure, much like in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that things didn’t get too out of hand.

For one thing, how much can we really trust the seismological surveys carried out to determine how near or far major fault lines are from the Bushehr reactor? What about the safety regulations? What about the environmental-impact studies for the best-case scenario? Has any thinking gone into plans for a worst-case scenario? Or, are the gentlemen in Tehran too dependent on good luck and divine protection?

And what about evacuation procedures should the worst happen? Iran’s roads are not exactly extensive or kept in any decent order. We know from New Orleans’ experience with Katrina that even in a country with extensive highway systems, evacuating large populations can take very long and therefore be very hazardous or even murderous deal, even when advance preparations are possible. A nuclear accident, by contrast, is capable of precipitating extremely poisonous atmospheric conditions in less than an hour.

Iran stands atop many very active and large fault lines. Of the major earthquakes that do occur in Iran, a good many are stronger than magnitude 6 on the Richter scale (from which point on, major damages increase exponentially). Here are some facts about major earthquakes since 1972:

* Dec. 26, 2003: Bam, Southeastern Iran, magnitude 6.5; 26,000 killed.

* June 22, 2002: Qazvin province, Northwestern Iran, magnitude 6; at least 500 killed.

* May 10, 1997: Northern Iran near Afghanistan, magnitude 7.1; 1,500 dead.

* June 21, 1990: Northwest Iran around Tabas, magnitude 7.3-7.7; 50,000 killed.

* Sept. 16, 1978: Northeast Iran, magnitude 7.7; 25,000 killed.

* April 10, 1972: Southern Iran near Ghir Karzin, magnitude 7.1; 5,374 killed.

In each of these cases, thousands if not tens of thousands more suffered dislocation and complete loss of livelihood, which was never compensated for. Now, imagine the additional casualty and displaced figures if any of these quakes had been combined with the meltdown of a nuclear reactor!

It should be pointed out that the deaths occurring as a result of these quakes are far larger than they should have been, mostly because of lax building codes in Iran. While Japan has some of the world’s highest standards for earthquake proofing, we can easily state that no such standards exist at all in Iran. Additionally, the building codes that do exist are regularly ignored and violated by unscrupulous contractors, developers and even individual home-builders more inclined to bribe an official than bear the larger costs of building safely.

We would therefore be right to wonder aloud about the building codes implemented in the construction of Bushehr’s nuclear power plant. Likewise, we should be worried about the maximum quake strengths the plant is supposed to be able to withstand, and even more worried about safety and rescue procedures foreseen for a worst-case scenario.

Forget IAEA inspections! In Iran what we really need is a guaranteed right of citizens‚ groups consisting of independent scientists, activists, and citizens‚ direct representatives, to carry out inspections of nuclear facilities on demand. Transparency and open accountability is the most legitimate demand of any citizenry as regards governmental activities; when it comes to meddling with nuclear power, transparency in accountability becomes absolutely essential.

In Iran, however, there is no accountability for anything the government does. For example—and directly related to this topic—there is no accountability for the fact that in an oil-rich country, refined oil (for the everyday consumption of the people) is mostly imported! Refining oil is not exactly nuclear science (no puns intended, but take as many as you like). This is a century-old technology. Why is it that the Iranian government is not investing some of its vast sums of petro-euros and dollars on improving the oil-refining capabilities of the nation, thus reducing the need for importing (much more expensive) refined oil products? Would this not be safer, more logical, more efficient, and a more economical short-to-mid-term investment of the national resources?

In Iran, it would be impossible to even bring to justice any government official who plays with peoples’ lives and livelihoods. We do not have the most rudimentary legal structures in place guaranteeing the citizens’ right of oversight over anything the governmental does.

As any Iranian could tell you, there is only one branch of government in Iran, the Executive branch; the other two stems (the legislature and the judiciary) merely decorate that one branch so it doesn’t look too bare. As enshrined into a theocratic constitution, the legislature, is not even a rubber stamp; it can easily be overturned by the Supreme Leader, as it has been repeatedly. The same goes for the judiciary, which has historically been a mere enforcer of the Executive’s will rather than an adjudicator of the laws of the land.

This situation clearly does not allow for a realistic system for citizens to keep a vigilant eye on the government’s handling of nuclear power. Indeed, should any disasters occur (which is to say, when a disaster does occur), the government is virtually guaranteed to act in the least responsive manner possible and to shirk as much responsibility as needed, leaving the citizens to bear the costs of a nuclear disaster on their own.

It is therefore the duty of any democratically inclined person—and more so the duty of leftists, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists in the West—to stand on the side of the well-being of the Iranian people and unambiguously oppose any nuclear energy development in Iran carried out by an unaccountable government.

No doubt some “leftists” will argue that demands for a halt to all nuclear activities in Iran amount to aiding and abetting the imperialists, especially at this historical juncture. But such logic smells too much like the knee-jerk Zionists retort of “anti-Semitism” to anybody daring to criticize anything about Israel. In the end, all fanatics argue in the same way: You are either with me, or against me!

What those so-called leftists do not understand, or willfully ignore, is that imperialism feeds on oppressed, un-represented people. To the extent that the Iranian regime stifles its own people and their potentials, to the extent that Iranian people’s well-being is undermined by their government, they as a whole are more likely to be swallowed up by the plans and designs of the imperialists. Empowered people are the best defense against imperialist aggression.

Those who, like the Islamic regime in Iran, insist that pursuing nuclear power as an automatic right must also be prepared to bear the responsibility of fully accounting for any and all activities relating to the handling of nuclear materials, especially if nuclear facilities are built near dense population areas, and most definitely if those reactors are located on active tectonic plates, as is the case with the Bushehr reactor.

Lacking transparent accountability for the preparations that have occurred so far, as well as for the future full operations of Bushehr’s nuclear power plant, people have a legitimate right to demand a halt to all activities that could lead to the enormous health threats from radioactive poisoning, potentially lasting hundreds of years, causing mutations in the gene pools of all living organisms in the area, and destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

Nobody has an automatic right to take people down this kind of road! And definitely not a government that refuses to be accountable to any on this earth, least of all its own citizenry.

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Reza Fiyouzat is an Iranian writer and activist currently working abroad.

This story first appeared July 24 in Dissident Voice
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/07/no-nukes-for-iran/

RESOURCES:

Atomic Blowback: The New Face of Nuclear Power (Same as the Old)
by Ralph Nader, Counterpunch, July 21, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader07212007.html

Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed “No Nukes!”
by Harvey Wasserman, Counterpunch, July 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman07202007.html

From our weblog:

“Bad nuke” closes in North Korea; “good nuke” leaks radiation in Japan
WW4 REPORT, July 17, 2007
/node/4234

Oil prices rise as Iran nuclear deadline passes
WW4 REPORT, Feb 27, 2007
/node/3247

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2007
Reprinting permissible with attribution