This weekend was another anniversary - Iraqi edition
Most of you probably aren’t aware that the 25th of February is the first anniversary of Iraq’s designated hashtag protest day. Protests of course had been going on there since 2003 but their most recent resurgence had started a couple of weeks before this, though they were completely ignored by almost all press and didn’t make most media roundups (I’m looking at you BBC/Guardian.) They were already taking place in Baghdad and Karbala a couple of weeks before that and in the 16th of February in Kut thousands managed to take over a government building to protest a total lack of services. On the 25th thousands showed up in Basra as well despite intense inimidation and pressure not to, while several mayors and local governors resigned. In Suleimaniya in the north thousands of protesters occupied the city’s main square for a solid two months before they were forcibly removed in late April with dozens being killed along the way. This actually isn’t something new, there has been widespread resentment in the Kurdish region about corruption and vast wealth inequalities; in 2006 at a Halabja memorial Kurds rioted because they were sick of being ignored by their leaders except for one day a year. Since then Kut has unfortunately become known for being victims of one of the worst terrorist attacks of the year while northern Iraq has been subject to bombings from Turkey, so these stories faded to the background, or they would have if any attention was paid there at all.
Smaller scale protests continued on in Baghdad and in September Hadi al-Mahdi, a radio journalist and activist was murdered. He’d given up his radio show two months ago out of what he said were serious threats. He was only the 7th journalist to be killed in the country that year and his experience of harrassment and intimidation going back to February wasn’t all that unique among either journalists covering the protests or for your average activists and dissenters as well (if you slept on the above linked articles btw now’s as good a time as any to read them.)
Anyways, last year between police violence, Turkish bombings, terrorism and assassinations, in a country where there supposedly is nothing worth talking about happening, 4000 Iraqis died violent deaths. I know all this has been lost with everything else that happened this past year but somehow I’m still seeing post after post by some activists about how not much is going on here or why Syria or Libya will not be Iraq and the upshot of what they’re saying is often that they are not an inert and passive or inherently bigoted people. Sometimes Iraqis are forgotten and sometimes they’re not, but sometimes being remembered isn’t all it’s cracked upto be.
