Most political rallies here involve thugs and guns. But when the communists got together it was like a family party
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Tuesday December 21, 2004 The Guardian
Mass gatherings and political rallies in Iraq usually follow the same patterns, set up by the Big Leader and his Holy Mighty party decades ago. Be it Islamists or secularists, Sunnis or Shiites, thugs dressed in pyjamas or Iranian-equipped militias, all have read the same instruction booklets on how to run a political party and intimidate supporters. It all comes down to fulfilling a few basic rules:
First, you require at least one large portrait of the Big Leader - Saddam, Chalabi, Sadr, whoever - no less than 10ft high, suspended in a very prominent place. This should be staring down at the faithful for the duration of the rally.
Posters also showing the Big Leader, grinning and preferably doing something else at the same time, should cover all the walls. Shiny cloth banners with the same old Ba'athist propaganda written on them should be hung everywhere. Dozens of schoolboys, carrying bouquets of flowers and chanting about the people's love for the Big Leader, should dance on a stage. And finally - and this, I suspect, is a Middle East speciality - no political rally is considered complete without having lots of thuggish militia men brandishing their Kalashnikovs in the air.
Then there are a couple of other rules regulating the audience:
They should be predominantly men, with big bellies and thick moustaches and all should look as if they have a serious case of indigestion. Since women are an inferior sex and know nothing about things like politics and Kalashnikovs, they have no place at these rallies, but to lend an aura of modernity there should be a dozen or so scarved women sitting on one corner.
With the first general election in decades now only six weeks away, most of the parties are relying heavily on these regulations - and sometimes coming up with new tricks. Friday sermons in Shiite mosques are now almost exclusively dedicated to elections with posters covering every surface.
Last Friday, the Communist party, arguably the oldest party in Iraq and which at one point had more members in prison chambers and torture cells than living freely, held its election rally in Baghdad. The last time they had anything similar was in the late 50s. And nothing I have seen, either in the many years I have enjoyed living in a totalitarian country, or even during the past two years, could have prepared me for what I saw.
Hundreds of women, men and children, poured from all over Baghdad into a big indoor basketball court. All were waving little red flags, singing and chanting old communist slogans. But the funny thing was, they were happy. The whole atmosphere was entirely unlike any other rally, especially a march I had witnessed two days earlier to commemorate the father of Moqtada al-Sadr, at which thousands of men dressed in black happily whipped themselves with metal chains, while others bashed their skulls with large nasty swords, in front of dozens of chest-beating women shrouded in black from head to toe. Even the armed guards searching people in the entrance to the communist rally were smiling and asking politely: "Comrade, do you mind if I search you?"
In fact, they broke every one of the golden rules of Iraqi political rallies, not only by being merry and having a good time, but by actually allowing women - who made up almost half the audience - to participate.
The atmosphere felt more like a family gathering than a political rally. And in fact it was. Apart from a dozen or so young artists with wavy hair and long leather jackets and red scarves, everyone else was either an old communist in his 60s, or a direct family member.
The jolly atmosphere faded away only when an old communist poet read a poem he wrote in the 60s for a revolutionary who was killed after a failed uprising. Old men started to weep - some for the old comrade, others for the decades they had spent in the dungeons.
"I was 25 when I first heard this poem," a man in his 60s wearing an old Lenin cap told me. "We used to dream of changing the world. Maybe now we have a future."
As the rally ended and the commies started to leave, Sadr's people arrived to begin to set up for another day of commemoration of his father. Posters of the old cleric, with his thick beard and staring eyes, mushroomed all over the walls. At least some still stick to the the good old rally traditions.
-- Michael Pugliese