NK: They’re using feminism and women’s issues to advance the occupation in a really dangerous way, because they are sullying the reputation of women’s issues, which could be seized upon by anti-women forces in Iraq. It is easy then to say, ‘if you are advocating women’s rights, you’re for the occupation’.
You could hear how people talked about Moqtada Sadr when I arrived. Support for him at that time was 7 or 8 per cent. But the more he was attacked, the more support grew for him, for a religious state. Combine decreasing support for secularism with the Americans marketing feminism: it’s not only a disastrous recipe for women: it’s a disastrous strategy against women.
HZ: Yes, they come with millions of dollars, while Iraqi women struggle for the most basic services and goods.
I don’t care about programmes for democracy because democracy is coming back like a joke. If you want to say a bad word about someone, you say they’re democratic. What Bush and Blair have achieved in the occupation is they’ve killed democracy.
... NK: The anti-war movement has been extremely remiss in not supporting and defending democratic resistance in Iraq. We’ve not been there supporting their demands and expressing outrage. We could have made a difference if we’d echoed calls for direct elections in January. Now it’s a total obscenity to support elections that are being bombed into being. But in January there were 100,000 people on the streets of Baghdad calling for elections, and where were we?
Attacks on journalists are ongoing. Western journalists should be screaming blue murder at the treatment of Al-Jazeera.
HZ: And at themselves! They were embedded in Falluja, so they could not report.
NK: There should be a ban on embedding. If you look at the kidnapping of journalists, whenever someone is kidnapped and released they tell the same story: ‘They thought I was a spy. They checked, found I wasn’t and I was released.’
But it’s not just journalists who’ve been embedded: it’s those working for the NGOs. Society is being destroyed by the embedded journalist and the NGOs. What’s the difference between a spy and an embedded journalist? It’s certainly confusing if you’re a Western journalist and are dressed like a soldier… Destroying the lines between combatants and journalists and aid workers has embedded what is called ‘civil society’ into part of the war machine.
If it’s a serious anti-war movement it has to fight wars as they are being fought, and we have to move from slogans to demands. In November the Paris club [of creditor nations] signed a deal locking Iraq into a structural adjustment programme until 2008. A country under siege can’t fight that. First, it’s not happening in Iraq; it’s happening in Europe. Second, the point of doing this in a war is that you can’t fight it. This is a straightforward opportunity for clear international solidarity in line with the principles of defending the rights to national self-determination. Our responsibility is to save space for Iraqis to decide for themselves, which can’t happen if they inherit a $200 billion debt, with no reparations and all reconstruction money already spent.
There needs to be a programme, developed inside and outside Iraq. We need to deepen our discussion of what democracy means because they have taken this word ‘democracy’ and, as Haifa says, made it into a dirty word. Arundhati Roy talked of [the US] bombing Afghanistan with butter. Here they are bombing [the country] with ballots: literally, the election as a weapon of war.