Dave Stockton, Redflagonline October 24, 2019<\/i><\/p>\n
Iraq is once again the scene of massive protests. In the capital and in southern cities thousands-strong demonstrations have been dispersed with tear gas, and police snipers using live ammunition. A huge rally in Sadr City in Baghdad \u2013 a district with 3.5 million people, was savagely broken up. UN officials in the city have condemned \u201ca senseless loss of life\u201d. Reuters reports that 110 people have been killed and 6,000 wounded. The government has restricted access to Facebook and WhatsApp in a vain attempt to stop the mobilisations.<\/p>\n
The issues which initially triggered the upheaval are mass unemployment and the absence of the most basic public services: this in in the seventeenth year since US and British forces overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein. Appalling as the dictator\u2019s totalitarian regime was, the \u201cfreedom\u201d the Western allies brought with their tanks and \u201cshock and awe bombing\u201d has meant social collapse, endless war and extra-judicial killings.<\/p>\n
Events show that the victory over ISIS, loudly trumpeted by the United Sates two years ago, has done little or nothing to improve life for the country\u2019s citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been 16 years of corruption and injustice,\u201d the Guardian reports Abbas Najm, a 43-year-old unemployed engineer, on one demonstration as saying. Demonstrators deny any links to parties or militia groups that they see as part of the country\u2019s many problems. Indeed, in the southern city of Nasiriyah, protesters torched the offices of six political parties that had tried to take advantage of the situation. Reports suggest the intervention by the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is not welcomed. A demonstrator is quoted as saying; \u201cThese men don\u2019t represent us. We don\u2019t want parties anymore. We don\u2019t want anyone to speak in our name.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iraq, the fifth largest oil producer in the world, suffers from the rampant corruption of the government and administration while its 40 million people exist in terrible conditions \u2013 22 per cent is absolute poverty and deprivation according to UN figures. 25 per cent of young people are unemployed according to the World Bank.<\/p>\n
This, quite as much as the use of live ammunition on crowds, has turned the movement into one demanding the downfall of the government of Prime Minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi. Iraqi governments since 2003 have been coalitions where rival parties cooperate to loot the states resources. In many respects this movement recalls the early days of the Arab Spring, which Iraq largely \u201cescaped\u201d due to ongoing warfare.<\/p>\n
In response, the government has desperately promised two packages of social reforms but once the masses are determined to get rid of the corrupt gang of politicians clerics and generals such feeble remedies are unlikely to quiet things for long.<\/p>\n
Events in Iraq, alongside ongoing protests across Egypt against the brutal dictatorship of general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, show that time and again, the millions of young people in the region, whose Spring was blighted by the chilling frost of counter-revolution in country after country, are driven by deep socio-economic pressures and a yearning for freedom to revolt.<\/p>\n
The real question is can they find the strategies and the leadership to make a revolution that puts power into their hands, creates a working class democracy and makes counter-revolution, by the generals, capitalists and imperialism, impossible.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave Stockton, Redflagonline October 24, 2019 Iraq is once again the scene of massive protests. In the capital and in southern cities thousands-strong demonstrations have been dispersed with tear gas, and police snipers using live ammunition. A huge rally in Sadr City in Baghdad \u2013 a district with 3.5 million people, was savagely broken up. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,1],"tags":[183,104],"class_list":["post-5120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-uncategorized","tag-arab-spring","tag-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7113,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5120\/revisions\/7113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}