altmuslim - Punishing the innocent in Iraq

"Ciao Naeem, Difficult days. My friend Simona was taken by the war. I was with her in Kosovo, I was with her in Iraq. I can't sleep anymore. Now the war has invaded my personal life. My stories and memories. I can't understand..Simona is really loved by all the people, she has worked in Iraq since 1990. Who did it?"

The words were in a letter from my friend Maddalena Spada. An Italian NGO worker who has worked all over the world, she is presently working with migrants in Morocco. The last time I saw her was when she marched with half a million people at March 2003 anti-war rally in New York. With so many people on the streets, everyone felt exuberant. We played music on the streets and Maddalena and her friends danced while holding peace signs. All across the crowd were rainbow flags with "Pace" (Peace), an Italian innovation Maddalena had first introduced me to in Florence. "You Italians come up with all the good signs," I told her, smiling. Everyone was confident, we would stop the war with our protests.

A few days later, Maddalena made her presentations to the UN for her New York project, and then she was off to Morocco. She hasn't been back in New York since then. Although our e-mails shared personal stories, and commiserated over the futility of the Iraq war, we always tried to cheer each other up. But our optimistic spirit was evaporating. The war was still going on, Iraqis were dying, the GI death toll had crossed 1,000 and hostages were now the rule of the day. Matt Taibi recently wrote in Alternet, "Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest or the next election." The evidence supports Taibi-- we still come out and protest, but the war machine seems totally unfazed by our actions.

In the middle of this blue funk, came the news that Iraqi insurgents had kidnapped Maddalena's friends. A day after her e-mail, her husband Paolo sent us a formal appeal. He filled in the blanks about Simona Torretta and Simona Pari-- details I vaguely remembered from Maddalena's stories in New York. The two Simonas work for an Italian NGO "A Bridge to Baghdad" (http://www.unponteper.it), that has helped the Iraqi people since the first Gulf War. Ironically, while the sanctions were strangling Iraq, the Italian NGO was one of the few that defied the US and worked in Baghdad. Simona Torretta was in Baghdad since 1994, working with schools, hospitals and universities. All this went on while the embargo was in full force and the world media was busy elsewhere. In 1999, Maddalena also joined them for a project fostering collaboration between Italians and Iraqi elementary schools. One day, while visiting a school, an Iraqi teacher told Maddalena: "[Simona] was here with us also under the bombs. We will never forget that." One of the Italians' most painful memories of that time was working in the hospitals, watching doctors with no medicine, trying to save dying patients. On New Year's eve 2000, Simona and Maddalena organized a demonstration with banners that said "Stop the Embargo."

Maddalena eventually left Iraq to continue her work in Sierra Leone. After a brief period working in New York, she started a new project in Morocco. Meanwhile the two Simonas stayed on in Iraq. Although most aid workers have evacuated the country, they felt safe because the local Iraqis all knew and liked them. Their abrupt kidnapping by mask-wearing militants shocked the local community. Paolo raised the questions that were on many minds: "Why did the Islamic guerrillas kidnap three women? Why did the kidnappers not have AK47 (kalashnikov) but electrified sticks and guns with "silenziatore" (silencers)? Why did they enter the building with a list of names of the people to kidnap? Why are there no demands from the kidnappers?"

As Iraq spirals further into madness, the lunatics are taking over the asylum. Italy was the scene of some of the strongest anti-war demonstrations. After London, the largest anti-war protests were in Rome, dwarfing even New York's protests. The Italians' reward has been to be kidnapped while carrying out humanitarian work. Two months ago, another group of militants kidnapped Indian truck drivers. By taking poor migrants hostage, and using them to punish the US occupation, the insurgents showed their brutal streak of inhumanity. During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists saw the Vietcong as a people's liberation army because they stood up to the US army. But in the present crisis, there are no good sides, reflective of our tangled global politics. True to many warnings, the US occupation has turned into a bloody mess and a recruiting ground for fanatics and terrorists. But in opposing the occupation, we cannot find anything to support among the insurgents. Especially for those of us from Muslim-majority nations, Muqtada Al Sadr or Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi are no heroic guerilla figures.

Sadly, the Italian hostages are even less safe than the Indian truck drivers. Their European background makes it more likely that fanatics will see them as members of the "evil empire." Activists everywhere, especially from Muslim nations, must speak up now against the ongoing cycle of kidnapping. There are many ways to oppose Empire, but this cannot be one of them.