Journalist and author Patrick Cockburn of the Independent newspaper appeared at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University last night to talk about his new book Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq - published by Faber - at a gathering in the Khalili lecture theatre organised by the Council for Arab British Understanding (CAABU).Cockburn spent around a quarter of an hour at the rostrum outlining his book and the reasons for writing it and then took part in an interview/discussion session with Dr Nadje Al-Ali, lecturer at SOAS's new interdiscliplinary Centre for Gender Studies. The talk was interesting and enriched by the observations of a journalist who has been reporting on Iraq since 1977 and who is one of the few reporters in the five years since the invasion to regularly report far from the relative safety of the Green Zone.
During the ensuing Q & A session, there were some surprising (to put it mildly) contributions from certain Iraq men of a certain age. Of course, as Dr Nadje Al-Ali pointed out in her conversation with Cockburn, and as she stresses in her book on Iraqi women, "history is open to contestation." But these particular Iraqi individuals were needlessly rude when commenting and asking questions. One of the things mentioned by Cockburn was the epidemic of honour killings in Kurdistan. He had been to one women's refuge in Sulaimaniya where a woman had been badly wounded and it was "chilling because it wasn't just someone going crazy with a machine gun. Somebody had found an empty house by this women's shelter, they'd climbed onto the roof, they had waited for a particular woman who appeared briefly at a window, and then shot her." One can produce reasons "why the position of women has deteriorated in in Basra, Baghdad and the rest - and then one also has to explain why it's happened in Kurdistan as well."
One man in the audience said: "This is because of the poverty, under the regime of Barzani and Talebani in the Kurdish area, to the extent that most women have resorted to prostitution to make a living...I am a Kurd...there are two streets in Sulaimaniya for prostitutes, one for Kurdish prostitutes and one for Arab prostitutes, the poor Arabs who have moved from the north to Sulaimaniya." When Dr Nadje Al-Ali, who is a leading expert on Iraqi women and author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present intervened to comment "Can I just say that the majority of Kurdish women are not prostitutes, although it has increased of course", the man who had made the comment denied he had said "majority".
This man and some others Iraqis in the audience claimed it was not Saddam's regime that had killed Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, and two of Muqtada's brothers in 1999, but members of the rival Al-Hakim or Al-Khoei families. Cockburn replied that the evidence, and his conversations with many people, convinced him it was Saddam who had done it. Another questioner accused Cokburn of issuing "three fatwas" in his talk: the first "fatwa" was that Shias make up 60 per cent of the population of Iraq. Cockburn replied that 60 per cent is the figure that is usually given, and was the figure that seemed to appear from the votes in the elections in 2005.
This man and some others Iraqis in the audience claimed it was not Saddam's regime that had killed Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, and two of Muqtada's brothers in 1999, but members of the rival Al-Hakim or Al-Khoei families. Cockburn replied that the evidence, and his conversations with many people, convinced him it was Saddam who had done it. Another questioner accused Cokburn of issuing "three fatwas" in his talk: the first "fatwa" was that Shias make up 60 per cent of the population of Iraq. Cockburn replied that 60 per cent is the figure that is usually given, and was the figure that seemed to appear from the votes in the elections in 2005.
A man originally from Basra told Cockburn "you have distorted all the history of Iraq" and that "it was not a Shia 'intifada', it was an insurrection instigated by the Americans." He denied that the Iran-Iraq war had started when Iraq invaded Iran, and added that the reason Saddam's regime drained the southern marshes was that under sanctions "Iraq needed the land to feed the people, they do it here in Norfolk, they did it in northern Holland, so why was it wrong for the Iraqis to do it?" Cockburn replied that Saddam had drained the marshes "becuase it drove the marsh Arabs out".
