BBC News reports: The tribes of the mainly Sunni western Iraqi province of Anbar are furious at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and have picked an unusual spot to showcase their anger.

Along a stretch of the Iraqi international highway leading to Syria and Jordan, a tent city has sprung up, each tent bearing the banners of tribes and delegations from different cities.

The tent city, near the provincial capital of Ramadi, is the focal point of a wider protest movement which started after the army raided the office of a senior Sunni politician from the province, and arrested some of his bodyguards.

This comes more than a year after former Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, another prominent Sunni leader, was charged with involvement in terrorism. He has since been handed three death sentences in absentia.

For the protesters, it all points to a campaign of revenge against the Sunnis of Iraq by a prime minister who they say is loyal to mainly Shia Iran.

They say the prime minister has unleashed a pliable judiciary on his political opponents in order to tame the opposition.

“We warn the sectarian government against dragging the country into sectarian war,” says the banner on the Fallujah Youth Council tent.

“Al-Boudiab tribe demands that the Maliki government release the Sunni men and women of Iraq from the government’s Persian jails,” reads the banner on another.

The most emotive issue is that of women prisoners the protesters say have been arrested instead of husbands or sons who are wanted on charges of terrorism.

“It’s now a question of honour,” said Sheikh Ali Hatem Suleiman, one of the most powerful tribal sheikhs in Anbar, to loud applause from the protesters.

“Not politics, not the constitution, not even the United Nations can resolve it. We want the women released here in the square.” [Continue reading…]

(Update below)

The New York Times reports: The vice president of Iraq, a prominent Sunni Muslim, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death on Sunday in a trial conducted in absentia. The verdict coincided with a wave of bombings and insurgent attacks that claimed at least 100 lives, making Sunday one of the bloodiest days in Iraq since American troops withdrew last year.

Together, the verdict and the violence threatened to deepen an already intractable political crisis among the country’s ruling factions.

Sunni leaders who support the vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, responded angrily to the court’s action, accusing the Shiite-led government of trying to sideline them from a power-sharing arrangement meant to guard against the sectarian violence that continues to plague the country.

Attacks were reported in at least 10 Iraqi cities on Sunday, including Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, where two markets, a restaurant and a crowded square were struck, capped by a car bomb that exploded late in the evening in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold in the capital. The attacks underscored the increasing potency of insurgent groups in Iraq, which appear to have blossomed amid the political paralysis that followed the American departure. Their attacks have tended to come in coordinated waves across the country, including the attacks by Sunni extremists on July 23 that killed more than 100 people and appeared to reflect a spillover of sectarian strife from neighboring Syria, and the car and roadside bombings of Aug. 16 that killed about 100, including dozens at an amusement park in eastern Baghdad.

Earlier this summer, the country seemed to be moving toward a sense of normalcy, with an easing of checkpoints in the capital, new buses going into service and women returning to local cinemas. But the mounting insurgent violence has prompted the government to reimpose security measures and has revived a sense of siege in some cities. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports today: The vice president of Iraq, a prominent Sunni Muslim who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a trial conducted in absentia, denounced the verdict on Monday as “false and unjust,” depicting the court’s finding as “an acquittal, confirming my innocence.”
[…]
Sunni leaders who support the vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, responded angrily to the court’s action, accusing the Shiite-led government of trying to sideline them from a power-sharing arrangement meant to guard against the sectarian violence that continues to plague the country.

Speaking in Arabic in a televised news conference in Turkey, where he is in self-exile, Mr. Hashimi declared: “For me, this verdict is an acquittal, confirming my innocence.”

“All the accusations set against me are false and unjust,” he said, referring to the verdict as politically-inspired and saying that he was prepared to be tried by “a just court, but never at a court, which is under the influence of” Prime Minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Mr. Hashimi urged his followers to remain calm and eschew armed struggle against their adversaries. He described himself as “a symbol of all oppressed, when hundreds of thousands of people remain in prisons.”

Haifa Zangana writes: Three women were among the 21 people executed within one day in Iraq, last Monday. It was followed, two days later, by the reported execution of five more people. The number of people executed since the start of this year is now at least 96 and they are not the only ones. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, said: “I am appalled about the level of executions in Iraq. I deeply deplore the executions carried out this week, and am particularly alarmed about continuing reports of individuals who remain at risk of execution.”

There is also news of another 196 people on death row. According to Iraqi officials, they have all been convicted on charges “related to terrorism,” but there is little information about their names, what crimes they committed or whether they have access to lawyers or not. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have previously documented the prevalence of unfair trials and torture in detention in Iraq. Confessions under torture are often the only evidence against a person who has been arrested following a secret informant’s report. Parading the accused with their tortured, empty looks on Al Iraqiya, the official TV channel, is the norm. It took a court in Baghdad only 15 minutes to sentence Ramze Shihab Ahmed, a dual Iraqi-UK national, to 15 years’ imprisonment after being found guilty of “funding terrorist groups”.

Amnesty has obtained and examined court documents and said it believes the trial proceedings were “grossly unfair”. Ahmed was held in a secret prison near Baghdad, during which time his whereabouts were completely unknown to his family. During this period Ahmed alleges he was tortured – with electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bags – into making a false “confession” to terrorist offences.

So what kind of human rights are observed in the “new Iraq”? Hardly any. The list of abuses is long and the tip of the iceberg is waves of arbitrary arrests (over 1,000 monthly), torture and executions. All are barely noticed by the world media and the US and British official silence is rather convenient to cover up the crimes and chaos they created. From time to time, they break their silence but only to justify their act of aggression. Recently, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu pulled out of a seminar in protest over the presence of Tony Blair, a statement was issued by Blair’s office to justify the morality of his decision to support the United States’ military invasion of Iraq.

The statement reiterated the plight of Iraqis under Saddam’s regime with no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the war and endemic abuses of human rights since 2003. [Continue reading…]

Part Two:

Part One:

AFP reports: A wave of violence swept across Iraq, with 111 killed on the country’s deadliest day in two-and-a-half years, after al-Qaeda warned it would seek to retake territory and mount new attacks.

Officials said at least 235 people were also wounded in 28 different attacks launched yesterday in 19 cities, shattering the relative calm that had held in the lead-up to the start of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

The violence drew condemnation from the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, the country’s parliament speaker and neighbouring Iran, while Washington slammed the attacks as “cowardly”.

In the deadliest incident – a string of roadside bombs and a car bomb followed by a suicide attack targeting emergency responders in the town of Taji – at least 42 people were killed and 40 wounded, medical officials said.

“I heard explosions in the distance so I left my house and I saw a car outside,” said 40-year-old Taji resident Abu Mohammed, who added that police inspectors concluded the vehicle was a car bomb.

“We asked the neighbours to leave their houses, but when they were leaving, the bomb went off.”

Abu Mohammed said he witnessed the deaths of an elderly woman carrying a newborn baby and of the policeman who had first concluded the car was packed with explosives.

A row of houses was completely destroyed and residents were rummaging through the rubble in search of victims and their belongings.

In Baghdad a car bomb outside a government office responsible for producing identity papers in the Shi’ite bastion of Sadr City killed at least 12 people and wounded 33 others, security and medical officials said.

The New York Times reports: One has a designated prayer room. Another frisks patrons at the entrance, requiring them to check their pistols, like coats in a fancy restaurant. They are good places to escape the desert heat, and in a conservative Islamic culture, they are one of the few places where young couples openly flirt or women smoke cigarettes in public.

American-style malls, fixtures in most of Iraq’s wealthy Persian Gulf neighbors, have come late to war-torn Baghdad, but Iraqis are taking to them now like Valley Girls, as a consumer society fueled by the country’s booming oil profits begins to flourish here.

Big malls are being built across the capital. The largest will include a five-star hotel and a hospital, and at one already in operation, a truck arrives each week carrying frozen Big Macs from a McDonald’s in Amman, Jordan.

The construction boom is generally hailed as proof of Iraq’s progress and return to normalcy, more than nine years after the American invasion and six months after the last combat troops departed. But economists and other experts see a dark side. They say the emerging consumer culture masks fundamental flaws in an economy that, like those of other energy-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stifles productive enterprise by relying almost solely on oil profits and the millions of government salaries those profits finance as part of the country’s vast patronage system.

“Basically, Iraq is trying to build a consumer society, not on state capitalism like in China, but on socialism,” said Marie-Hélène Bricknell, the World Bank’s representative in Iraq.

One of Washington’s principal aims was to develop a free-market economy here. Yet with so much oil wealth at hand, Iraq’s leaders have taken few steps to develop a private sector. More than 90 percent of Iraq’s government revenues derive from oil, and with oil production rapidly expanding, the country’s annual revenues could triple over the next five years, to more than $300 billion. With that kind of wealth rolling in, one of the greatest questions the country faces is what it will do with all that cash.

Given the statist mentality of most top Iraqi officials and widespread corruption, diplomats are generally pessimistic that the expected boom in government revenues will be used either to help develop a private sector or to pay for an ambitious public works program — something the country, where 40 percent of the population still lacks access to safe drinking water, desperately needs. Instead, experts worry it will finance more of what Iraq already has: corruption and a huge government work force.

Most of the major industries remain in the hands of the state, and the greatest ambition of many Iraqis is to secure a government job. According to statistics from the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, almost a third of the labor force works for the government. That is more than five million people, and the number is rising, as political parties that run government ministries use paychecks to expand their constituencies. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Online reports: Influential Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said on Wednesday that his parliamentary bloc would back a motion of no confidence in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki if that gave it the support of a majority of MPs.

In the latest twist in a political crisis that has dogged Iraq ever since US troops completed a pullout in December, Sadr denied that he opposed moves by MPs of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya faction to bring down the Shiite premier.

“This is not true,” Sadr said in a written answer to a question from one of his followers.

“I promised my partners that if they got 124 votes, I will complete the 164 votes,” he added, referring to the 40 MPs who belong to his parliamentary bloc.

Under the Iraqi constitution, a no confidence motion can be put before parliament either by the president or by 50 MPs. To pass, it must be approved by an absolute majority in the 325-seat parliament.

The Associated Press reports: Iraq’s lawmakers have hightailed it out of town for a six-week vacation without following through on promises to cancel a pricey perk for free armored cars that they approved for themselves in the annual budget.

It is the sort of move that is fueling resentments among the struggling Iraqi public, many of whom accuse the country’s leaders of being corrupt and only in politics for their own profit. For months, parliament has failed to rework the $100 billion budget that came under widespread criticism or pass a list of laws to tackle the country’s numerous problems.

“They have not discussed ways of how to improve the lives of people like me,” said Ammar Hassan, a college graduate from Karbala who drives a taxi to support himself. “They only think about themselves instead of paying attention to people’s welfare.”

The 39-year-old Hassan said he earns an average of about $200 each month — a fraction of the monthly $22,500 salary afforded to each of the 325 lawmakers in parliament. [Note: Members of the U.S. Congress pay themselves $14,500 a month.]

“I’m afraid the day will come when lawmakers pass a law imposing taxes on ordinary people’ salaries and incomes to cover their own living costs,” he said bitterly.

Iraq’s government has been rife with corruption going back to the regime of former dictator Saddam Hussein, who hoarded the nation’s oil riches for himself and his cronies amid an impoverished public. Hopes that conditions would dramatically improve as Iraq tried to build a post-Saddam democracy proved overly optimistic, however. A quarter of Iraq’s population of 31 million people live in poverty, and an estimated 15 percent are unemployed, according to U.S. data compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Raw sewage runs through the streets in many neighborhoods, polluting tap water, sickening residents and adding to an overall sense of misery. Many Iraqis only have 12 hours of electricity each day. (H/t John Robertson)

The Washington Post reports: The Iraqi government is debating proposed laws that would impose strict controls on freedom of speech and association, prompting fears that the authorities are playing a growing and increasingly oppressive role in citizens’ lives.

As the country settles into its new identity as a sovereign state, about four months after the departure of the last American troops, some Iraqis are nervous that the government is moving back toward the heavy-handed monitoring of citizens that was a hallmark of life under dictator Saddam Hussein.

In parliament, there has been fierce debate of several draft laws. One would carry harsh penalties for online criticism of the government. Another would require demonstrators to get permission for any gathering.

Local and international human rights groups say the proposed legislation is vague and would give the government power to move against people or parties critical of the government.

“In Iraq, we need to respect all the ideas,” said an activist and blogger known as Hayder Hamzoz who is campaigning against a proposed information technology law that would mandate a year’s imprisonment for anyone who violates “religious, moral, family, or social values” online.

The proposed law also contains a sentence of life imprisonment for using computers or social networks to compromise “the independence of the state or its unity, integrity, safety.”

Hamzoz, who does not use his real name out of concern for his safety, said the legislation is intended to allow the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to control social media. The government essentially did just that more than a year ago, when it swiftly smothered an uprising inspired by the Arab Spring revolts sweeping the region.

The Associated Press reports: A torrent of bombings and shootings ripped across eight Iraqi cities on Tuesday, targeting police and Shiite pilgrims and killing 46 people. The deadly wave undermined the government’s hopes for stability ahead of next week’s meeting of the Arab world’s top leaders.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks, which also wounded more than 200 people. But authorities have feared al-Qaida or its Sunni sympathizers would try to thwart this year’s Arab League summit.

The gathering is to be held in Iraq for the first time in a generation. Plans for Baghdad to host the meeting last year were postponed, in part because of concerns about Iraq’s security.

In all, eight cities were hit Tuesday in what appeared to be coordinated attacks against police and government officials. One of the deadliest strikes came in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where officials said two car bombs exploded in a crowded shopping and restaurant area.

Scott Long writes: Hassan – it’s not his real name – had a heavy metal band with two other twentysomethings. The raucous music represented rebellion, and in Iraq there was plenty to rebel against: occupation, poverty, patriarchal families – ample impetus to anger. The band made an album, but nobody would touch it; their songs and their look, people said, were satanic. Hassan uploaded a video to YouTube, and included the band members’ names. Five days ago, the other two musicians were killed on the street. Hassan is in hiding; he’s almost too terrified to speak. “Why are they doing this to us?” he asked me. “Why?”

A new killing campaign is convulsing Iraq. The express targets are “emos”, short for “emotional”: a western-derived identity, teenagers adopting a pose of vulnerability, along with tight clothes and skewed hairdos and body piercing. Starting last year, mosques and the media both began raising the alarm about youthful immorality, calling the emos deviants and devil worshippers. In early February, somebody began killing people. The net was wide, definitions inexact. Men who seemed effeminate, girls with tattoos or peculiar jewellery, boys with long hair, could all be swept up. The killers like to smash their victims’ heads with concrete blocks.

There is no way to tell how many have died: estimates range from a few dozen to more than 100. Nor is it clear who is responsible. Many of the killings happened in east Baghdad, stronghold of Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous). Neither, though, has claimed responsibility. Iraq’s brutal interior ministry issued two statements in February. The first announced official approval to “eliminate” the “satanists”. The second, on 29 February, proclaimed a “campaign” to start with a crackdown on stores selling emo fashion. The loaded language suggests, at a minimum, that the ministry incited violence. It’s highly possible that some police, in a force riddled with militia members, participated in the murders.

It’s logical to compare this to the militia campaign against homosexual conduct in 2009, which I documented for Human Rights Watch. Hundreds of men lost their lives then. Gay-identified men have been caught up in these killings as well, and Baghdad’s LGBT community is rife with fear. Yet there are differences. The current killings target women as well as men, and children are the preferred victims. It’s not quite true to say, as some press reports have suggested, that “emo” is just a synonym for “gay” in Iraq. Rather, immorality, western influence, decadence and blasphemy have come together in a loosely defined, poorly aligned complex of associations: and emo fashion and “sexual perversion” are part of the mix. Nobody cares much about disentangling the concepts, least of all the killers. All that matters is that all those things are bad.

Iraqi authorities should halt all executions and abolish the death penalty, Human Rights Watch said today. Since the beginning of 2012, Iraq has executed at least 65 prisoners, 51 of them in January, and 14 more on February 8, for various offenses.

“The Iraqi government seems to have given state executioners the green light to execute at will,”said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government needs to declare an immediate moratorium on all executions and begin an overhaul of its flawed criminal justice system.”

Human Rights Watch is particularly concerned that Iraqi courts admit as evidence confessions obtained under coercion. The government should disclose the identities, locations, and status of all prisoners on death row, the crimes for which they have been convicted, court records for their being charged, tried, and sentenced, and details of any impending executions, Human Rights Watch said.

A Justice Ministry official confirmed to Human Rights Watch on February 8 that authorities had executed 14 prisoners earlier in the day. “You should expect more executions in the coming days and weeks,” the official added.

According to the United Nations, more than 1,200 people are believed to have been sentenced to death in Iraq since 2004. The number of prisoners executed during that period has not been revealed publicly. Iraqi law authorizes the death penalty for close to 50 crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and murder, but also including such offenses as damage to public property.

Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because of its inhumane nature and its finality. International human rights law requires that, where it has not been abolished, the death penalty be imposed only in cases for the most serious crimes in which the judicial system has scrupulously complied with fair trial standards, including the rights of the defendant to competent defense counsel, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and not to be compelled to confess guilt.

Criminal trials in Iraq often violate these minimum guarantees, Human Rights Watch said. Many defendants are unable to pursue a meaningful defense or to challenge evidence against them, and lengthy pretrial detention without judicial review is common.

The New York Times reports: A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering plans to field unarmed surveillance drones in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

The drones are the latest example of the State Department’s efforts to take over functions in Iraq that the military used to perform. Some 5,000 private security contractors now protect the embassy’s 11,000-person staff, for example, and typically drive around in heavily armored military vehicles.

When embassy personnel move throughout the country, small helicopters buzz over the convoys to provide support in case of an attack. Often, two contractors armed with machine guns are tethered to the outside of the helicopters. The State Department began operating some drones in Iraq last year on a trial basis, and stepped up their use after the last American troops left Iraq in December, taking the military drones with them.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: Seif Abdel Sadeh’s eyes lolled as his brother tipped a cup of orange juice to his swollen lips. As he lifted his arm to push his brother’s hand away, he grimaced, agitating the charred skin on his face, causing still more pain. The day before, Seif, 18, was walking to his Sadr City high school when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle exploded. It shattered his left leg and sent so much shrapnel into his right leg that it had to be removed. The bomb that hit Seif that morning, and another that went off minutes later, killed a dozen Iraqis, mostly day laborers waiting to pick up work at a busy intersection on the road that connects Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad, to the downtown expressway.

Seif’s family huddled around his hospital bed. “We lived in fear of this happening to one of our kids,” Seif’s father, Abdel Sadeh, said, fingering a set of worry beads. His eyes welled up. “Who benefits from attacking innocent people?” He saw the blasts as bad omens: “These attacks are proof that the political parties are going to start tearing this country apart now.”

By some statistical measures, Iraq today is safer and more stable than it has been in nearly a decade. In 2011, fewer than 1,500 Iraqi civilians were killed by bombs, sniper ambushes, and other “enemy attacks,” according to the Brookings Institute Iraq index, the lowest figure since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Business owners say they’re freer than ever to travel, borrow from international creditors, and transfer money abroad. A visitor to Baghdad can take heart in the signs of postwar normalcy: the shouts of young men watching soccer in the cafés, the laughter of children tromping off to school.

Iraq, however, is far from stable. The wave of violence that has rocked the country since the last U.S. troops rolled back across the border into Kuwait on Dec. 18 began with a dozen coordinated attacks in Baghdad on Dec. 22 that killed upwards of 60 people; then there were the Jan. 5 bombings in Kadhimiya and Sadr City and another attack on a bus full of Shiite pilgrims the same day, near the holy city of Karbala. All 30 passengers died. Fifty-three more pilgrims were killed near Basra on Jan. 14, and 10 died in attacks on a police station in Ramadi the next day. Add the victims of drive-by shootings and bombings at military and police checkpoints from Fallujah to Mosul, and the total number of dead in the month since the withdrawal tops 250.

The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of tyranny, terrorism, and foreign occupation will transform itself into a modern and open economy in the heart of the Arab world. That vision recedes a bit more every day as sectarian tensions reemerge, corruption hinders development, and the country’s political leadership moves against its opponents and flirts with autocracy. Iraqis are reluctant to ask aloud if the most recent attacks represent the deadly half-life of war, or, as Abdel Sadeh and many others I spoke to during four weeks in December and January say they fear, another meltdown.