For decades the International Monetary Fund (IMF) served as one of the key pillars of the “Washington Consensus.” Dominated by the White House, the Fund allowed successive administrations to control the economic policy of poorer countries in this hemisphere and beyond. Those nations wishing to buck a U.S. agenda of corporate globalization risked having their access to international loans cut off. The brutish IMF not only handled its own funds but also played gatekeeper for money from other creditors, such as the regional development banks. This power made the institution as hated throughout the global South as it was celebrated inside the Beltway.

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that an increasingly progressive Latin America is starting to say good riddance.
tompaine.com

ON February 7, 1901, [Cuban] President Tomás Estrada Palma [] signed the agreement ceding Cuban territory to the United States in order for it to construct a naval base in Guantanamo.

Guantanamo Bay is one of the country’s deepest and largest bays. Christopher Columbus discovered it during his second voyage to the New World on April 30, 1494. It has some very special natural characteristics: it is extremely deep, it is secure and it has the capacity to receive large ships.

For centuries, it was virtually abandoned, as the Spanish colonizers were incapable of appreciating its virtues.

After an attempt by the British to occupy the Bay in July, 1741, in the hope of establishing a base of operations there, the colonial government finally understood the site’s strategic importance.

U.S. REFOCUSSES ON CUBA

In the early 19th century, when it realized the value of the island’s geographic location, natural resources, its historical, economic and social characteristics, as well as those of its population, the United States publicly expressed its interest in taking over Cuba.

Attempts to buy the island from Spain were made in 1805, 1807 and 1808, but according to the Central Report of the First Congress of the Communist Party, “if Spanish obstinacy ever served Cuba’s cause, it was in its systematic refusal to agree to the buying and selling that the United States had repeatedly proposed during the last century.”

In 1823, John Quincy Adams, the U.S. secretary of state, articulated the “ripe fruit” thesis, holding that Cuba would inevitably fall into U.S. hands as soon as it was no longer a Spanish colony. And that same year, President James Monroe developed the doctrine that bears his name, warning the European powers that America was reserved solely and exclusively “for the Americans.” At the same time, for years his country obstructed and discouraged attempts by the Cuban people to achieve independence.

In 1895, U.S. investments on the island totaled some 50 million pesos, particularly in the sugar and tobacco industries, along with iron, chrome and manganese deposits.

Thus, in 1898, the Americans understood that the imminent end of Spanish colonial rule and before the unstoppable advance of the Liberation Army was a propitious time to intervene in the Spanish-Cuban war.

Taking advantage of the growing sympathy among North Americans for Cuba’s cause, the U.S. Congress in April 1898 approved a Joint Resolution that brought about the Northern giant’s intervention in the conflict.

The Spanish-Cuban-U.S. War, described as the first imperialist war of pillage, was centered primarily in the eastern provinces of Cuba and the Guantanamo region. On July 16, 1898, the terms of surrender were signed, and on December 10 of that same year, the Treaty of Paris was signed. The United States took control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam; Cuba remained as “special territory,” from which the Americans were to withdraw after the “appeasement.”

The administrative government, with General Leonard Wood at the head, convened a Constituent Assembly charged with drawing up the Constitution for the future republic. But in order to firmly establish relations between Cuba and the United States, the occupying forces brought heavy pressure to bear and imposed the notorious Platt Amendment, with two clauses that atrociously encroached on Cuba’s national sovereignty and which had serious implications for the nascent republic’s self-determination.

Clause 3 of the Amendment reserved the right of the United States to intervene for the preservation of Cuba’s independence and the support of a government appropriate to its interests, while Clause 7 forced Cuba to cede part of its territory for the establishment of naval bases or coaling stations [for the loading of coal into rail cars].

Historian Miguel D’Estéfano Pissani, in his book Derecho de Tratados (Treaty Law), explains: “The Platt Amendment became a Sword of Damocles, whose edges were the naval and coaling concessions. The strength of the Constitutional appendix was based, precisely, on the military base clause.”

On November 8, 1902, the U.S. government asked for a permanent lease of land in the bays of Nipe, Honda, Cienfuegos and Guantanamo. But due to the violent reaction of the people, it was limited to the Honda and Guantanamo Bays.

One of the most outstanding individuals of our independence struggle, Juan Gualberto Gómez, made his voice heard, warning that Articles 3 and 7 of the Platt Amendment “… were the same as handing the keys of our house over to the Americans, so that they could come in at any hour … day or night, with good or bad intentions …” and that “… its purpose is none other than to reduce the power of future Cuban governments and the sovereignty of our Republic.”

Finally, after a series of negotiations, on December 10, 1903, the United States took possession of the territory for its naval base in Guantanamo. Via a supplementary agreement signed on July 2, 1903, the U.S. government promised to pay 2,000 pesos per year in U.S. gold (about $4,085 at today’s prices), a laughable sum that Washington would continue to deposit, but which Cuba has refused to accept or cash since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

According to Doctor Fernando Alvarez Tabío, in his article “La Base Naval de Guantanamo y el derecho Internacional” (The Guantanamo Naval Base and International Law”), the leasing contract for the naval base lacks legality and juridical validity because it is marred in its essential elements: … due to the inability of the Cuban government to cede a piece of its national territory in perpetuity … and because the consent was snatched via irresistible and unjust moral violence…

Rejecting Honda Bay, the United States concentrated on Guantanamo. That choice was due to a strategic objective. Because of its exceptional value and geographic characteristics, it made it possible to assure military predominance in the Caribbean and fix its eyes on Panama’s inter-ocean canal, for which it had obtained the construction rights that year as well, in 1903.

A CENTURY OF INFAMY

During its century of existence, the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo has been the scene of shameful episodes and events.

Once the base was established, U.S. capital investment rose, first with the construction of the base’s vital water supply, and then in the sugar industry, railroads and electrical power. Gambling, prostitution and contraband proliferated with the arrival of the Marines, and became lucrative businesses for the national bourgeoisie.

The enclave’s presence also had repercussions on the region’s political life. In 1917, 1919 and 1922, the Marines were sent out from the base to “protect” the sugar mills and other U.S. economic interests in response to the revolt by the Partido Independiente de Color (Colored Independence Party), the Chambelona uprising and that of the liberals against the Menocal government.

During the final liberation war led by Fidel and the Rebel Army, the base was used as a supply point for the Batista dictatorship’s air force, which indiscriminately bombed and fired on farmers and other civilians in the liberated zones. The base was also a launching point for U.S. troops invading other countries, like Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1918.

After the revolutionary triumph in January 1959, the base became a refuge for the old regime’s murderers and torturers, and has been used as a platform for aggression against Cuba, including infiltration by enemy agents; the protection of counterrevolutionary bands; pretexts for justifying direct aggression against the island; a center of radio-electronic espionage and a point of concentration for ships and planes enabling sudden naval blockades to be imposed on the island.

Throughout these years, the military enclave has been the center of provocations and violations of our nation, and against the Border Guards responsible for patrolling the outer perimeter. According to official figures, from 1962 to August 1992, more than 13,000 such incidents have been registered, including shots fired with rifles and pistols (taking the lives of two Cuban Border Guards); aiming with machine guns, tanks and cannons; the throwing of objects; obscene gestures; breaking through the border fence and violating air and maritime space with ships, planes and helicopters.

The most recent ugly episode in the base’s history is its use as a prison, where more than 500 detainees accused of being terrorists or having links to terrorism have been held and subject to physical and psychological torture, without the right to legal assistance or a decent trial. The world has been shaken by the spine-chilling images of chained men being subject to extreme degradation and force fed after waging a hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison, where they are denied access to their lawyers, humanitarian organizations or the United Nations.

The Constitution of the Republic of Cuba, approved by the people on February 24, 1976, says in Article 11 that our country “… rejects and considers null and void the treaties, pacts or concessions agreed to under unequal or unknown conditions or that diminish its sovereignty or territorial integrity.”

Thus, Cuba demands the return of that territory because, as Fidel affirmed, “… That base is in their possession against the will of our people … it is a dagger thrust into the heart of Cuba’s land …”
watchingamerica.com

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – A speeding bus crashed into a small van carrying a group of U.S. soldiers in northern Honduras, killing two and injuring one, authorities said Thursday.

The accident happened Wednesday near the village of Agua Caliente, on the Atlantic coast 220 miles north of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Transport Police Commissioner Jose Luis Flores said.

The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa declined to confirm the identities of the victims pending notification of next of kin.

Flores said the driver of the bus was speeding before he crashed into the van carrying the soldiers. The soldier driving the van was unable to avoid the collision.

The bus driver was uninjured but was immediately detained by police.

The soldiers were traveling from La Ceiba to the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, Flores said. They had been participating in joint military exercises with their Honduran counterparts for the past month.
news.yahoo.com

PARIS, March 16 — Once again, students are on the barricades in France, evoking comparisons to the uprising of May 1968. But this is not a revolt. It is not 1968 revisited.

Certainly, students are taking to the streets and shutting down universities, and tear gas penetrated the heart of Paris.

On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of protesters, most of them students, filled the streets and marched in cities throughout France. With teachers, workers, labor union leaders, the jobless, even retirees beginning to join in, an even larger nationwide protest is planned for Saturday.

And the images of cheering students occupying the 17th-century Sorbonne, the birthplace of the 1968 revolt, last Friday night called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement 38 springs ago.

But the students’ goal this time is far more modest. They want the abolition of a new law, the First Employment Contract, which aims to increase hiring by allowing employers to fire new workers without cause in their first two years.

“We’re not back there in ’68,” said Nadjet Boubakeur, a 26-year-old history major at a public university here and a leader of the student movement UNEF. “Our revolt is not to get more. It’s to keep what we have.”
nytimes.com

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will henceforward account only to God for the Iraq war makes perfect sense. Every secular reason he has concocted for the catastrophe has turned out to be the reverse of the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction, we are less safe from terrorism, the Iraqi people themselves do not want us in their country. No more of his excuses for this epic man-made disaster stand an earthly chance of being believed.

As the third anniversary of the calamity draws close, the final argument used by what little remains of the brave army of pro-war punditry that set out with the prime minister in 2003 has gone belly up. Far from preventing a civil war, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is provoking one. It is doing so through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has entrenched and inflamed the Sunni-Shia divide beyond anything in Iraq’s history, and through its refusal to afford Iraqis the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, which is the only framework for overcoming such differences.

There is scarcely even a pretence that Iraq is permitted such sovereignty at present. Both Jack Straw and the US ambassador to Baghdad have recently been instructing the Iraqis as to what sort of government they must form – three months after the supposedly decisive national elections took place.

And all this to the accompaniment of unabated violence. Reliable estimates for violent civilian deaths under the occupation range well over 100,000. Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has had to flee the country after revealing that more than 7,000 people had been killed, often after torture, by officers of the US-supervised interior ministry. The carnage continues: more families will be burying their dead this morning after yesterday’s 50-warplane assault on Samarra by the US – the biggest yet and clearest possible demonstration of the occupation’s brutality and failure.

It defies common sense to suppose that the only torture and degradation of civilians carried out by US and British troops has been that caught on camera at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. No wonder Iraqi local authorities now refuse to deal with the British army in the south.

The pledge that all this suffering would at least assist a solution to the Palestinian question has proved painfully hollow, with the Israelis ram-raiding a Palestinian prison in Jericho – just like British troops in Basra. But still the war junkies seem to believe one more hit – this time against Iran – will lead to the breakthrough to the docile Middle East they desire. Straw’s assertion that it is “inconceivable” has found no echo in Washington or Jerusalem. Almost every Iranian agrees that aggression will consolidate support for the regime in Tehran. It will certainly cost many more lives and inflame Muslims everywhere.
guardian.co.uk

A new poll finds that a plurality of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush, while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.

A poll taken March 15, 2006 by American Research Group found that among all adults, 46% favor Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) plan to censure President George W. Bush, while just 44% are opposed. Approval of the plan grows slightly when the sample is narrowed to voters, up to 48% in favor of the Senate censuring the sitting president.

Even more shocking is that just 57% of Republicans are opposed to the move, with 14% still undecided and 29% actually in favor. Fully 70% of Democrats want to see Bush censured.

More surprising still: The poll found fully 43% of voters in favor of actually impeaching the President, with just 50% of voters opposed. While only 18% of Republicans surveyed wanted to see Bush impeached, 61% of Democrats and 47% of Independents reported they wanted to see the House move ahead with the Conyers (D-MI) resolution.

The poll, taken March 13-15, had a 3% margin of error.
rawstory.com

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
lrb.co.uk

VARANASI, India — They came to banish ghosts, find a cure for eczema, seek succor for a cheating husband or an unruly child. Their feet bare, their heads covered, the believers, both Hindu and Muslim, entered the shrine in droves, stopping only to kiss each stair.

That was the scene March 9 at the tomb of Hazarat Syed Baba Bahadur Shahid, a Muslim, two days after homemade bombs tore through a Hindu temple and a railway station here in Hinduism’s holiest city, raising the specter of Hindu-Muslim violence.

But such violence did not come to pass. Indeed, the scene at the Bahadur Shahid shrine served as a reminder of a fact often obscured by the spasms of ruthless sectarian violence that strike India: that after living cheek by jowl here for so many centuries, Hindus and Muslims often find themselves quietly braided together in worship as in daily life.
nytimes.com

…Pentagon officials said the air assault, part of Operation Swarmer, was the largest since April 2003 when the 101st Airborne Division launched an air assault from Iskandiriya to Mosul, shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

On Friday, US and Iraqi troops could be seen purposefully moving through fields sown with winter wheat, searching isolated farm buildings US officials say may harbor scores of insurgents, including foreign fighters linked to Al-Qaeda.

While 48 people were detained and six weapons caches found, no insurgents have yet been encountered, US forces said.

But the deputy governor of Salaheddin province, Abdullah Hussein, suggested at least one key insurgent leader, whom he named as Jaish Mohammed, had been apprehended.

“The rebels in the area are a mix of local nationals and foreign fighters,” Hussein added. “We have their voices recorded along with their names and pictures.”

“There has been no contact with the insurgents,” admitted Major John Calahan of the 101st Airborne Division, a unit specializing in helicopter-borne air assaults that spearheaded the sweep.

“The aim of the operation is to dissuade anti-Iraqi forces from taking sanctuary here,” he said, adding that 60 helicopters were involved in the operation.
bakutoday.net

Crazy crazy crazy

AL-SADR FORMS SHADOW GOVERNMENT IN BAGHDAD STRONGHOLD
Erbil, 16 March (AKI) – A Kurdish source in Baghdad has told a Kurdish national daily that the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, ” has set up a shadow government in Sadr City in the centre of Baghdad”. The source told the Aso daily: “this group was tasked with carrying out the affairs of the city in the place of the Iraqi government and institutions.” The source explained that the Mahdi Army, accused of kidnappings and sectarian killings, has transformed the rundown Sadr city into an independent district with its security forces and its own courts which do not only judge local residents but also Shiites from other areas of the capital.

The source alleged that “the health and transport ministers, which both are headed by minsiters from the Sadr faction, have been completely monopolised by followers of this movement” adding that “in Sadr City the police forces, for example the local police, take their orders from Moqtada al-Sadr and not from the interior ministry.”

The Cultural Network of Iraq, an internet site which publishes news on the Shiite community, has said that “the peoples courts in Sadr City have condemned to death terrorists who carried out massacres in the city.”

The former government of Iyad Allawi and the movement of al-Sadr,. who has headed two lengthly revolts against the US-led coalition forces, clashed over these courts, which have special police forces and prisons. When the authorities in Baghdad tried to close them down and disband the militias they failed.

The power of Sadr’s militia and his huge constituency of loyal Shiite voters have made him a growing force in Iraq.

America Switches Sides in Iraq War
While President Bush was threatening Iran on Monday, he blamed the Iraqi Shiites and Iran for the insurgency. According to the AFP, Bush said that:

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq.”
I know what you’re thinking: President Bush is so stupid that giant mistakes like this should just be taken with a grain of salt. Even if he’s lashing out at Iran for intervening in the affairs of the Iraqi Shia, surely he’s not blaming the “improvised explosive devices” that are killing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq on the Shia. … Wrong. That’s exactly what he was doing.
“Asked about the linkage to Shiite forces, two US officials who declined to be named pointed to previously reported ties between the government of Iran and radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.”
The first problem is that the next day General Pace said he had no evidence whatsoever to back up the president’s false assertions and Secretary Rumsfeld just dissembled. The second is that the last time al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army was in violent conflict with the US was back in August of 2004 and the roadside bomb was not their tactic, those have been the tool of the home-grown Sunni insurgency which is led by the ex-Ba’athists and the recently under fire foreign fighter jihadist types.

Though al-Sadr has openly threatened war if America were to bomb Iran, he had been known as the leader of the least Iran-loyal faction among the Iraqi Shia, denouncing the federalism in the new constitution, and insisting on Iraqi nationalism regardless of religion and ethnicity. Recently, his political fortunes have been said to be on the rise, and though that may be in conflict with some genius’s plan to spread the war, a leader of the Iraqi insurgency he is not.

The U.S.’s natural allies would be Saddam’s Baathists, of course. Did the glorious liberators of 3 years ago ever seriously believe that the Shia would just curl up and hand the country over to Americans, of all people? Of course not. Maybe this Iran scenario was on the drawing board then.

Seven days in Iraq
An American hostage is murdered. Car bombs kill 58 at a street market. Police discover 29 bodies in a mass grave. And the US launches its biggest assault since the invasion. On the eve of its third anniversary, Audrey Gillan pieces together just another week in a war zone.

Sectarian violence leads to displacement in capital
BAGHDAD, 16 March (IRIN) – Dozens of families in the capital, Baghdad, have been displaced from their neighbourhoods due to the sectarian violence that has come in the wake of the Samarra shrine bombing in February and subsequent attacks.

“The explosions at the Samarra mosque and the attack on a market in the Sadr district [of Baghdad] have frightened minority communities in some neighbourhoods,” said Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) spokeswoman Ferdous al-Abadi. “They’re afraid they could become victims of sectarian violence.”

On 22 February, the bombing of a revered Shi’ite shrine in Samarra, about 100 km northwest of the capital, left more than 75 people dead and sparked sectarian reprisal attacks countrywide.

On Thursday, the Ministry of Interior announced that at least 630 people had been killed as a result of sectarian violence since the Samarra bombing.

Many families in Baghdad, lacking essential supplies, have preferred to camp outside their neighbourhoods rather than risk being killed in their homes by armed sectarian groups.

According to the IRCS, more than 300 families from different areas of the capital have been displaced, many of them Sunni residents of majority Shi’ite neighbourhoods.

HALABJA, Iraq, March 16 — For nearly two decades, Kurds have gathered peacefully in this mountainous corner of northern Iraq to commemorate one of the blackest days in their history. It was here that Saddam Hussein’s government launched a poison gas attack that killed more than 5,000 people on March 16, 1988.

So it came as a shock when hundreds of stone-throwing protesters took to the streets here Thursday on the anniversary, beating back government guards to storm and destroy a museum dedicated to the memory of the Halabja attack.

The violence, pitting furious local residents against a much smaller force of armed security men, was the most serious popular challenge to the political parties that have ruled Iraqi Kurdistan for the past 15 years. Occurring on the day the new Iraqi Parliament met for the first time, the episode was a reminder that the issues facing Iraq go well beyond fighting Sunni Arab insurgents and agreeing on cabinet ministers in Baghdad.

Although Kurdistan remains a relative oasis of stability in a country increasingly threatened by sectarian violence, the protests here — which left the renowned Halabja Monument a charred, smoking ruin — starkly illustrated those challenges even in Iraq’s most peaceful region.
nytimes.com

Kurds take out anger on Halabja monument
…Just two years ago, the then top US administrator in Iraq L Paul Bremer stood at the Halabja Monument with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, who is now president of Iraq.

Mr Bremer said the town served as proof that the US-led invasion of Iraq was justified, and that the coalition would establish a $1m fund for Halabja. Mr Talabani urged people to “come to Halabja to see how mass destruction arms (were) used.”

Now, the people of the town are saying that officials have used the atrocities for their own political ends, but they have seen little in return.