For “Metro”, Christian missionaries in Iraq defend peace

In the headline of the New York edition of the free newspaper Metro dated November 30, 2005, an article of the Associated Press entitled “Four activists for peace kidnapped in Iraq” told about the fate of the four employees of the “NGO” Christian Peacemaker Team based in Chicago, who were kidnapped and shown on a video broadcast worldwide. If the other hostage shown in the video, a German archeologist, is mentioned in the article and not in the title, it is because obviously Metro wanted to insist on the fact that kidnappings are taking place within the framework of a “wave of kidnappings which, according to the police, might be aimed at causing violence during the national elections scheduled for next month”. Therefore, it would be related, as usual, to an anti-democratic violent movement in a sovereign country.

However, as soon as we pay closer attention, things seem to be more complex. The country is immersed in a spiral of violence that will only come to an end with the total withdrawal of the occupation troops and the return of national sovereignty.
Thus, even voices which have fully backed the imperial logic, have told a very different reality. The New York Times indicated, for example, that “hundreds of stories about killings and kidnappings have been disclosed over the last few weeks, most of them by civilian Sunnis, who have stated that their close relatives have been taken by uniformed Iraqis without any arrest warrant or explanations.”. The former prime minister himself, puppet of the occupation troops, Iyad Allawi, has totally changed his discourse since he was removed from power, as shown in an interview he recently gave to the London Observer. “The authorities are doing the same as Saddam Hussein did, and even worse”, he said. “It is an appropriate comparison. That reminds me of the people when Saddam was in power: these are precisely the reasons why we were fighting Saddam, and now we see the same things. […] You hear about the secret police, secret bunkers where people are interrogated. Many Iraqis are tortured or killed during those interrogations. You even see courts which are based on the Islamic Sharia to try people and execute them.”. But if Associated Press tells us from the Pentagon that violence is only intended to undermine democracy, why does that former Prime Minister and probable war criminal believing that?