Decolonizing the Narrative of Mesopotamia Campaign

decolonizing
Andres Succar
Environment

Ahwar at the frontlines:

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 28th Conference of Parties is still going on in Dubai as I write this in real solidarity; but if ever I were the real problem in this world for claiming to have some solutions, their corruptly performative solidarity keeps only legitimizing unsolved business-as-usual. That is, despite the Government of Iraq’s entrance in full force, with a 300-strong delegation to this event and a first pavilion1 , can we really expect the Ahwari people to witness a revolutionary change that centers them, globally, when their indigeneity and language is not even recognized officially by Iraq’s national government? or are we to just quietly accept for them to perish because we failed at informing ourselves, getting all too busy with our daily lives’ privileged routines of servitude as mere cogs to the Capitalist machine? At this rate of global warming, billions are expected to become climate refugees2 , like Ahwaris: so, we might as well be able to sympathize, myself as an exile due to dictatorship, with the millions of people who are being currently displaced from their homes and lands because of the slow onset of man-made climate-induced disasters!

The purpose of this article is actually to tell the brutal history of Britain’s colonialism at the onset of World War I, through its Mesopotamia Campaign, in order to reclaim this as a large-scale internationalist platform for amplifying Ahwari voices who still relentlessly advocate for their land-back and indigenous sovereignty rights. Apart from instilling urgency in the COP28 process before it ends, I will also try to draw parallels amongst other groups of stateless peoples, including the many millions who are violently forced to migrate in the face of evermore complex and multifacetedly dangerous threats upon our lives and livelihoods, systemically intensifying criminality through the spaces we are invited to rely on for deriving accountability and ensuring people’s mere rights are respected even by the humanitarian bureaucracies that supposedly front state powers in defense of the marginalized, after centuries of racial genocide carried out through these repackaged networks of intermeshed authoritarian governance, the world over.3 The fact of the matter is that history continues to be weaponized at the indiscretion of racial typologies – with barely one fifth of universities in the UK showing commitment, in one way or another, to rework their pedagogy through the ‘decolonization’ of specific curricula in at least one its faculties4  – hence, the possibility of sedition and riot that the ‘liberal security paradigm’ is so damn concerned with, only serves to render dialogue virtually impossible5 , reinforcing violence as the only understandable form of political language, at least as Orwell would have it: when English fails6 . 

 

The International Relations of Land Grab:

It is quite frankly, thus, a shame that the recently crowned King Charles III delivered the inaugural speech of this event, which probably costed even more than the meager financial pledges made at it to address the biggest existential threat humanity has ever faced. In his speech, he does aptly recognize how the magnitude of this challenge necessitates everyone with money to pull up a few meaningful trillions of dollars in funding which are self-evidently needed by those of us who are humiliatingly confronted to the enormous harshness of Nature’s angry whips, unstoppable fires and waves. It is dramatically comedic that the amount raised did not even exceed one billion dollars for the historic Loss and Damage Fund finally agreed to last year in Sharm el Sheikh7 , despite his assumption of leadership, and significant concessions made by Least Developed Parties to accept, being (hopefully only temporarily) based at the World Bank of horrendous track-records in the corrupt mismanagement of water8 , for instance, in water-rich Lebanon – no longer, where it must have surely been profitable for their contractors entrusted with guaranteeing local populations as well as refugee camps with drinking and waste water systems, only to syphon its credibility – on the long run, disastrously costing the Bekaa its sacred soil and public health9 . In legal terms, although ecocide is just beginning to get recognized as a crime in international courts, our current global authorities, which in turn stem from much older imperial and colonial systems, are trying to keep building atop environmental racism, instead of making way for a clean new start with the assurance of peace in a world that isn’t warmer than 1.5C before Liberal Capitalism. When these well-dressed criminals get rewarded, championed, covered and escorted for forcefully maintaining the status quo through the terrorization of minorities and abuse of dissident activists’ human rights: they will surely have to hear us when we use technology to organize ourselves to overcome the frontiers that they so easily go over with their private jets. The UN can pick between having us or them next year: we did warn that if we don’t get it, we will shut it down. 

King Charles is the largest landowner in the world, at a staggering metric equivalent to a sixth of planet Earth’s total surface10 …. These climate negotiations, ironically involving, by the way more, than 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists11 , some of whom belong to the mentioned Iraqi delegation, should therefore be taken at face value for their colonialist reproduction of systems that continue profiteering from feudal policies of landgrab that will now allow polluters to off-set their emissions through white-washed carbon markets of ‘fortress conservation’ seen with pretension as a superior model to those established by who tills and protects the land.12  This is best evidenced in the case of Palestine, where the genocidal Israeli President  is welcomed in a setting meant to finally include youth and children’s marginalized voices in all political decision making processes since COP21, rather than those who try us in military courts, illegally detain us, torture us,  and for the past two months also murder us at the unimaginably painful rate of ethnic cleansing that has taken the lives of over 20,000 martyrs, with more legal minors deliberately murdered in these past two months alone than in any other conflict spanning years: about double the number of children killed by the US invasion of Iraq in 14 years!13  Not comparing both these tragedies, the argument goes to claim that their historical root was and continues to be one: for at the same time as the British Raj troops were navigating Tigris upstream to conquer Mesopotamia from the Ottomans, by 1918 they launched yet another offensive campaign against Palestine and Sinai to recover their ego, after being reverberatingly sieged for 147 days in the city of Qut. 

 

Internationalist Social Ecology:

What’s worse than colonialism itself is the fact that, still, it continues unabated – as shown above – with white people’s vast support in the distortion, negation and erasure of history. Some such as Dr. Kanan Makiya see the development of a modern administrative structure that centralizes power in Baghdad positively14 , as ‘nation-building’ despite Kurdish and later Assyrian aspirations to self-determination getting crushed; the development of hospitals and Westernized educational institutions cannot be considered as such.15 Babylonian numerals underpin our mathematical understanding of time and circles, as well as many other advents!16  Claiming that the colonization of Iraq, in specific, resulted in better health for natives is ridiculous: the causal relationship between fossil fuel extraction and cancer is especially apparent in Basra17 . Moreover, the British East India Company is not only to blame for a great number of famines as a result of the pillaging that pushed India’s fall from occupying 20% of the global economy, then to only 4% of it centuries later – this persistently harsh environment adapted genes to survive induced starvation – but more starkly weaponizing health/epigenetics to now make South Asian people between four to six times more prone to diabetes than white people.18  Terms like “resilience” and Commonwealth “diversity” feature in these exhibitions retelling the lived experiences of its majority Indian Sikh soldiers, who found safety from the war they were forced to fight in through their faith, which allowed them rebuild the Baba Nanak Gurdwara of Baghdad circa 1511CE only to be destroyed yet again by the Americans in 200319 , so these narratives are merely tokenized down to museum settings along with our stolen ancient relics, without meaningfully ever really changing the historical exploitation of race and biopolitics. 

To try and answer the questions posed at the beginning, things are only bound to keep getting worse – except if we all revolt now against genocidal intents dooming indigenous and other stateless peoples – for our shared planet. This article hopefully contributes to holding British Petroleum (BP, then Anglo-Persian Oil) thus to account for launching the Mesopotamian Campaign in its interest’s sake over the oil fields of Khuzestan and Shatt el Arab.20  A recent study carried out by Carbon Brief found that if we were to calculate Colonial Brittain’s historical CO2 emissions, rather than those emitted from burning fossil fuels within the UK’s current borders, they are nearly twice more responsible for causing this climate crisis.21  This number does not, most probably, account for military emissions, which all other countries seem to also evade as the UN’s mechanism allows. It’s important to note, though, the far-reaching implications that the Royal Air Force carried out its first aerial warfare operations here, flying over 4,000 hours as a form of policing (also over Palestine, Afghanistan and modern-day Somalia) as well as dropping some 97 tons of bombs against Mesopotamian and Kurdish rebels in 1920.22  According to renowned scholar, Noam Chomsky, Churchill moreover incited for chemical weapons being used “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.”23  Its military victories, emphasized by cultural institutions such as the National Army Museum as chivalrous, serve to hide a much uglier truth of bestowing power upon a Sunni minority until today, passing by a foreign monarch and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The government of Iraq has long been complicit in changing the course of its rivers so that BP can keep digging. For the exploitation of North Rumeila, the largest oil field in the world, 800km2 of wetlands have been totally dried up as such.24  

To tie at all together, the point to bring home is that this affects all of us, and so all of us can stop it. The statelessness of Ahwaris, Palestinians, and Baloch people may be further conjoined with black people’s struggle against the state. After all, Black Iraqi and Iranian lives matter, too! Beyond recycling charged words, such as Trump’s campaign to “drain the swamp” from malarial corruption perfectly aligning with that of the fascist heydays of Mussolini, this rhetorical background is based on literal engineering feats to do the same thing they are currently doing in Iraq also in their own countries of Italy and the USA.25 Why, the geography of change certainly welcomes runaway rebel slaves who had been traded by, both, Europeans and Arabs into its ungovernable wetlands! Whereas the COP28 Presidency could have chosen to propose a framework for fully phasing fossil fuels out from our near future – but Saudi Arabia and Europe changed the text as usual at the last minute, to ‘phase down’ instead26  – its disappointing outcomes also emerge from the utter lack of recognition to the shared histories of camaraderie between Ahwar, Baluchistan, Palestine and East Africa (especially Zanzibar) withstanding slavery through an inexplicably deep connection with nature27  now taken from us with Dubai’s Kafala system on the lead of modern day slavery left untouched. In this dog-eat-dog world, would anyone be surprised to know that the COP27 greenwashed usurper of power, dictator Maduro – well, his last Minister of Petroleum, former temporary vice-president and prior Minister of Industry and Development, Tarek el Aissame -- overseeing none less than the Orinoco Mining Arc of enslavement and mercurial ecocide at that time… is the son of a former Iraqi Ba’athist party representative28 . Sincerely, no one is free until we all are.