Washington Post
March 28 2005
Picnic Is No Party In the New Basra
Uproar Over Armed Attack on Student Event Redraws Debate on Islam’s
Role and Reach
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A09
BASRA, Iraq, March 28 — Celia Garabet thought students were
roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few
minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something
different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles,
pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of
hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and
hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men
dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.
That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that
has shadowed Iraq’s second-largest city since the U.S. invasion in
2003: What is the role of Islam in daily life? In once-libertine
Basra, a battered port in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, the
question dominates everything these days, from the political parties
in power to the style of dress in the streets.
In the days that followed the melee, hundreds of students, angry
about the injuries and arrests, marched on the school administration
building and then the governor’s office, demanding an apology and,
more important, the dissolution of the dreaded campus morality
police. The militiamen who attacked the picnickers at first boasted
of stamping out debauchery, even distributing videos of the event.
But, gauging the popular revulsion, they later admitted to what they
termed mistakes. The governor, himself an Islamic activist, urged
dialogue to calm a roiled city and deemed the case closed, even as
students insisted they remained unsatisfied.
To many in Basra the students managed what no local party or
politician had yet done: They interrupted, if briefly, a tide of
religious conservatism that has shuttered liquor stores in a city
that once had dozens, meted out arbitrary justice and encouraged
women to wear a veil and dress in a way considered modest.
“The students broke through the barriers of fear,” said Ali Abbas
Khafif, a 55-year-old writer and union organizer jailed for 23 years
under former president Saddam Hussein. “This was the first mass
response to religious power.”
The victory may be fleeting in a city where Islamic activism and guns
often go hand in hand. Even in their moment of triumph, many secular
students acknowledge they are fighting a losing battle; some suggest
it is already lost.
“We have felt both our weakness and our strength,” said Saif Emad,
24.
The day began with eight yellow school buses lined up by 10 a.m. at
one of the two campuses of Basra University, a sprawling expanse
where pink bougainvillea interrupts a dreary landscape. Hundreds of
students from the university’s engineering college piled into the
buses. They were joined at Andalus Park by hundreds more on foot and
in their own cars. By 10:30 a.m., there were from 500 to 750 students
and guests at a picnic the university had approved.
Young men started playing soccer. Others went to buy ice cream. The
more boisterous began dancing to a song, “He Went to Basra and Forgot
Me,” by Ali Hatem, an Iraqi singer. A few grew exuberant, thrusting
tape players along with red-and-white scarves into the air. Most of
the women were veiled, although a handful, including some Christians,
went bareheaded.
“All of a sudden, students started running,” recalled Garabet, 21, a
civil engineering student.
At that moment, from 20 to 40 militiamen loyal to the militant young
Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army charged into the
two-acre park of overgrown grass, concrete picnic tables and paths of
colored tiles. Some of them wore checkered headscarves over their
faces, others black balaclavas. They carried sticks, cable, pistols
and rifles, a few with a weapon in each hand. They were accompanied
by two clerics in robes and turbans: Abdullah Menshadawi and Abdullah
Zaydi.
Garabet, an unveiled woman from an Armenian Christian family, never
saw her assailant. He struck her twice in the back of the head with
his fist. “I was afraid to turn around,” she said.
She stumbled, then headed with others toward the black steel gate.
Militiamen were shouting “Infidels!”
“It was chaos,” she said. “Everyone was yelling.”
As she walked out the gate, a second blow to the back of her head
almost knocked her unconscious. Two weeks later, she is still wearing
a neck brace, and her vision is blurred. She has numbness in one hand
and suffers severe headaches.
At about that time, students said, a militiamen struck an unveiled
21-year-old, Zeinab Faruq, with a stick. Another accosted a couple,
they recalled. The militiaman fired two shots at the legs of
22-year-old Muhsin Walid; another shot grazed Walid’s hand.
Sinan Saeed, 24, a husky mechanical engineering student, described
seeing one girl run toward the exit, then seeing a man stumble over
her. Both were beaten with sticks and cables as they lay on the
ground. Some surged through the gate; others tried to clamber over
the chain-link fence, Saeed said. At the exit, militiamen slapped
students with one hand, gripping their pistols in the other.
Students accused the men of stealing cell phones, cameras, gold
jewelry and tape players as the students left.
“They focused on the women,” said Saeed’s friend, Osama Adnan. “They
were beating them viciously.”
“Without any discrimination,” Saeed added.
Within half an hour, the fracas had ended. University officials said
15 students were seriously injured. The militiamen detained about 10
students, who were taken to the local office of the Sadr movement
before being released that evening. By all accounts, police were
present in force but did not intervene. The students insist that the
police were cowed by Menshadawi, one of the two clerics.
One student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled Menshadawi
shouting, “There is no secular government! There is only the
government of the Mahdi Army!” as he stood on some park steps
brandishing a stick and a pistol.
In the Sadr movement’s office, Heidar Jabari acknowledged excesses
but defended the action. “There was a mistake in our execution, but
we had the right to intervene,” he said.
Tall, with a friendly demeanor, Jabari said he had warned students
two days before the incident that the picnic was inappropriate.
Shiites were still observing the sacred month of Muharram, he said,
and a suicide bomb had recently killed 125 people in the southern
city of Hilla. “The blood from there was still fresh,” he said. “No
one listened to us.”
Jabari conceded that students were hurt and the beatings “went beyond
what was legitimate.” But, he added, “They say freedom means they can
do what they want. This is not freedom. Freedom does not mean you can
transgress traditions.” He spoke calmly but with clerical sternness.
“There are traditions and rules in an Eastern society that are
different from a Western society. Every Iraqi has a right to act
against these transgressions.”
To bolster their case, the movement, one of Basra’s most powerful,
released a video of footage it had gathered of the picnic. It
distributed it to local stores, which in turn sold it for about $1.
The images were relatively tame, even by Basra’s conservative
standards. Men are shown dancing. In the most exuberant moment, one
dancer ties a scarf around his waist and swivels his hips. A man
pushes a woman on a swing.
“At a wedding party, they do a lot more than that,” said Saleh Najim,
the dean of the engineering college.
The night of the confrontation, word of a protest went out, and the
following morning about 150 students gathered at the engineering
college, itself divided between secular and religious students. Their
numbers swelling as they went, they made their way to the president’s
office and issued their demands: no work for the Islamic groups on
campus, an official apology, punishment of the militiamen, return of
stolen property, disbandment of the much-feared security committees
that act as morality police in each university department and their
replacement with Iraqi army troops.
Students vowed to remain on strike until the demands were met.
Classes were canceled.
The next day, the students convened again. This time, they said, they
planned to head to the governor’s office. Police tried to block their
path, firing shots into the air at the gate, but they managed to
leave through another exit in 15 school buses. Once at the governor’s
office, they found hundreds of students from smaller colleges and a
few high schools already gathered. Inside, the governor met with
members of the city council and the Sadr movement, student
representatives and school officials.
Two hours later, students recalled, Mohammed Abadi, the president of
the city council, emerged. The students’ demands would be met, he
declared. He read a text from a microphone mounted on a police car
outside the office, going over each demand.
“We will compensate what was lost,” students recalled Abadi saying.
“What was stolen!” someone shouted from the crowd, correcting Abadi.
Following Abadi’s statement, city officials and Sadr’s movement
treated the matter as closed.
“The issue is settled,” said Mohammed Musabah, who took over as
governor of Basra the day of the melee. He acknowledged that police
had not arrested anyone, as students had demanded. But, he said in an
interview, “We spoke with them in a stern tone. Both sides wanted to
resolve it by way of dialogue.”
Few students this week said they were thinking about dialogue. Nor
did they seem to believe their demands had been met.
Saeed said that as he passed out leaflets during the protests, a
student sympathetic to Moqtada Sadr tapped his shoulder. “Be
careful,” he said he was told menacingly. On the wall at the campus
gate, scrawled in black, graffiti reads, “Basra remains Moqtada’s
Basra.”
“For a moment, we felt the strength of our voices,” Saeed said. “We
were making up our own minds.”
But, he added, “You can see on campus that students are still scared
to speak.”