August 27, 2007

Compared to this occupation, even colonialism looks like a nice ride.

At least, colonialism still managed to build a road or two, a couple of schools and maybe a health dispensary.

But tell me, what has this occupation done apart from destroy ?
Do you understand the word DESTRUCTION ? Do you know what it means?

Ok, let me refresh your memories since you do not know what destruction is.

Remember when you had two towers crumbling to the ground, in a mass of rubbles, with fire shooting all over the place ?
Yes, that is destruction.

Ok, let me refresh some more since you happen to have a few amnesic lapses.
Do you remember your 3'000 dead and their families still seeking therapy 6 years down the line?
Yes, that is destruction.

Do you remember how that tiny spot looked so desolate, empty, ravaged, afterwards ?
Yes, that is destruction.

Do you remember the people crying, shocked, lost ?
Yes, that is destruction.

But that was no occupation.

Occupation is multiplying that one episode of destruction by 1000. Nay, by 1'000.000.000 and you get the full picture today.

THAT IS CALLED OCCUPATION.

Your tanks rolling on pavements where people are meant to be walking, destroying the pavements and the lamp posts on their way and running over a couple of civilians. That is OCCUPATION.

Your guns shooting innocent civilians at checkpoints just because one of your shits is having a bad day. That is OCCUPATION.

Your jets roaming the skies day and night and bombarding neighborhoods and villages and killing children, women and men. That is OCCUPATION.

Your especially designed prisons filled with innocent "local" detainees, for years without trial. That is OCCUPATION.

Every single street, building, school, office, in rubbles and ruins. That is OCCUPATION.

No water, no electricity, no food, no functional hospitals...That is OCCUPATION.

Arbitrary arrests, arbitrary killings, daily house searches, ransacking, pillaging from the "locals". That is OCCUPATION.

Raping women, girls, boys, men. Torturing them, spitting on them, humiliating them, insulting them, castrating them, sodomizing them, burning them, pissing on them.
That is OCCUPATION.

Destroying houses of worship, burning Holy Books, and drawing crucifixes on the walls, pissing and shitting inside, and shooting the elders. That is OCCUPATION.

Having 1 million widows dressed in black, orphaned children eating from garbage dumps, 70% unemployed, villages where famine is rampant, 4 million "locals" with their homes and belongings destroyed and now living in squalor, begging the streets.
That is OCCUPATION.

Seeing young women and mothers sell their bodies in exchange for bread and older women sleeping on sidewalks. That is OCCUPATION.

Having your children, boys and girls, either sold to strangers, kidnapped as sex slaves, or caught in pedophile rings. That is OCCUPATION

Having your schools, universities, libraries burned down and emptied. That is OCCUPATION.

Witnessing the fleeing and/or the slaughter of your academics, researchers, scholars, doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists...That is OCCUPATION.

Seeing your palm trees, your fields, your parcs, your rivers, your soil either burned down, or razed to the grounds or filled with garbage and dead bodies, or contaminated with toxic waste, radiation and Depleted Uranium. That is OCCUPATION.

Turning your agricultural land that used to sustain you into poppy fields, open for drugs traffickers and mafias. That is OCCUPATION.

Walking out of your doorstep and stumbling on rotting cadavers, immersed in pools of sewage and have your neighborhood turned into a junk yard. That is OCCUPATION.

Having your loved ones kidnapped, abducted, tortured, mutilated, raped and dumped in some street. That is OCCUPATION.

Seeing the "locals" riddled with disease, cancer, allergies, asthma, swellings, inflammations of all sorts, skin lesions due to your "smart" bombs, plus the fact that they can't get treatment for already existing ailments. That is OCCUPATION.

Looking at your cultural, historical heritage in ruins. Seeing your museums, art galleries, musical conservatory...emptied. Seeing your archelogical sites turned into military bases and the walls of your ancient towers either destroyed or filled with yankee graffitis. That is OCCUPATION.

Having neighborhoods sealed and turned into ghettoes, building huge walls that suffocates you in. That is OCCUPATION.

Seeing your family ripped apart, either because you are christian, sunni, shia, yezidi, sabaean and having your friends disappearing or be driven out in hordes. That is OCCUPATION.

Not being able to walk the streets, go out at night, curfews, bombs, snipers, explosions, mortars, militias, armies, mercenaries, contractors...That is OCCUPATION.

Having your life reduced to survival and catching your breath. That is OCCUPATION.

Running from morgue to morgue, cemetery to cemetery, counting the 1 Million massacred. That is OCCUPATION.

Becoming an undertaker, coffin maker or a professional mourner because that is the only lucrative affair today. That is OCCUPATION.

Dismantling the State apparatus, the "local" army, sacking civil servants or killing them, taking over ministries and government offices. That is OCCUPATION.

Installing a puppet government made of corrupt thugs, criminals, spies, bandits, psychopaths, sectarian, chauvinistic fundamentalists, and embezzlers...That is OCCUPATION.

Dividing your country, enabling its cleansing, partitioning it along sectarian and ethnic lines when these lines were non existent before, even forcing couples to divorce as a result of these new maps. That is OCCUPATION.

Emptying your country's treasury of its wealth in billion of Dollars, making fraudulent contracts and stealing by every mean possible. That is OCCUPATION.

And last but not least, witnessing your smelly shits, squatting the palaces of the legitimate President that you slaughtered. That is OCCUPATION.

And I can write a thousand more lines on occupation...So forgive me, Iraq, if I have missed out on something.

So tell me, what part of OCCUPATION don't you understand?


Painting: Iraqi artist, Sabeeh Kalash.