BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
U.S. president William Clinton's four-day shower of cruise
missiles and bombs on 22 million Iraqis has escalated political
tensions and social turmoil in the Mideast in a way not seen
since Washington's 1991 Gulf War slaughter. Tens of thousands of
people rallied in the streets throughout the region to protest
what they considered an outrageous assault on Arab people.
The Associated Press noted December 18 that "not one Arab government has expressed support for the airstrikes." The news agency reported that the attack was condemned by the world's largest Muslim group, the 52-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference based in Saudi Arabia.
"Clinton is nothing more than a criminal," said a student in a demonstration December 19 of more than 1,000 people at the University of Jordan in Amman. "He says he respects the month of Ramadan by not starting his attack on Iraq during the holy month, as if it is okay to strike our Arabs and Muslim people and to kill them during any other month."
Hundreds of students also demonstrated at Yarmouk University, and students at private and public high schools said they organized protests on their campuses. More than a dozen unions and 14 opposition parties in Jordan issued a December 19 statement urging Arab governments to condemn the bombardment. The next day more than 3,000 women marched in Amman.
That same day, December 20, more than 100,000 protesters marched in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Though the demonstration was led by a banned Islamic group, the government did not try to stop it. Similar actions were organized there during the 1991 onslaught against the Iraqi people.
In Yemen 15,000 protesters rallied on the streets of San'a December 18 chanting, "America is the enemy of the Muslims." About 2,500 people in Beirut, Lebanon, organized a sit-in outside UN headquarters, and in Egypt 4,000 students burned U.S. and Israeli flags December 19 at Banha University, north of Cairo.
Also that day, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets of Damascus, Syria. "The Syrian people are with you, our Iraqi brothers," read one banner carried by the marchers. Syria's parliament speaker Abdul-Kader Qaddoura told that legislative body, "[We] condemn and denounce this attack and call on the international community to condemn and halt it immediately."
About 1,000 students attacked the U.S. embassy and some hurled rocks at the British embassy in Damascus. They overturned a British diplomatic vehicle and the U.S. embassy's Marine guards reportedly fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.
Other protest actions included 2,000 people in Khartoum, Sudan, where Washington bombed a pharmaceutical plant in August claiming the facility was used to make components for chemical weapons. Some 4,000 people rallied outside the U.S. Consulate in the Netherlands to protest bombing raids.
Palestinians take to the streets
More than 4,000 Palestinians marched in the West Bank city of
Hebron December 19, despite attempts by the Palestinian Authority
to ban protest actions without prior permission. Israeli soldiers
attacked the demonstration with rubber bullets and tear gas,
injuring at least 100 people. Elsewhere, about 2,500 Palestinians
marched in Jenin, West Bank, and 400 rallied in the Gaza Strip
town of Rafah. In southern Lebanon, 1,000 Palestinian refugees
rallied against the bombing as they burned U.S. and Israeli
flags.
On December 18 about 15,000 Palestinians demonstrated in the streets of Nablus, West Bank, chanting "Death to America." U.S. flags distributed by the Palestinian Authority during Clinton's visit the previous week were trampled and burned. At Manger Square in Bethlehem, protesters found some leftover U.S. flags and wrapped them around their shoes to show contempt for Clinton's hypocrisy. Other actions that day included a funeral procession joined by 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank village of Beit Douku for a youth killed by Zionist troops during an earlier protest against the U.S. bombing.
Palestinian cops beat 500 protesters in Gaza City December 18 and arrested nine journalists who were covering the demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority shut down media that broadcast programs on the U.S. military assault and protests in the West Bank against it. An Associated Press photographer was briefly detained by Palestinian security, who warned him not to take pictures of other protest actions.
The rising tensions and the dilemma posed for the Palestinian Authority to curtail protests against Washington's war moves was also faced by other Arab regimes that are more pliant servants for the U.S. imperialists. In Jordan 500 police were mobilized to surround a rally of 500 people in Amman December 18. And in Cairo, Egypt, about 300 cops circled a rally of some 40 people at a mosque near the U.S. embassy in Cairo.
The governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates were reticent about allowing support operations for Washington's war machine on their territory, including takeoff of refueling planes that service fighter jets and airspace clearance.
The government of Saudi Arabia, which had long refused to permit the 60 U.S. warplanes based there to attack Iraq from Saudi soil, hardly acknowledged its operational support for the missile barrage. Reporters on bases in the region were told not to disclose their location.