Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche - New York Times, September 17, 2007

On a recent Tuesday, a thin parade of tired-looking couples trudged through the office of a family court judge in Sharchiya, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad. Only about 5 percent of the marriage contracts he registers are for mixed-sect couples, down from about 50 percent before the war, the judge said…. The court is one of the city’s few family courts, but as a testament to how separated the neighborhoods are now, just one in 10 couples he marries is Sunni.

Omar’s father was shot dead by six men from the neighborhood in May. Omar can name every one of them. Now they visit his grocery shop and take sodas without paying. They were poor before the war. Now they drive Land Cruisers taken from their victims.

They drive through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting songs about the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and sometimes honking the horn….

Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards to his father’s killers.

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust - Independent, August 28, 2007

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation.