Al-Shoura [Archives:2003/683/Press Review]

2 Nov. 2003
Main headlines:
– Washington seeks to make Yemen headquarters for its activities
– Tripartite grouping countries impose more isolation on Aforki
– War crime, Occupation kills 14 Iraq demonstrators
– Advanced training course on ‘’ Rights in Family’’
– 200 trainees on small industries
– 631 detainees on charge of dual jobs stage sit-in Lahj
– In Aden, Owners of nationalized properties demand their return, accusing local council members of benefiting from them
– Local Councils, minimized image of central government failures
Columnist Ali Mohammed Omer comments on a recent fire raged in al-Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The street is renowned of housing tens of bookshops and books of various branches of knowledge and culture. The writer says that it does not need hard effort to pinpoint the side benefiting from burning Iraq’s bookshops and libraries. Those who have looted he Iraqi museums and antiquities during the entering of the American military forces in Baghdad under whose nose all acts of destruction and looting of Iraqi universities and educational establishments were carried out are the first accused ones and they are responsible of what happened and still going on in Iraq, especially against the Iraqi cultural heritage. The American occupation is held responsible for what has and is happening to the Iraqi humanitarian and intellectual heritage. Whatever its justifications are colonization as a phenomenon has its political and economic and other dimensions and also have its cultural and intellectual goals which usually take parallel directions:
– the first aims at imposing concepts of colonization culture on the colonized peoples,
– and the second is effacing the cultural identity of the people under its control. These two directions complete each other.
The tragedy the Iraqi people are living since its occupation in April is by all specifications a national and humanitarian tragedy. What is destroyed and being destroyed in Iraq is not only the political and economic structure but also the civilization and culture of the people of Iraq in the first place and the Arab Islamic nation in the other and even for humanity in general.
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