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(回答先: 部族は断ったらしい。NYT(login必要記事）Re: 米が部族長らに警告 投稿者 木村愛二 日時 2003 年 11 月 11 日 23:34:32)
LAW AND ORDER : Iraqi Tribes, Asked to Help G.I.'s, Say They Can't
By SUSAN SACHS
Published: November 11, 2003
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 8 ・As a tribal chieftain in Iraq's most rebellious city, Sheik Khamis el-Essawi has met more American commanders in the last seven months than he can remember.
They all make the same polite yet firm demand. He must, they say, exert his legendary tribal authority to stop guerrilla attacks on their troops.
Sheik Khamis, a dapper man whose Buessa tribe still controls a fine swath of fertile land along the Euphrates, says he keeps responding that, alas, his influence is just not what it used to be.
"Every time a new general comes, they call us to a meeting and say the same things," he said after conferring Saturday with the latest high-ranking visitor, Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East. "But they don't understand that the sheiks have no control over those people doing the attacks. Believe me, those people are not going to listen to me."
In Iraq's Shiite-dominated south, a cohesive group of Shiite Muslim clergymen, quickly established themselves as the new authority figures when official hostilities ended and they urged their followers to tolerate the occupation.
There has also been virtually no violence in the north, where the majority Kurds had long built up their own institutions.
But in restive Falluja, and places like it across the Sunni Muslim heartland of central Iraq, Saddam Hussein had so decimated the natural social hierarchy, Iraqis say, that no group could fill the political vacuum left by his ouster.
"We miss the support that the government used to give," said Sheik Khamis, lighting up a Pleasure brand cigarette and recalling the days when no one in power expected him to actually lead his tribesmen. "Now it's the state that's coming to us for support."
In their day, imperial powers like the Ottoman Turks and the British used to manage this unruly region by co-opting the tribes, keeping them occupied with internal rivalries or buying their loyalty with land.
Iraq's newest foreign occupiers are trying the same formula, but the ingredients are different, producing inconclusive results. Under Mr. Hussein, tribal leaders became an extension of the all-powerful Baath Party, rendering them irrelevant in the eyes of many of their followers.
In the 1990's, Mr. Hussein further undercut tribal authority with his "faith campaign," which placed a new class of militant Sunni clerics above the tribes in the social and political mix, residents here say.
Since Baghdad fell in April, five different American commanders have tried to tame Falluja, a rough and tumble city of 450,000 people that lived almost exclusively off the patronage of Mr. Hussein's government.
Nearly every day, bombs explode near American convoys, rocket-propelled grenades are fired at American patrols or soldiers raid the houses of suspected insurgents. On Nov. 2, a rocket fired from the outskirts of Falluja brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing 16 soldiers on board.
To judge by the look of Falluja, the violent opposition still has the upper hand.
The main streets display neatly written banners urging people to kill "traitors" and Americans. The police station, where officers are paid and supervised by American soldiers, is reinforced against attack with sandbags and barbed wire. City Hall, where the American-appointed mayor sits, has been hit repeatedly with rocket-propelled grenades.
Yet the newest American commander is confident he has found the right combination of military force, persuasion and promise of a brighter future to pacify Falluja.
"What we offer is this," said Lt. Col. Brian M. Drinkwine, of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took charge two months ago. "If Falluja and the surrounding area are safe, then the coalition and the international community would invest here."
The colonel and his men operate from trailers on the southern outskirts of the city, among the bleak remnants of an old holiday camp. They frequently invite clerics and tribal leaders over for chats about the disadvantages of allowing attacks to continue. Sometimes they also make the point more forcefully.
After American convoys encountered homemade explosives on roads running through Sheik Khamis's land, soldiers turned up on his doorstep and demanded to search his home for weapons.
The sheik was delighted.
"When they came to my house, honestly I was happy," he recalled. "It's kind of a cover for me because some people were calling me a traitor for supporting the Americans. It actually helped me."
Colonel Drinkwine has also dangled financial incentives, spending thousands of dollars to fix some schools and a hospital. Not everyone was impressed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11FALL.html?th
(Page 2 of 2)
"He was telling us one day how he spent $3,000 on this and $5,000 on that," said Sheik Ibrahim el-Buessa, a cousin of Sheik Khamis. "So what? When Sheik Khamis's father died two years ago, we paid $35,000 just for the funeral."
The American commander's adviser on tribal and religious affairs is a young Arab-American medic in his unit, Pfc. Khaled Dudin, a Californian who spent part of his childhood among the Bedouin tribes of Saudi Arabia.
Private Dudin has taken to warning local Sunni clerics that they will have "blood responsibility" under Islamic law if they incite their followers to attack American forces.
"I am a paratrooper and an American Muslim," the soldier declared, "and I can quote Koran as well as anybody."
But there is nothing simple about Falluja and its murky stew of tribal leaders, Saddam-era pretenders to tribal power, clerics of varying militancy and a population primed for hostility to the United States.
The city and occupiers got off to a bad start. A pro-Saddam Hussein demonstration in late April led to a shootout with soldiers that left at least 15 Iraqis dead. Other lethal confrontations followed, fueled in part by mosque preachers who spread stories about American soldiers spying on women from their posts in residential neighborhoods.
The rumor, denied by the military, was poison in a conservative city where women rarely leave their homes and then only when they are completely covered. Iraqis said it also enhanced the standing of young Sunni clerics who preached that the United States was waging war on Islam, a theme that had been encouraged by Saddam Hussein.
"This used to make a lot of young men eager to go fight the infidels and become a martyr," said Abdelhamid al-Jumaili, one of the more moderate of Falluja's clerics. "So now it's practically impossible for clerics to preach moderation and patience."
Sheik Jumaili, whose title is religious rather than tribal, would prefer to see Falluja at peace.
Most of the city's clerics share these views, he said, but are too divided and frightened to exert influence.
"What can a majority do against 100 people with guns who can go into the street and terrorize us?" he said. "These people don't listen to clerics or anyone else who disagrees with them. They only listen to the hardliners, those who will march with them."
The same questions were asked one night last week in Saadi Muhammad's home in Falluja. The men sat cross-legged on the floor for the sunset meal to break the daylong Ramadan fast. The women stayed in the kitchen, away from visitors, letting the children deliver the flat bread they had baked in an outdoor oven.
The talk around the dishes of soups and rice was of rising prices for gasoline, meat and vegetables, and the many neighbors who lost their jobs in the disbanded military and security services. Mr. Muhammad, a schoolteacher, could not work up much indignation. Under the Americans, his monthly salary has skyrocketed from about $30 to $300.
"We used to sit and dream about people with satellite television," he said. "Now I have it so the kids can watch sports. Before I had a wreck of a car. Now I bought a nice used one. We fixed up the house, too. I guess I'm rich."
Mr. Muhammad was reluctant to criticize openly those who attack American forces here, insisting that no one was fighting for Saddam Hussein ・"all he brought us was wars" ・but noting, "It's a kind of religious belief that they should not accept occupation."
After several hours of conversation over tea and plates of fruit, he let his own frustration show, just for an instant.
"We were just discussing this at school, that with no security, companies will not come to help us rebuild and the Americans will stay longer because all Iraq will be in chaos," he said. "But I can't stand up and say anything."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11FALL.html?pagewanted=2&th
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