What can Iraq’s war on emos tell us about state-sanctioned murder?
Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, how does a government get away with the state-sanctioned murder of its own people? I’m glad you asked because there have been loads of examples of this from all over the world…and a lot of them are really quite recent.
At the risk of talking about a news story still playing out, we should analyse a story from a few years ago so we can also see the aftermath of it and how said government responded to it. We should also pick a government that bears more than a passing resemblance to the one responsible for the murder of two of its own citizens over the past couple of days. Thus, we’ll have a look at Nouri al-Maliki’s premiership of Iraq in 2012. After all, it’s also a transparently corrupt theocratic dictatorship in all but name, waging a war of terror on innocent civilians.
Now, focusing on one crime against humanity of al-Maliki’s premiership almost feels immoral. After all, there are so many that he committed that focusing on one over the others sounds like you’re making the others lesser. This is precisely why governments that flirt with fascism keep throwing atrocities at their populace. People can focus on one, process it and decide what to do about it. So you give them one every hour, let the proles argue about which is more important and then do whatever the hell you want.
The fact is that every atrocity committed by any government deserves analysis and retribution, this one included. Not more so than others, but not less so than others. It’s just another story of a government deciding that one group of its populace is worth murdering and going through with it. Turns out that’s a relevant story for today, so we might as well understand what happened and how they got away with it, even if it sounds trivial to some.
In 2012, al-Maliki’s government decided that it was emos and goths that were worth murdering for the sake of controlling their populace.
How did this state-sanctioned murder begin?
In the West, the story broke after reports that alternative youths who followed the emo and goth trends were being stoned to death after a memo was posted to the website of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, basically the wing of the government tasked with overseeing border control.
Civilians being murdered at the behest of border control? Funny, that. The memo read “The Emo phenomenon or devil worshipping is being followed by the Moral Police who have the approval to eliminate [the phenomenon] as soon as possible since it’s detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger.”
This memo led to the deaths of a reported “90 to a hundred” emo youths at the hands of government officials who led gangs of other, easily led teens while disguised as civilians themselves. They weren’t alone; there were unconfirmed reports of many more deaths, tortures and injuries done in the name of combating what they saw as a sign of societal decay. It wasn’t, they just wanted people to be scared of the government, but if you asked them, that’s what they’d say.
After that, they got conservative voices in the press explaining why these children deserved to die for expressing themselves differently. People like conservative cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who branded the children that the government murdered as “fools” and said that “experts much finish them”. After all that, you get the grace note. The claim that all this is a smear on the government’s good name, with Ayatollah Mohammed al-Yakoubi claiming to the press that he reports of these killings (most of which were filmed and photographed by their perpetrators) were false.
He said that the whole thing was a ruse “aimed at tarnishing the image of those who are religious and have problems with the current government”. Which, never forget, is a sign that it could get worse. At this point, al-Maliki’s Iraq was at the same place that Donald Trump’s America is in now. Denying that the murders they’re responsible for were illegal. Soon, we will get to a point where they’ll have the power to proudly admit to it. At which point it may be too late to do anything else but take drastic action.
But sure. The midterms will end all of this. Sure.