Ayoon Wa Azan (He Has No Other Ally But Me)

My relationship with a Lebanese friend dates back to our days at the American University in Beirut. After we both got married, our friendship then became a family relationship that joined together our wives, then our children. While I am a journalist who only writes under his own name and every word I say is written down and recorded, he is a businessman whose primary activities took place in Iraq and Iran in the beginning, where he was awarded contracts to provide fire engines and fire-fighting chemicals. He then moved to the Gulf where he had contracting companies and represented international companies.

We were supposed to celebrate this year our thirtieth trip to Hungary where we hunted birds and rabbits; after having been displaced out of Lebanon because of the civil war, we went on a search for a hunting place that replaces the small birds we used to hunt in the Bekaa Valley or South Lebanon, and thus found what we sought in Hungary.

The thirtieth trip to Hungary was ruined by my friend’s detention at a police station in Frankfurt since last July. He was returning to the South of France from the Gulf, as he did hundreds of times in the past. When he attempted to change airplanes to finish his trip, he was arrested by the German police on an arrest warrant issued by the Interpol, at the request of the U.S Department of Justice, on charges of corruption and bribery in the oil for food program in Iraq.

I admit that I do not know much about my friend’s business, since there is a mutual animosity between me and “French”, and also since I am disabled in everything that is related to numbers, and that every number is “difficult”, and not just the one that Abu Ammar, Rest in Peace, used to talk about. For this reason, I am not writing today to claim that my friend is innocent, and that there is a conspiracy to ruin the hunting trip. I will leave that for the courts to decide, but I want to say the following:

In the transparency indicator, or the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), there are 180 countries accounted for, with the top ranks being occupied by countries such as Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, and Finland.

For years, Iran under the occupation has been in the last rank, and last year, Iraq equally occupied along with Myanmar the 178th and 179th ranks; however, the last country this year was Somalia, but I do not consider Somalia to be a state (Afghanistan occupied the 173rd rank, also thanks to the occupation).

Today, there is a daily news item about the corruption in Iraq, just like the “dish of the day”. This is although Iraq was far from corruption in the days of Saddam Hussein, because he used to kill the corrupted unless they were of his own gang and had his consent, while Abdel Karim Qassem was accused of many things, but not of corruption. Moreover, the monarchy in Iraq was even farther from corruption, and I remember that King Faisal II asked the Iraqi parliament to cover the expenses of his official visit to Britain at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II, because he did not have enough to pay for the trip in an oil producing country.

The Americans then came with the Iraqi dissident spies, impostors, thieves and exiles who were rejected by the people and who had the goal of “liberating” Iraq, but who then murdered a million Iraqis with the killings still going on. They thus rendered the cradle of world civilization, before the Nile Valley itself, into the most corrupt and crime-ridden area of the world.

The arrest warrant made against my friend was issued a year before the surprise at Frankfurt, that is, in the days of George W. Bush. I do not know why it was not executed until the summer. Again, I am not trying to second-guess the judiciary and its verdict, but I am saying that there is a list of a hundred Lebanese, including officials or their children, who were involved in the oil for food program.

Some of the names were published at the time, after the scandal had seemed to implicate the United Nations and its staff, before the case was closed without any investigation. This made it seem as though my friend was the only Lebanese who dealt under a program that involved tens of thousands of contracts, with each involving a bribe to the regime of Saddam Hussein, after the latter had insisted on an additional amount to be paid to his government for each contract, all under the knowledge of the United Nations and the Unites States and their silence.

The program, whether it is corrupt or whether it is pure and untainted, did not kill anyone. However, it was the Bush administration that forged the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which led to the death of one million innocent people, all while the head of the war mongering gang Dick Cheney is at large, roaming freely and giving lectures without being held accountable by anyone.

In fact, all the above is in agreement with a report published by the New York Times last week, and which mentioned that the Blackwater security company had paid bribes that amounted to one million dollars, to Iraq after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians. I did not hear yet that anyone was arrested or interrogated for these murders, and not for the bribes alone.

Blackwater obtained contracts in the billions of dollars, and after facing repeated charges, it changed its name to Xe, and is still being awarded government contracts. Nonetheless, this company remains a drop in the sea of corruption represented by Halliburton, Cheney’s original company; in fact, most of the 50 billion dollar contracts that were allocated by the U.S government for the reconstruction of Iraq were given to Halliburton without holding public tenders. As such, the Inspector General for the reconstruction of Iraq is now investigating contracts worth $ 6.4 billion, while acknowledging the corruption, the lack of control and the fact that some bills were paid twice or to fictitious addresses.

After all of this, a friend is arrested in Frankfurt at the request of the U.S Justice Department, on charges of corruption in individual contracts within the oil for food program. He finds no one at his side except a friend, while Roman Polanski rapes a 13 year old girl and then finds in Europe and America those who defend him and those who attack the judiciary in support of a human monster, all while a respected businessman and a family man finds no other ally but me.

khazen@alhayat.com [1]