Maliki in damage-control mode

DAMASCUS - "Never mention defeat." These were the wise words of British prime minister Winston Churchill during World War II. Throughout the war, he always told the people of Great Britain to never mention the word "surrender" and he always tried to hold back bad news.

With little success, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is trying to do the same in Iraq. Apart from basically uncontrollable news, such as a spreading cholera epidemic which is claiming lives almost as fast as the terrorists, Iraq is saturated with bad news and its increasingly difficult to quell.

Maliki's office ignored, for example, news that yet another mass grave had been discovered in Karbala. Pro-Maliki dailies turned a blind eye to the fact that a grave - with 22 bodies - was found this

 

week, with corpses all murdered in the summer of 2008. Twenty-one bodies were identified as male, while one remained "unknown" because of its mutilation.

For long in private and public discourse, Maliki and his team claimed that this kind of brutality only happened under Saddam Hussein; only in the "previous era". Never after 2003 - never under Maliki. The premier himself refused to comment, troubled by yet another reality coming out of Iraq, being the displacement of 1,600 Christian families from Mosul.

Ever since the occupation of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi Christians have complained that they are being persecuted by Islamic militias. In some cases, many Christians were killed, churches attacked and women raped for walking outdoors without wearing headscarves.

Over the past 10 days, 12 Iraqi Christians have been found dead in Iraq, angering the prime minister, who created a senior ministerial delegation to investigate the crimes. The group is composed of the ministers of defense, industry, planning and refugees.

The depiction of Maliki's Iraq as a theocracy where freedom of religion is not tolerated is a terrible setback for Maliki, and is tarnishing his image in the United States and Europe. Ordinary Iraqis - mainly Christian - cannot but compare him with Saddam Hussein, who despite all the faults of his dictatorship, upheld religious diversity in Iraq and protected Iraqi Christians from fundamentalist threats.

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