New York Times – April 8, 2006

The Gospel Truth
By ELAINE PAGELS

The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. … Jesus said to him, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”ó The Gospel of Judas

THE Gospel of Judas, which remained virtually unknown to us from the time it was written 1,700 years ago until its publication this week, says that when Judas Iscariot handed Jesus over to the Romans, he was acting on orders from Jesus to carry out a sacred mystery for the sake of human salvation: “Jesus said to Judas, ‘Look, you have been told everything. You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.’ ”

For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament. But the unexpected discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945 of more than 50 ancient Christian texts proved what church fathers said long ago: that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are only a small selection of gospels from among the dozens that circulated among early Christian groups. But now the Gospel of Judas ó like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and many others ó opens up new perspectives on familiar gospel stories.

Many scholars who first read these gospels had been taught that they were “heretical,” which meant they were the wrong gospels. When I was introduced to them as a student, we called them “Gnostic” gospels, the name given to them nearly 2,000 years ago by Irenaeus, one of the fathers of the church, who denounced them as false and “heretical.”

Yet those early Christians who loved and revered such texts did not think of themselves as heretics, but as Christians who had received not only what Jesus preached publicly, but also what he taught his disciples when they were talking privately. Many regarded these secret gospels not as radical alternatives to the New Testament Gospels, but as advanced-level teaching for those who had already received Jesus’ basic message. Even the Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus explained things to certain disciples in private, entrusting to them alone “the mystery of the Kingdom of God.”

If so, Jesus would have been doing what many other rabbis did then, and most teachers do today. Many of the gospels not included in the New Testament claim to offer secret teaching: Thus the Gospel of Thomas opens, “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.” The Gospel of Mary Magdalene reveals what Jesus showed Mary in a vision, and the Gospel of Judas claims to offer a spiritual mystery entrusted to Judas alone.

Irenaeus, however, insisted that Jesus did not teach any of his disciples secretly; such secret revelations, he said, were all illegitimate, and those who revered them heretics. Knowing many such gospels circulated among early Christian groups, Irenaeus wrote that “the heretics say that they have more gospels than there actually are; but really, they have no gospel that is not full of blasphemy.”

Many of these secret writings, however, were still read and revered by Christians 200 years later when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, an admirer of Irenaeus, wrote an Easter letter to Christians in Egypt. He ordered them to reject what he called those “secret, illegitimate books” and keep only 27 approved ones. The 27 he named constitute the earliest known list of the New Testament canon, which Athanasius intended above all to be a guideline for books to be read publicly in church. The New Testament Gospels, which contain much that Jesus taught in public, were the most obvious books to put on that list. The secret books, which contained paradox and mystery akin to the mystical teachings of kabbalah, were not considered suitable for beginners.

What in the Gospel of Judas, published this week by the National Geographic Society (disclosure: I was a consultant on the project), goes back to Jesus’ actual teaching, and how would we know? And what else was there in the early Christian movement that we had not known before? These are some of the difficult questions that the discoveries raise for us ó issues that historians are already debating. What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.

Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. Those of us who go to church may find our Easter reflections more mysterious than ever.

Elaine Pagels, the author of “The Gnostic Gospels” and “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas,” is a professor of religion at Princeton.

‘posted by matt greene at 8:55 AM: The widely variable coloration of boletes has made their identification very difficult for me to learn. I’m going to call this B. dryophilus a.k.a. “oak loving bolete”. Identifying characteristics include the blueing reaction of the irregular yellow pores when handled, the pinched and then swollen base of the stalk, and the red cap cracking with age and becoming tinged with olive. The stalk also gradates from red to yellow. I’ll do a spore print next time I find one – it should show brown or olive-brown eliptical spores. B. dryophilus is the most common bolete in Los Angeles county, and associates with coast live oak. It is supposedly edible (and bland). The cask fungus Hypomyces chrysospermum parasitizes this species more readily than any other; I was uncertain of my identification until I found one half encased in a shell of white powder.’

April 6, 2006 New York Times

‘Gospel of Judas’ Surfaces After 1,700 Years

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of what is known as the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years. The text gives new insights into the relationship of Jesus and the disciple who betrayed him, scholars reported today. In this version, Jesus asked Judas, as a close friend, to sell him out to the authorities, telling Judas he will “exceed” the other disciples by doing so.

Though some theologians have hypothesized this, scholars who have studied the new-found text said, this is the first time an ancient document defends the idea.

The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, and now its translation, was announced by the National Geographic Society at a news conference in Washington. The 26-page Judas text is said to be a copy in Coptic, made around A. D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.

Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the geographic society, said the manuscript, or codex, is considered by scholars and scientists to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text to be found in the past 60 years.

“The codex has been authenticated as a genuine work of ancient Christian apocryphal literature,” Mr. Garcia said, citing extensive tests of radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and multispectral imaging and studies of the script and linguistic style. The ink, for example, was consistent with ink of that era, and there was no evidence of multiple rewriting.

“This is absolutely typical of ancient Coptic manuscripts,” said Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at the University of Munster in Germany. “I am completely convinced.”

The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover.”

The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas “you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.

Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus’ teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, “These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse ó and fascinating ó the early Christian movement really was.”

The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.

The Gnostics’ beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.

As the findings have trickled down to churches and universities, they have produced a new generation of Christians who now regard the Bible not as the literal word of God, but as a product of historical and political forces that determined which texts should be included in the canon, and which edited out.

For that reason, the discoveries have proved deeply troubling for many believers. The Gospel of Judas portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus, but as his most favored disciple and willing collaborator.

Scholars say that they have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what was probably an early version of it in a text called Against Heresies, written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, about the year 180.

Irenaeus was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics. He wrote, “They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.”

Karen L. King, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, and an expert in Gnosticism who has not yet read the manuscript released today, said that the Gospel of Judas may well reflect the kinds of debates that arose in the second and third century among Christians.

“You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus’s death was all part of God’s plan, then Judas’s betrayal was part of God’s plan,” said Ms. King, the author of several books on the Gospel of Mary. “So what does that make Judas? Is he the betrayer, or the facilitator of salvation, the guy who makes the crucifixion possible?”

At least one scholar said the new manuscript does not contain anything dramatic that would change or undermine traditional understanding of the Bible. James M. Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University, was the general editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic documents discovered in Egypt in 1945.

“Correctly understood, there’s nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas,” Mr. Robinson said in a telephone interview. He said that the New Testament gospels of John and Mark both contain passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.

Mr. Robinson’s book, “The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and his Lost Gospel” (Harper San Francisco, April 2006), predicts the contents of the Gospel of Judas based on his knowledge of Gnostic and Coptic texts, even though he was not part of the team of researchers working on the document.

The Egyptian copy of the gospel was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back, and found in a multitude of brittle fragments.

Rudolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script. The effort, organized by the National Geographic, was supported by Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American nonprofit organization for the application of technology in historical and scientific projects.

The entire 66-page codex also contains a text titled James (also known as First Apocalypse of James), a letter by Peter and a text of what scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.

Discovered in the 1970’s in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. It moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N. Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was given the name Codex Tchacos.

When attempts to resell the codex failed, Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation.

Mr. Robinson said that an Egyptian antiquities dealer offered to sell him the document in 1983 for $3 million, but that he could not raise the money. He criticized the scholars now associated with the project, some of whom are his former students, because he said they violated an agreement made years ago by Coptic scholars that new discoveries should be made accessible to all qualified scholars.

The manuscript will ultimately be returned to Egypt, where it was discovered, and housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Ted Waitt, the founder and former chief executive of Gateway, said that his foundation, the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, gave the National Geographic Society a grant of more than $1 million to restore and preserve the manuscript and make it available to the public.

” I didn’t know a whole lot until I got into this about the early days of Christianity. It was just extremely fascinating to me,” Mr. Waitt said in a telephone interview. He said he had no motivation other than being fascinated by the finding. He said that after the document was carbon dated and the ink tested, procedures his foundation paid for, he had no question about its authenticity. “You can potentially question the translation and the interpretation, he said, but you can’t fake something like this. It would be impossible.”

London Review of Books | Vol. 28 No. 7 dated 6 April 2006 |

Patrick Cockburn

Iraq is splitting into three different parts. Everywhere there are fault lines opening up between Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In the days immediately following the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1300 bodies, mostly Sunni, were found in and around Baghdad. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry, whose police commandos operate as death squads, asked the Health Ministry to release lower figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang me. “I am not leaving my home,” he said. “The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.”

It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies — all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance — are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in early March. Several days later a group of children playing football in a field noticed a powerful stench. Police opened up a pit which contained the bodies of 27 men, probably all Sunni, stripped to their underpants; they had all been tortured and then shot in the head. Two and a half years ago, when the first suicide bomb targeting the Shias killed 85 people outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, there was no Shia retaliation. They were held back by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the hope of gaining power through legal elections. Since the Samarra bomb this restraint has definitively ended: the Shia militias and death squads slaughter Sunnis in tit-for-tat killings every time a Shia is killed.

Iraqis often deceive themselves about the depth of the sectarian divisions in their country. They say, rightly, that there are many intermarriages between Sunni and Shia and claim the sectarian divide is less extreme than it is in Belfast, where Roman Catholic and Protestant seldom marry. But such marriages are most common among the educated middle class in Baghdad and, in any case, they have become less common since 2003, when sectarian differences widened after Sunnis rebelled against the occupation and the Shia community did not. My Shia and Kurdish friends, who see themselves as wholly non-sectarian, sincerely believe that the three-year-old Sunni rebellion is the work of a few jobless Baathist officials making common cause with Islamic fanatics imported from Saudi Arabia. “They are not real Iraqis,” they say. They refuse to accept that the guerrillas are supported by most of the five-million-strong Sunni community, despite the evidence of opinion polls. The Sunnis and the Kurds, for their part, see the Shia leaders as puppets manipulated by Iranian intelligence. They will not take on board that the 15 or 16 million Shias, who make up 60 per cent of the population, will not give up their bid for power after centuries of marginalisation. Kurdish hostility to Arabs is equally underestimated by both Shia and Sunni. While I was in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, two Sunni friends emailed to say they planned to drive from Baghdad to see me. They didn’t realise that they were as likely to spend the night in jail as in a hotel, because Kurds regard all Arabs visiting from the rest of Iraq with deep suspicion.

The differences between Shia and Kurd explain why Iraq still doesnÔø?t have a new government three months after last DecemberÔø?s elections. The current government is the one that took office in January 2005; based on a Kurdish-Shia alliance, itÔø?s headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shia Dawa Party. Over the past year, Kurdish leaders have come to detest him and are refusing to agree to a new government with him at its head. They were enraged when he made a surprise visit to Turkey in early March in order (they feared) to enlist Turkish support in his bid to rob them of their quasi-independence within Iraq. Above all, the Kurdish leaders fear that Jaafari is manoeuvring to avoid implementing an agreement under which they would gain permanent control of the oil province of Kirkuk, which they captured at the start of the war.

Kirkuk, beneath which lie ten billion barrels of oil reserves, is a prize well worth fighting for. It is also, even by Iraqi standards, a depressing and dangerous city. It sits on the plain 150 miles north of Baghdad, overlooked by a citadel whose ancient houses were wrecked by Saddam Hussein after the failed Kurdish uprising of 1991. There are heaps of rubbish everywhere. Despite the oil reserves, there are mile-long queues of vehicles waiting to get petrol. Shops are small and mean. In the centre of the city a cluster of dilapidated market stalls sell fruit and bread. Ôø?Kirkuk is a ruin, it is the most ruined city in Iraq,Ôø? a Kurdish official said, with bitter pride, as we drove through the city. Over the past fifty years the Kurds have been systematically expelled from Kirkuk. After 1991, a full-scale programme of ethnic cleansing began: between 120,000 and 200,000 Kurds and Turkomans were forced from their homes by Saddam. Almost all the small towns and villages in the province were bulldozed to reduce the Kurdish population and to prevent the buildings being used by guerrillas. The Iraqi constitution, along with the Shia-Kurdish agreement, promised to remove Arab settlers and return Kurds to Kirkuk. Grim place though it is, undisputed possession of the province and its oilfields is vital to the Kurds if they are to get close to self-determination.

Under the new constitution, the fate of Kirkuk will be decided by 31 December 2007. If Kirkuk joins the Kurdish region, the Kurds will have first rights to new oil discoveries. Saddam had not only denied them a share in oil revenues: any Kurd found working in the oil industry was sacked. Ôø?Of the 9000 employees working for the Northern Oil Company in 2003, only 18 were Kurds, and they were mostly servants,Ôø? said Rezgar Ali Hamajan, the chief of KirkukÔø?s provincial council. Now the Kurds are intent on having their own oil. Given that the need to share oil income is almost the only thing holding Iraq together, the secession of Kirkuk to join the Kurdish Regional Government could be the decisive moment in the dissolution of the country.

Inhabited by Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs, Kirkuk is a good if unnerving place in which to observe the growing hatred between IraqÔø?s ethnic communities. The Kurds won five out of nine parliamentary seats in the parliamentary election in December. Ôø?Security is not as bad as in Baghdad,Ôø? said Rezgar Ali, a chain-smoking former land surveyor who was for years a Peshmerga commander in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), while admitting that this is not saying a great deal. He complained that the media exaggerate the violence in the city. Ôø?One day a rich Kurdish lady was kidnapped,Ôø? he said. Ôø?They claimed she was a female Kurdish leader. In fact it was just an ordinary kidnapping.Ôø? He conceded that many Arab police officers were probably collaborating with the insurgents and that several Arab police chiefs had been arrested. Like many Kurdish officials in Kirkuk, he wears a pistol in his belt and has a submachine-gun always close to hand. Whatever happens, he said, the Kurds Ôø?wonÔø?t leave Kirkuk. Even if we had only two thousand Peshmerga we would not leave here.Ôø?

But one recent development has shocked even Rezgar Ali. In the centre of Kirkuk there is a building that seems quite imposing compared to the ramshackle houses all around: this is the Republican Hospital. It is here that most of the casualties from gun battles, bombings and assassinations are taken. In 2005, some 1500 people were killed or injured in Kirkuk province. Large numbers of those taken to the hospital died, and there turned out to be an extraordinary reason for this. Some time earlier, the hospital had recruited an enthusiastic young doctor called Louay, who was always willing to help. What the other doctors didnÔø?t know was that Louay, an Arab, was a member of an insurgent cell of the Ansar al-Sunna group. He used his position to make sure that soldiers, policemen and government officials died of their injuries. A police inquiry found Dr Louay guilty of killing 43 patients. He doesnÔø?t seem to have found this very difficult. Many of the injured were bleeding when they reached the hospital and, according to Colonel Yadgar Shukir Abdullah Jaff, a senior policeman, Ôø?Louay would inject patients he wanted to kill with a high dose of a medicine that made them bleed more.Ôø?

Given that Iraqi hospitals are invariably short-staffed and there is little time for autopsies, Dr Louay might have been able to carry on his killings indefinitely. But earlier this year Kurdish security in Sulaimaniyah arrested the leader of his cell. Abu Muhijiz, whose real name is Malla Yassin, confessed that Louay was a member of his group and detailed the grisly work that he had carried out.

In Kirkuk, the most effective military and police units are Kurdish. The same is true in Mosul, the mainly Sunni city on the Tigris further to the west. Nominally, there are 12,000 police in Mosul province, drawn mainly from the Jabour tribe. But according to Saadi Pire, the former PUK leader in Mosul, Ôø?they are policemen only by day and terrorists at night.Ôø? The Sunni in Mosul, for their part, see what the US claims is a war against insurgents as an American-Kurdish attack on their community.

Across Iraq, the community-based allegiances of members of army and police units are sapping the power of the state. As sectarian and ethnic war escalates, people want militiamen from their own community defending their street, regardless of whether or not they belong in theory to the army or the police. In Sunni areas, the only people well enough armed to organise a defence are the resistance fighters, and the fear of Shia death squads swells their ranks. In Shia areas, sectarian bombings and shootings lead to greater reliance on the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Meanwhile, the number of American casualties has decreased to about one a day, compared to two or three a day last year. The insurgents believe that the Americans are going to leave whatever happens, as support for the war diminishes in the US, and that attacks against US troops are therefore less urgent. But in the Sunni heartlands north of Baghdad, resistance is as strong as it has ever been. On 21 March, a hundred fighters armed with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers and mortars captured a police headquarters and stormed a jail in Muqdadiyah, sixty miles north of Baghdad. By the time they withdrew they had killed 19 policemen, freed 33 prisoners and captured enough radio equipment to make the rest of the police network insecure. Provincial authorities claim the Muqdadiyah police chief was a resistance double-agent.

Solidarity within each community Ôø? Kurdish, Shia and Sunni Ôø? is strong. But none is monolithic. Iraqis in general are highly cynical about the honesty and competence of their own leaders. The four to five million Kurds have a strong sense of national identity and are well organised. Nevertheless, on 16 March thousands of Kurds marching in Halabja to commemorate the deaths of the 5000 people killed in the 1988 poison gas attack on the town burned down their own brand-new monument. It was a curious, circular building outside the city boundaries which housed a museum; from the distance it looked like a strange mosque. Opened by Colin Powell in 2003, it contained lifesize wax models intended to represent the dead and dying, and photographs of the dead. For two years, Kurdish officials had taken foreign officials to the monument as a symbol of Kurdish suffering under Saddam. People in Halabja, however, had watched the visitors with growing rage. Few of them travelled one mile further, into the town itself, to see the sufferings of the present-day inhabitants Ôø? for whom little had been done since 1988. Funds sent from abroad to help the survivors of Saddam HusseinÔø?s most famous atrocity never seemed to arrive.

I reached Halabja after the riot had subsided. The guards at the monument were still looking shaken. The building itself had been gutted by fire: long strips of plastic hung from one of the ceilings and several small fires were still burning. Kana Tewfiq, one of the Peshmerga guards, whoÔø?d been hit in the spine by a stone thrown from the crowd, said that protesters had taken Ôø?gasoline and oil from the museum generator to get the fire goingÔø?. A second group of Peshmerga had arrived and fired into the crowd, killing a 17-year-old demonstrator and wounding half a dozen others. Shako Mohammed, the PUK leader and government representative in the Halabja region, came with a couple of carloads of bodyguards to survey the damage. He said he had begged people not to demonstrate while he took their demands to the PUK government in Sulaimaniyah. He suspected that the crowd had been infiltrated by members of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, which once controlled the region.

In the local hospital, a 29-year-old man called Othman Ali Gaffur was lying in a bed with a bullet through his leg. His injuries looked serious: he was missing part of his left hand and had only one eye. But these turned out to be the result of ordnance detonating when he was playing with it as a child. Othman worked as a journalist on the magazine put out by the handicapped peopleÔø?s association in Halabja, to which five thousand people belong. He said the first aim of the demonstration had been to keep government officials away. Ôø?They were always promising us help but the help never came. There are no roads, no streets here, only mud. They only took people to see the monument to the dead and never to see the living. ThatÔø?s why it became a target.Ôø? Another man, Omar Ali, said he was against violence, but Ôø?if we donÔø?t do something they wonÔø?t listen.Ôø?

At this point several Peshmerga entered the ward and told me to leave. I refused to go, and they seemed divided on what to do. When I did leave they surrounded the car and said I should stay where I was while they rang their headquarters. When they finally got through, they were told to let me go. Later the PUK claimed that Islamic fundamentalists and shadowy pro-Iranian groups had fomented the riots. The next day in Kirkuk, a senior PUK official admitted that this was nonsense. Ôø?What happened in Halabja could happen anywhere in Iraq because people look at what has happened to them and donÔø?t think their leaders are any good.Ôø?

Iraq is divided and the insurgency is strong, but the real reason for the collapse of Iraq is the weakness of the state. Ali Allawi, the finance minister, told me that corruption had reached Nigerian levels and that the government is just a parasitic entity living on oil revenues. ItÔø?s not merely that a percentage of spending disappears into official pockets: entire budgets vanish. The US and Britain are trying to push Iyad Allawi forward as a sort of super-minister in charge of security. But while he was prime minister in 2004-5, the whole $1.3 billion defence procurement budget disappeared. Millions more were spent on a contract to protect the vital Kirkuk-Baiji oil pipeline but the money was embezzled. The few men hired to guard the pipeline usually turned out to be the same men who were blowing it up. Ali Allawi says the insurgency is largely financed by oil smuggling, and 40 to 50 per cent of the vast profits go to the resistance.

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A Ôø?national unity governmentÔø? may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. Ôø?The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,Ôø? one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.

Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. Ôø?The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the fighting,Ôø? a Kurdish leader told me. Ôø?The soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from their own communities.Ôø? The parts of the country with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street by street.

Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq since 1978. The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq will be published in October.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/unklemunki/sets/72057594094432772/

Heritage extremists threaten builders with sites damage

Robert Booth
Saturday April 1, 2006
The Guardian

Police are to investigate threats against housebuilders and demolition contractors made by Britain’s first known architectural extremists who have accused them of being responsible for “beautiful buildings, full of history, being ripped apart and replaced with featureless junk”.

Barratt Homes, Bovis Homes, Laing Homes and Westbury are on the Historic Buildings Liberation Front’s list of 37 targets which have been threatened with “retaliation for nationwide devastation” in an attempt to escalate a decade-long campaign by the shadowy group which has staged dozens of attacks across Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.

The group says it is dedicated to stopping modern housing developments and the destruction of historic buildings.

It claims that “as a result of developers’ greed and planners’ indifference, the erosion of regional identity is at crisis point”.

Police believe the group is being spearheaded by an individual. So far most of the attacks have been carried out single-handed.

The HBLF has damaged new buildings with paint and angle-grinders, slashed and punctured tyres on demolition contractors’ vehicles and caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the property of companies and individuals connected to new developments or the demolition of historic buildings.

Its campaign restarted this month with a call for supporters to step up activity and target the housebuilding companies which are being relied upon by the government to make up a supply shortfall of 50,000 homes a year nationwide.

A manual on how to carry out attacks has been written for recruits and includes instructions on using a specialist grinding wheel to tear into brickwork and glass “throughout the night to cause tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage”.

There is advice on executing its trademark technique of splashing buildings and cars with white paint. It recommends tyre walls are spiked with Stanley knives and that activists carry bolt cutters and saws for vandalising fences and cables. Weedkiller should be used to paint the letters HBLF on to the grass of target sites.

Members are told to cover their faces and wear hats and gloves. Old clothes, especially for assignments, should be kept hidden, for example under the floorboards in a garden shed. The manual even advises would-be attackers who are feeling nervous. “You are feeling apprehensive, leave your tools where you can pick them up later, go into the site and sit down for a time. Relax for a while, perhaps with a flask of tea,” it advises.

It also offers advice on avoiding capture and insists on every action being accompanied by a calling card.

“There has been a huge indifference to his beliefs and horror at the nature of his crimes,” said Sergeant Howard Travis of Bedfordshire police, referring to the invidual thought to be behind the attacks. “In the last 10 years, crimes claimed to be by the Historic Buildings Liberation Front have been committed in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. It involves very serious damage and is without a shadow of doubt a serious issue.”

HBLF’s reported activities include an attack on the offices of Hitchin Youth Trust in Hertfordshire because the trust’s building was slated for demolition prior to redevelopment. It spiked scores of tyres at two demolition companies and in September 2003 it ground the letters HBLF into the wall of a social housing development by Bedford Pilgrims housing association in Kempston where an ornate Victorian house had stood, causing damage estimated at Ôø?2,500.

“The attack came out of the blue,” said the association’s chief executive, John Cross. “There had been a campaign mounting through formal means and some councillors were saying perhaps we should save our Victorian heritage, but it came as a shock.” He said the building was replaced with “routine family housing that wouldn’t win any architecture awards” but denied it eroded local character and pointed out the Victorian building was fire-damaged and could only be reused at great expense.

The property of Gerald Angell, a farmer in Ashwell village, Hertfordshire, was attacked after he decided to carry on with a project to build a new barn in spite of a planning refusal because the site was thought to contain the remains of an historically important villa. “The experience was absolutely shocking,” said Courtenay Patten, a friend of Mr Angell. “They knifed his tractor tyres and they also knifed my Land Rover tyres and they threw paint over his tractor and over his house.”

The HBLF’s call for action was reported in the Architect’s Journal this week after it was sent to campaign group, SAVE Britain’s Heritage.

“There is no way we could condone violent action, but this reflects widespread concern and anger at the continuing loss of great historic buildings and the continuing erosion of the wider historic environment,” SAVE director Adam Wilkinson said. “There are thousands of houses threatened with demolition in the north and midlands under government policy.”

A spokesman for the House Builders Federation refused to respond to the HBLF’s criticisms. “These are criminal activities and are matters for the police.”

COURTESY BEN. C.!