Due Diligence

Khalid Albaih, Eye Test for the Media, November 4, 2019.

Freedom, social justice and the right to take part. In one word: Dignity. People are taking to the streets all over the world and in some cases we have next to no access of information on what is taking place. Iraq is the prime example right now, and the blindness is all the more blatant for the violence with which the demonstrators are met.

Khalid Albaih, 2015.

The Iraqis are taking action, while we are being served passivity and as always other stories take up the spotlight. Such as the killing of IS-leader al-Baghdadi.

When we were preparing Khartoon! last year this cartoon of al-Baghdadi was in the running for a while to be included. It is elegant, giving a precise analysis of a person of not that much importance as scarecrows goes. He is just a noise screen to distract attention from a much larger problem.

The cartoon remained the odd one until he was finally taken out of the book: There was simply no right place for him. He did not add to the arc of the narrative and to return to my point when the book was made, going through the massive amount of cartoons from the hands of Khalid, they create for a dense and detailed narrative on our time. There was already so much material at hand that including al-Baghdadhi would be yet again a mere distraction.

The only interesting fact about him is that he was a useful diversion for all parties involved and 1) diversions are the first thing to tear down in cartooning while 2) Khalid drew said parties strangling Iraq, drawn (and shown back then on this blog) on very the day IS took over Mosul in 2014:

Khalid Albaih, The Remains of Iraq, June 10, 2014.

All of the players form an entangled web of Iraq of which the main point of the cartoon is to let them all be exposed: the blue of Uncle Sam, the green of the Islamists, and the oil as the constant in every dirty conflict. Iraq was spelled out as mere bones at this point. 

In October 2019 Iraq took on a new spelling.

The new I is breaking the way to another beginning or the insistence of one. Not rattling bones, but sharp and collected and fully able to transform itself from all that was and is. It is not a quest taking away from the country, but working to add to the core of it. The protesters are the country.

Khalid Albaih, November 6, 2019.

The protesters do so only to have been met with bullets. They have taken on the entangled maze that is power at play. The old gamers have no intention of giving up their position, thus sending out their armed recruits to cut the protesters short. There may not ultimately be a maze to take on where the one party has a goal and the other none.

The protesters of the one country reflect all the protests right now how the quest for dignity is transformed into movement. First and last their goal is shown to be relevant. The many angles of the bullets make the I above all the sharper for continuing in its stride.

Cartooning is journalism and art in equal measure. The present cartoons on a subject of hardly any attention today show the diligence and responsibility with which the cartoonist covers it. We are given insight into the context and recent history of the players at hand and a perspective on the psychological patterns of one group that has had enough and what another automatically employs when threatened.

This is how it ought to be done by the media. This is how it is done by the cartoonist.

Khalid Albaih, November 2, 2019.

The cartoons shown are courtesy of Khalid Albaih and must not be reproduced without his permission.