At least 14 youths have been stoned to death in Baghdad in the past three weeks in what appears to be a campaign by Shiite militants against youths wearing Western-style “emo” clothes and haircuts, security and hospital sources say.
Militants in Shiite neighborhoods where the stonings have taken place circulated lists on Saturday naming more youths targeted to be killed if they do not change the way they dress.
The killings have taken place since Iraq’s interior ministry drew attention to the “emo” subculture 
last month, labeling it “Satanism” and ordering a community police force to stamp it out.
“Emo” is a genre of punk rock music that originated in the United States in the 1980s. Fans are known for their distinctive dress, often including tight jeans, T-shirts with logos and distinctive long or spiky haircuts.
At least 14 bodies of youths have been brought to three hospitals in eastern Baghdad bearing signs of having been beaten to death with rocks or bricks, security and hospital sources told Reuters under condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Nine bodies were brought to hospitals in Sadr City, a vast, poor Shiite neighborhood, three were brought to East Baghdad’s main al-Kindi hospital and two were brought to the central morgue, medical sources said.
Six other young people, including two girls, were wounded in beatings intended as warnings, the security sources said.
“Last week I signed the death certificates of three of those young people, and the reason for death I wrote in my own hand was severe skull fractures,” a doctor at al-Kindi hospital told Reuters. “A very powerful blow to the head caused these fractures which totally smashed the skull of the victim.”
Other sources put the”emo” death toll much higher. Hana al-Bayaty of Brussels Tribunal, a nongovernmental organization dealing with Iraqi issues, said the current figure ranges “between 90 and 100,” Arabic-language newspaper Al Arabiya reported on its website.
via World News – Iraqi teens stoned to death for wearing ‘emo’ clothes.
One thing that strikes me in reading about Emos is how much other adolescents target them for bullying in places where the subculture genuinely has flourished, like the US. (A comment on an earlier post I didn’t let through, from an IP address in Atlanta, Georgia, read: “Hahahah Gay Emos in Iraq? What the fuck is going on ?? Hahhaah emo iraqis i can’t imagine that shit lol .. we should stick dildos up their asses and fucking set them on fire”). Emo style (unlike the comparatively hard-edged cynicism of goth) emphasizes open emotional vulnerability coupled with a certain nervy fearlessness in displaying it. You can see how, in a society with repressively stratified gender roles like Iraq or high school, this would be a comprehensive recipe for not fitting in. Boys 
aren’t supposed to be vulnerable at all; girls would face reprisals from more confidently feminist girls for reveling in their weakness, and from boys for the covert, armored bravery with which they reveal it. Equally, you can see how, for those who feel at odds with those gender straitjackets, Emo would be a way to find a community, and an Archimedean point from which to start saying “no.” No one should slight the heroism in that.
Iraq is far from the first place to crack down on Emo. In addition to all the school principals who have gone apoplectic, my colleague Brian Whitaker points out that Saudi religious police arrested 10 Emo girls in Dammam in 2010, among other grounds because they were “trying to imitate men.” And in Russia, always reliable for such things, lawmakers in 2008 contemplated a bill to restrict Emo websites and ban Emo coiffures from schools and public buildings. (What headscarves are to the laic French, hairstyles are to religious Muscovy.)
Emo culture’s “negative ideology” may encourage depression, social withdrawal and even suicide, the bill alleges – with young girls being particularly vulnerable. ”Of course, there are emo teens who just listen to their music. But our actions are not directed at them but rather at those who also hurt themselves, commit suicide and promote those acts,” bill co-author Igor Ponkin explained to the Moscow Times. Though we are not certain how Ponkin intends to target people who have committed suicide, he certainly seems determined.
There was also angry rhetoric about how the state was losing control of its population: ”‘The point of the bill is so that by 2020, Moscow will have someone to rule its government,’ explained Alexander Grishunin, an adviser to bill sponsor Yevgeny Yuryev, apparently without irony.” That, of course, is always part of the point of these panics. They not only reinforce the state’s power, they furnish it a raison d’etre. What better legitimates the repressive side of rule in the hypothesized public’s mind than the defense of custom and the control of deviance? And again and again — as the middle class find that kids, given a little money, will start carving out a dangerous independence — deviance among bourgeois youth turns into repression’s favored object.
The main differences in Iraq are that state urging, or state action, finds a responsive echo among the militias; and that both forces, either dispossessed of or disdaining more delicate methods, prefer the crudity of the gun. The extremity of the solution doesn’t erase the ubiquity of the impulse to repress. The Emos who are dying in Iraq stand up for all of us who, stuck with being different, chose to embrace it. I am ashamed I can do nothing to help, just salute them.
and more -
Ministry of Interior waging a campaign to eliminate the “EMO”
The Director of Community Police of the Ministry of the Interior has been following up on the phenomenon of “EMO” or Satanists, and they have official approval to eliminate them as soon as possible, because the dimensions of this community have begun to move in another direction, and are now threatening danger.
It is noteworthy that the phenomenon of “EMO” derives from the word “emotional” in English. It is a widespread experience among adolescents, not just in Iraq, but in the majority of communities. They rely on appearance and movements as a means to express their feelings and embody their behavior and outlook on life.
Colonel Mushtaq Talib Mohammadawi said: “The EMO phenomenon was discovered by members of the Directorate in the capital, Baghdad. They have studied it, prepared reports and research, and gone to the Ministry of the Interior to obtain approval to follow up this case and determine how to eliminate them.”
He added that the Ministry of the Interior recognized the importance of this, and a priority was obtaining the approval of the Ministry of Education specifically for the preparation of an integrated plan that would let them enter all he schools in the capital.
He continued that they had marked the spread of the phenomenon specifically in the schools of Baghdad, but that they faced great difficulty because of the lack of a women’s cadre in the district that would permit them to pursue the issue in detail, especially as the phenomenon had spread most among girls aged 14 to 18 years. Signs included the following: they wear strange, tight clothes with skull-like decorations, and use school implements in the form of skulls, and put earrings in their noses and their tongues, along with other manifestations of the exotic.
“Eliminate.” Who can say exactly what that was meant to mean, in a country brutalized to the root over the last forty years? Toward the end the statement morphs into an analysis of the schools: but the Emos aren’t a “phenomenon” merely to be left to the Ministry of Education; otherwise why would the cops want unimpeded entry to their corridors?
Militias have been killing kids suspected of being “Emos” for several weeks now, in Baghdad and apparently several other cities. The scope of the killings is unclear, with figures from 56 to 90 dead traded in the media in the last three days. The best you can say of this press release is that it echoes with the cry of Henry II – you know, the English king who talked overloudly to himself about his Archbishop: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” His knights overheard him, and the priest turned up dead. The statement, by the most generous interpretation, sends a perhaps-inadvertent message to the militias that the Ministry wants the problem eliminated, and is looking for help. By a more sinister reading, it says the Ministry is eager to get its own hands bloody as well. Given the thuggish brutality of Nouri al-Maliki’s administration, the second is hardly unlikely.
from a paper bird blog
