wildfirejo

Just have to share this, from Herbert:- How many American soldiers does it take to change a lightbulb? About 130,000 so far, but don't hold your breath.

Last night we were in an internet centre on Sadoon Street because all the ones near home were closed, it being Friday and boxing day. We sat down and a rocket roared down the street. OK, probably that’s not strictly accurate, but there were lots of exploding noises and we decided perhaps we weren’t that keen to communicate with the world after all.

Raed’s uncle rang to say that US planes were bombing the Ad-Dora area where he lives with cluster bombs. Can someone please tell them to stop littering residential areas with delayed action explosives? The constant racket of fighter planes overhead combined with the flashes of lighting – I think it was lightning – and the small quakes of explosions, sometimes not small enough for comfort, were the background to the evening. We had electricity for quite a few hours, for a pleasant change, so we put the music on loud and turned up the bass.

The next door neighbours say they’re trying to intimidate people in the city with the low flying; either that or they’re bombing outside town. They say it isn’t safe to travel out of Baghdad any more. Who knows? www.albasrah.net is publishing weekly Resistance Reports and photos from the south. I'm not in favour of killing civilians, whoever does it, but this is information you won’t get anywhere else. Melody, don’t look. It will make you cross.

Melody says the American soldiers, “bless their hearts” (she really used that expression) would be bringing peace to Iraq if only it weren’t for the resistance and the ingratitude of Iraqis. The letters from US soldiers who are still serving here or have recently returned, questioning what they were sent to do, on www.michaelmoore.com, don’t represent “the real American soldiers”. The dissent from Iraqi people against the occupation, however widespread, doesn’t represent “the real Iraqis”. The things I write are not “the real truth”, that being whatever Melody is seeing from home in the US.

It’s simple. If you don’t like it, dismiss it as not real. My mum used to tell me that: “Ignore it and it will go away.” Now let’s all concentrate really hard, all at the same time, on ignoring George W Bush, Tony Blair, the international arms trade, war, occupation, famine, pestilence, plague, global capitalism (OK, I know the last one covers the previous eight and two of the next three.), Fox “News”, flies and plutonium.

Easy, wasn’t it?

December 25th
Living by the Fence

Dr Jinan at the clinic in Abu Ghraib says there are patients coming in with illnesses that she and her colleagues can’t diagnose. Patients are referred to the main hospital complex at Baghdad Medical City but they return with still no diagnosis and having had no treatment. In particular, there have been patients presenting with bubbles on the skin. They “become hot, like burning coals, get hard and spread.” She said they don’t understand it.

There’s been an enormous increase in allergenic respiratory and skin problems with no apparent trigger. In particular there has been a rise in three conditions – alopeicia (hair loss), psoriasis and viteligo (skin problems). These are not infections spreading through the community but auto-immune, caused by the body attacking itself, to put it simply. They are related to nerves, so fear and stress could be a factor in the increase, but environmental factors are also believed to be important.

In the row of houses closest to the airport fence every single household reported some kind of skin or breathing problem. Probably the most common was white patches on the skin, which started, for most people, between April and July. Or spots on the skin, which turn black and then the skin peels off. Or the blisters or bubbles on the skin that Dr Jinan mentioned, with or without fluid.

Women brought us inside, away from the men, took off their hijabs and showed us bald patches on their heads. The water is contaminated and, to combat that, it’s filled with chemicals. It means you can drink it without spending the rest of the week in the toilet but it wrecks your skin. One of the women brought us to her small son whose scalp was like a toadstool of red skin and white pustules under the hair, insanely itchy but too painful to touch.

Immediately after the bombing of the airport, people said, thousands of trucks started removing the soil from the complex. No one can tell us where it was dumped. Other trucks brought fresh soil from elsewhere to replace it and tarmac trucks came in to cover it over. About a month after the bombing, the trucks started leaving their loads closer to the fence, tipping rubble, metal, broken crockery and general debris in the 1st June sector. Kids play and men forage in the heaps between the houses.

One said “There are no jobs. Sometimes useful things are dumped and we come and find them and sell them.” Some of the kids told us about sweets, food and mineral water being thrown out. They go and eat the sweets and bring home the water and military ration MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). “No you don’t,” scolded one of the mothers. “I do,” the child said with a gleeful grin. She went red and said “Well, sometimes.”

The November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Committee (UMRC) said: “Witnesses living next to the airport report 3,000 civilians were incinerated by one morning’s attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since the cessation of the main phase of battle, several of the Baghdad area battlefields… [were] landscaped by the US forces and Iraqi contractors, thus preventing a thorough examination.”

One family living near the fence told us that all their chickens died on the day of the bombing. “There was no harm to their bodies, they were still complete, but they were dead.” The grandmother’s eye ruptured during the bombing. A thermobaric weapon – stop eating before you read this – is essentially a fireball which sucks out all the oxygen in the area. Among other things it sucks out eyeballs and suffocates victims.

“On the day of the bombing the smoke went in his eye and it ran for a week and then stopped and the doctor said he can’t operate because the nerves are already destroyed.” The five-year-old boy watched us with his other eye and his 22-year-old sister stood in silence as their mother told us she was already deaf and mute from birth. She had her first fit during the bombing at the airport and has had them regularly, every week or ten days, since then. The mother is one of the women who have had several miscarriages in recent years.

The Dairy Buildings on the other side of the airport are a little further from the fence, the Dairy provided a buffer. Less illness was reported there: the same conditions but less concentrated. In 1st June sector as well, the frequency of problems seemed to decrease in the second and third rows of houses as you move back from the fence.

Health statistics are few and basic. We could get the rate per year of cancers, all types and all ages, for in patients at the hospital (one or none each year from 1991 to 1996, 7 in 1997, 3 in 1998 and then 11, 16, 15, 19 and 20 respectively for each of the last five years). We could get the monthly incidence of skin and breathing problems for in patients at the hospital.

We could get nothing about out-patients treated in the clinic, nothing to compare the monthly data for this year with previous years, nothing about the geographical distribution of sufferers, let alone any details of the majority who never go for diagnosis or treatment because they can’t afford it, which is why we were chatting about health with the women of the community in the first place.

Because of the threats made, we weren’t able to test water, soil and air to map the environmental contaminants which might be responsible and to work out a clean up scheme, but I didn’t come here to whine about the nigh-impossibility of doing any research so I’ll give it a rest there. What we did achieve was a general picture of health conditions and some of the environmental clean up work that might be needed.

Zakia asked us, “Why don’t you tell them to tarmac the road?” That would be an improvement over the mud slide in front of her home, but they need decent drainage as well to get rid of the pools of manky water. They need the piles of rubble taken away so the kids can play somewhere safe and clean.

And they need and they need and they need. A tiny child called Melaak (Angel) was carried by her mum and her brothers and sisters, too weak to walk, suffering from a failure to thrive. She needs vitamins. Her mum’s pregnant again with the ninth child, the oldest being 17, out of school and working in a shop so now they’ve got a heater, after 8 years without even that.

Christmas day has been quiet after a night of low flying planes, rather than the usual helicopters, and frequent explosions. At the shop last night Ali said the Sheraton Hotel had been hit. This morning our neighbours told us it was hit again about 6am. In the Dora area there was bombing from the air and fire from an anti aircraft gun.

Baghdad’s Christians are mostly having a quiet one. Clusters of people by the churches on a Thursday and longer-than-usual queues in the international telephone centres are the only real clue. Firas celebrated last night with basturma. It’s meat, mixed with garlic, stuffed in socks to make it the right shape. He says they use women’s socks. Somehow this is supposed to make it sound better. The full sock is hung on a line to dry out and then the mixture is sliced and fried with eggs. He says it’s the best thing. The sock thing is putting me off. Maybe I’m just too squeamish.

We celebrated Reema’s 18th birthday instead. Parties happen in the daytime because it’s too difficult and dangerous to go out at night, so we went to a restaurant and ate cake. It was great. It was normal.

December 22nd
Abu Ghraib

She’s had five miscarriages in the five years since 1998. Her two girls were born in 1991 and 1994 and since then she’s lost each one at three, four, five months of pregnancy. In the hospital they told her they had about 100 cases currently of women who were having repeated miscarriages. Another woman lost six babies in ten years, five girls and a boy, each one born prematurely at about 8 months. They were born alive and died within the first day. Another lost her baby about three weeks ago at 8 months pregnant. She says she got a fever, lost all her water and the baby died. She saw him, she says. He was perfect and complete.

B’s baby is fine. It’s got a normal heartbeat and is moving normally in a normal amount of fluid. The first day I met her she said she hadn’t been able to feel it moving lately so she was going for a scan the next day. The Abu Ghraib hospital didn’t have working equipment for the scan and she couldn’t afford the 9000 Dinar fee [3 quid, $4.50] for the private clinic so she hadn’t had one.

B’s husband used to be a school teacher in Nasariya. Until recently he was working as a security guard at a school in Baghdad. His colleague was shot for “working for the Americans” and threats were made against him too so now he’s off on leave. He doesn’t know whether to go back and risk being shot or quit and be without money for B, the two kids and the new baby.

When we went to pick her up some men came to the house. Was she going to be a spy for the Americans? What were we going to pay her? Surely she didn’t believe that this was about health? A woman came in and sat down. Who were we? What were we doing? Why were we taking B for a scan? Why were we asking about health? What was in it for us?

In any case the Abu Ghraib part of the survey is over after our local contact was threatened. Men went to his son’s house last night and said his father was working as a spy for the Americans and they were sure he knew what happened to people who worked for the Americans.

The conviction couldn’t be overturned by any amount of explaining that we weren’t Americans or spies – that one of us is Iraqi – nor by any amount of questioning what information we might obtain from discussing health with the women of the community that the American troops couldn’t find out with door to door raids.

Last week US troops came and searched three of the Dairy Buildings, the blocks of flats next to the huge milk factory beside Baghdad airport. We let them in, the women said, we didn’t argue, but they turned everything upside down and still didn’t find any weapons. Shouting distracted us and we all went to look off the landing. Three US humvees were passing and the boys were running after them shouting “Ali Baba” – ie, thieves – and throwing mud.

Too many of their people are locked in the compounds at the prison and the airport, too many dead, too many houses raided. People say it wasn’t something we should have expected, it wasn’t foolishness to go there and ask questions in the first place. Just before the war once I wrote about a swamp of fear and suspicion that seemed to suck you in and suffocate you. In Abu Ghraib, at least, neither the physical toxic swamp nor the metaphorical one has yet been drained.

I meant to post something about my slightly weird day on the health survey but I left the bloody thingy at home and I can't be arsed to go back up the street and spend 10 minutes trying to get in the house past the 14 padlocks that are needed in Baghdad these days.

So instead I've been adding photos to my website

Daniel Winters e mailed to tell me he'd seen my site and hopes that one day I will accept the truth and work to spread it. I enquired but have yet to be told The Truth According To Daniel who, as far as I'm aware, is not here. All the information I've got from him so far is "The truth is not entertainment". No, Sweetpea. You've got that bit right at least. The truth here is very very unfunny.

Oh yeah, and Melody e mailed me the column of a Saudi newspaper writer who said everyone's very happy in Iraq now. Not sure which streets he's walking down.

I've worked out there are 3 types of fear - one is the rational fear of stuff like bombs, dictators, rampant imperialists, GWB and TB getting re-elected, Nestle killing babies, etc. Two is the irrational fear of things like spiders, foreigners, scented tissues and monsters under the bed.

Three is the fear of change and complexity. Don't tell me there's more to this that black and white, yes and no, love and hate, the liberators and the Bad People.

Three outweighs all the others. Three prompts rage, insults, character assassination and very cross e mails. Fine, shoot me, feed me to the monsters under the bed, but don't tell me things aren't as straightforward as the TV tells me.

Bee had her baby - Sarah Sue. Wahoo. Welcome to the weirdness, small girl.

December 20th
Shootings and Stories

Sura wanted me to meet her friend, Hassan, one of the guards at the hospital she works in. On December 8th about 11pm he was asleep, off duty, in the guard room at the entrance to Abu Ghraib hospital. A car arrived with a patient inside and his colleague went out to search the car, because all vehicles entering the hospital have to be searched.

A Humvee of US soldiers came and started shooting at random with the gun on top of the vehicle. They all ran back into the guard room. His two friends were injured by glass from the window. A bullet hit Hassan in his abdomen. Another went through the window of the delivery room while women were giving birth in there.

Just before Hassan went into the operating theatre, the commander, a Major whose name I couldn’t quite understand, maybe Major Pavel, something like that, came and told him he was sorry. It was a mistake. Oops. Hassan’s had two operations in the 12 days since then, to cut away the infected tissue. He shuffled, with help, from the corridor back to his bed. It took two men to help him sit because he can’t bend at the waist. Holding his clothing away from the ghastly mess of his belly, he told me he’d heard that the soldiers suspected something so they started shooting.

A friend filled in the compensation claim forms on his behalf but as yet they’ve heard nothing. The problem is, he’s married with 2 kids. His mother is also dependent on him, as are some of his siblings. His 37 year old sister has breast cancer, which appeared in May. She has epilepsy, which was aggravated by the chemotherapy, so now she’s having no treatment for the cancer.

By coincidence, as we arrived at the hospital, the group of men we saw on Thursday was carrying a coffin away. It was the man who came in with a gunshot wound, the man who was shouting, gasping, groaning. He died at 4am on Friday. He’d been selected as the head of an interim council for a district within Abu Ghraib. I don’t know which area and I don’t know who shot him.

We stopped in at Hekmet’s house. They got married 2 months ago. He was married before and has a son, but she never has. The last time I was at their house he was campaigning on her to go and do her hair and dress up so I could take a photo of her, because he liked the ones I took of the local kids the other day. “don’t you think my wife is beautiful,” he kept saying. “Take her photo.”

“Moretania,” she kept saying – another time. Stop going on. Kiss me, he said, and make me forget about it. Khadije knelt over him, lifted his head, kissed him on each cheek and then bit his nose. So today we did the photos. He calls her Hokha for short. We had a small adventure trying to work out what kind of fruit that is in English. An apricot? No, bigger. Hairy. Ah, a peach. Bitch? No, no, don’t call her that.

Zakia Ibrahim is 62, a woman in an abaya, contour lines on her face mapping her life, a huge mole under one eye, surrounded by grandchildren. There are 23 grandchildren from her fice sons, still more from the six daughters. “I was harvesting wheat in my village when my first son was born. I cut the cord with something I had with me and carried on working, not like women today, lying on their backs for days.” It was 1958 and she was seventeen, already three years married.

They kept sheep, cows and donkeys. In those days you could live wherever you pleased and you went wherever there was land that you could use. “But when the King came [in 1958], people were taken to places like Thawra, Sadr, places where there were authorities.” Boys and girls used to swim together in the villages, not like now, she said, when they are all separated. In 1963, when Iraq changed from monarchy to republic and urbanisation increased, those things started to change as well.

Her husband was 13 years older. “We used to be afraid we would be beaten by our husbands. We were not allowed to wear make up. I was married in a small hut. When you looked up at the ceiling you saw the sky. We had no car - they took me to my husband’s house on the back of a donkey and I sat on a tin can at my wedding. But then at least we had animals to raise for food, for eggs and milk. Now we have not even an egg. There is no gas, no petrol, no electricity.

“The Americans promised us first aid and humanitarian assistance but they have given nothing. Under the sanctions we would eat whatever we could – there was no variety. We couldn’t even change our clothes. Under Saddam and the sanctions it was the same as now under Bush. It is not a pleasant life.”

Of Saddam’s arrest, she says it was fate. It was written. He was caught because it was meant to be. “Under Saddam, we could not even open our mouths.” But still she has sympathy for him: “He has Moslem blood.” Her son was jailed for a year for avoiding the army. He was paying money to an officer to overlook his non-appearance so he could carry on earning money for his family. He was beaten and tortured in jail, in 2000. “They did not give them food. They were treated like dogs, herded, and I used to tell him, remember, they are Moslems like you.”

She was allowed a two hour visit every three weeks, which meant a whole day traveling to get to Mosul, because he was jailed where his unit was based. “But at least under Saddam we had security. I could travel back from Mosul after dark but now we can’t go anywhere. I told my sons’ wives not to get pregnant because if the birth started at night we could not even take them to the hospital.”

Two of her sons were conscripted into the war with Iran. One was injured. “No one could say he wouldn’t go. He would be executed in front of his family. The year you went in depended on the year you were born and then you stayed until the end, your end or the war’s end. There was always food then. It was good living but so many men died. There were always big funerals for the men who were killed.”

Things were better then, she said, because of the nationalisation of the oil industry. “We had opportunities, better jobs, a higher standard of living.” Chuckling to herself, she told us how two ladies once asked her about the standard of living now. I don’t even have money for the hairdresser, she told them. “At my age,” she said with glee. “As if I still go to the hairdresser.”

Another son was called up for the 1991 war but went into hiding. “He hid here, beside me,” Zakia laughed. “So many wars. It’s amazing we still have flesh and blood on us.” They left Abu Ghraib when the US soldiers entered the airport, taking the kids to the tribal leaders nearby and distributing them around the homes. She and some of the others stayed in the house until things got really bad: “It was like fire on top of our heads.”

Fadhil, her sixteen year old grandson, was shot dead by US troops firing from a helicopter when he went to the roof to call the younger kids indoors while they were cleaning up the house after the war. “Lots of people died in Iraq. It would have been better to lose the house or have everything looted. It is better to die than to live like this, to live with deaths every day.”

Two of her sons now support the extended family. Her youngest son is 21, married for three years with a child. He worked in one of the palaces, earning good money. Now there’s no money. “If I could I would work and let him sit, because he’s still only a child.” We appointed Zakia the president. First, she said, she would bring law and order and then she would give to the poor. “The rich already have thick bones. I have suffered with the poor. I met a woman who had never even tasted dates. Imagine that, in Iraq, where we grow the best dates in the world.”

And then we had to go because it was half past four and the ground was already rocking with sporadic explosions and the air thudding with helicopters so low you could almost flick mud at them and by dark, they say, Abu Ghraib is a war zone, and Aala, Abbas, Yousef, Yaseen, Abdelqader, Afra’, Adhra’, Mabreen, Noor, Amer, Shibreen, Meruh, Rusha, Mustafa, Hussein, Shahet, Amer, Sareh, Hadih, Tabarek and the rest danced after us to the car, between the swamps and the rubbish and the ducks and geese and cockerels poking about in them.

December 18th
Arresting Children


“Two days ago there was a demonstration after school finished, against the coalition and for Saddam. Yesterday the American army came and surrounded the whole block. They just crashed into the school, 6, 7, 8 into every classroom with their guns. They took the name of every student and matched the names to the photos they got from the day before and then arrested the students. They actually dragged them by their shirts onto the floor and out of the class.”

They wouldn’t give their names. The children at Adnan Kheiralla Boys’ School in the Adamiya district of Baghdad were still scared, still seething with rage. Another boy, Hakim Hamid Naji, was taken today. “They were kicking him,” one of the pupils said. A car pulled up and a tall, thin boy ran into the school, talked briefly with staff and left again. The kids said the soldiers had come looking for this boy too.

The headmaster, too, was reluctant to speak. No, he said, looking down at the desk, there were no guns. But Ahmed, an English teacher, followed the soldiers on the raid. “The translators had masks or scarves because maybe they are from this area. They came and they chose several students and they took them. The demonstration started after school on Tuesday. I advised them not to do it because I am their teacher and the Americans don’t care. The children had pictures of Saddam Hussein from their text books and that’s all, so they demonstrated and just said we want Saddam Hussein.

“There were no leaders, this wasn’t an arranged demonstration. It comes honestly, some of the students say, we love Saddam Hussein. Some of the students say no, we hate Saddam Hussein. I told them, it’s OK, let them love him and let them hate him, we can all express our opinions. There are no weapons, there is no bombing.”

“The American soldiers came with tanks and stopped the demonstration and the kids sat in front of the tanks. They took pictures of the students and they had some spy maybe, I’m not sure, maybe students in the school. I begged the soldiers to leave these students because they are naïve, they just believe this is a civilian demonstration, but the soldiers were very rude to the students and treated them like soldiers. They are kids, they are teenagers, so I begged the officer, but he didn’t care.

“I told them, just calm down, but they said no, they are not kids. In Abu Ghraib we have 16 year olds shooting at us. I said yes, but these are in school. They have books, not weapons. And they took pictures of us, what is your name, stand here. I am not a criminal, I am a teacher. They took pictures of most of the teachers.

“I told them you have to educate people about freedom, not punish them, but they brought tanks and helicopters. Yesterday they surrounded the school and came in with weapons everywhere, soldiers everywhere and used tear gas on the students. They fired guns to scare them, above their heads. One student got a broken arm because of the beating. They had some sticks, electric sticks and they hit the students. Some of them were vomiting, some of them were crying and they were very afraid.”

All the other teachers and students who talked to us backed Ahmed’s version over the headmaster’s: the soldiers were armed when they came into the classrooms. One of the arrested boys decided he trusted Ahmed enough to talk to the people that Ahmed told him were safe, as long as he wasn’t recorded and we promised not to identify him in any way. He wouldn’t give his name or age.

“The soldiers pointed at me and I was grabbed by about 8 of them and dragged out by my clothes and my collar. They threw me on the ground and searched me and cocked their guns on me. We were held in chicken cages, about two metres by a metre and a half with criss cross wire. They were swearing at us a lot. They didn’t beat us but they accused us of having relations with Saddam Hussein, asking who organized the demonstration, telling us anyone who is against our American interests will be arrested.

“They offered us some food but more curses. They didn’t inform our parents at all. The headmaster came with three of the fathers. Most of us were held between 7 and 10 hours but one student is not Iraqi and he was held for much longer and they questioned him for two hours and made him stand outside from 10pm till 2am in the freezing cold. The youngest was 14.”

The school is named after a brother-in-law of Saddam’s who was popular with both Sunni and Shia people. For this he was killed by Saddam and, when the statues of former regime figures were being destroyed after the invasion, both of his monuments, in Baghdad and Basra, were protected by local people. The pupils have painted over the sign at the school’s entrance, renaming it Saddam’s School. The depiction of Saddam on TV in American hands seems to have made him a heroic symbol even to many who disliked him.

One of the boys told me, “Only 40 kids out of all of us were on the first demonstration but after the raid, we will all go out on Saturday after school and demonstrate against the occupation. They have turned us all against the American soldiers. We don’t care about their tanks, we don’t care about their machine guns, we don’t care about their prisons any more.”

Outside the school, Rana asked me, “Did you see the bodies in Adamiya? There were bodies in the street, Americans and Iraqis. They stopped an ambulance, threw in 5 bodies and said go, just go. It is a war zone. They don’t want to give the bodies to the families. Even my neighbour, he was killed by the Americans a few days ago and they didn’t receive his body yet. When they went to the hospital the doctors said you have to go to the Americans, bring permission from them and we will give you your son’s body.”

Wasef, one of the Iraq Indymedia members, was shot in the foot while filming the demonstration in Adamiya yesterday. He’s OK, still smiling, doesn’t know who fired the bullet that hit him.

In the Abu Ghraib hospital while I was visiting someone, there was a noise, something more than a groan but weaker than a shout, broken by short in-breaths, aah, aah, aah: a man with a gunshot wound, a crowd of men trying to lift him from the trolley to the bed. Outside was exploding at frequent intervals. In the doorway they were loading a coffin onto a pick up. A woman with a full pregnant belly told us her two children were playing in the garden when a rocket landed in the flower bed. Another one landed in the street outside.

The petrol queues are now about 2-3km long, two cars wide in places. Billboards and leaflets declare the new penalty of 3 to 10 years in jail – yes, it does say years – for buying or selling black market petrol. They, like the posters advertising rewards for information, are plastered with paint, red or black.

December 16th
The Aftermath

“It started about 3pm in Fallujah. From the time it was announced that he was caught until about 3 pm everyone was astonished. There was no reaction, just waiting, to see if it was true. There was a rumour that he was seen in Fallujah, so people went out cheering. Explosions started, people demonstrated in the streets, with lots of heavy firing till midnight, rockets, RPGs.”

We rang Rafah in Fallujah. Her husband was a prisoner of war for 17 years in Iran. “It’s not just resistance and mujahedin now, it’s everyone. The mujahedin were holding their RPGs openly in the street, not even bothering to hide them, not hiding their faces. Everybody is in the street demonstrating so there are thousands, you wouldn’t recognize individuals.

“The Americans are using some kind of weapon, sort of small globes of white light that split into smaller lights and as they get nearer the ground it turns to gas. They’re thrown out by aircraft, a fighter plane rather than a helicopter. We don’t know what it is. People think it’s a polluted substance or something and some people think it’s some kind of sleeping drug to calm things down because they lost control of Fallujah and Ramadi yesterday. The aircraft has a very loud voice which is working on people’s nerves, it’s like sound bombs or something.

“The people took over the mayor’s office and looted everything. They burned the Islamic Party and the Al-Naseri party buildings, throwing all the equipment out of the windows and burning the offices. On Tuesday at 12, midday, they hit the train. It was full of equipment and food for the Americans, and they took all of that, so then the Americans started going into the town today to try and take control of the town.

“They only have troops in the mayor’s office normally and the rest of the troops are outside, because they were always being attacked. Now they’ve taken a school as a base, near the main street, and they took over the mayor’s office again, a youth centre, the train station and the police station, so those are now occupied by the Americans and lots of soldiers and tanks are in the streets, lots of checkpoints.

“The next few days are going to be hell. I sent my 2 girls to school today and they were sent back. There was no school because they were afraid for security, so they haven’t been to school for two days. We’ve had no electricity for two days and we can’t go shopping because everything has been burnt, even vegetables, everything that was in the way was burnt.

“In Ramadi it started about 4:30 on Monday, after the rumour spread from Fallujah. My family in Ramadi say the Americans are using tear gas. There are lots of explosions and low flying. They can feel it right on top of the houses. They are using sound bombs.
Resistance is increasing more than you could imagine. Lots of people still believe in Saddam and won’t leave him, especially when they see him humiliated on TV. Whoever captured him is not better than him.”

Jinan Tahar, a primary school teacher in Al-Jaam’a, said “We are celebrating because the slayer is gone that was torturing the people for 35 years. I think he surrendered. I want the trial to be in Iraq and the Iraqi people to try him because those are the people he hurt. I wouldn’t execute him because that would be a relief for him. I would put him in jail for life so he can suffer more.

“I think resistance will decrease because most of them were with Saddam and now Saddam is captured they will fade away. I think things will get better because they announced there will be more focus on reconstruction now they are not distracted trying to find Saddam.”

Ghanim Al-Khayoun is the youngest son of the leader of Beni Ased [Tribe of the Lions]. They are a Marsh Arab people from near Nasariya and their marsh was drained. Ghanim is a history writer and an intellectual. Many members of his family and tribe were killed. He will be supervisor to whoever rules in Nasariya. He said in Nasariya people went out on demonstrations to celebrate on the first day.

“Saddam was a poker player. He gave an interview in 1990 or 91 talking about how you have to use your cards even if they are not strong. You fake it and pretend you have strong cards. It was said about a person from ancient times who was like Saddam that he acts like a lion on me but in wartime he acts like an ostrich. In Iraq in general, we have the habit of showing our muscles, trying to prove we are strong, but whoever shows off will lose from the first fist. His children died with more honour than him.

“I don’t just blame Saddam but the Iraqi people as well who supported him through fear or love or greed. I wouldn’t call those people ‘resistance’ and they will fade away now Saddam is gone. I think Saddam surrendered and begged the Americans not to kill him. Really he was not even a dictator but a thief.”

“I once beat Uday playing billiards in the hunting club. I saw all my friends whispering, because whenever they play with Uday, they will lose, they are scared, but what people saw of Uday was just a media thing of him being strong, evil and brave. Really he was just a coward. Qusay was much cleverer. He was planning to be in charge one day.

“To me his trial is not important. I would judge him by the laws of the Quran. If he committed one crime, he would have to be killed. How many times should we kill him? Some people think knowledge is over religion, which is why Saddam started showing religious interest in the last ten years to try and regain points.”

Ammar, a 28 year old shopkeeper from Adamiya, told us, “The resistance had very good luck yesterday, about 10am. They hit 3 American humvees in front of the big Abu Hanifa mosque and 2 in Anter Square and 3 in Al-Saleya, 9 altogether. There were at least 5 men in each car and don’t think any survived. Twelve Iraqis were killed. Two of them were mujahedin and 10 were civilians.

“If you have time, if you want to see something, stay here until 4 o’clock. Something is going to happen. If you like you can watch from my roof. The rumour goes around telling people who have shops to stay indoors at certain times. It won’t start dead on 4 but we will stay indoors after that time and not go out walking.

“Those operations have nothing to do with Saddam. We don’t love him - he’s killed and tortured people, but because they are invaders, because they have occupied our country, they don’t deserve to stay here. Some Shia people started shooting in the air, but if anyone has courage, he should write god’s name on every bullet and fire them at Americans. Every one is needed for the Americans, not for the air.

“I think resistance will increase now. A lot of people didn’t fight before because they did not want to be called pro-Saddam, but now he is gone, it’s pure jihad, and there is no reason not to fight.

“When I saw Saddam shown on TV in that way I was really sad. It’s not really right for him to be judged by US. The problem was that we were humiliated by Americans. Arabic nations should take a lesson from that. The Interim Council is not much better than Saddam because they came from outside the country and they didn’t live the suffering and they have not much time left in power because even the Americans don’t accept them.”

Next to Adamiya is Kadhmiya, a Shia district. Sa’ad lives near the old secret police HQ, now occupied by US soldiers. The resistance, he said, is not from Kadhmiya but, “We weren’t as happy as when we heard that Uday and Qusay were killed. It’s not because we love Saddam but because he was captured by Americans not by Iraqis. As Iraqis we do sympathise with another Iraqi even if he made mistakes, because he was caught by an American.

“We have a saying, ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, but me and my cousin against the foreigners. I would defend Saddam against foreigners, but between us, he deserves what he’s getting because he caused the deaths of lots of people. I was not a Baathist. Saddam didn’t hurt me but he took us into wars we weren’t meant to be in. H spent money on stupid things and didn’t give enough to the people.

“Some of the shooting was celebration but in truth after a while it’s just because there are lots of weapons, so mostly people are just trying their guns. I bought a new gun quite recently and I fired it just because it’s new and I wanted to fire it. I am happy he’s caught but I’m not happy because he was caught by Americans. They’re not here for the benefit of Iraqis but for their own benefit.

“I think his trial should be public and he shouldn’t be executed, because no one will benefit from that. He should be jailed for life so he will see the changes. Resistance could increase or decrease but if the US doesn’t keep all the promises it made, it will face Shia people as well, because now there is nothing to stop them, no fear of being called pro-Saddam and as you know there are more Shia than Sunni people here.”

We tried to talk to some soldiers as we were passing but they all said they were under strict new orders not to talk to anybody. Fernandez of 41FA [he didn’t tell us that, his helmet did] said “I think they did a good job” but told us we’d have to go to the base for signed permission if we wanted to write that down. There were two tanks of US soldiers, guarded as ever by Iraqi soldiers, parked in front of an empty petrol station.

As we drove away we were flagged down by a man with a biscuit wanting to know if we’d asked the soldiers about the petrol shortage and what they’d said. We told him no, just about the capture of Saddam. He wanted to talk but not to give us his name. He works as a baggage searcher at Baghdad airport, where the diplomats and businessmen come in and out.

“When I saw Saddam on the television I had mixed feelings. I felt pained, not because I love Saddam but because he is Iraqi and we are Iraqi and we have love for our country. He’s still an Iraqi and caught by foreigners – it would be different if he was caught by Iraqis.

“I want to ask the Americans why they didn’t block the borders with neighbouring countries because lots of people came in from other countries. Resistance is not only Iraqi, it is also outsiders coming to help. The resistance might increase for a week but it will fade now that Saddam is gone. I want him to be jailed for life, not executed, because I want him to see how things will improve, but I want America to keep the promises because we had hope when they came in and so far they haven’t done anything.”

Sheikh Adnan Al-Ani is the Imam of the Al Hasanein Sunni Mosque in Ameriya. He’s in charge of 500 mosques in the area. “Intelligent people of all communities, Sunni and Shia, have to make a union because the situation is very delicate and could be used to provoke civil war. I consider that Saddam has been gone for months, since the invasion. I saw him as a dead man already.

“I would have no problem if Saddam was caught by Iraqis, but being caught by Americans is not honourable. Americans have committed lots of crimes as well. If Saddam is a war criminal then so is Bush and they should be tried side by side. This is the only fair way.

“The resistance has nothing to do with Saddam. It’s because they are invaders and we have to resist the invader. Here in Ameriya the schoolchildren went out and demonstrated and lots of young people. The Americans tried to get rid of the crowd so they sat in front of tanks and started cheering, long live Saddam. It wasn’t really for Saddam himself but for Iraq, with him as a symbol of Iraq, because people know that chanting in his name will provoke the occupiers.”

The streets of Abu Ghraib were mud tracks with more horse carts than cars and haystacks leaning on the houses. Hekmet said there was lots of fighting there. People felt really angry because Saddam was captured by bastards. “This place turned to a warzone from about 6pm, lots of shooting, RPGs, rockets. It wasn’t about Sunni and Shia but about a person who represents a country being caught by occupying forces.”

The clattering of metal gates was interspersed with explosions making much the same noise but with more quaking through the ground. It’s normal, they say. On the north side of Abu Ghraib there are rivers and bushes where people can hide, so it happens all the time, when aeroplanes come in. The ones on the top of the hour are usually controlled explosions of munitions collected and brought in to the airport.

“People are fighting because they are comparing between now and Saddam’s time. The Iraqi army left weapons abandoned on the streets so people collected them. In Abu Ghraib people have a lot of weapons. The resistance is legal because we are fighting occupying forces. We have so much petrol and now there is none in the petrol stations.

“Every day there are people killing ex Baathists and people killing any person who works with the Americans. It’s happening in Abu Ghraib every day. They warn Iraqis to stop working with Americans or get killed. Abu Ghraib is like a bee hive. If you touch it at all it will all be very angry. If I knew where Saddam was I would go and release him. I hate him but he is like the flag I used to hold.”

December 14th
The Arrest of Saddam

They are saying that Saddam has been caught. The TV stations are showing pictures of an old, grubby, bearded man in captivity. Khalid says it’s definitely him. “He has been on television for 12 hours a day for 35 years. I am sure it is him.” Marwan says it’s all a trick. “It’s not the real Saddam.”

The woman who begs with her six year old daughter flung her arms around me: “Saddam kelaboutch”. The watch seller came over to try to give me a kiss as well but I’m not sure that was anything to do with the capture of Saddam. An old woman in a raincoat and a floppy hat stood on the island in the middle of the road twirling a plastic mop. Again I’m unclear whether that was related to the Saddam issue. Firas was grinning enormously, taking photos of everyone and everything. “My brother died in Saddam’s war with Iran. Now they have caught him.”

There was more than the usual amount of gunfire in the air as word spread, though thankfully less than when the Iraqi football team won a match a while back. The habit of firing into the air at times of celebration scares me more than all the car bombs, thieves and twitchy Americans put together. A man crossing the road crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs and called out “Saddam kelabach” through the window. Kerim, the driver, asked did I think it was true? “Saddam kelabach?”

I haven’t yet met anyone with any pity for him, though I haven’t been yet to the main areas of resistance, but I haven’t seen the dancing I thought I’d see in the streets while I’ve been driving around town this afternoon. The petrol queues are longer than ever and even smiles were a blessed break from the weariness of the struggle for basics. Kerim says 8 hours is a good run from the queue’s end to the pump. The 960km drive to the Jordanian border can be done in four and a half. Iraqi police shield the US tanks on sentry duty outside empty petrol stations. When fuel arrives, Kerim says, sometimes it only lasts an hour or two and then no one moves until another tanker arrives.

We passed a portrait with his face painted over and Hamsa said, “Poor you. Now you are in handcuffs, the bastards.” For me, I want to see his trial. I want to hear him tell the truth. I want to hear the whole truth. I want us to learn from this and never let it happen to people again, that they live under such a man.

December 13th
Prisoners

“My son was taken 6 months ago by the Americans and I don’t have any information about him. I came here to ask about him and they told me to get a lawyer but the lawyer is asking for 250,000 Dinar. I don’t have money to pay, so what can I do? I don’t know if he’s charged with anything. He was just a taxi driver, he had a Brazili car and that was it.”

A Brazili car is, essentially, a lemon. They were imported from Brazil and sold cheaply and the streets were soon blocked with breakdowns because they were the most useless cars ever built. Hayder Sahib Jum’a Obaid is 25 and lived in Al-Habibia with his parents Hamdia and Sahib Jum’a. Hamdia showed me his picture.

“I am his mother and I went to a lot of places, to Basra, to Amara, to a lot of places, a lot of prisons. Some Iraqi people at the jail eventually told me you should get a lawyer for him, and then we will see if he is here or not. I said take his picture and make sure if he is here or not and that way I can pay money, because I don’t want to spend all the money and then he is not here and then I have nothing to get a lawyer when I find him.”

Sahib explained, “He was a taxi driver and he went out from home and just didn’t come back, about 6 months ago. I didn’t know what happened. First I went to a lot of hospitals and to the morgue and I did not find him, so I went to the American base and after that I went to the computer office and they gave me a paper and told me your son is in Abu Ghraib and gave me a paper with his name and a number on and I came here but no one gave me any answers and the guy inside, the translator, just told them to go and get a lawyer.

Hamdia continued, “After 3 months we found the car in a police station and when I talked to someone there he told me my son had been arrested, the Americans took him and then the police found the car and took it to the police station and left it there.

“Under the old regime he escaped from the army and even when they caught him they let his mother see him but now, no. We thought that they would do something good for us but they did not. They did the worst. When he was arrested we paid money, 15000 Dinar and they let him go. I just want to see my son. Just let me see him. You can ask anyone about my son. He is a good man. They should at least tell us where he is.

“Before, we were hiding our son from the old regime because we were afraid, we didn’t know what they would do, maybe they would kill him, maybe they would take him to jail, maybe they would take him to the army, but right now it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s worse. It’s been 6 months and we don’t have any information about our son and we didn’t see him.

“Even under the old regime if you had someone in jail you could go and see him, if you had someone in jail, your son or husband, anywhere, you could go and see him. Now if anyone took your son or husband or took anything from you, they will just leave you and no one is going to know any information about them. His daughter is crying all the time for her father.”

On the second of two days of protests for the rights of people detained without charge by the occupying powers, people stood waiting quietly, holding pieces of paper, queueing to talk to activists, NGO workers, journalists, anyone who would hear their story, anyone who might perhaps be able to help.

Abdul Rahman Abd Al-Khaliq told me, “The soldiers came and put bags over our heads and I was in the prison here. They took 6 people from my house. My father and I were released after 103 days. My 4 brothers are still inside. I was arrested in August at 3am. They destroyed 2 doors and everything between the 2 doors. Luckily no one was in that room. They took everything: computers, telephones, even the pictures on the walls. They stole from my home 11 million dinars [about $5,500 – people keep all their money in their homes because the banks are unstable]. They hid the money inside their clothes.

“They just put me in one room and gave me ration food. I was wearing only shorts, because it was night when they came. I wasn’t wearing anything on my chest. I wasn’t even wearing shoes. I was asking them please, just give me something to wear and no one would give me anything when they took me from the house. When I went into the jail, I asked the soldier, just give me a t shirt but no one would give me a t shirt. Only when they took me out from the prison one of them gave me a t shirt and I was asking for shoes and no one would give me any shoes, they said no shoes.

“They took me first to the republican palace in Karada and then here to Abu Ghraib. They did really silly things at first, like tying our hands and putting bags on our heads when they took us to the bathroom. On the first day they kept a bag on my head and my hands tied the whole day. After that it was only when they moved us from one cell to another.

“They will keep you there for 3 months and after that they will decide if they will release you or not. I was questioned only on one day and the rest of three months I was just in a cell. We had 6 cars, that’s what they said, that was the first reason they gave for arresting us, we were Fedayeen, that was the second one and we tried to kill Paul Bremer. That’s what they said.

“When they questioned me they asked, do you know why you are here? I said no. They asked me, why do you have a lot of cars in your home? I said we are a rich family, we have a lot of things, we are five brothers and my father. They told me no, there are a lot of people meeting in your home. I said of course. My father is the oldest one of the family, all the family gatherings happen in our home. He said no, you are trying to make a new party now, trying to resist us. They came for me at 4 in the morning and questioned me until 10 at night.

“I said I will kill myself if you don’t release me. I’m a student in college and I need to be in college. I was studying business in Ma’amun College. After that they brought a lot of pictures and started asking me, even about children, do you know this one, do you know that one, about every picture. All the rest of the days for three months. I was just in the cell on my own.

“The Americans are just like Saddam because anyone who gives them information, they give him money, just like Saddam’s regime. They would give you money if you went and told them this person is against Saddam and now it’s the same. The Americans are paying money for anyone who tells them that this is information about the resistance. They are cheap people, trying to get money for CDs and satellite TV.”

One man said his brother was arrested when a policeman called Mohammed Saddam came to their home with US troops. The policeman had come to the family before to ask to marry one of their daughters and they said no, you have no honour. In revenge, they said, he returned with soldiers, accusing the brother of being part of the resistance.

Of course some of the information bought by the US administration is probably true but the practice of paying for tales in a country where, for so long, people have been paid for selling their neighbours, is a dangerous one. A woman told of a fight between her family and some neighbours. The other family told the troops that her sons were with the resistance. They were arrested in June and, as yet, she’s not been allowed to see them. She heard from one of the other detainees, who’s since been released, that an army dog bit her son while he was in the jail and he had to have 12 injections. Released prisoners are, for a lot of families, the only source of information.

Majida Hassan’s son Tahin was arrested on September 10th at the police station where he worked. He’d been a police officer for 6 years. She was told about it by his colleagues. He was first in Um Qasr, is now in Abu Ghraib. She took out a clear plastic bag, unrolled it and withdrew a scrap of paper with his name and the tag number – 18751. Everyone there had one of these scraps, kept safe somewhere, from the computer office where, if you give them a name, they might tell you the whereabouts of the person you’re looking for, as long as their spelling of the name, transliterated from Arabic to English, is the same as yours, otherwise there will be no trace.

They all have the A4 papers too – one headed “Request for Information” and another, “Request for Visitation.” Each contains the name of the prisoner. The former states that the bearer would like some information about the prisoner and the latter records a wish to be allowed to visit them. And that’s it. They have pieces of paper saying that they want information and a visit.

Majida has been more than 50 times to the prison trying to visit Tahin. The guards always refuse, tell her to come back in 4 months time. No appointment, just come back in four months. That’s what the pieces of paper are worth.

Sattar Mahmoud Alwan has a story: “You remember when there was looting? The kids found something, not gold but it looked like gold, some shiny thing, and they picked it up in the road and brought it home. Then you remember on the television, they put a picture and they said it has been announced that they found a big officer of the Fedayeen and the suiciders? It was my brother. His name is Khalid Mahmoud Alwan. After a while they put him in the jail and that’s it, we hear nothing about him. There has been no court hearing.

“They announced they had found a big general in the Fedayeen but he had no relationship with the Fedayeen. He’s just a normal civilian. He had a small shop for chocolates and sweets. They should make sure. If they want to fight the resistance, the resistance is out there. All they are doing is throwing innocent people in jail and saying oh, we captured the resistance. The fact is the resistance is outside and they are killing your soldiers. There is no difference any more between the freedom under Saddam’s regime and the freedom now. It’s not freedom, it’s like they are taking some revenge on our people.”

On Friday’s march they were chanting, “Britanee, amreekan, Wayn al haqooq al insaan?” [Britain, America, where are the human rights?] Women and children carried signs, photos, ID badges of their missing persons. A young woman called Yasamin had three brothers in jail, Mohammed, Mustafa and Waleed. “The Americans raided our house and arrested them and then came again and took all our money and jewellery and our ID.”

Her dad added, in English, “So now we are not Iraqis because we don’t have our IDs. In Iraq anyone who crosses the borders from Syria, from Iran, we are now like them, we are not Iraqis, and they stole about $11,000. That is our money. They stole everything, our jewellery. They are thieves.”

None of the brothers has been charged with anything as far as they know. The first was taken from the house at 3am, during the raid, the second from his workplace and the third was arrested when he went to the CPA to ask about the first two. One brother is married with three kids. “Where is the man, where is our man,” his mother asked. “We are just women in the house and children asking for their father. We don’t know where he is.”

Yasamin told me, “The American army, in the morning, stopped near my house in Adamiya four days ago. They saw the children playing on their way to school and the soldier pointed his gun at him and said ‘I’ll shoot you, I’ll shoot you’. The child didn’t understand what did he say and he was afraid, very afraid.”

Ali and Odai were arrested in Ad-Dora in October. Eman, their mother, said Ali was due to get married. She’s not been allowed to see them at all so far. For a long time she didn’t even know where they were. Their dad died 3 days after his sons were taken. Two brothers, carpenters, Abdul Rahman and Fadil, were in the mosque at early morning prayer time. The area, near Ramadi, was suurounded by troops and they were taken by US soldiers as they left the mosque. A third brother, Yasir Alewi was a guard at the electricity station. Soldiers came and asked for him a month ago, saying they would bring him back in an hour. There’s been no sign of him since.

And there was Ahmed Berdi Shermouk from Habania, whose brother Abed was arrested driving home from the barbers to his village, which had been surrounded by US troops while he was gone, and Abdul Khattan Mohammed with a letter from a lawyer stating that the governor of Diwaniya had ordered the release of his son Tha’ir, subject to bail, because no charges had been made against him, and a man carrying a list of 20 names of young men arrested from two villages near Ramadi and Sayid Ghazi Shahaf with a list of more than 20 names from Diyala.

“They surrounded the area and entered the villages after one and started choosing people and they took all of those people with them and we just don’t know any information, why they did that. They came on four occasions with a few days in between, 1 and a half to 2 months ago. No one knows any information about any of them, even whether they are alive. I have come as a representative of the village. They are all farmers.”

Even if people are accused of genuine terrorist offences, or caught in the act of theft, for example, still there has to be due process, otherwise, as the families say, there is no difference between the Americans and the old regime. Previously you could be detained on a trumped up charge and could disappear. Now, they say, you can be detained on no charge at all and disappear.

The demonstration gave the relatives a chance to be seen and heard which they seemed desperate for. After some hours it was announced that, in the morning, a list of 700 names would be published and each of those prisoners would be allowed one visitor, women only, then men the next day. Only a few relatives were still there to hear the promise, those still waiting to give their prisoner’s name to the Chirstian Peacemaker Team in hope that they could find out some information from the generals.

One man put a hand, for balance, on the coil of razor wire that separated the protesters and families from the soldiers. “Don’t touch my wire,” the major shouted. “Ah, it is his wire,” said an Iraqi man next to me, “but his wire is on my soil.” A bulldozer thing came along and started shunting concrete wall blocks into a line, sandwiching metal posts in between and draping coils of razor wire between the posts. The noise of the machine was making the kids nervous and they stood shouting at it.

The far side of the wall a fourteen year old boy called Mohammed was herding sheep. Later, when the soldiers had gone back to the prison gates he came over to talk, stepping and wriggling his way through, throwing stones at the sheep when they came too close to the dirt road into the prison. “All their relatives are in here,” he said. “Many many people. Down Saddam, down Bush.”



Please write letters to newspapers about the detentions without charge in Iraq and to Tony Blair, George Bush or whoever you’d normally write to, demanding that detainees be given legal representation, visitation rights and proper legal processes, like charges and trials or release on bail.

If there are any doctors reading, there was a man called Khalid at the march whose 3 year old daughter Shahat is sick. He had a paper from a doctor saying she has lamellar icthyasis and recommending neotigason or isotretinan / acitretin. He says the medicine is not available inside Iraq. Her skin is cracked and discoloured dark brown, her eyes are red and sore around the lids and he says in the summer when it’s really hot her eyes and nose and ears bleed and they haven’t got a generator. Can anyone tell me what this disease is, what causes it and whether those are the best drugs to give to her.

December 11th
Ramadi

There was, after all, a welcome in Ramadi. I can’t say the rumours that it’s dangerous are exaggerated, but my hands were not cut off and wherever I went people gave me chai, invited me in and wanted to talk. It’s true there was a constant percussion of gunfire, but Thursday afternoon is peak time for weddings and a lot of firing in the air goes on.

We were outside the army base to ask the commander for an explanation about the raid which killed Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin Mohammed when guns were pointed at us and we were surrounded by an incoming convoy of humvees. They were already “on lock down” when we got there, apparently having some warning of the attack on the other side of the palace which, a couple of minutes later, made the ground quake as I haven’t felt since the war and the appointment with Captain Galloway was postponed by implication.

In Ramadi, for the first time since I got back to Iraq, I was besieged by people saying they want Saddam back. The anger is tangible: not only the lack of electricity, petrol, water, jobs and so on, but the collective punishments, the deliberate cutting of supplies and services, raids and the continued presence of the US troops in the town, a couple of months after it was agreed that they’d withdraw to the edges.

Ismail Odai went to get the bodies of his brothers, Sabah and Ibrahim. The doctors wrote and signed death certificates saying the men died from fractures and body wounds. Both men were shot dead by the troops in a raid on November 20th. “There were American soldiers there with a Lebanese interpreter. They asked why is that man [Ismail] shouting?

‘The interpreter said, because they have written that the cause of death was fractures and wounds in the body. The Americans were on the head of the doctor when he wrote the death certificate. It was not wounds and fractures, it was assassination – they shot them on the ground, but the doctor refused to write that. There are bullets in the ground where they shot him. The doctor was sitting writing and the Americans were there standing over him.

“This was doctor Khattan Abed Hanish at Ramadi Hospital who signed the death certificate for Sabah. It was apparent that the doctor was under pressure from them. A different doctor, Dr Hamdi, signed the certificate for Ibrahim but he gave the same cause of death.”

We chased wild geese around the city and eventually failed to find either doctor but an Iraqi friend who works with foreign journalists explained that he has encountered Dr Hamdi before. He signed the death certificate for a Hungarian civilian worker killed recently. Three different causes of death were given in public statements by the US authorities, none of them mentioning shooting, though witnesses indicated that the man was shot by American troops. My friend stayed outside the hospital chatting while the reporters went inside and were told nothing. Away from the cameras the guards told him the man was bleeding from bullet wounds when he arrived.

Khalid was outside the house with Sabah, Ibrahim and their cousin Mohammed, waiting for futtoor, the meal which breaks the day’s fast during Ramadan. “American cars came on the road. Ibrahim’s mother asked what’s going on. He said it was only traffic control. We stayed outside the house, not thinking the troops were coming for us.

“The first car stopped beside the bush there and the others were standing on the road. The soldiers came from the road towards the house and they were running. They surrounded the house. We were outside the front of the house. The soldiers came and put ties on us and put us on the ground. The Americans entered the house through two doors – this is one and the other one is at the back.

“The women and children were in and outside the outdoor kitchen building when the Americans arrived. The soldiers entered through two doors and started shooting each other. The soldiers were terrified, between themselves, and reacted thinking each other were the enemy. They were firing as well from outside the house, through the windows. Three or four Americans were killed inside the house, killed by Americans. As revenge they came outside and shot us on the ground. They killed Ibrahim and Sabah and Mohammed and I was shot in the arm.”

He carefully removed the coat from around his shoulders and undid enough buttons to show us the wounds on his arm, dark scabs surrounded by yellowed bruising, a smallish, ragged entry wound and a larger exit wound. He’s no idea why they let him live. The house was devastated by continued attacks. Shell casings litter the ground outside. The US troops threw a grenade into a front room with no one inside. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and the papers for all his cases were taken from his car. One of the family’s Qurans was torn and thrown outside.

The rest of the family is now living in the medical aid building. Ibrahim’s wife is in mourning for three months and wouldn’t see us though her brother in law says she wants to send the information overseas for lawyers outside Iraq to take on the case. Ibrahim’s daughters were also indoors in mourning. His nine year old son Ibed stood outside among the adults in silence, the devastated, lonely, speechless, powerless rage in his eyes answering any question you might think of asking him. I’m not clear exactly where he was standing but his uncle says he saw his father shot.

“Bush is the head of the terrorists,” Ismail said. “The Americans came the next day and smashed the car. On the second day after, they came and said we are sorry, you are not the people we want, it’s a mistake. They were from the 8th Brigade – the commander was Isle.” (No one had any idea how the commander’s name was spelt, so that’s my guess).

A local police officer came with us from the outskirts of Ramadi to show us the way. He told us his full name but asked to be identified only as “Hussein”. He knew Ibrahim as a police cadet, an uncommonly honest man who refused to accept bribes. “He was very ambitious to be a lawyer, so he studied and got his degree and when he became a lawyer he started coming back to his friends who were still policemen, asking us to send him our cases in which the people in prison were illegally or dishonestly accused, in Saddam’s time.

“He graduated 2 years ago and started to work with those people accused by the others. He wouldn’t work for anyone who was trying to harm anyone else – it was the first time I’d ever seen a lawyer who wouldn’t accept bad things being done. Beside Ibrahim’s house, which you saw, near the medical aid place, there was an office of the Baathist party. When any soldier leaves his unit and goes absent without leave the Baathis used to come and take him from his house and send him back to his unit.

“This was near Ibrahim’s house and he told all the police that when people escaped from the army they shouldn’t tell the Baathists, he told them do not take anyone from his house, just talk to them and try to persuade them to go back. Don’t take them to the prison. This is a good thing from Ibrahim, because they weren’t punished if they went back, only if the Baathis took them.”

Hussein said there is no electricity most of the time. About a month ago the supply was stopped almost completely. The outlying villages are given it for one hour a day and the city of Ramadi has a little more but not much. Wherever I went in Ramadi, in cafes, markets, to the medical clinic to look for Doctors Hamdi and Khattan, people were eager to talk. The fury is tangible here.

December 10th
Nahrain University

We didn’t move for twenty minutes. The petrol queues, combined with the usual chaos of intersections, had packed the traffic solidly so that, if you had an inch either end to rock back and forth in, you counted yourself lucky. Passengers got out of cars and passers-by came off pavements to marshal cars onto the pavement, which freed a bit of space in the middle of the jam though another crisis came up in the shape of a heap of bricks and sand further up the alley.

Hussam’s college, when we finally reached it, is Nahrain University, which used to be Saddam’s university. A plinth at the entrance with a ragged stump on top marks his demise.

The Dean, Professor Fawzi, graduated from Newcastle University in the UK, as did I. Nahrain, he says, was not as badly hit as others by the war. Its libraries were not looted and its buildings weren’t damaged, but nonetheless it’s short of pretty much everything. He said the college has the finest librarians it could have, very dedicated, well trained and fluent in English. The science and engineering books used in Iraqi universities are mainly in English.

“The soldiers shot one of our lecturers, Dr Imad, by accident. We had a demonstration on the campus. You know today there is a demonstration against terrorism. I am not sure whether it is against US terrorism or some other kind. In the student halls of residence here on the campus they have had no electricity for the last 10 days.”

In the library Amal explained that they use the CD ISIS system, an international library system. They have books, although usually not the most recent editions, but they have no journals more recent than 1991. They’re especially short of civil and architectural engineering material because they’re new subjects to the college There is only one computer for the whole science library for cataloguing, internet and other work. Baghdad university students also use the college’s library, so the shortage of resources is acute.

The campus was packed with young men and women milling together after the day’s exams. Here were the most women I’ve seen since I got here, because the lack of security outside the campus means girls and women are staying off the streets. The graffiti on the walls is officially sanctioned ‘tagging’ by graduating groups, Science Class of 2003, King of Electronics, as well as the ubiquitous ‘mind the bomb’ posters warning against stepping on landmines and cluster bombs.

Farah says laboratory equipment is the biggest problem on her course. Electronic and communications engineering is a practical course but there isn’t enough equipment to do practicals, so it’s mainly theory. Her friend Tegrit agreed. She studies civil engineering and wants to work in construction. Laboratories are the thing they most need.

Farah said, “I was against the war. We did not love or hate Saddam, it made no difference to us, but we did not want to be invaded. I don’t like seeing soldiers about, although some of them are cute. They are just here because they’re ordered to do this, because their government told them life in Iraq was really terrible, so I don’t blame the soldiers but I don’t like to see them here.”

She was born in 85, during the war with Iran, and has no memory of life except under war and sanctions. “I want safety and a government which is strong and can keep control. I am not very interested in elections. They are a foreign thing that people are trying to give us. I wish people and students overseas will listen to the Iraqi people and not to their own governments’ news about Iraq. I live in Karrada, so it is not far from the university, but I can’t just go there and back. For the boys they can, but not for the girls. A driver comes to fetch me here because it is safe in the campus but not outside.”

Really neither of the girls has much interest in who governs Iraq, so long as it is safe and they have what they need. Everyone said there’s no political activity on campus. There are no students’ unions now that the old Baathist ones have gone. The political parties are not recruiting here and there are no student organizations that any of them were aware of.

My friend Saif had more of an interest in getting rid of Saddam – he and his brother found out after the war that they were on the Public Security list, of people who were being watched. Mukhabarat were for everyone, Public Security was just for Shia, Saif said. “So the war helped me, but this isn’t freedom. What the Americans are doing is wrong. They killed an old man in Thawra the other day.” Thawra is Saif’s neighbourhood.

Saif, though, like the students, has little interest in politics. He pointed out a wall where nine different parties had painted their names and slogans but he didn’t know any of them. He asked did I know which party a particular group of people were representing. I thought they were from one of the Communist parties. “Are they Russian,” Saif wondered. “My friend has a picture of Stalin and of Lenin. My father also has a picture of Lenin.” He’s a young Shia from one of the poorest areas, irregularly employed and presumably a prime target for several parties but is utterly unmotivated by politics, just like his counterparts in the college.

Ahmed told me more about his time driving the ambulance after the war: “US troops used to shoot at the ambulance sometimes and three times thieves tried to steal it. The first time the road was blocked by men with guns. I said to them, ‘What do you want? Do you want to steal our wounded people?’ They saw that our clothes were covered in blood and ourr faces were exhausted. The man said no, brother, carry on. I told him I’m not your brother.

“The second time, we were taking one of the nurses back to her home and we were surrounded by armed men, but they let us go when they realised it was an ambulance.
Once we were treating a man injured in a fight between US and Iraqi gunmen. He was bleeding from the head, so we bound the wound. Then I realised he was also bleeding from his arm, so I took off my shirt because I had nothing else to use as a tourniquet.

“Then I found another bad wound in the front of his shoulder, so one of the men who was nearby gave me his head covering and I used that on the wound. There were three US soldiers holding guns to our heads while we were bandaging him. The soldier’s hands were shaking on his gun.

“Two months later, I went to try and find him but it turned out he died. Half his face was gone from dum dum bullets but I hoped I had helped him. They explode, so you don’t always find the bullet in the body and they do a lot of damage.

“I don’t feel like the war lasted 21 days. I feel like it’s been 6 months because I was still seeing bodies and bullet wounds and burns and still being shot at. Every time we went into the hospital to take a wounded person there were more people in the hospital begging us to transport them back home or to take their relative to another hospital because they could only do the emergency treatment there and then they have to go to another hospital. We had to go out and get more people who were injured and try to help the people who needed to go to other hospitals.”

He was exhausted after a sleepless night with helicopters overhead and tanks up and down his street. There was an explosion. He didn’t dare go out to see what it was because he thought it was an attack on the US troops, so they would be shooting at everyone. It was only in the morning that he found out it was a bomb in the house of man who used to be a thief and is now a spy, giving information to the Americans. Half of the house was destroyed but he’d still no idea whether anyone was hurt. It’s dangerous to stop and ask on the way past. And his friend Ali is still in hiding and it still doesn’t feel like the war is over.

December 8th 2003
Ahmed and Ali

Ahmed volunteered for the last 15 days of the war as an ambulance driver. He started out trying to bring bodies and injured people to the hospital in his car, but as only one of the hospital’s ambulances in use during the later two thirds of war, he and his friend Ali started using a second one instead of the car.

“I brought five hundred bodies and many injured people. I brought all of them to Saddam Children’s Hospital [part of the Baghdad Medical City] because it was the only one that was still functioning. I never even saw a dead body before and they took me to the morgue and there were 80 bodies there.”

He had no medical training – he used to be a university lecturer in applied physics. After the war, for three months, Ahmed and Ali carried on driving the ambulance at night when people were reluctant to drive about, if they had cars, for fear of being shot by the soldiers. They got permission from the US authorities to drive after dark and, says Ahmed, after work they would start driving, collecting people and bringing them to hospital. He promised me the whole story another day over coffee and baklavas.

They kept the ambulance running as long as they could but eventually it sputtered to a halt and hasn’t worked for three months. Ahmed quit the science college because he couldn’t live on the money they paid him and now works for an organisation which clears away mines and cluster bombs. Apart from the salary, he says, there was no organisation after the war. People took freedom to mean doing exactly as they pleased, there was no co-operation and it became impossible to do anything.

The ambulance, as I just mentioned, hasn’t worked for three months. “One week ago the American soldiers raided Ali’s home. They said they have been given ‘information’ that he uses the ambulance to carry guns and ammunition and these things around at night. They found nothing in his home, not even one gun, although you are allowed to have one gun.

“Now he is a fugitive. He cannot go home because they are looking for him, they will arrest him even though they found nothing in his home. He cannot go to the Americans and say he has nothing to do with moving guns, because they will arrest him as soon as they see him and he will be in prison for at least six months. That is what happens.

“They give $2500 reward for people who give information so people tell stories about someone they don’t like, or they make something up just for the money, and they take the prize. For three months he did not sleep, just worked and then came home and drove the ambulance and now he cannot go home.”

The signs promising these rewards are on huge billboards all around Baghdad. On one of the roundabouts the posters have been bloodied with red paint – a comment on the suffering caused by those who give information, a warning to those contemplating doing so or a middle-finger salute to the authorities offering it: your offers of money won’t protect you.

But, as I’ve said before, solidarity is an alien concept for many here and while there are people like Ahmed and Ali who risked their lives, at times, to bring dead and wounded civilians to the hospitals, tale telling on neighbours and colleagues became a means of survival under the old government. The promise of a couple of years’ worth of wages to a population of which more than two thirds is unemployed means that no one has been liberated from that culture of fear of the people next door.

The mobile phone network is now said to be at least a couple of months away. It seems to delay is deliberate: in Afghanistan the network was up and running within a couple of months of the invasion. It proved useful to the resistance, who were able to communicate troop locations between, for example, the lookouts and the ambush teams. With resentment increasing, the existing MCI network is being cut back as well.

Every time you try to change dollars for dinars someone will frown suspiciously at the note you offer, shake his head, tut and pronounce, “This one is not real.” He will point out whatever feature determines that the note is a fake, maybe show you an identical one of his own as proof, and ask if you haven’t got another one to exchange instead.

Unless you’ve got a kalashnikov in your other pocket, you’re probably not carrying another $100 with you, so you move on to the next money changer, who happily hands over a wedge of the old Saddams for your dollars, thank you very much. You still get a better rate of exchange for the old Saddam notes than you do for the new liberated currency. The dinar, incidentally, is rising against the dollar, though I’ve no idea why. It’s not as if the Iraqi economy is in recovery.

Coincidentally, Tahrir Square, scene of the Saddam-Statue-Toppling ceremony, is now encircled by money changers, who sit at wooden tables with stacks of money in front of them. The wealthier ones have the new, smaller, more pert banknotes in a drawer, with only a small sample of their wares on display, a single 25,000 Dinar note the equivalent of the elastic-banded 100 note bundles of 250s which the little men are still trading. Tahrir means ‘Liberation’ – it was called that long before the Americans got there. It just seems somehow ironic that the scene of the symbol of ‘liberation’, whatever that was for anyone, has turned into the closest thing Iraq has to a stock exchange.

The petrol queues are longer than ever with several hundred cars waiting in spiral queues from petrol stations without even enough fuel to power the generators to work the pumps when the electricity is off. People spend the night in queues in order to drive to work in the morning. Tanks and humvees stand guard to make sure no one gets a can filled to sell outside but when the stations close, it seems it’s still possible for the black marketeers to get a few litres.

Check out www.iraqtoday.com for a front page report on the fuel crisis and other English language news from Iraq. The risk of being caught, tied up and held down with a bag on your head by a thug-fest of American soldiers [I believe this to be the correct collective term for US troops] has driven up the unofficial price even higher. I suppose in a sense it’s more socialist than you might expect of the occupying powers, preventing those with greater wealth avoiding the suffering of those without, but you still never see a humvee in a petrol queue.

December 6th
The Mess Between Two Rivers

Mesopotamia is the land between two rivers and both of them are filthy. It feels a little impolite to say so, of such legendary and ancient veins of the lifeblood of the cradle of so much of our civilization. Rude or not, though, it’s true.

Apologies if I start mutating into a former geography student in all of this – I’ll try my best to write in English. The Tigris and Euphrates in the Baghdad area are running low on water because of dams up-river: there are 28 in Turkey alone. The discharge of the Tigris has fallen from around 40 billion cubic metres in the 1960s to around 16 billion now. It means pollutants are more concentrated. If the water has already been used for irrigation further up the river it’s already contaminated with pesticides and fertilizers before it reaches Iraq.

During the sanctions it was impossible to repair the country’s sewage and water systems, damaged by both war and old age. Pipes were placed on hold for a long time by the sanctions committee, lest anyone should attempt to fire anything unusual out of them. Corrosion leads to leaching of heavy metals from the pipes.

Husni, a professor of Environmental Pollution, says there hasn’t yet been any testing of Iraq’s tap water or sewage but, when he worked in Libya and elsewhere, lead, cobalt, zinc, magnesium and manganese were found in both tap and sewage water from pipes which were corroded much as they are here. Most heavy metals cause damage to the brain, liver, kidneys and other internal organs.

Half a million tons of raw sewage a day (still contaminated with heavy metals) were dumped into Iraq’s fresh water courses – the Tigris, Euphrates and their tributaries. Some is used as fertilizer, so the heavy metals pass into the soil and from there to the plants, into the animals, concentrating in the people who eat them. Seepage of ground water into the river brings with it not only the heavy metals but also more pesticides and fertilisers from the irrigation water, as well as salinated drainage water.

There aren’t even effective road laws here, let alone environmental or health and safety ones, so industrial waste, chemicals and petrol also end up in the river. Husni says under Saddam no one could mention environmental pollution, as it would imply criticism of his policies, and since Saddam, no one cares. Instead of environmental legislation, he says, now there are companies wanting quick and easy money.

Apart from the water, the sewage, the heavy metals, the chemical pesticides, fertilisers and wastes and all the rest of it, there are areas of high radioactivity dotted about with no warning signs, where kids are playing and people are doing their ordinary stuff – the Christian Science Monitor recently surveyed a few areas with a Geiger Counter and found four with extremely high radiation levels.

There’s a ‘tank cemetery’ near Ad-Dora where all the burnt out armoured vehicles were dumped, inside Baghdad, where people cut pieces of metal off the ruins to use for all kinds of stuff. Some of them know the tanks might have been hit with radioactive weaponry but ignore that knowledge as it’s their only source of income. The risks of illness later are less than those of destitution now in a country of 60-80% unemployment.

There isn’t any sort of public health survey or statistics. There is no way of knowing, other than by knocking on every door in a given area, how many people have become ill, how many have died, whether there are patterns among these illnesses, how they correspond with sources of environmental contamination, whether there was heavy fighting there, what weapons were used. It’s urgent because memories, pollutants and people will disperse, the effects will go on and the chance to monitor them will be lost.

Less dramatically, there’s rubbish everywhere, including the rivers – rat infested and toxic, and no one to remove it. Baghdad, Husni says, is on a lake of sewage. The piles of rubbish, I suppose, are the islands. How romantic. As I just mentioned, between 60 and 80% of the population is without a job. Part of this is because there are no public services. No one is employed as a dustman. No one is employed as a worker in the municipal tip or the incinerator. I was about to write that no one is employed in the recycling depot, but I suppose that would be an unnecessary waste of pixels.

Some are dying from poverty and pollution and others are raking in fortunes to put paint on school walls and build mobile phone networks (incidentally it’s looking good for those who bet on ‘when hell freezes over’ for the mobile phone network to become available).

So Hosni wants to set up an organisation which will empower and educate local people to clean up their own environment, where possible, and otherwise to demand that the local, national and occupying authorities do so. He wants to carry out surveys door to door, provide a small salary for local unemployed people to remove the rubbish, collect up the litter on the streets and dispose of it.

He says at the airport, where fierce fighting went on, the topsoil from the area was scooped up by the US forces and taken away. This story is backed by other people. I believe it’s called ‘landscaping’ and it conveniently means that no one can take a soil sample and people can only guess at the type of weaponry that was used there. They’re pretty sure they know, but they can’t prove anything.

The road to the airport used to be like a wood, he says, but the Americans have cut down all the trees along it, for their safety. “It takes years for a palm tree to grow and only a few seconds to chop it down. Baghdad needs some green cover.”

It seems to be that, often, people’s professional knowledge is augmented by personal sadness. After returning to Iraq from work overseas, his brother, a military officer, took him to see the bunkers where the aircraft were kept which had been hit by the Americans in the 1991 war. Around that time his wife became pregnant. She got ill and, almost 7 months into the pregnancy, scans showed the baby was developing abnormally. They lost the child. His face, says Husni, looked like their second child. He says there’s no way of knowing what caused his wife’s illness or the baby’s abnormal development but that’s the importance of finding out. It won’t, he says, make him popular with the Americans.

December 3rd
Killings in Ramadi

Two days before the end of Ramadan, just as they were about to break their fast, the family was interrupted by two groups of US troops from the 82nd Airborne Division bursting into the house, from opposite sides. The family dived for cover and the troops fired on each other, killing three of their own. They then separated the women and girls, putting them in an outside kitchen building of the home near Ramadi.

Three men, brothers Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin, were taken outside the house, forced face down in the mud and shot dead.

The next day the military returned to the village bringing papers with them. They were sorry but they had raided the wrong house, acting on false information. Claims for compensation for any damage suffered could be submitted, along with proof of fault, photographs of damage, medical reports, death certificates, details of the amount of money claimed, and so on, to the nearest office.

The women of the village were in mourning, in black, indoors, the widow and children of one man, the mother of the two brothers, a little girl with a dressing covering a shrapnel wound on her face, a young woman with her arm heavily bandaged. The house was more or less destroyed. A white car was a strainer of bullet holes. There were bloodstains on the ground where the men were executed.

I’m passing on information from an independent journalist friend. I’ve seen the photos but I haven’t yet been able to go and take statements from the people. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and today there was due to be a demonstration by other lawyers in Ramadi. It hasn’t been much in the news though and I thought it was too important to wait till I get to see them. I’ll give you more details when I do.

We attempted to go to Ramadi today to join the demonstration and get their statements but by the time we got petrol it was 9:30 and we wouldn’t even have got out of Baghdad by 10, so the journalists I was hitching a lift with decided not to go. I’ll go on Saturday, inshallah. Cross your fingers for me. It’s a scary place. When I told Raed I was going to Ramadi he pleaded with me not to go. “They will cut off your hands. And your tongue.”

The reason it took until 9:30 to get petrol was that the queue went round the entire block from each of the petrol stations. Men wait outside their cars on the street parallel with the one where the actual pumps are and, every few minutes, open the driver’s door, put their shoulder to the frame and push the vehicle forward a few minutes. To leave the engine running or restart it for every step forward would be unaffordable madness.

The petrol station just past Wathiq Square said it had no petrol to sell, but still there was a motionless queue two cars wide and easily a hundred long. Even the black market sellers now have lines. The queues block the road and the rage of waiting is amplified by the continued inertia outside the station, burning the fuel so hard won. You never see a humvee in a petrol queue.

The Turkish drivers don’t want to drive to Baghdad anymore, according to Mohammed, and there isn’t enough fuel coming in from Kuwait and other neighbours to satisfy the demand for both cars and generators. Iraqi plants are generating too little because they need repairs and the Iraqi engineers know how to fix them but are not being allowed to.

As well, the prices are going up, because Halliburton (the one that’s paying Dick Cheney $1 million a year ‘pension’) is charging, via the US administration, $2.65 per gallon (4 litres) to transport it in from Kuwait. Even the Pentagon, known for its robbery of US taxpayers, used to do the job for $1.12 / gallon.. Iraqi businesses were managing to bring it in for less than $1 a gallon.

As we drove away with a full tank after a half-hour wait, even for black market petrol, Mohammed indicated another queue occupying two lanes of the highway we were passing over. The roadside sellers said an American tank just crushed two cars in that queue and drove away. No one was hurt, because they were out of the cars, just very, very angry.

December 2nd
Catching Up

Husam was driving his uncle’s car when a US humvee (big armoured car thing) pulled out and crashed into his side. He came to as they were dragging him out of the car. They pushed him onto the ground with his arms pulled up behind his back, tied them, put him into the humvee and didn’t speak to him for 20 minutes or so. The soldier in the humvee just watched him, smirking.

The translator came and told Husam he knew it wasn’t his fault, that it was the soldiers who caused the crash. Husam asked him please, go and tell them that. The translator went to tell them and a soldier came and hit Husam. “Watch yourself.”

After a while one of the soldiers suggested to the others that “we should take $50 from him for attacking us.” Husam didn’t have $50 for them to take but there was a child’s bike in the boot of the car that he was taking to one of his young cousins. One of the soldiers said, “Aah, he’s going to make a child happy. Let him go.” He was untied and let out of the humvee. He asked what they were going to do about the damage to his car. “It belongs to my uncle, not to me and you’ve destroyed it.” The translator said just go. You have your life, you have your freedom, just go.

He emailed a few days ago and today was the first time I’d seen him and his family since the war started. Harb, his dad, greeted me with open arms and a huge smile which faded when I asked him how he was doing. “Lousy,” he said.

“No work?” I asked.

“I have no work, there is no electricity – look, we’re using a generator, there is no security, no law and if something is broken, who do I complain to? There are no ministries. The sewers are full and there is no one to fix them. Saddam was a criminal, a criminal. I’m not defending him, but I am defending the government. We had an establishment, very much establishment, and if something wasn’t working you made one phone call and they would come and fix it. The sanctions made everything slower and more difficult but still we had this establishment. Now there is nothing: no government, no police.

“We can’t drive anywhere. It takes me an hour and a half to drive Husam to his college in the morning and in the afternoon it takes two hours to bring him back. Today my wife had to walk half her way to work. She is an old woman.”

Umm Talaat’s English isn’t as fluent as the rest of the family’s but she understood that much and gave him a resentful look – as if having to walk around the road blocks and traffic jams wasn’t indignity enough, now she was being called an old woman. The bus didn’t arrive – no doubt caught in traffic or broken, so she had to take a taxi. The bank she works in is on Old Rasheed Street, which was closed by the Americans for some reason connected with the exchange of the old currency for the new one. The closure stopped the traffic on surrounding streets and she had to walk about 3 kilometres.

The petrol queues make everything worse: Harb described the choice between queuing for two hours to fill up in a petrol station for between 20-50 Dinars per a litre or paying 4000 Dinars for 20 litres of black market petrol – 200 Dinars a litre - from a roadside seller who’s already done the queuing for you. Last time he paid the extra; today he queued, hence his overflowing frustration. “The Americans did one good thing today – they chased away the kids with petrol cans at the petrol station, so the queue moved quicker. When they do something good, we have to say so, they did something good, but when they do something bad, we can’t say they did something good.”

Talaat, the oldest son, is a doctor. His salary has gone up, he said, trying to be positive. But, he shrugged, everything is more expensive. Harb said a kilo of potatoes has gone up fourfold, from 300 to 1200 Dinars. Talaat said he bought a kilo of meat earlier that day for 9000 Dinars. I’ve no idea what it cost before but the entire family looked scandalised.

He got married in September to another doctor: the wedding had been on hold until after the war, which he spent living and working in the hospital. They received sometimes 100 casualties in a quarter of an hour, ran out of everything. He saw looters in the hospital while he was operating in theatre the day Baghdad was taken by the US. The next day, marines came to guard what was left because Baghdad Medical complex was the only hospital still functioning in the city.

The far side of the bridge was a tank, shooting at everything, “human or animal”. A pick-up was fired at: “Incidentally there was a family inside. The ones who could run away escaped and came to the hospital for help, there is a woman dying in the car and children. We went to the soldiers guarding the hospital and said to them please signal to those soldiers and tell them to stop shooting so we can get to those people. They said we can not signal to those soldiers because we are the marines and they are the ordinary army.

“We told them please, can’t you talk to them, so we can get the ambulance there and they said no, it’s not possible. So they were killed.

“Nothing has changed since the war. We have no nursing staff. I work as a surgeon, a scrub nurse, a cleaner. Still there is nothing. I am working in a septic environment. We have to prioritise – we will operate on this one now, this one later, let that one die because we can’t spare the treatment for him.”

Bullet wounds are now the biggest generator of casualties. Last year’s medical graduates are still without jobs because ministries not working properly to put them into work. They’ve been told they’ll have to wait till after January 1st. Harb indicated the girls’ accommodation buildings for the university, which are unuseable at the moment, because the glass is all broken and the structure damage. “The girls, mind you – they can’t just live in any rented accommodation.”

Husam pointed out the old republican palace. “People used to drive past as quickly as possible and make sure they didn’t slow down or stop near it. This was the main street. Now look what the Americans have done – they have put razor wire and concrete and the road is blocked so only one car can pass at a time. Now the street is always jammed.

“Did you see the telephone exchange? It was bombed four times with eleven missiles, to make sure it will never work again. We were here in the house. It was unbelievable.”

The house is a block away from what used to be the exchange. Piles of rubbish burn on the crumpled remains of the building and the tower, as if the ground opened and sucked the concrete, metal and glass into the crater it created. The surrounding houses are derelict as is the block of flats on the corner which used to house NASYO, the Non-Aligned Students and Youth Organisation, which sorted out my visa last time. Squatters live in what’s left of it.

Aside from being able to say aloud, “Saddam was a criminal”, the sole advantage Harb and Husam could think of was that you can now get onto all of Yahoo. Before, you could only access the search page. Still it’s impossible to download software that you have to pay for because there are no credit cards. Harb says it just means there is lots of pornography now on the internet. Husam is the supervisor in an internet centre which uses satellite, so all sites are accessible, but otherwise some sites are blocked by the US, notably the hacking sites which used to be the key to Iraqis’ navigation of the internet.

Adamiya is still under frequent US attack, still resisting occupation. Another friend from the neighbourhood expressed pride in his part of town. They don’t want Saddam back, he says, but they don’t want Americans there either. He was sitting outside a café one day when two men ran out from the market carrying grenade launchers. He and everyone around saw what was about to happen and dived on the ground. The first man caused a little damage but the second hit the tank hard.

The Americans started shooting in all directions but a third man was on a balcony in the market and hit them from above. All but one of the soldiers in the tank, Ahmed thinks, were killed. The last one carried on firing for a while and then realised it was hopeless and ducked back into the tank. The helicopters came but by then everyone had run away. That’s the only thing to do, Ahmed said. Get away before they arrive.

In a coffee shop a couple of days ago he was talking to a man and realised he was the brother of the men involved, who have now escaped the country. Amid the sound of dominoes clattering on the tables you could hear people talking about various weapons and ammunition. The sabotage, he says, is coming from ordinary people, local people, because they don’t accept the occupation. “I love the people of Adamiya,” he said.

December 1st 2003
Farouq

Yesterday I was loitering on a corner when a familiar face caught my eye. It took a minute to place him: the last time I saw him Faroukh was a teacher in Qataiba Boys’ School in Thawra, shouting angrily that the people would not fight for Saddam but would fight for their country and would not accept foreign domination - neither the Baathists nor invasion. He was far from the only one who said it, but the only person I saw venting real fury, openly displaying a genuine and emotional response to what was happening, among the already dangerous whispers of truth between the vocal announcements of What You’re Supposed To Say.

He’s still teaching but also works for a human rights organization called the Patriotic Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Iraq, based in the building which used to be the Office of Peace, Solidarity and Friendship on Old Rasheed Street, near the Jumeriya Bridge. The building, though partly derelict, houses several human rights groups.

Thabat checked down a list: “This is cluster bombs, this is cluster bombs, this is cluster bombs, but you know, there are no cluster bombs. They will not come and clean them up.”

A doctor was standing outside his home waiting for a taxi when he was shot dead by American troops. “There were thieves nearby and they ran away. The soldiers chased them in the vehicle and they were firing, firing, everywhere, and they killed him. And they pay nothing. They say he was in the wrong place. If they shot him in his house they would say he was in the wrong place.”

On November 8th a man was waiting in the bus station when soldiers came and began searching people. He reported to the group that they stole 160,000 Iraqi Dinar from him – about $80. He didn’t see the face or rank of the soldiers responsible because they’d covered his head with a bag. They didn’t give him any paper stating that the confiscation had been made, nor the value, nor the reason. This happens a lot, according to Thabat’s list of cases, in people’s homes as well as on the street.

Thabat said that in only one of all the cases reported to the group had the victim been given a paper stating what had happened but, he said, the paper was worthless. It didn’t bring anything from the CPA or CMOC (Civilian Military Operations Centre). In not a single case that has been reported to him has any compensation been paid or any action been taken against the perpetrators.

He’s a lawyer but that’s almost irrelevant here. Where is the court, where is the process, where is the justice? He’s acting for Baqer, the boy I met a few days ago who was shot by US troops, but the soldiers and the military have impunity. The CPA and CMOC officials tell him to come next week, come in two weeks, and never give anything.

Another of the groups based in the building began in the 1960s and has branches throughout the country. There is an association focused on prisoners, both under the old regime and the new. They looted the relevant buildings after the war to get the information which would help them to record what happened to people. They’re kept busy with the huge number of people now detained without charge by the coalition, trying to find out who is still alive but held incommunicado, who is dead, where they are being held, for what and when they will be tried or released.

A couple of days ago I received an e mail entitled “The good news” from someone in the US. Each sentence began, “Since president Bush declared major combat over on May 1st…” followed by an assertion purporting to be a benefit which has accrued to the Iraqis as a result of the war or some item of progress in rebuilding the civil and physical infrastructure. Apparently all the courts are now functioning. The lawyers laughed when I told them.

Yet friends and families of the detainees and the missing have called a demonstration for Friday (December 5th), marching from Tahrir (Liberation) Square across the bridge to the coalition-occupied Republican Palace. On Saturday there will be a vigil at Abu Ghraib prison. Saturday is also the date for the Kimadia workers’ demonstration, though there’s some doubt whether it will go ahead because a lot of them are scared to participate.

Qasim Hadi, the leader of the Union of Unemployed Iraqis (UUI), and Adil Salih, from the Union’s leadership committee, were arrested in Baghdad on November 23rd. They’ve now been released, but Qasim was arrested along with 54 Union members during the 45 day protest this summer at the CPA headquarters, demanding either jobs or social security for millions of unemployed people. The Union and its protests have also been attacked by Islamist parties. They pointed out that Qasim and Adil’s arrests breach the rights to freedom of association and organisation.

It doesn’t make much difference, if you’re the one on the receiving end, who’s carrying out the arrests, who’s detaining you without charge, who’s randomly shooting at you, who’s refusing to clean up the cluster bombs.



I know it’s short notice – that’s because the detainee protest here has only just been organized – but it would be great if people could organize any kind of solidarity demonstrations for this weekend. The march is Friday and the vigil is Saturday, so maybe corresponding vigils on Saturday could highlight the huge number of people detained without charge here.

For anyone wanting to do press releases, the text of the leaflet here reads:

“Demonstrate for the Rights of Detainees
“The coalition claims there are only 5000 detainees. This is a lie.
“Most of the detainees have not been charged and are being held without legal representation. They are classified as ‘suspected terrorists’. This is illegal.
“Support the rights of the detainees. Support families who do not know whether their loved ones are alive. Oppose the occupation
“Join a peaceful demonstration beginning at Al-Tahrir Square at 10am on Friday, December 5, to march over Jumhuriya Bridge to the gates of the Republican Palace that is occupied by the coalition. There will be a vigil at noon on Saturday December 6 at Abu Ghraib prison.
“This demonstration is organized by friends and families of the detainees.”

For testimonies from people who have now been released from detention, see the Christian Peacemaker Team website – http://www.cpt.org/iraq/iraq.php

Peat's Peace - Circus Revolution in Northern Ireland
Hi there,

For those of you who don't know me. I'm a full time fool called devilstick peat. When I say full time fool, I don't just mean it's my job (i.e. red and yellow suit, lots of bells, silliness etc). I also treat it as a way of life (i.e. seeing the humor in the horrid, the treasure in the litter, the rainbow in the storm etc).

Its been a strange life, being a fool. Strange but full of "interesting times". Very interesting times. Take the last few days for example. I had to go to Glastonbury to meet up with Paddy and Charlie (two group leaders from CHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONAL). Together we were going to Northern Ireland to run an integration tour.

"So, you got your passport with you"? asked paddy.

I laughed saying "We're only doing the north, so I wont need it".

"But we're still flying, so you need photo I.D. even though it's still an internal flight".

For a second or two I panicked as my mind run through a mental checklist of my pockets and wallet. Then I relaxed as I remembered that I did indeed have photo I.D. Then I remembered what it was.

"Oh yes, I've photo I.D." I said with an air of confidence.

"Oh god, I'm in the shit" I thought with an air of certainty.

The young lady at the airport check in was around 25, with tied back blond hair, too much makeup, and a bored look on her face. "Can I have your I.D. please gentlemen"? she said

Paddy handed over his passport. Charlie handed over his passport. I handed over my I.D. card for Warwick castle. It has a number, my name and a photo of me on it. Me in my fool’s suit, complete with horny hat and a big smile. Not a friendly smile, oh no. This is the big, slightly deranged, manic, "you-really-don't-want-to-get-on-the-wrong-side-of-me" smile that I normally save for my first play group session with children.

It was so disappointing. She didn't bat an eye lid. She just gave it a quick glance then handed it back along with my boarding card. But the funny thing is that my Warwick castle I.D. is only valid for the castle. And due to the fact that I no longer work there, it isn't even valid for there. Yet it's good enough to get me onto a plane!!!!!! So much for tighter security.

So, here I am, back in Northern Ireland, working for one of my two favorite charities. The reason I like CHILDREN'S WORLD INTERNATIONAL is that they have their own goals and few morals about how they reach them. Take this tour for example.

"The European year for people with disabilities" have paid for "CONTACT A FAMILY" to bring C.W.I. to Northern Ireland and run integration workshops. Getting children with severe learning disabilities, and children without severe learning difficulties working and playing together. We done it the other year in Belfast and some of those friendships are still going strong. Like I say. That's what we're paid to do and that is indeed what we do do.

BUT..........That's not our only goal. You see, what we're really doing is convincing them that making friends is soooooooo much fun, that it never occurs to them to wonder if the wheel chair was made by a catholic company, or a protestant one. (actually, none of today's children were in wheelchairs, but hey, you got to allow me a little poetic license).

The thing is. If you can convince an 8 year old that not all Catholics have hoofed feet, and not all protestants come complete with devil horns. Then when he's 80, That's 72 years of fear and hatred that never happens. And that folks, is peacekeeping. REAL peacekeeping.

Sending in the army, kicking in doors and giving people grief might be
called peace keeping, but it aint. All that does is breed more anger. You
cant put a fire out with petrol. It don't work. Believe me, as an ex member
of the British army (infantry) I know. What we got to do is teach the army parachute games, give them red noses and baggy clowns trousers, then send them to play with kids. Not just in Ireland but the world over. That's the only realistic way to bring about world
peace. Any old fool knows that.
The trouble is that we old fools don't run the world. Instead its run by politicians and multinationals. Which is why solders wear khaki instead of clown clothes, and carry guns in place of custard pies. It's also why I, an ex British solder. Armed now with nothing more dangerous than heart, hope, and a pigs bladder on a stick, spent last night sitting in
a republican bar, underneath the flag of the local branch of a well known paramilitary/terrorist group, listening to some great live music and thoroughly enjoying the crack. .Like I said. "Its been a strange life, being a fool. Strange but full of "interesting times". Very interesting times".

I just hope that my Warwick I.D. gets me back on to the plane home. Otherwise
it's a long, cold swim.
PART TWO
The last two days of our tour was to be spent with the same children. One day we'd all meet at the special school, the next day we'd all be at the mainstream school. In the morning of the first day, standing against the wall, were two girls with severe learning difficulties (S.L.D. children). The way they didn't join in made them stick out like a sore thumbs. It wasn't that they weren't enjoying the session. Indeed, they both had smiles on their faces. The big broad innocent types of smiles that the gods saved especially for children.
No, the problem was that all the fun, new friends, and enjoyment overwhelmed them. It was, quite literally, too much of a good thing. In that situation you can't force the child to join in. All you can do is leave them be and let them join in at their own pace, and sure enough, 15 minutes latter and they were both playing and working with as much joy and zest as the other kids.
That night we scoured the town in search of a eating house who's vegetarian menu stretched further than veggie-burger and chips. (When we were in Kosova I had to survive on bread, tomato salad and raw onions. To this day, the mere mention of tomato salad can bring about a reemergence of my nervous twitch, and a far away, Vietnam type look to my eyes).
At one point, as we strolled around the town centre, we were passed by two army vehicles . Protruding from the top of each one was a soldier, their young, nervous eyes scanning the rooftops, windows and us (I found myself wondering if I too was really that young when I carried a gun). Then I noticed Paddy and Charles reaction to the sight.
Like me they too had been to Kosova, where armed soldiers are common place, and Albania where the sound of gun fire from running street battles made for an interesting back drop to night life, Tirana style. (And where also, the sudden ending of the sound of gun fire brought a new twist to the saying "dead quiet"). Yet the sight of these two vehicles shocked them. Not because they had soldiers in them, and not because these soldiers were armed, but because they were on the streets of Britain. And that was what upset them.
The trouble was that this wasn't Manchester or Liverpool or any other main land town. This was a place close to the north/south boarder, a place known as Stroke city. But don't bother looking for it in your atlas, it's not there. Well, not under that name anyway. What's that you say? "What name is it under"? Well now, that all depends on whose map you’re looking at.
You see. It's like this. If the map your reading was made by republicans (I.E. Those who want a united, independent republic of Ireland). It will be under the name of Derry. If your map is a unionist map (I.E. Those who want the north to remain in the united kingdom) then it's under the name of Londonderry. And if, like us, your stuck in the middle, in the politically correct verbal wasteland called no mans land. Then you call it DERRY/LONDONDERRY. And it's that diagonal stroke from which Derry/Londonderry takes it's nick name.
Now if that was the only difference that some of these people are prepared to fight and kill over, it would be an easy problem to solve, just change it's name to something completely different, but it isn't. This difference has friends, lots of friends. They're called painting the curb stones of your street in the colours of the British or Irish flag. Which school you went to. The estate or street that you live in. Whether you pronounce your "S"'s like Sean Hues or Sean Connery. Even your first name can give away which side of the divide you come from. Apart, these things are nothing more than small minded bigotry, but together. Together they become bricks in that giant wall called segregation. And that's really important, here's why.
If you take a community and split it into two groups, making sure that there's no social intercourse between them. Then neither group will see the human side of the other group. This means that it's easier to forget that the other man, like you, might be a father, or a brother, a member of a pool team, A HUMAN BEING............................... And lets face it. If it aint human, then where's the harm in shooting it, bombing it's pub, or beating up it's kids just because they took a short cut home from school, through your estate.
That shows just how powerful fear and hate can be. It also shows why it is that your never see the politicians from the two opposing sides finish work, then go down the pub together. If they did, if they got so rat-arsed that they threw their arms around each other saying "Your my (hic) bestish mate you are". Then the people would lose their fear and hate, which in turn would cost the politicians their power. And that, they will never allow to happen.
On the Friday it was the turn of the mainstream school to host our integration workshop. In the afternoon, as the children filed in after lunch break, a child came running up to me and throw her arms around me in a big, heart felt hug. She was one of the two S.L.D. girls I mentioned earlier, and was just at the right height to accidentally head butt me where it hurts.
"Thank you" she said as she squeezed me tight
"For what"? I asked with watery eyes.
She turned and pointed to a mainstream girl in the group. "Is she your friend"? I asked. She nodded. "What's her name"? I said in an attempt to get her to communicate verbally. For a few seconds she stood there, staring at the girl with a look of concentration on her face as she tried to remember the her name.
"I don't know, but she's my friend" she said, then she run across the hall to join the other kids.
That was one of those truly wonderful moments that one has to be there to appreciate, but for the rest of the afternoon, every time I looked at this girl who thought more of friendship than names or labels, I thought of the politicians who only know hate, and I found myself asking the following question.
Who's the one with the learning impediment. The girl who's learning difficulties are so severe that she'll never learn hate or bigotry. The politician who's power craving is so severe that he'll never learn the meaning of tolerance, peace and understanding. Or the society that not only decided which of these two should be in parliament, and which should be in a special school, but also knowingly got it the wrong way round?
The day came to a close and we packed away our kit. Done a lot of hand shaking, waving and good bye saying. Then got in to the car and headed for the airport, and our flight east, to Bristol, in the west of England.
The girl at the check in was around 25 years young, with red hair and the type of Irish accent that sounds so soft, you'd want to fall into it and wrap it all around you. "Can I be seeing your I.D. please" she asked. Paddy handed over his passport. Charlie handed over his passport. I handed over my Warwick I.D. card.
She burst out laughing and handed my I.D. to her friend. He too laughed and a small group of easy jet personal gathered around, passing it from one to the other before handing it back with my boarding pass. As I proceeded to the departure lounge I could feel the quizzical looks coming from the rest of the queue. "Now that" I thought "Is the sort of reaction a fool of my caliber expects from his I.D.".
And here I am, back in my little welsh village. Enjoying the quiet, peaceful life of a small community that has hardly changed for generations, and getting ready for my next adventure. Which (if all goes well, and if I can raise the cash) should be the circus tour of Iraq. (WWW.CIRCUS2IRAQ.ORG)
Which brings me rather neatly to the point of this email. You see, lots of people have shared with me their views on the Iraq trip. Some say I'm brave, some that I'm stupid, others say it's just an ego thing. The truth is I aint brave (I actually have to change my under wear every time I think about it, as opposed to every other month, as per normal), and as for stupid. Well, although I cant argue with that, I prefer the word "foolish", and yes, like all performers I have an ego. I couldn't get up on stage if I didn't. But none of the above, regardless of how true they may or may not be. None of the above come close to the real reason I fell the need to go, which is this.
If I said no to this trip. If I was to refuse the chance to go out there, meet, interact, learn from and teach with these people, the chance to interact with the children. Then surly I'd be as guilty of putting the diagonal stroke between arab/western, middle eastern/european as the politicians and killers are in stroke city, Northern Ireland. and I just cant do that. Wish I could but I cant. Not where children are involved. It wouldn't be right

November 28th
Rebuilding

Emar is an Iraqi organization set up to involve Iraqi people in their own civil society and the reconstruction of the country. The name means ‘rebuild’ or ‘reconstruct’. There are teams of local volunteers in eight cities who identify needs, work out a plan and try to fulfil the need. In Nasariya the group has been helping to build a school in a marsh village outside the main town.

The vehicles skated through mud along the track into the village, over earth bridges across streams and rivers, between palms, vegetable plots, reed or mud houses and tribes of small children. The area is controlled by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and we were obliged to take two of their members with us, cover our hair and not smile at them.

The almost-finished school is made of mud bricks covered with mud and straw plaster. The roof is woven straw. It’s cost $1500 to build and equip. The boys crowded around us as the volunteers proudly showed us the new schoolrooms. None of the kids there has ever been to school, so the first grade will include children aged from 6 to 14. The head of the school is from the village and teachers will come from other schools to teach in shifts.

Girls passed by a little way off carrying water and bundles of reeds. A stampede of shrieking boys fled the courtyard of a house, chased by a woman throwing clods of earth at them. She invited us in. Girls in bright clothes and patterned headscarves were leaning on the walls and looking after the youngest children.

The marshes were a centre of resistance to Saddam, offering a safe haven for fighters and activists because they were difficult for the troops to get into. This village wasn’t drained, as many were, but the diversion of water did, overall, have the desired effect of crushing the resistance.

Abbas, one of the volunteers, summed up the contrast between Emar’s projects and the contracts given out by the occupying powers. Contracts for school rehabilitation are commonly worth forty to fifty thousand dollars and they do almost nothing. The schools are still not fit for use. Bechtel has been one of the main beneficiaries. They immediately sub-contract the work for about $28,000 to a company which then contracts the work to another company for about $10,000. He has this information from a friend who works as an engineer in the Ministry of Education.

At one local school that was “rehabilitated” this way, the fence the contractors built was such poor quality that it collapsed, hurting two of the girls. Abbas said their lives are finished. Both girls suffered broken hips so they won’t be able to have children, so no one will want to marry them. His medical information is maybe a bit sketchy – they’re only 8 and it’s unlikely that broken hips now will stop them bearing babies, should they want to, in adulthood, but his take on the situation is indicative of the distress the accident must be causing the girls and families concerned.

Abbas runs a restaurant that his father and grandfather ran before him. Even his great grandfather worked there. The dish he serves is a traditional Iraqi one. Don’t read the next line if you’re squeamish. It’s the head and feet of a sheep, skinned, but with the brain and eyes, etc, still there.

He wasn’t active in local civil society before Emar, but now he devotes his spare time and energy to the group. The things that attracted him to Emar are its freedom from political and religious affiliations. Decision making is decentralized, by consensus within each local group without any form of hierarchy. Raed provides co-ordination, support and funding but everything is up to the teams. Individuals have the space to develop their own projects and it was the Nasariya group’s idea to take the project out of town and into the marshes to ask people there what they needed.

The building was damaged by the explosion at the nearby Italian Carabinieri headquarters. The doors were blown off and were found inside the building. Every window was shattered and glass fragments embedded into the inside walls. The walls and ceilings were badly cracked. People were killed in buildings the far side of the Emar house from the bombed HQ but luckily no one was hurt in Emar. The volunteers chose and equipped the building themselves, building some of the furniture. Since the explosion they’ve worked almost constantly to clean and repair the place, replacing the destroyed windows.

Just after it got dark some of the volunteers came back with food and the information that there was to be an infijar, an explosion, within the next few minutes, of some unexploded stuff nearby. We all trooped up to the roof to watch – it’s what people do here. Even though we were expecting it, it still made everyone jump. Abbas was involved in the armed uprising against Saddam in 1991 and said it was the same then – even when you were expecting a blast, they never stopped making you jump.

Ammar is a recent graduate from the technical institute, currently unemployed. He has just got married, on paper, to Safa, but before the marriage ceremony could take place their mothers fell out, followed by their entire families. The two are not allowed even to see each other at the moment.

Some of the volunteers are students at Nasariya University. Bassim is studying computing and Ali is a mathematician. They were keen to make links with universities outside Iraq who would work with them to rehabilitate their library. Part of Emar’s aim is to start open student discussions between the different ethnic, religious and political groups to increase understanding and reduce violence. The idea is that a student forum will widen to include the whole community. It’s as much about building civil society as the physical infrastructure.

They also distribute information about, for example, the dangers of shooting into the air, highlighted by the volunteers in Simawa, most of whom are doctors. They had 48 casualties in the hospital from shooting into the air during Eid celebrations.

On the drive back to Baghdad we crawled through the flooded streets of Najaf. Women in hijabs splashed across the road, black tights splattered with mud. Men hitched up their robes around their knees and waded. A car got stuck on the side of a lorry after they drove too close together, closing two thirds of the road. Every car was plastered with grime so thick the registration plates were illegible and the back windscreens were blacked out. The drains were irrelevant in the face of real rain. It seemed impossible that anything would ever be clean again, like it did after the sandstorm during the war.

A convoy with flashing lights led the way as we left Najaf, presumably carrying the SCIRI member of the governing council. At each intersection, a man hopped out of the rear car, ran to the traffic policeman in the middle to tell him to let them through and then made a flying leap back into the car as it passed.

But at least there was electricity when we got home.

November 27th
Coalition Troops

Driving down to Nasariya we were forced off the road by a US military lorry. The convoy was pottering along the road and cars were weaving in and out of it, overtaking one, two, three vehicles at a time depending on the gaps between cars coming the other way, until they were clear of the whole convoy. The practice, to be on the safe side, is to hoot the horn and flash the lights before pulling out, as well as indicating, if you have the facilities to do so, just to make sure the vehicle in front knows you’re pulling out.

We’d been doing that for a while when we pulled out to pass another lorry. There was nothing in front of it for a little way but, as we were half way past it, it pulled out into the other lane. Raed braked hard and swerved to avoid it but it kept coming, side-swiping the car and knocking us into the dirt off the road. I don’t believe the driver could have failed to notice we were there when he pulled out and there was no reason for him to have pulled out at all. There was nothing for him to overtake and no obstacle in the road. Certainly he couldn’t have missed the fact he’d just hit us but he didn’t stop.

We were lucky that the car is quite new, big and solid, with good ABS brakes and 4 wheel drive for all the off road bits where bridges have been destroyed and trips into the marshes. We stopped at the next checkpoint and Raed got out to check the nationality of the convoy and make a complaint. A small Dutch boy nervously scuttled off to check. It was definitely a US convoy. His colleague took photos on a digital camera of the car’s number plate and the damage, gave us a contact number and took a number for Raed. It wasn’t clear whether the camera was a regimental one or the soldier’s own, with his holiday pictures on, or what they were going to do with the pictures, but they did say they’d be in touch.

The night before, while my housemates were on their way home, they were ordered out of the car at a US checkpoint, pushed about and accused of filming pornography because there was a camera in the car.

Waleed was going to work when he saw three Humvees stop by a man selling petrol at the roadside. There are queues, two cars wide and fifty cars long, outside every petrol station in Baghdad, waiting for tankers importing Saudi fuel. Roadside petrol is more expensive but infinitely easier to come by if you can afford the extra. The soldiers threw him to the ground, put a foot on his back and shouted in English. The man was screaming. Waleed had his video camera with him and wanted to get out and record the incident but the taxi driver refused to stop near the American troops.

A friend’s dad was telling me how he acted as a translator for some of the tribal leaders in the Abu Ghraib area when the coalition troops first arrived. He said he told them they would have to treat the tribes with respect because they would never control them with force and that, by July, three months after the invasion, they were likely to face increasing attacks. They knew nothing, he said, about the country and its culture or religion. The timescale was proved right. After three months, frustration had grown and the US troops in the Abu Ghraib area now face almost daily attacks.

The same applies to Fallujah, he said, where his family is from. The city is now one of the biggest danger areas for the troops, part of the so-called Sunni Triangle. The people there, he said, hated Saddam. Even when he came to ask what they wanted they refused to accept his offers of money and developments. The resistance there is not, in his opinion, pro-Saddam, but arose because the invaders didn’t show respect to the tribes, women and traditions.

Time after time I hear people say that the occupying forces are no different from Saddam, they use the same tactics as Mukhabarat, the secret police, they are as corrupt, as dishonest, as self-serving as the old leadership.

November 26th
A Boy with a Bullet in his Brain

Saif, who used to work in the hotel I used to stay in, asked me to come and meet his neighbours. Their son Baqer was shot by US soldiers and survived, but with a 9mm bullet lodged in his head. The CPA promised to help with his treatment and medicines but has given the family nothing: not money, medicines, treatment nor assistance with traveling out of Iraq to hospital in Jordan or beyond.

Baqer is four and a half. On May 26th the family were going to visit relatives. They were waiting for a taxi when there was an explosion. US troops started shooting. Baqer fell. He was taken to Al-Yermouk, the main trauma hospital for south and west Baghdad. He suffered injury to his left cerebrum and his left 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th cranial nerves causing partial nerve palsy which have impaired his sight, hearing, speech and walking. One of his eyes is unfocussed and unmoving. Whenever he tries to get off someone’s lap, he lists and staggers and falls over. His dad Ali says he can’t sleep properly, so he cries with tiredness.

He’s been taken to one doctor after another in the hope that someone will be able to do something to help. At first Baqer screamed, wriggled and squirmed out of his dad’s arms and flung himself out of the room in panic because he was sure Michael and I must be more doctors, come to poke and stare. It was a while before he decided we were friends. The doctors only prescribe medicines but the family can’t afford to buy them.

They live in Thawra / Sadr City, formerly Saddam City, a huge, poor and reputedly wild Shia district hammered by Saddam as a centre of resistance. The friend of Saif’s who drove us there was lost in central Baghdad, having not left Thawra for four years before the war because Saddam’s police were after him. Ali was a meat salesman but had to quit his job to take Baqer on the rounds of the hospitals. They’ve sold the TV, almost everything, to buy medicines. The house is bare but for rugs on the floor, a single light bulb and a lamp which takes over when the electricity is out, which seems to be most of the time, throughout Baghdad (including now).

Charities and NGOs helped the family to take Baqer to Jordan to see if the doctors there could help. He went on November 5th but the report from the Palestine Hospital says there’s nothing they can do at this stage. If the bullet migrates medially and inferiorly [for the benefit of the doctors among us] it could encroach on the brain stem so Baqer has to have regular scans to check it isn’t moving. If there’s any visible deterioration they’re to take him immediately on the 10-12 hour journey to Amman for emergency treatment. They’ve been advised to get him to hospital in Europe because the equipment and treatment he needs is unavailable in Iraq’s devastated hospitals. His eye is getting worse all the time and drops for keratitis are not working.

Ali sat surrounded by papers and photographs: the statement about the shooting, the medical report from his discharge from Al-Yermouk and the one from Jordan, pictures of the scene of the shooting, of Baqer’s damaged eye, of the bullet wound, of him still perfect in a family photo before the shooting, with sisters Heba and Zahra, 7 and 2. There’s another baby due soon.

A lawyer from one of the CMOCs (Civilian-Military Operations Centres) promised money for Baqer’s treatment but they’ve been unable to find the lawyer again on subsequent visits. After the visit to the Jordanian hospital, Ali went again to the CPA. They told him they were busy and to come back another time. The family are more fortunate than many in having support from various groups including Care International and Human Rights Watch.

There’s no dispute that US soldiers were responsible for Baqer’s shooting, that it’s a US army bullet in his head. There’s no knowing how many more families and individuals are going through the same struggle, trying to find the money for medical care, trying to get the forces responsible to give the financial help they promised.

For that reason, rather than start an appeal for Baqer, I think we need to demand compensation and financial support from the forces responsible, for all their civilian victims. At the moment the military institution has complete impunity for what its soldiers do and the soldiers have impunity within the military. No soldier has yet been disciplined for incidents like this. In terms of supporting Iraqi people, increasing the accountability of the occupying forces is probably one of the most important things to do.

Direct action, blockades, marches, compensation confetti in the House of Commons, letter writing to MPs or congress people, Blair, Bush and so on and the newspapers and all the rest of your powers of creative mischief and mayhem making are needed.

November 24th
Solidarity and Destruction

What would you do if there weren’t any road laws? The lights still turn red and green but there’s no one to stop you or punish you if you drive straight through. No one stops at red lights – the idea would be ridiculous. People drive on whichever side of the road is convenient. At junctions all the drivers pile into the middle, pressing the horn and trying to either shove or shimmy through.

When you found you were going the wrong way you’d just reverse around the roundabout, drive backwards up the nearest exit till you could turn round and go the way you wanted, like my taxi driver earlier. The chaos is so all-encompassing that the road laws don’t matter enough to bother enforcing.

Add to that a situation where people have, for thirty-five years, been encouraged, brutalised, into near-complete depoliticisation and tale telling. My housemate Raed told me how, during Saddam’s rule, it was illegal to have a satellite dish. If your neighbour put up a dish and you reported it, your neighbour disappeared and you received money and praise. If you didn’t report it, you’d disappear too. You couldn’t be certain the dish wasn’t a plant to see whether you were a loyal subject or not.

A journalist I met just before the war is now working for Al Jazeera. She said the new bureau chief who came in after the invasion spent his first two months under siege in his office as one staff member after another came in to make reports on his colleagues. This person said this, that person did that, this man told me the other, and so on. A lifetime of being expected to report on your co-workers’ every move has ingrained the idea that, to survive, never mind to get on in a job, you have to be part of the thought police.

It’s not surprising, in the circumstances, that it’s hard to explain the concept of “solidarity” to people in Iraq. There is an Arabic word for it but most of the population find it hard to comprehend. Even on a demonstration, even in trade unions, a lot of people look at you in bewilderment and ask why you would think of doing that.

A friend of Raed’s came round to drink wine and put the world to rights. I’ll call him Ahmed. The two of them and another friend used to sit for hours in the weeks before the war and talk about the country’s future. Ahmed lived in a broom cupboard with a waterfall in the kitchen from the toilet upstairs which was leaking. He was on the run from the army and had been for seven years. Avoiding military service meant it was impossible to get a decent job, so he was always broke, living in a hovel without enough to eat, unable to register for the food ration because it would give away where he was.

In the early days of the war he was arrested for being a British agent because he was riding a bike and wearing a small rucksack. The suspicions were only confirmed when a book in English was found in said rucksack along with a radio – the kind you listen to, not the kind you talk on. He thought that was going to be the end of him but it seems the police knew the thing was nearly over and couldn’t be bothered. It reminds me of a joke about how the dinosaurs became extinct as a result of existentialist doubt: “Rrrrroarrr,” stomp stomp stomp. “Oh, what’s the point?”

He was arrested by US soldiers a short way into the occupation for having a beard which, evidently, made him look like a fundamentalist or a terrorist, or something, so they pinned him to the ground and put a bag on his head.

As you might expect of someone who was living in poverty because he was wanted by the existing regime, he was all for the war if it was going to get rid of the people who were pursuing him. We talked about the demonstrations against Bush’s visit to London. “You know,” he said, “It would have been nice if people had been demonstrating against the tyrant while he was in power.” And I thought he had a point.

What I have heard from almost every Iraqi, whether for the war or against, whether happy under occupation or not, is that the sanctions were a disaster for the people of Iraq. They strengthened Saddam because people were so nearly crushed to death by the struggle for food and medicine and shelter. Saddam was still building palaces, statues and elaborate mosques while the people were starving.

Ahmed has no time for the oft-repeated claim that the Oil For Food scheme was the biggest humanitarian intervention ever. “That was not humanitarian intervention. It was just a way of controlling Iraq and the oil.” This, remember, is a man who was welcoming the invasion – anything, anything to get rid of Saddam. But he added, “If it weren’t for the sanctions the regime would have fallen from inside.” For him there was no doubt of that. “It would have been nice if people were demonstrating against the sanctions.”

And I thought, again, he had a point. Some people said, at the time, that sanctions were no more than Saddam deserved, apparently forgetting the other 23 million people in the country. Others argued that sanctions were the non-violent alternative to war, apparently oblivious to the fact that sanctions had directly caused enormous suffering and death as well as isolating an entire nation of people in a smallish space with a vicious dictator. Other people came out with equally ill-informed rubbish, including the magistrate who ruled that there was no evidence that the sanctions materially restricted the flow of humanitarian goods. No. Obviously not, if you didn’t take your head out from under the table.

Raed wrote, in his final project for an architecture degree, that Iraq needed to learn a lesson in destruction. He quoted an exiled poet, at that time an unmentionable, a traitor to the old regime. To do that was a risk, which Ahmed was clearly proud of him for taking.

And I think he had a point too, but not just for Iraq. The campaign against Saddam and against British arms sales and funding to him was always small, though the information was out there (see Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, State Watch, Campaign Against Arms Trade and so on for information about current human rights abusing regimes). The campaign against the sanctions was never a mass movement of solidarity like that against the war.

We need to get out more. We need to pull down more statues, blockade more corporations, shout louder, more often and more consistently, demand an end to our governments’ support for any leaders and governments which don’t respect human rights. We need to learn a lesson in destruction of the mental constructs that say there’s nothing we can do, take the risks, especially enough we’re lucky enough that quoting poetry in our dissertations doesn’t rank as a risk. Then maybe we’ll understand solidarity.

November 21st 2003
No More Cheap Chickens

“When Saddam was here,” Doctor Faris half-joked, “we knew who to blame for everything. We just cursed Saddam for whatever went wrong. Now we don’t know who to blame – Bush, Blair, Bremer, the Governing Council, Aznar, the people who are fighting. This is our democracy. Nothing has changed but now we have a choice of people to blame.”

In Faris’s paediatric intensive care unit there are only 2 working units. Of those only one has a spirometer to measure the gases given to the patient and the monitors don’t connect to the units any more, so the patients have to be monitored from inside the room. That’s less of a problem now there are only two beds in use. The other two units have broken and the companies, Drager and Tema, refuse to repair them – they are out of guarantee.

When they are desperate they resort to manual pumps, blue bubbles with valves. “We ask the mother, we say to her, the life of your child depends on this, so she squeezes until morning, but you know, it’s not right. Every squeeze is different from each other and with the machines everything is measured, it’s controlled ventilation. This is not controlled ventilation and then things go wrong and the patient will die from another cause.

“There is no mixing either. The ventilator will do both, mixing and control, but here we have only industrial oxygen, not medical, so it’s too pure so some of the patients die from toxicity. We do the best we can to save the patients but we know that what we do might kill them. When a patient is on a ventilator for a long time, I need to wean him off. I need to measure the gases to withdraw them gradually but I can’t. That can cause barotrauma. I do something to try and save him and he dies of something else, or from the thing I did to save him. If he vomits he will die because I have no oral suckers. We know it is all wrong but we have no facilities to put it right and no one trying to solve it.”

Faris’s former colleague, A’ala, who brought me here, explained, “You know, even, we have no senior doctors. We are still training, Faris and me. We are qualified anaesthetists but we are still under training for intensive care. The ministry of health would be responsible for employing a senior doctor. When I need an opinion I have to call to another hospital to talk to the senior to give me a telephone opinion, without seeing the patient. When I tried to call to ask him to visit me he said, you don’t know how to talk to me, you should learn how to talk to me, ah, and the bureaucracy never ends.”

Just to take me into his old department, A'ala had to go to another building, 5 minutes away, go to the office of the head doctor to phone the head of the hospital, who was in the same building we'd just been sent from, to get permission. It was only when he mentioned that I'd just come from the Ministry of Health and a meeting with a senior advisor that it was agreed I could go in. It was carefully left unsaid that my visit to the Ministry was on different business entirely and it was not they who had sent me. It reminds me, again, of the old days. "The bureaucracy, the bullshit," Doctor A'ala muttered. "Nothing has changed."

At frequent intervals both men would shake their heads and, in unison, sigh, “Nothing has changed.” Doctors’ wages are not enough to live on. They all have second jobs in private hospitals or drive taxis after work, sell vegetables or depend on relatives. A’ala is concerned that the effort and energy needed to improve things in the hospitals will not be available when people are working in other jobs to sustain themselves.

“They promised more ventilators but I still don’t have them, and from where are you going to get the nursing staff, from where are you going to get the senior doctors. Only the Ministry can put the money into this and if they don’t this ward will go down and down until they close the ward and let the children die.”

The Ministry has not consistently provided even disinfectant – A’ala told how the nursing staff at times bought the cleaning materials themselves. The wards are never fully cleaned for germ cultures. There is only one cleaner. A’ala wielded a phial of ineffectual drugs bearing the stamp of the old Ministry of Health, which have still not been replaced by new imports: “Did we go through this war to carry on using these things from India and Turkey? Nothing has changed.

“I am so fed up, I don’t know how I can continue. I am saturated. Nothing changed when the Americans came except the money increased by little and the market increased by much. Really it’s not our country.

“People who used only to hate, now take action. People who were in the middle, started to hate. People who were for them, now are in the middle. That’s what happened with Britain in the 1920s – they push, push, push, until 2800 English soldiers were killed. That’s not counting all the Indian soldiers who died. Their graveyard is nearby.”

Faris smiled. “They fixed it before the war, they put up a new fence. I don’t know, maybe they decided to make it ready for the foreign soldiers again.”

A’ala and two friends, Doctors Yasseen and Laith, have been seeking out foreigners to offer their services as drivers and translators. Faris recalled government subsidised chickens, raised by the Ministry of Agriculture and sold cheaply for several months of the year. Now, they agree, nothing has changed except the disappearance of the cheap chickens.

There can be no mistaking their reminiscences and current complaints for a longing for Saddam. Dr Yasseen had a place to study for a Masters degree in anaesthaesia in Cardiff (UK) but doctors were not allowed out of the country under Saddam. If they traveled, it was with false documents that said they were merchants or general workers. There was a joke about crossing the land border out of Iraq. Someone collapsed and, instead of asking whether there was a doctor in the place who could help, they would ask is there a merchant or general worker here who can assist.

They laughed as they talked about the tongue loosening effects of ketamine, a horse tranquiliser used as a sedative when it was impossible or undesirable to use full anaesthaesia. “People didn’t care what they said, they just said whatever was in their heads because it removes all the inhibitions, so they would shout and curse Saddam.”

Yasseen tried to leave by ‘the northern route’, via Suleimania, but the ‘smugglers’ turned out to be government agents. He was arrested and taken to the security building in Suleimania. He was blindfolded and seated, then told, “But you’re a doctor, we must treat you with respect.” A guard told another to give him a pepsi. He was clubbed across the back. A sinalco (lemonade) was a blow to the face, mirinda (fizzy orange) across the knees. You knew where you would be hit next but not the direction the assault would come from or when. Dr A’ala said everyone could see the changes in Yasseen, how he had aged in those eight months.

He was sentenced after 2 months to a year in jail and all his assets were seized – about 12 million dinars’ worth ($6,000). After 6 months his family were allowed to buy him out for a million dinars because the party was more interested in money than in justice - even their own idea of justice. A’ala was arrested once too and clearly appreciates his good fortune at having spent only a week there, during which his family paid $1000 to protect him from beatings.

A’ala’s father died a week ago from multiple tumours. His fiancée is a gynaecologist, whose dad is also dying from a brain tumour. He’s been operated on but needs another instrument to remove the last of the tumour and it’s not available in the entire country, a specialised knife that costs about $10,000. They are looking for any international organization that can provide one before it’s too late, but they hardly expect to find one.

On the way to meet Salma Al-Hadad, the head of Paediatric Oncology [child cancer], we stopped to help two people manhandling a wheelchair with only two wheels left, occupied by a limp child with a tube in her nose, over the ridges in the pavement. There were no orderlies, let alone medical staff to supervise.

Salma summarised the unit’s needs as “everything”. She’s just back from London where a group of Iraqi doctors were hosted by London hospitals. She’s very keen on twinning links between hospitals in the UK and Iraq, to raise the Iraqis’ skills to the current level of advancement, after the last 13 years of isolation. She thought links between medical schools would be enormously valuable. Ideas we discussed included visiting lecturers and experts coming to Iraq and bringing Iraqi doctors to the UK to learn from the foremost doctors there. Their medical education is based on the British model and they use many British treatment protocols so they feel already strongly linked to the British medical system.

The same applies for nurses: one of the nurses in the oncology unit told me she went to Birmingham (UK) for training organized by the Peace and Reconciliation Fellowship. The lack of trained nurses is particularly desperate. I’ve been in touch with a few people already about medical school twinnings and am getting on the case with those. If anyone wants to be part of a hospital twinning, please get in touch.

November 20th
Suleimania 2

In Suleimania, within the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq, I met a woman called Ashti. Her name means ‘peace’ in Kurdish. She was born in 1966 and, in 1988, joined the Communist Party. All political activity had to be carried out in secret which is why there was little, if any, open and non-party based political activity. If you wanted to be an activist and oppose the Iraqi government, you picked a party and joined it and did your work that way.

About 1:30 am on June 1st 1989 a group of men burst into her family’s home. One of them was called Abu Hadil. She knew they’d come for her because, as far as she knew, no one else in the family was politically active, though her parents didn’t know she was a party member.

“They asked, ‘Who is Ashti?’ I said, ‘I am Ashti’ and they took me.”

“They didn’t hit me when they first arrested me but they took me to the security police headquaters in Suleimania and the beatings started the minute I arrived there. I was a girl, only young, about 22 and used to the comfort of my parents’ home. They started beating me and I was wearing jeans. Jeans were seen as a symbol of capitalist America. They started beating me really hard and asking me are you a communist, you can’t be a communist, how can you be a communist and be wearing jeans.

“I denied any knowledge of or connection with Communism. I said I had no idea why I’d been arrested, so they started beating me again. They threw me in a big room with other women, not from the Communist Party, but from other Kurdish parties.”

She was jailed for about three years altogether, sentenced after one year in the National Security HQ in Baghdad to fifteen years. She was interrogated and tortured throughout that first year.

“The manager of the prison was a woman named San’a but the security guards were men. They were not men, they were wolves. They treated us the way the national security forces did. They’re all security forces. They were really rough. We are a people with traditions and a woman is to be respected, she must have her privacy. They used to do things to us that were very… hard.

“The government didn’t give us food – it was provided by our friends and families. We were allowed 2 hours visiting time per month, during which our parents would bring food. I don’t know why they were so tough on us. I saw my parents from 9-11 once a month. They would bring me food but this only lasted sometimes 15 days and I wouldn’t be able to see them till the next monthly visit.

“When they brought pregnant women to the jail, when a woman was giving birth there, the other women were not allowed to go and help her. If another woman went to help her she was shot. She couldn’t scream or cry out – if she made any sound, sometimes they would stitch her lips to make her silent.

“Because of the torture I have constant pain in my back. They hung me by my arms, behind my back, which affected my spine.

“After I heard the male comrades talking, I don’t understand why, but it was worse for us in the women’s prison. We were not allowed to have pens, paper, even cardboard from detergent cartons. I heard comrade Ali saying they allowed them a radio at one stage. This was never allowed in the women’s prison. For us it was beatings sometimes and solitary confinement. For example on the Kurdish new year I danced the Kurdish folk dance and they put me in solitary confinement for 3 days in a very small room, 1x1.5 metres and gave me no food.”

The men from her party had been allowed to celebrate Niruz, the Kurdish new year, with music and folk dancing.

“I was the only communist activist in the jail among 45 women from the Daawa party so it was hard for me. I wasn’t only sentenced for 15 years. I was also sentenced within the jail for being a communist among the other prisoners. At the beginning they were not nice to me, they wouldn’t allow me to eat with them or talk to them, they told me I was dirty, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.

“I thought to myself I was destined to be here 15 years so I have to learn to live with them, made an effort and they realized I was nice and not rude. Deep down inside they were all nice and they changed their treatment of me, but still I was kept in a room alone while they shared rooms. Would you be able to live in a room alone inside a prison and a prison owned by Saddam himself? Would you be able to eat alone, sleep alone?

“When I left prison and saw the sanctions outside I felt sad – these sanctions were not on the government. These sanctions were imposed on the people. From the beginning I was against the sanctions. They didn’t affect the Baathists, they affected the poor. The poor didn’t have food in the first place and the sanctions made it worse for them. The sanctions were horrible - food, medicines and stuff that the people needed.

“We were under a dictatorship and now we are live again, but they did not come for us, they came for oil and for our natural resources. Everyone knows the US and British supported Saddam. We found documents and correspondence between them which proved that. When Baghdad fell there was some kind of an uprising and people looted the governmental offices and found correspondence between the US and British governments and the Iraqi regime.

“If they gave us the right of self determination the Iraqi people are good enough to not need soldiers to protect them. We are capable of ruling ourselves. We are ready to do this. It’s not one person from one party who is going to rule Iraq, it’s a group. If this group unites we can make it. In prison the problems between different groups were fuelled by the Baathist regime in order to divide and control us. Without deliberate provocation of conflicts we can work together.

“I will be a Communist until I die. I joined the party in 1988. Those days were very difficult – the Baath party was very cruel. I was a teacher then in Darhandikhan. Many people from there were tortured and I was one of them, but I understood that I could not tolerate capitalism. I knew these things might happen but resistance to oppression is like your blood – could you leave it?”

She told this story with quiet dignity in Kurdish but after, left to her thoughts, silent tears overwhelmed her. The national security building in Suleimania where Ashti’s torture started is now a museum and memorial. It was damaged in a fire fight and parts of it are crumbling. On the way in there are photographs of whole families who were arrested and killed, walls with names scratched on, dates.

An old man looked at the photograph along with us. He had been held in the other jail in Suleimania, arrested with 32 members of his extended family because his daughter and her husband were Peshmerga fighters. He stood, hands behind his back, showing how they had been forced to stand.

A sculpture is part built in the yard, made of bullet casings, in the overlarge figure of a man, arms crossed in front of his face – the Baathist, ashamed. In one of the torture areas a local artist has tiled the walls with a crazy paving of broken mirrors so that everywhere you look you are surrounded by fragments of yourself, mingled with the reflections of thousands of tiny lights all over the ceiling. In a courtyard in the middle of the complex is a white stone relief of a group of people, adults and children, tied together. “This commemorates a family killed all together.”

Heyman, our guide, translator and friend, indicated a bare grey room about 6 metres square. “This the children’s room.” Children were often detained with their whole families. Then a corridor or so away, “The women’s room.” The room was no bigger than the other, with a single hole-in-the-ground toilet in the corner, shielded on three sides but open on the fourth. “Ninety six women were kept here at a time.” They wouldn’t have been able to sit, let alone lie down.

The solitary cells were no more than a metre square while the shared cells were only a few metres bigger. Names, dates and pictures are engraved on the walls. “They came in the night and took us all.” “I have not seen my daughter for 25 days.” A tree. A flower with leaves growing towards the sun.

Here and there are statues to illustrate what happened in a given place. On a flight of stairs is a blindfolded prisoner, handcuffed to the rail so he can’t stand straight. “Every person who passed would hit him. This was for new prisoners.” Another figure stands alone in a solitary cell.

It winded me as I entered the room: a figure hung by the wrists, tied behind the back so the head was forward and the shoulders wrenched back. The museum guard showed how the interrogators would pull down on the legs to increase the pain. “Men and women were hung here naked.” He pointed out a tear in the armpit of the figure. “Even the statue is broken, so how could a human being bear it?” Electrodes were attached to the figure, wires running to the power source. The floor lino was stained black with blood in irregular patterns.

Tears ran and ran for not even a fraction of the pain that had gone on in this place. How would you ever close your eyes again, or smile, or speak? I had the barest glimpse of why Ashti cried and now I couldn’t see how you would ever stop crying?


Ali Hamid Qadis and Mohammed Arif were both arrested the night before Ashti. Members of any party other than the Ba’ath were viewed as traitors. The military Anfal, Ali explained, was followed by a political one and all the former prisoners I spoke to were clear that Saddam was responsible for what he did to them. But Ali explained: “Britain and the US helped the Baathist regime to overthrow Abdul Kerim Khassim. They replaced a democratic regime with a dictatorship. The US and Britain and Europe in general all helped overthrow Abdul Kerim Khassim. They brought up the new regime in the name of religion and Arab nationalism.

“All of this was to pave the way for the US to invade Iraq now. I personally had this feeling when the US ambassador [April Glaspie] met with Saddam before the invasion of Kuwait and stated that the problem between Arabs is for them to solve and not for the US. This was like a green light for Saddam to invade Kuwait, which paved the way for the US to invade Iraq. The presence of foreign troops in Iraq is an occupation. It was the duty of the people of Iraq and the national parties to carry out change and not for the foreign troops to invade Iraq under the title of liberation.

“The sanctions were nasty and they affected us in prison because they wouldn’t give us enough food any more. We didn’t have electricity or water and we were not allowed to have visitors . Prisoners were eating cats, they would even eat a dog. It only affected the Iraqi people. We knew it would not affect the regime. The sanctions did not contribute to the fall of the regime.

“When Britain took over Iraq after WW1 they could’ve, or France, formed a Kurdish state. Still today they are reluctant to form a Kurdish state but they use the Kurdish cause for their own interests. I once heard of, in prison, a counter-communist committee based in Cyprus. This means that the regime had affairs with systems that were fighting communism all over the world.

“We were interrogated, beaten up and tortured in Suleimania and Baghdad. We were flogged, electrocuted. When we got to Baghdad it was a month before the interrogation was repeated all over again and of course accompanied by beatings and torture. I lost sight as a result of the beating on the night of the 13th of September 1989. The effect of the beating on my head and my body and my back affected my sight so that I bit by bit went totally blind. I was denied treatment.”

Mohammed Arif looked after Ali in the jail after he lost his sight. I can’t begin to imagine the terror of facing all of that in the darkness. “At 12 midnight they would call out someone’s name and would take him to the interrogation. In prison the guards are something but the interrogation committee is something else. I was told that the people who guard our rooms had nothing to do with us except for keeping us in place. At night different people from the interrogation committee would come and question us.

“They used to take us one by one for interrogation and the consequent torture, sometimes for 2 hours, sometimes for 3, sometimes 4. When it was over they would put you on a blanket, carry you and throw you in the air, back into the room. They didn’t care whether you would die or not.”

And you come out, back into the light, and all around are mountains, dark blue against a bright blue sky, and trees and cool air and warm sun, sweeter beyond measure for the knowledge that the man you just met is in darkness forever because he decided to fight for social justice; tinged with sadness beyond description for precisely the same reason.

I know well enough that beautiful scenery doesn’t prevent evil things going on – look at Rwanda, Guatemala, Croatia – but it’s hard to comprehend. Because you stand there, amid the walls inside, among the mountains outside, and the screams haven’t died down. But torture is designed to isolate. You go through it utterly alone and, as loudly as you might scream, no one who can help you hears them. Or no one who can hear them helps you.

The former prisoners were all unequivocal – their torture and detention were the responsibility of Saddam and of the governments which ignored what they knew and carried on supporting him. How many opportunities were there for the British, US and other governments to contribute to an end to the repression? How many decisions were made which, like the police who pulled on the legs of the hanging prisoners, only intensified the agony? How many people tonight will be tortured in the darkness in countries which our governments still support, fund and arm?

November 19th, 2003
Suleimania (1)

The Kurdish zone in northern Iraq is like another country. It has its own language, even its own alphabet which is different from Arabic, as well as quite separate culture, dress, sweets and, since 1991, its own economy. My friend Salam announced, on our arrival in Suleimania, that he would acquire a guide. He stepped into the barber’s shop next to which we were dithering and a young man flung his arms around him.

This is not just the extraordinary friendliness of the Kurdish people – they’d met before and Heyman took it upon himself to make us welcome. His family’s home is warm and busy with four sisters and two brothers, Heyman and his parents. A fourth son is in Britain and photos of him are all over the house. The youngest brother, Rawish, is only three and the family’s joy and comic.

The girls dressed me up in Kurdish costume, as worn on special occasions. Underneath were loose trousers and a sleeveless smock which came just below the hips, in a bright red, sequined fabric, with a sheer, flowing gown over the top, black with deep red leaf and flower patterns. A short waistcoat went over that, black with a jangling fringe and a jeweled collar which fastened at the throat. The sleeves on the gown were way longer than your arms, widening at the ends and they were tied and draped around the back. They’re loose enough not to restrict your movement at all. The head dress was a sort of skull cap, also fringed, with a sash tied around and hanging down the back. I wasn’t into this last bit – it made me look like I had a pot on my head, but the rest was good.

Rawish joined in with his own national costume, hugging the bits in glee as they were brought out of their bag. A lot of Kurdish men dress this way on an everyday basis: enormously baggy trousers, gathered in at the ankles, with a loose collarless jacket in the same fabric, which tucks into the trousers, with a waist sash around the join so it looks like a single garment. There’s a shirt under the jacket, whose collar is worn outside the jacket. Rawish strutted like a king in his finery.

In the 1920s, when Heyman’s grandfather was two years old, his mother and uncle were killed by bombs dropped by British aeroplanes, supporting the Arab regimes’ war against the Kurds.

Heyman’s dad, now 55, described how throughout his childhood, “Every once in a while we had to escape and take refuge up in the mountains. They used to arrest a lot of us all the time. Some families got buried in a place called Hamia which is now a high school. They were buried alive and then they threw dirt on top.

“In the mountains it was very cold and we didn’t have any food or any of our things but we wouldn’t care because the enemy was far away. The Kurds are very active people. We are not lazy. We used to work a lot, eat plants and fruits, some of us even went to other states for work and provided for the family. In 1974 they used to get pens and toys for the children and when the children picked them up off the floor they would blow up. Where is this stuff from? Does Saddam know how to manufacture it? No. He doesn’t know how.”

Heyman added his own memories: “When I was about 12 and started wanting to move around, my mum and dad would tell me no, you can’t go there, this street is dangerous, this area is not safe – they were scared of the Baathists. We couldn’t say anything, even as children. I remember my friend’s friend who was 11 when he got arrested by the Baathists and until today we still know nothing of him. It was terrifying.

“In the 80s my dad ran away from military service and we had to flee up north to our village. Life up there was much better than here. I also remember when we fled Suleimania in 1991 and we went up to the Iraqi – Iranian borders. It was very hard. I was about 12 – 13 years old. We were better off than other families – we had a car, while most of the families did not. I saw an old man walking with no shoes and falling down on the way. We were able to stay in a friend’s house but some families had no shelter.”

Abu Heyman went on: “The Baathists were totally nasty to the people, they were criminals, beasts. This war was in the best interests of the US but Saddam gave them an excuse to attack Iraq. He launched a war on Iran and then on Kuwait. He spent 35 years in power without doing anything good for Iraq. He was supported by the US, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. All the chemical weapons were from those countries.

“Then under the sanctions 1kg of flour was worth 10 dinars while now it’s a quarter dinar. Everything was very expensive.

“The Kurds own land that contains loads of oil and Saddam didn’t want us to be in control of that and didn’t allow us to have our own government nor any kind of freedom or liberties. They would send a Kurdish man to do military service far in the south. This is all because of greed. Why would anyone take anybody’s freedom.

“But still there is no freedom. It’s better than when Saddam was in charge but it’s not freedom. Saddam didn’t even give freedom to the Arabs: they had to hang Saddam’s pictures and sing about him, all singers sang about him. Even architects had to praise Saddam. In Iraq under Saddam no one had freedom. It wasn’t only the Kurds.

“ If the Kurds living in Iraq got their freedom, Turkey, Iran or Syria would be afraid that Kurds in their states would demand their freedom as well. The Kurds are oppressed by Turkey, which has a very strong army, supported by other countries.

“If Britain had our interests in mind they never would have created such differences between Arabs and Kurds under the British mandate. It would have been Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds all living together, but making difficulties among us makes it easier to control us. Now America is the ruler of the world and if we were good people, the Kurds, the Turkmen, the Arabs, all living in Iraq, we would have never allowed the US to interfere.”

Heyman echoed both the former and the latter point. He first quoted a Kurdish saying, that if two fish were fighting in the sea, it would be because Britain fuelled the conflict between them. “They are the origin of the problem. They don’t solve the problem. In the first place they were the ones who created the problem, so how can they claim to have solved it now? They need this problem in the region to justify their presence.”

But he went on to talk about Gandhi. In looking for his enemy, Gandhi realized that it was not the civil servant in the administrative buildings of India, nor the British soldier on her streets, nor the British man or woman on the streets in the UK. To find his enemy he would have to look within himself. With this he backed his dad’s point about the need for the Kurds, the Turkmen, the Arabs and other Iraqis to unify, to defy the divide and rule tactics of successive powers.

“We want a separate state, an independent state with the Kurds of Syria, Turkey and Iran, but our best interest nowadays is being with the Iraqi people due to our economic and political situation.

“All we need is stability, peace and freedom.”

November 18th
The Convention Centre

I went to the Convention Centre by the Al Rasheed Hotel once before the war and it was a strange enough place already. Now it’s the centre of a fortress in whose grounds a maze has been constructed out of razor wire, concrete wall pieces, barrels, tents and checkpoints.

There are five checkpoints to get through between the last passable bit of road and the front door. At each one you’re frisked and metal detected and your bag is fumbled in, lest you happen to have found a rocket propelled grenade launcher or other such item in the tens of metres since someone last checked. The place swarms with soldiers, security guards, bodyguards and I don’t know what else, all traipsing about with phones, curly wires coming out of their ears, big guns in their hands and small ones strapped to their legs.

I went primarily to ask about mobile phones, since there used to be free MCI network cell phones available to NGOs working here. In fact the MCI network is soon to be replaced by a new network so they’re not distributing them any more. The new network is expected into service the beginning or middle of next month or towards the end of the month when hell freezes over, depending whose estimate you trust. There’s talk of problems, investigations, etcetera, etcetera.

There are posters everywhere for things like the internet bazaar – “don’t walk the streets, order online…” Some of the international staff even sleep here, in the corridors, a short distance from their desks, because they’re afraid to leave the compound. Other signs indicate the whereabouts of various offices. The British consulate is more or less opposite Bechtel’s Baghdad bureau, which is next to the Ministry of Planning, so it’s good to know there’s no danger of undue influence there.

In the same area there’s a welcome desk for “Human Rights and Transitional Justice”. It was unattended but for a sign stating “This office handles only the following cases: 1. past human rights abuse under the former regime: killing, disappearance, torture and rape; 2. NGO education.”

There’s actually a Ministry of Human Rights, which is based in the Ministry of Oil. Where else could you file human rights in this country? The minister apparently wants to investigate some more recent abuses by coalition forces in Falluja and to look into conditions in the detention centre at Baghdad airport. To do the latter, I’m told, he has to ask Emperor Bremer and the governing council for authority. The Human Rights Minister has to ask permission to investigate human rights abuses. Somebody sack the script writer. He’s lost the plot.

A friend taught me a new expression – “wala democracia, wala batierq” which literally means ‘neither democracy nor a water melon’ but more accurately translates as ‘democracy my arse’.

I bumped into a Brazilian journalist I know at the Conference Centre. He was waiting to interview a bloke called Derek (name changed for no real reason other than it seemed like a good idea) who was giving a lecture on the transfer of the control of the Oil for Food programme from the UN to the CPA. I stayed and waited for the interview primarily so I could get a lift back with the journalist and his translator, a very funny man who speaks perfect English and teaches me bits of Arabic.

‘Derek’ eventually came and said sorry, he couldn’t do the interview, not for at least 2 weeks and when I tell you what’s been happening you’ll understand why. Then he turned and did a Blair-esque Earnest Look and said, as if divulging a great secret, “They’re shooting at us.”

No. Are they really?

They’re shooting at us and if the Bad People found out that this is where the programme is moving to and I’ve got $8 billion here, well, for the Bad People that would be a really great bit of propaganda if they could hit us. I swear, he used the words “the Bad People’. I find people often underestimate my age: I believe it’s my fresh-faced, youthful appearance rather than my immature behaviour that does it, but I know I look more than five years old. “The Bad People”?

It’s common knowledge that the Oil for Food programme is to be operated from the Convention Centre. It’s common knowledge that some of the least desirable activities undertaken by the Civilian-Military administration are based there – see reference to Bechtel, above. It’s not as if a resistance fighter / insurgent / terrorist / Very Naughty Boy was going to refrain from hitting the Convention Centre if he was able to because he hadn’t realised the Oil for Food Scam (ah, scheme, sorry) was about to be controlled from there.

‘Derek’ was really sad that he couldn’t tell us the story. He wanted to tell us the story, because “it’s a great story”. No it’s not. It’s not like you’ve been part of some rags to riches triumph over adversity or overcome some incredible odds to save someone. You’ve just taken over a programme of which two former heads have resigned in protest at its immorality. You’ve taken it over as part of an occupying military force after more than a decade in which the government that sent that force has restricted the flow of food and medicine to the people who now live under your occupation. You’ve taken over a programme which was implemented in order to translate simple vindictive deprivation of an already oppressed civilian population into power and money and control of that country’s oil sales. What a great story.

Within the US consulate, in the same building, there is an advisor for US-Iraqi couples wishing to marry and obtain a visa for the States. Apparently there is a significant number of Iraqi women marrying American soldiers in order to get visas. I can’t enlighten you as to how many because the secretary – who was very apologetic about the pedantry of it all - wasn’t allowed to even hint at a figure unless the person asking had written authorisation to ask the question.

No doubt a couple of hours in the Convention Centre provided me a valuable, if superficial, induction into the workings of administration here, especially coupled with my recent forays into the Ministry of Health, but I think that’s education enough for me. Unless I lose my passport or develop an insatiable urge to hear more rubbish I think I’ll stay away from the Convention Centre from now on.

November 17th
Asking the Fairies

There are buildings in Baghdad, old government premises, secret police offices, properties formerly owned by members of the ruling clique and Saddam’s family, officers’ clubs, military barracks, houses, apartment blocks which are now squatted by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families made homeless by bombings during the invasion and evictions after.

A compound which used to be a farm belonging to Uday, one of Saddam’s sons, is now home to around 135 families. People there will point out the building which served as a lab for research into chemical growth enhancers for the animals. Accommodation is in farm buildings with open doorways bricked up or in breezeblock shacks with straw rooves and there are gardens among the rubble. There is a clinic but it’s only a room. There’s no medical equipment and there aren’t any staff.

The point of going there was to interview kids living there about what they wanted and needed, to inform some organisations outside Iraq. Of dozens and dozens of stories, I’ll just tell a couple, by way of illustration.

Marwa is 11. She told us she misses her school. She used to go but, as with many girls, her parents are too afraid she’ll be kidnapped to let her go to school. It’s not an unrealistic fear – untold numbers of girls and young women have been kidnapped. Her three older brothers go to school but because the schools are segregated and hers is nowhere near theirs she can’t travel there with them and, even if she could, her parents don’t think she’d be safe within the school. A few of the girls still go, but most stay at home helping their mothers.

Marwa said they fetch water 3-5 times a day. A family consumes a lot of water, she explained, for washing dishes and clothes. She wears a headscarf and has done for about a year because she heard form her parents that her hair would burn if it was seen by people she’s not related to. Her favourite thing about school was playing with her friends at morning break. She wants to become a doctor if she gets to go back to school. There are many women doctors in Iraq, education is free and she’s a bright child, able to express herself clearly.

A lot of the kids had trouble expressing ‘wanting’. Asked what they needed, what they would like, most looked around for help before asking, “What do you mean?” We started talking instead about a fairy, a magician, who had come to offer each of them three wishes. What would they have the fairy make for them?

Marwa asked for school, blankets and headscarves. For Eid, which is coming up at the end of Ramadan, she’d like new clothes to celebrate – it’s an important part of the tradition. She also wanted things to play with.

Overall blankets were the commonest wish among the Ghazalia camp kids, because they’re cold at night. They don’t even have enough blankets. School and clothes were the next most frequent request though several of the children didn’t know the word school and had no idea what you did when you went there. Toys were fourth, followed by shoes and some also mentioned cookers and fridges to keep food fresh and water cold during the day, when it’s hot.

Despite the poverty of conditions at the camp, a significant number made a wish to stay in the compound giving, perhaps, a hint of the instability of their lives before arriving there. Umm Kadim told of losing her daughter to an unknown illness while on the run with her four children after her husband fled military service. They stayed in the desert because if they came close to the towns they were harassed by security forces and feared they would be caught. When the little girl got ill they couldn’t afford transport to hospital. They set out to bring her but it was too late. They were one of the first two families in the camp, which was frightening because they felt exposed and vulnerable.

Aal’a dropped out of school at about 10 years old, when his dad died. He’s now 17, an only child. He and his mum were evicted from their house when they couldn’t afford the $10 a month rent. Costs have risen, wages have fallen and, amid the chaos, their ration card also went astray so they can no longer collect the monthly food handout.

Aal’a works in a slaughter house. Skip the next couple of lines if you’re squeamish. His job is to blow into slits in the feet of recently slaughtered sheep to ease the skin from the carcass. His voice rasped and he mentioned a constant sore throat from blowing all day. He earns usually between 1000-1500 Dinar a day, a maximum of 2500. A dollar is 2000 Dinars. He said the only thing he wants is a safe, stable place to live. He can support his mum in every other way. She echoed his longing, her ancient face more tired than her 56 years. A safe place to live would be enough but they have nothing – no blankets, no cooker, not enough money for food.

The Al Hoda camp, in a former officers’ club, houses 350 families in less urgent poverty but, nonetheless, there were still children asking the fairy for blankets as well as toys. The first building as you enter is burnt out and when you go into people’s rooms the walls are blackened with soot. Conditions are better, with a garden and a few swings but still a lot are not going to school, especially the girls because of the ongoing fear of abduction.

As I understand it, there is a decision to clear some public buildings but to allow others to remain squatted. The Ghazalia inhabitants have a letter from the Civil Military Administration saying their right to stay is recognised until such time as someone takes responsibility for them.

Part of the problem appears to be precisely that: no one is responsible for them. Strictly they’re not refugees but internally displaced so there’s no international intervention. The position in international humanitarian law is that the occupying power takes over the main responsibilities of the deposed national government and is obliged to ensure an adequate supply of food, water and medical care (4th Geneva Convention, Art 55 and 56) and clothing, bedding, shelter and other supplies (Art 69, Protocol I Additional to the Conventions) that are essential to the survival of the civilian population within the occupied territory. Relief operations cannot be deemed to alleviate the occupying power’s responsibilities. (Info from Programme on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, Harvard University: http://www.ihlresearch.org/iraq ).

Some of the political parties are bringing supplies to people in the squats, clearly marked with the name of the party which delivered them, as a means of recruitment. Though far from ideal, it’s all they’re getting at the moment.

Meanwhile, whichever company makes the ubiquitous wall blocks is doing better out of the new Iraq than the protesting police are. After they blocked Sadoon Street and besieged the police HQ for a second day yesterday, this morning the building was surrounded by a ten foot concrete wall and reams and reams of razor wire. They’ve been promised some money in 6 days – two days per office to get the approval of one for the authorisation of a second to enable a third to process the payments. Or something like that.

I’ve finally managed to speak to the assistant to Jim Haveman, the senior advisor to the minister of health. To get to speak to him I need to make an appointment with her to tell her what I want with him so she can decide whether or not I can make an appointment to speak to him about the unpaid wages of the Kimadia workers who have been threatened to drop the claims.

In the all encompassing traffic jam on the way to the ministry, there was a Red Crescent ambulance trapped in front of me, its siren howling in four different shades of urgent, while a long line of US military vehicles passed – trucks, tanks and personnel carriers. A soldier on top of one pointed his pistol up at the underside of a bridge as they passed under it and the ambulance went on screaming.

It started off as a game, to help the children tell us what they need, but when you look around Baghdad and you see all the chaos and want and confusing priorities, it seems like whatever you want, however basic, however necessary, you might as well ask the fairies.



* The Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq has taken on distribution work for the refugee camps. You can give money for blankets and other essentials direct to the following UK bank account:
BARCLAYS BANK, BERMONDSEY BRANCH, LONDON, UK
ACCOUNT NAME: H. AHMADI
ACCOUNT NO: 80392286
SORT CODE: 20-80-57
The money in the account comes directly to the women running the Organisation’s programmes here.

* Correction: The old passports from the Saddam era are not invalid but do have to go through an approval process in order to carry on being used.
Also the Oil For Food programme is not ending but being transferred from the control of the UN to the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority).

November 16th
“Kull ishi maaku”

“Kull ishi maaku” is an Iraqi expression which literally translates as “everything is not available” – we have nothing.

Since about 1997, Kimadia, the state-run medical supplies company, like a lot of state enterprises, has been run essentially as follows: the government gave a subsidy to the company. Workers received a small monthly salary which was deemed to be an “advance” on their annual payment. It’s between 45-60 thousand Dinar a month, the latter equivalent to $30 a month. The rest of the money was kept back for the running of the company and distributed at the end of the financial year. It wasn’t ideal because it meant the workers had to incur debts for several months against the promise of the end-of-year payment but that promise did at least enable them to borrow enough to live on.

The money for 2002 was to be distributed a short while after the invasion. It was brought in sacks to the warehouse with lists stating how much each worker was to receive. We saw with our eyes, they say, how much money we were owed, but we never quite held it in our hands.

According to the old system, shares were determined by rank not only within the company but also within the Ba’ath Party. The same managing directors remained in place and, though the party was ostensibly gone, the same distribution policy had been followed. When the workers started demanding a fairer division of the funds, the son of the accountant who was holding the money got out a gun and started shooting. US soldiers arrived and seized the money. That was the last the workers saw of it.

At the warehouse this morning a pick up sat idle, with a red crescent stenciled on the side beside the words “Medical Supplies.” The company management has hired freelance drivers to take supplies around the country, so the drivers have no work. Warehouse workers crowded to tell us their stories and vent their anger at Mr. Jim Haveman, the military officer and senior advisor at the Ministry of Health who is responsible for the matter.

One man with six children and a wife to support couldn’t pay his rent any more, so had to move into one of the many squatted former government buildings. Another said he owed a co-worker 20,000 Dinar. She nodded. He did. Most had borrowed money for basic essentials on the basis of the annual payment and are now unable to repay the loans. Rent and food are more expensive now than before the war and the sunken cheeks, creased eyes and crumpled foreheads of many of the workers testified that the wages had been painfully meagre for a while before that. The two men who brought us there were 31, only two years older than me, but looked easily 15 years my senior. Kull ishi maaku, they told us. We have nothing.

A letter from Jim Haveman stated that the matter had been “dealt with” in the spring. Kimadia was a corrupt organization. There could be no profits for distribution because it was a state subsidised company. The intention had been to give the money to the managers and a selected few and the billions of Dinars now formed part of “the general funds of Iraq.”

90% of the workers have signed a petition calling on Haveman to release the funds. Khalida, the secretary to the managing director of the company, originally said she wanted to be the first signatory. When it was brought for her to sign she advised them to drop it or they might lose their jobs altogether. She refused to give any statement, saying she wasn’t authorized to do so.

Workers have been told they should forget the whole matter: that Haveman is “worse than Saddam”. According to many of them, the heads of the Profit Boards, Abu Assen and Ahmed, who work for Haveman, passed on a threat that those making a fuss would be viewed as working against the coalition forces and arrested, which is why none of them are named here. They might arrest a couple of representatives, someone said, but could they arrest all 4000 workers if they all stood together? Haveman, they were told, would “scatter you to the stars”. They would never see each other again.

We went to the Ministry and handed in our passports in exchange for visitors’ passes. In a saga reminiscent of the old Iraq we tramped up and down between levels 1,2 and 5 chasing pieces of paper from one person which would permit us to ask another for an appointment to ask a third for a piece of paper to grant us passage into the office of the secretary of the assistant of the person we wanted to see, to ask a single, simple question. The upshot is that we’re still looking for Mr Jim Haveman who takes his weekends on a Sunday, unlike the rest of the country which has Friday off and is mid-week by Sunday.

In the new Iraq, people are still threatened by and scared of the political leadership. It’s telling that they still need advocates from other countries to assert their rights to the authorities, not that there’s any guarantee we’ll be able to sort things out for them, but we’re going to give it a try.

The women who clustered into one office said they were ready for strikes and demonstrations and we promised to support them in whatever they decide to do. There may come a time for international pressure, so keep reading and I’ll let you know what help they need.

On a similar theme, having given up on the inextricably stuck taxi and walked the last of the way back, we found ourselves in the unusual position of standing on the same side of the barricades as the police. There was a demonstration blocking Sadoon Street, police and security staff besieging the building where the young boys and old men used to queue with their call up papers. They haven’t been paid for three months. Kull ishi maaku, they all said, brushing one hand against the other repeatedly, as if dusting them off. We have nothing.

“Amreeki,” people started calling: Americans. Two tanks had pulled up to the far end of the demonstration and the police and security guards, some still wearing their IP [Iraqi Police] armbands, many with their ID cards hanging around their necks, ran to face the soldiers, whose response was to shout and swear and issue orders in English. One, who said he was a lieutenant, ordered an underling to push people, which he obligingly did, with his gun.

They don’t have the right to block the street, according to one soldier. Blocking the streets is somehow an act of violence in the confused mind of the soldier who went on to tell us that this could not, therefore, be called a peaceful protest. The soldiers threatened to arrest the police if they didn’t go away. What were they doing there, we asked. Supporting the Iraqi Police, one said. But, we pointed out, the IPs are this side of the razor wire. No comment, said the lieutenant on his behalf.

One security guard burnt his badge. An IP took off his armband and wrapped it round his head like a pirate’s hat. Rubble was thrown into the road, razor wire coils pulled across from the central reservation and the pavement and rusting junk from the roadside piles turned into a barricade. Cars were surrounded and made to turn back and a man who tried to escape the siege with armfuls of files was sent scurrying back into the building. A loyalist police van attempting to get to the building was set upon and screeched off.

Eventually a representative of the Minister of the Interior turned up. He was allowed to cross the razor wire. The men crouched and sat in a crowd so that everyone could see and hear and he promised to meet them at 10am tomorrow. Always they promise to pay us in 3 days’ time, then 3 more days, some muttered, but they felt they’d upped the stakes enough, made their intentions clear.

The representative was reluctant to talk to us at all but finally explained that the problem was that men had been hired before the authority had been given. No, he couldn’t guarantee that they would be paid. It was some while before he accepted that, having worked for three months as employees, it was their right to be paid. But no, he still couldn’t guarantee that they would be paid.

I learnt a new word – zbala – scum. A boy of maybe 12 announced, “Amreeki, Baathi, Bush, zbala.” Police officers said they’d had enough of the Americans. Some say that an American company is being paid $50,000 per school for repainting buildings. I’ll do it for a thousand, an Iraqi friend said. I’ll get a load of paint and a load of cake and juice and we’ll get everyone to come and do it together. It would make people feel involved and then they could save the money for paying the workers.

Anyone listening?

November 15th
Talking Politics in Baghdad

It’s truly a joy to walk down the street talking openly about politics with an Iraqi person in Baghdad. Less joyous, of course, are the “Please mind the bomb” posters pasted to bus stops and walls, depicting an alarmed man, hands raised in horror like a pantomime dame, and a catalogue of unexploded bomb types of which the passer-by should beware. Lest anyone should miss the point, the different shaped bomblets are each accompanied by a puce skull and crossbones.

It seems there are two things all Iraqi people are unanimous about: that “security is very bad” and that, whatever their own opinion is, “Every Iraqi person will tell you this.” If you mention that another Iraqi person has told you something else entirely different, they will shake their heads and tell you this other person is only telling you that because they just want to blame everything on the US or because they always grumble, or because they are too scared of the Americans to tell you what they really think or because they have lived their entire lives saying what they think they’re supposed to say, but really they feel exactly the same as your current informant.

Saif came round yesterday, having heard I was back in town. He declared that things were better when Saddam was here. I reminded him of how, when we first met, he used to clean shoes on the street and he and his friend Ahmed were scared to have their photos taken outside in case they got arrested. They used to invite us to their houses but if we’d gone their families would have been in trouble.

Yes, he agreed, we were scared of Saddam. It was like he lived in your house, because he was always there, listening, watching, and it wasn’t that he wanted Saddam back, but now people are scared of everything. They’re scared at home, scared in the street; nothing functions and the Americans are taking everything, selling everything the country ever had. He looked at the clock. “Before… 8 o’clock you will hear the guns.” Sure enough, before he left, there was gunfire. He’s not fond of the soldiers – they once wanted to beat up his friend for having an obviously plastic gun and only let him go after Saif intervened and made them laugh in his broken English.

At the beginning of the war, soldiers came to his house just outside Thawra [formerly Saddam City] and demanded to know where he was. They left a message with his mum that he was to report to the Baath party HQ. They came back later. His papers which prove that he’s sick, they said, he could put in water, drink it and then shut up and go with them. He was shown how to use a gun, before he ran away. The war ended before they could catch him. Surely then, I suggested, he must be glad the Americans had arrived just in time. Still he was adamant that the war and occupation have made things worse.

Muayad has lived 21 years in England. He owns a hotel and used to come back periodically, spend a year in Iraq, a year in the UK. Political discussion was impossible under Saddam, he said. If he and I had sat like this drinking tea and talking there would be government agents at the next table listening. I remember it all too well. There were always secret police in his hotel, he told me, keeping an eye on the guests. They hid cameras in the rooms, he explained. There was no privacy even for the ladies – there would be men in the next room observing.

Saddam, he says, is physically gone now but is still there in people’s heads. I think he must be. I remember how the feeling of being watched lingered after I got home from spending a few weeks here. An entire lifetime under scrutiny must take a long time to shed. Muayad didn’t think elections would be feasible here yet. People need to learn to live as a civil society. Anyone could come and set up a party and, if they had the money, buy a few votes.

The US-installed Governing Council he calls corrupt. The benefits go only to their cronies. For the most part, they came back from abroad for the prizes, not for the good of the Iraqi people. He acknowledged the role the UK, US and other countries played in installing and maintaining Saddam but shrugged it off as inevitable. There has always been empire. There have always been countries with the power to control others. That power has rarely taken account of the welfare of the people living in the places seized.

Sura, a secretary, was less adamant than most. She was really glad to be rid of Saddam but was finding things very difficult now. You make your plans, then someone changes everything and you have to plan all over again. You just have to cope, you can’t give up. She talked about a constant fear of troops and violent crime. Everywhere is unsafe, jobs are hard to come by and the salary isn’t worth much. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, struggled to find a coherent feeling to express – everything is still too uncertain to form a sense of what’s going on.

Opinion is divergent, and that’s a start. There’s no way to summarise or quantify, even for the few people I have met, let alone the millions I haven’t, except for this: security is very bad, the internet says it’s been “the bloodiest week yet” for the US in Iraq and some American civilians here say the taxi drivers don’t speak to them any more.

November 10th 2003
Home

This morning Samar and her 12 year old daughter Saba moved out of the house Samar's lived in for 34 years. Tonight they will stay in the damp, ratty apartment which their old neighbour, Abu Nidhal, has just moved into.

They are the last of eleven families being evicted by the landlord Abdul Aziz Khoderi, known as Abdul Aziz to the families and Aziz Khoderi in the US, a member of one of the richest families in Iraq. He lives in Texas and came back to Iraq a few days ago to finish the process his agents have been carrying on. By a law passed about 3 weeks ago, it's illegal to evict tenants for at least the next year except in certain specific circumstances.

Samar's been through the courts, the occasional Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the Coalition Provisional Authority. The former told her only Bremer could help her. Many judges are still as corrupt as they ever were and a fat bribe still goes a long way. The latter has a US army major as senior advisor (ie, the "minister"'s superior) who declared himself in favour of the landlord's rights. The Palestinians, he said, did well under Saddam, as if that justified denying them any rights at all now. His British deputy, Irene Friendly, of all the names, denied any knowledge of the non-eviction law, as did the rest oif the department.

Either it takes a very long time for information to be passed from the emperor to his departments or his edicts are quickly forgotten. Hatra, here in Iraq, was the eastern-most outpost of the Roman empire. Surely even Caesar could have got a message here in that time.

This was social housing, rented by the government from the owner and free or very cheap to tenants, more or less in the vein of Housing Benefit in the UK. Aziz himself says it was a generous rent from 1982, when his family bought the building, until 1990 but the collapse of the Dinar during the years of economic sanctions meant the value fell to nothing. Abdul Aziz’s agents expect him to knock down the buildings and either speculate or build something else on the land.

The agents have been round to harass and intimidate the women living there. Sometimes they brought the Iraqi police, once even some US troops. A human rights advocate who was helping them was threatened and then arrested. In front of Canadian TV cameras, Aziz promised Samar would be given an apartment and a job. When the cameras were gone he reneged on both.

Yesterday Samar made us thick coffee flavoured with cardamom in the usual tiny, dainty cups, served on a table improvised from the tray and a plastic spool in a room containing two wooden chairs, a bed made on cardboard on the floor and a calendar on the bright yellow wall with a picture of a pink skinned blonde baby. Aya and two cousins carried out the remaining furniture - a bookcase, a small TV, a square cupboard. It was going to Samar's sister’s house because they haven’t got anywhere to go yet.

Samar is divorced. Her family disapproves. Her brother sorted himself out a new apartment through the ministry but did nothing to help the rest of his family. She doesn’t want to live with her mother because she doesn’t want her own daughter to grow up internalising the same oppressive attitudes towards women that were foisted on her throughout her life, both by society and her own family. She agreed, finally, to be rehoused with her mother if it’s the only way to get somewhere to live.

Part of the problem is that Samar's Palestinian. Saba was born in Iraq. Palestinians were privileged under Saddam and landlords were forced to accept lower rent for them. Now it’s difficult for them to get apartments even if they have the money to pay a market rent because of discrimination against them. One contact told us he would ask about an apartment in a nearby block but looked doubtful when he heard they were Palestinians. He could try, he said, but the landlord might not agree.

Walking back through Betouin, one of the poorer parts of Baghdad, we stopped to chat to a small horde of young homeless men who are squatting a former Mukhabarat (secret police) building. They’re paid to take care of the burnt out remains of the building next door. Faroukh thought we were mad to walk down that way - there were Ali Babas down there. A few vehicles of troops went past and Abu Mohammed stroked his boy’s cheek and gestured. There, he said, were the Ali Babas.

Ali Baba gets a very bad press. In a classic case of victim blaming, it seems everyone’s forgotten that he was the one being robbed by the forty thieves, not the leader of the bandits. His muddied name is now synonymous with all dishonesty and crime in this country.

We were barely through Samar's door before explosions and gunfire caused a disturbance. Saba was scared so the two of us sat on a cushion in the corner and cuddled till it was apparent that it was only a short outburst. Someone said it was rockets being fired. Incidentally, we’ve not heard that Saddam’s been captured so I’m supposing the gunfire and red flares the night before last were part of a battle, but I didn’t find anything about it on the internet. Perhaps it’s too common to rate a mention.

Sami, the landlord’s agent, had come round while we were away. We explained about the apartment and tried to dream up more possibilities. So tonight Samar and Saba are in Abu Nidhal’s house. Tomorrow, we don’t know, but along with the law against eviction of tenants came an order to clear public buildings, many of which have been squatted by homeless people. There's no knowing how many families are without adequate housing. Among all the billions spent here, it seems there isn't enough to provide housing for all the displaced people.

November 8, 2003
Welcome to Iraq

I’m safely in Baghdad. As if in welcome a bright orange sun was just easing over the horizon as I crossed the much slimmed-down border from Jordan. No more the endless glasses of sugary tea in the “VIP lounge”, a riot of tinsel and paper chains with a giant Saddam gazing benevolently across the room at the TV watching Caspar the Friendly Ghost or some other cartoon. No more the 10 Euro bribe not to search your luggage too carefully, because they only opened the boot of the car, glanced in and closed it when there were no obvious rocket launchers or assault rifles.

It’s too soon to tell you all that’s changed here. Superficially little is different. The streets are not teeming with troops. Now and then you pass a few carriers of them. Those are the Poles, a companion remarked. Apparently you can tell the difference. People are still selling clothes, food and tools on the streets. Kids selling petrol at the roadside are a new sight, standing around a metal can with a funnel waiting for customers, who are many, presumably avoiding the immense queues at petrol stations which began shortly before the war and have continued.

The roads are still crowded with cars. Roads have been closed off around government buildings, hotels, all manner of things, so the roads left open are ever more tightly packed. No one bothers about traffic lights anymore because there is no enforcement and no penalty. Wasef shook his head in despair at the other drivers and explained: before the war a lot of people couldn’t afford cars. Now they have money because they looted the palaces and government buildings and they’ve bought cars and they think they’re big shots and so they drive like shit.

He pointed out a cubicle on the roadside – one of many white and blue concrete sentry boxes for the traffic cops to stand in when not directing traffic. There was a huge jam a few days ago and everyone assumed it was another roadblock which, from time to time, the troops put up. The tanks, though, stopped a little distance away from the cubicle which, they said, was booby trapped.

Why would anyone booby trap a traffic cop cubicle, he wanted to know. It wasn’t going to cause the troops any trouble. It wasn’t even a very busy street, let alone an important one. And how was it that after the “booby trap” was discovered there was time to call the troops and they had time to arrive, through all the morning traffic in Baghdad, before it went off? But the next day in all the newspapers there were pictures and accounts of the heroic American soldiers who defused the bomb. It was all staged, he concluded, as propaganda.

It’s still cheap to get a taxi to anywhere but there are less of them about. Before the war, when petrol was cheaper than water – many times cheaper – men would just drive around looking for people who needed a taxi. Now a lot of the cars are full already. Waiting near the Palestine Hotel (of which more later) one of the hotel workers asked where we were going. In Arabic Imad explained and his eyes lit up. Were we going to see the English girl with blonde hair to about here – he indicated his shoulders – who works with the workers? We weren’t – Ewa is in Basra, but Imad laughed. Everyone knows Ewa, he said. I’ll write more about her work when I’ve had a chance to talk properly to her about it.

There are almost no working telephones, so you have to go by taxi to the usual places of anyone you want to see. I tried to phone Michael yesterday: I came to the Fanar to get his number and Luay gave it to me but, he said, “You cannot call from here. There is no operator.” From the internet center around the corner I had to dial the full international code to call a few miles across the city. Calls within Iraq were free before the war. Bugged, of course, but free. If you know the address it’s cheaper, though much, much slower, to just go and see if they’re in but, if you don’t, you have no choice but to try to call and to pay over $1 a minute.

I tried again from the Kandeel Hotel where I stayed last night but the phone in my room just beeped at me. “There is no operator here,” said Mohammed, at reception, “because… bombing, you know.” Still only a few exchanges are working. Even if your phone is working the chances are that the person you want to call is not connected. Still most people in the city can’t call an ambulance or fire engine if they need to.

Today I was on my way to Al-Muajaha and Emar’s offices when I spotted Michael on his way to find me, so he jumped in and we went for falafels. He’d been staying with a couple of Palestinian families about to be evicted from their homes, but they were made homeless yesterday. Palestinians were seen as receiving preferential treatment from Saddam in his attempts to build up his image as the great Arab leader, so landlords were forced to accept lower rents from Palestinian refugees. Now a lot of them are getting kicked out, as are other people for a whole variety of reasons because there’s no protection from eviction here.

No one was in at Emar’s offices, nor in the internet café they use, so we carried on to Al-Muajaha. Again I’ll write more about their work when had chance to spend some time with them but essentially Muajaha is a newspaper and website set up by some Iraqi people I met here last time and Emar is Arabic for ‘rebuild’ and is setting up teams to assess their own reconstruction and other needs, again set up by some Iraqi friends I met before the war.

At the Muajaha office Muthanna was looking for Salam. The two of them have been invited to Geneva for some web posting training as part of the Indymedia network. He’s really excited but as yet they haven’t got passports. Previously passports had to be approved by Saddam, so now they’re invalid, even if you had one, and the Americans are not issuing any at the moment.

Muthanna’s in his final year of a film degree at university. He went today with a journalist and a member of a European NGO (non-governmental organization) to translate for them in an interview with the dean of the film college. It was a terrible interview, he said. The dean was really rude to them and he told them lies. He told them there were a thousand Iraqi films. Muthanna says there are only a hundred and the last Iraqi film came out in 1992. Films had to include directly and indirectly things about Saddam, pro-Saddam, so all the respected artists went abroad and only – he consulted Imad in Arabic for the right word in English - only the bullies were making films in Iraq.

The taxi driver who brought me back here used to be a major in the Iraqi army. It was bad, he said. Saddam used to force them to be in the army and then to join the Ba’ath party and if they wouldn’t join they were fired and then jailed. He made the army do things that were bad for Iraq – to go to war and to attack other Iraqi people in the north and south. During the ‘Anfal’ campaign against the Kurds he was sent up to the north. He was an engineer, so he was only mending cars and the large guns but his friends were sent to go and gas people. I hope to interview some of those people about what happened during that time. It was a brief conversation but one which would have been unlikely before the war.

Mohammed in the Kandeel agreed some things are better now, but it’s extremely unsafe and they don’t have enough money. The new currency is in bigger denominations than the old, which is still in use, in the familiar bundles of 250 Dinar notes. The crisp, waxy 5000, 10000 and 25000 Dinar notes fit into wallets but, Mohammed and Sura explained, you go to the market and you can’t afford anything with your salary. The food ration has dwindled to almost nothing. The electricity situation is better than over the summer because the weather is good – not so hot they need air conditioning but not yet cold enough to turn on heaters. There’s less demand for electricity so there are fewer cuts and the loss of power when it happens matters less.

The falafel seller, the kids in the street, the taxi drivers and so on still ask where I’m from and say ahlan wa sahlan fi Iraq – welcome - as they always did. An English woman can still find a welcome in Baghdad. The dashboard kitsch hasn’t changed either: one taxi driver had nodding dogs next to the steering wheel grooving along to Justin Timberlake.

Kamil is still working in the Al Fanar. He gave me a big hug when he saw me and brought me a glass of numb basra, the hot sweet lemon drink I loved last time I was here. But the Fanar has now extended into the street, which is closed, with an outdoor café called The Meeting Point, between the fortress walls and razor wire which now surround the Palestine, Ishtar Sheraton and recently-bombed Baghdad hotels, the closed-down UN Development Project building and the whole of Abu Nawas Street.

The familiar view from the window is filled with strangeness. Concrete walls ten feet high or lower ones with spikes on make an alleyway that, after a frisking and a bag search from Iraqi policemen backed by four US soldiers in full kit, people can pass down. The roll of razor wire is moved aside, now and then, for an approved vehicle to pass down, before joining the gleaming rows of the car park on what was once one carriageway of Abu Nawas.

As I write there’s a gun battle going on. I can hear the crackles of smaller weapons and the roar of heavier fire. Red flares are rising from all sides, reminding me of the tracers of anti-aircraft fire the last time I stood on this balcony. Three tanks trundled out from the Palestine and then steamed along Sa’adoon street, parallel with Abu Nawas. A helicopter silhouetted against the dark blue of the sky and disappeared behind the building. It’s either a gun battle or they’ve caught Saddam.

Over tea I saw a journalist, Boris, who I met before the war, writing for Die Welt. Casually he mentioned that on his trip to Ramadi today he caught the back end of the attack near Falluja. The usual, he said: smoke everywhere, helicopters overhead and Americans running about shouting at everyone to go away. He got to Ramadi where, it was reported, students were too scared to go to the university because of the resistance. He asked them about it. “We are the resistance.”

Welcome to Iraq.



• A group in Canada has raised the money to take 5 people from Iraq to the World Social Forum in India in January (15th to 21st). The people who the organizers think would benefit and contribute the most don’t speak English. Is there anyone out there who speaks fluent Iraqi Arabic and English who would be able to get themselves to the WSF and be there for those dates who’d be up for going and translating. The possible group includes a bakery worker and a textile factory worker – not sure of any other details but please e-mail wildfirejo-owner@yahoogroups.com if you think you can help.

• There’s a woman here trying to set up a shelter for women who have fled domestic violence. I’ll have more details of the project soon but if there’s anyone who works in that field and / or knows about grant making bodies which might be able to help, please let me know as she needs funding sources to get it going.