The Association has a real find, an eyewitness to one of those extraordinary massacres, which took place in Tuz, a town to the north of Baghdad, on the way to Kirkuk. He was a bus driver, and he and his bus were requisitioned by the police. He thus became a passive observer of the whole operation. As he drove around different villages across the region, he saw the police loading up his bus with entire families, parents along with grandparents and children. With his human cargo he was directed by Ba’ath Party members, who were in charge of the operation, to a piece of open ground on the outskirts of Tuz. There were already thousands of people there, being taken off lorries trucks and buses like his by policemen and party activists. As soon as they were unloaded, they were immediately put to work digging a long ditch, in the form of a trench. The witness says that he arrived there at four in the afternoon and that the activity went on all night. When the ditch was deep enough, the police and Ba’ath Party activists put on gas marks and gave him one as well. He was paralysed by terror.
Bludgeoning and firing at the terrified throng, they forced them into the excavated ditch and threw toxic gas cylinders on top of them. By dawn, it was all over. The driver was warned to keep his mouth shut and then sent off by the assassins. The ditch has now been found. It is one of many that are appearing across Iraq, often with four or five thousand corpses in each. ‘They were trenches rather than ditches,’ Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi specifies. And also that, in certain cases, the victims did not have the fortune to be gassed, because the Ba’athists preferred to bury them alive.
These ditches that are being excavated attract thousands of people, who come to see whether, among the remains that are being uncovered, that bear witness to the horror of the recent past in Iraq, they might discover their disappeared family members. One of these couples, who, since April, have been searching the country for the bones of their son who disappeared twelve years ago, are two old people. The woman is very ill, and her daughter tells me that the only thing keeping them alive is the hope of finding the remains of their loved one. Her name is Mrs Al Sarrat, and I visit her in a small, precarious house built on pillars, also in the Al Kadimia neighbourhood. ‘My life is thirty-five years of grief,’ she declares, without crying, her Spartan face chiselled out of despair. She is a woman of indeterminate age, swamped by a black abaya that only allows her face to be shown, flanked by her two very young daughters, who are also veiled and remain motionless throughout the entire interview, like tragic statues. The room is very modest and hot, crammed with pictures, and there is a majestic view of the Tigris through the windows.
‘We cannot breathe or pray because misfortunes kept befalling us, one after the other. He was one of the youngest boys in the family. He was a secondary-school student and signed a petition asking for money to bury a dead school friend. Someone sent that list, which was just a charitable gesture, to the security services. All the boys were arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, as conspirators. Some of them died in prison.’
Another of Mrs Al Sarrat’s brothers was a soldier. He was wounded three times in the eight-year war with Iran. ‘A hero, no?’ Well one day he was arrested, accused by someone of wanting to get out of the army, a crime that often meant a death sentence or otherwise a prison sentence and the added penalty of having an ear cut off. The family found out about this through rumours, since they never received any information in their frequent enquiries to official bodies. They never heard of him again.
Soon after this second misfortune, a third blow fell. Her father was arrested and disappeared into the night of the dictatorship. Three years later a stranger brought a note to the family. ‘Go to Abu Ghraib prison’, the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the worst tortures and political murders took place. There was her father, and she was able to visit him for several minutes every few months. He was released six years later, as mysteriously as he had been arrested. He was never told why he was detained.
Finally there was a younger brother who disappeared when the Shia uprising of 1991 was put down in an orgy of blood. He was a soldier during the war in Kuwait. The last time anyone saw him, he was still in the forces, in Najaf. He has not been heard of since then, and Mrs Al Sarrat’s parents are searching for him in their painful pilgrimage to the common graves scattered throughout Iraq.
When I leave, rather dazed by my morning’s immersion in suffering and barbarity, instead of saying goodbye to Mrs Al Sarrat with the usual right hand on the heart, I stretch out my hand. She looks at me, alarmed.
Just in case I hadn’t had enough barbarity, this evening, in the Hotel Rimini, where I have come to take refuge, betraying the hospitality of my friends in the Ibero-American-European Foundation for a few miserable hours of air conditioning which might finally help me to sleep a bit, I have a conversation with a woman who works for the United Nations which has sunk me into depression and will probably bring me nightmares tonight. She tells me about an investigation by America’s Watch, which has yet to be made public, but which she has read, into the rape and kidnapping of women in Baghdad since the anarchy began, on 9 April. This is a taboo subject because, in terms of traditional morality in Iraqi society, a raped woman is a disgrace that dishonours her entire family and, instead of receiving compassion and support, she is shunned and despised. She knows that her life has ended, that she will never be married and that in her own household she will be subject to exclusion and derision. To wash away this affront, it is often the case that her father or one of her brothers will kill her. The law has always been lenient towards these medieval ‘honour-cleansing killings’, and the perpetrators receive symbolic sentences of two or three months in gaol. Americas Watch has twenty-five testimonies from girls, young women and older women who were kidnapped and raped in Baghdad by criminals and who, for obvious reasons, do not want to report the abuse that they have suffered. Not only because right now there is no police force or functioning judiciary, but also, and above all, because even if these bodies were in place, the procedures and infinite humiliations that heroic women in the past suffered when they dared to report such crimes did not bring them justice. It just exposed them to the disdain and humiliation of public opinion, which increased the hostility of their families. For that reason, according to the Americas Watch report, the girls and women try desperately to hide what has happened to them; they are ashamed and sorry, as if it is they who were responsible for their misfortune.
Now I understand more clearly why, at the gates of the University of Baghdad that I visited yesterday, there were so many mothers waiting to take their daughters home, as if they were nursery-school children.
25 June–6 July 2003
6. Othello Back to Front
The dramatist, journalist, soldier, artilleryman, bon vivant and firm optimist Ahmad Hadi is tall, strong and engaging, and, with his exuberant anatomy, he seems very cooped up in the narrow rooms of the house where the newspaper Azzaman (The Times) has located its editorial offices. The paper was started up, in exile in London, by a famous opposition journalist, Saad Al Bazzaz, after he split with Saddam Hussein in 1991. The cause of the split was the despot’s eldest son, the ineffable Uday, who controlled the Press Union, along with innumerable other responsibilities (including the Olympic Committee, the Football Association, the newspaper Babel and many other activities). With the fall of the regime, the newspaper now brings out four editions: in London, in the Arab Emirates, in Basra and here in Baghdad. It started printing in the capital on 27 April and already has a circulation of sixty thousand. Azzaman is considered to be the widest read and perhaps most influential newspaper. It is produced by forty-five journalists, fifteen of them women, who fit with great difficulty in this small house where we can scarcely breathe, because the electricity cuts frequently shut down the ventilators, leaving us sweating and stifling. Despite this, there is a great energy in the air, one might even say joy, and the editorial staff – almost all young people - who are coming and going, or else toiling on the computers, are very
friendly.
Bathed in sweat, the main editor of Azzaman is enthusiastic, and gives a cheerful account of his busy life. He had studied theatre, graduating from the Baghdad School of Dramatic Arts with a study and a stage adaptation of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire. He wanted to pursue a career as an actor and theatre director, but the regime decided otherwise and made him join the army, in the artillery division. He was kept in the army for eleven years, eight of which he spent in the mad war against Iran that Saddam Hussein instigated and which cost a million lives. Ahmad Hadi, who was by then an artillery captain, hung up his uniform and tried to return to his old love, the boards, when the Shia intifada against the dictatorship broke out, in which he became actively involved. Following the failure of the uprising, when the punishment killings were in full flow, he managed to escape across the border to Saudi Arabia. While he was in exile, as a reprisal for his rebellion, the regime burned down his two houses along with everything inside them. He tells me all this laughing out loud, as if the matter was funny or the victim of these misfortunes was his worst enemy.
Perhaps Ahmad Hadi is happy because, in his forties, he has finally managed to take up his theatrical vocation after so many frustrations. His work, Obey the Devil, which was performed four times in an open-air setting, amid the rubble in Baghdad, has been a monumental success and many Iraqis have told me about it, praising it to the skies. There were nine male actors and one female, who was also a dancer, and the actors appeared daubed with the ashes of the fires that every passer-by comes across in the streets of the city.
To hear the robust, sweating, gesticulating Ahmad Hadi explaining his work to me is, I am sure, almost as stimulating as seeing it myself. He describes it with great verve, lots of arm movements and loud guffaws, mopping the rivulets of sweat that soak his face and his shirt. The work is a recreation of Shakespeare’s Othello, a work which, Hadi assures me, could have been written with the Iraq tragedy in mind, since it fits so perfectly. There are also other coincidences, real premonitions by the Elizabethan bard. Othello, read backwards, from right to left, as is the case in Arabic, produces in that language a sound very similar to ‘Leota’, which means, ‘Obey him’. My translator, Professor Bassam Y. Rashid, who is a linguist, gets caught up in a philological discussion with him, and finally he admits that he’s right: it does mean ‘Obey him’. Ahmad Hadi added the word devil; although, he tells me, an infernal presence is implied in the idea that a society must ‘obey’ an irrational and destructive force. Life in the palace of the despot was indeed a world of jealousy, open hatred, rivalry, envy, crimes and betrayal. Iago’s betrayal, he assures me, is symbolic of the treachery of Saddam Hussein’s Head of General Staff, who, out of jealousy, handed over Baghdad to the American forces without letting the Iraqi soldiers fight. There is no doubt about it: his version of Othello represents what Iraq has lived through all these years, which is why the people of Baghdad identified so closely with the work.
This is the only time, in our conversation, that the optimistic Ahmad Hadi says something that could be construed as a veiled criticism of the coalition forces. In every other aspect, his view of the current situation in Iraq exudes confidence and appreciation. ‘I am optimistic for one very simple reason: nothing could be worse than Saddam Hussein. After that atrocious experience, things can only get better for us’.
He believes that once the CPA puts in place the Iraq Governing Committee which, he is sure, will be made up of significant figures from across the political spectrum, then the confidence of the people will grow, order will be imposed, services will be re-established and the uncertainty and insecurity everyone feels today will start to disappear. The main desire of the Iraqi people, he is convinced, is to live in peace, without hatred and violence, and to build a modern, tolerant, secular, pluralist democracy, on Western lines. This is what Azzaman promotes and exemplifies in its pages, where different opinions are freely expressed. Even among the most politicised religious sectors, be they Sunni or Shia, it is the moderates, not the extremists, who – now – prevail, and they are prepared to make an effort to coexist so that the nightmare of the Ba’ath Party does not recur.
The people will never forget these thirty-five years. Significant sites of memory are the common graves which continue to appear throughout all the provinces of Iraq, full of the bodies of disappeared, tortured and executed people. The figures he gives me, with emphatic certainty, are even greater than those I was given by the Association of Freed Prisoners. They make me dizzy. I know that they are more a fiction than a reality, but even after cutting them down drastically, the total remains horrifying. Every time I hear from Iraqis accounts of the horrors of Saddam Hussein, I am reminded of the Dominican Republic and what I heard there about General Trujillo’s exploits.
Ahmad Hadi states categorically that the figure of eight million victims of the Ba’ath tyranny is perfectly realistic, despite my look of incredulity. I tell him that it doesn’t matter if he is exaggerating. I didn’t come to Iraq to listen just to the truth but also to the fictions that the Iraqis believe, since the lies that a people invent very often express a very deep truth, and are as instructive a way of understanding a dictatorship as the objective truth. He insists that this mountain of eight million corpses is close to the historical truth. He adds that you can make calculations based on the numbers of bodies in common graves that have appeared since April: there are at least three in every province in Iraq, and in just one of them, in Babilonia, there were some 115,000 bodies. I tell him that this is the largest figure I have heard of in any city since the butchery perpetrated by the Nazis in the Holocaust. He insists on giving me more horror statistics: in the city of Shanafia, which has scarcely twenty thousand inhabitants, they have already counted almost eighty-five thousand human remains, victims of the homicidal rage of the Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein. After a past in which so many extraordinary horrors were committed, how could one not feel hopeful about the future, despite the blackouts, the lack of water, the anarchy and the insecurity? Ahmad Hadi wants exemplary sanctions to be imposed on Saddam and his sons (Uday and Qusay died in a fire fight with American troops on 22 July, after this statement was made) and henchmen, but he does not want them to be taken to an international tribunal. They must be judged here, in an Iraqi court, with Iraqi judges. That would be an example that would inure Iraq for ever against dictatorships.
I ask him whether one can say that today there is complete freedom in his country to write and publish. ‘Absolute freedom, like never before in the history of Iraq.’ And even in the economic sphere, those with jobs must recognise that their situation has improved (for those without jobs, the majority of the people, it is another matter, of course). For example, under Saddam Hussein, journalists earned some ten thousand dinars a month (the equivalent of five dollars). Now they earn the equivalent of two hundred dollars. Isn’t that a big improvement? He tells me that, for example, with his first two-hundred-dollar pay cheque he rushed out to by a spare part for his fridge that had been broken for two years. His wife, who is a school teacher, spent her first salary after the liberation on a satellite dish, which means that she can now pick up television stations from around the world. And she is very happy!
Ahmad Hadi is from the south, from the region of the mystic Shia cities of Najaf and Kerbala. He invites me to his house – Iraqis always do this, when they scarcely know you, something that reminds me of Latin American hospitality – so that I can visit this beautiful part of the country. But he is not thinking about Shia mysticism or the sacred emanations of the place, but rather of more material things: ‘Between Najaf and Kerbala they produce the best rice in the whole of the Middle East,’ he effuses. ‘Do come and I’ll prepare you a treat that you won’t forget for the rest of your life.’ Guffaws well up from inside that enormous body every now and then, like one of those cries that warriors make to give themselves confidence before going into battle. ‘Of course things are better in Iraq,’ he exclaims. ‘Before I had to dr
ink that poisonous alcohol that they sell loose, and now I am drinking malt whisky.’
It is good to talk to someone like the journalist and playwright Ahmad Hadi, who is convinced that, even in this problematic, destroyed country of Iraq, life is worth living. I leave the newspaper and take a walk around the centre of Baghdad. I feel that I am walking in a world that has been conquered by the surrounding desert: the façades of the buildings, the squares, the trees, the public monuments and even the faces and the clothes of the people are all stained an earthen colour. Dry sand is floating in the air and gets into your mouth and nose. In the Al Ferdaws (Paradise) Square, where the titanic statue of Saddam Hussein had been that television viewers all over the world saw toppled the day the coalition forces entered the city, there is now an inscription in black paint, addressed to the Americans in idiosyncratic English: ‘All done/Go home.’
In my rather intermittent readings during these past weeks, as I tried to get some sort of idea about the country that I was coming to, Al Rachid Street was always mentioned, for in the forties and fifties it had been the great commercial artery at the centre of Baghdad. With its luxurious shops and jewellery stores, this was the place that the most prosperous families of the Middle East dreamed about and came to on shopping expeditions. My heart sinks when I walk along it, skirting round the foul-smelling rubbish, the scraps that scrawny dogs are scavenging, and the rubble. It takes imagination to make out the former mansions of the rich and powerful, and the elegant shops of what was Baghdad half a century earlier in these crumbling, shaky, windowless, lopsided, looted and burned-out constructions, many of them about to collapse on top of the residents who sit on benches or on the floor under the portals and columns, impervious to the impending disaster, talking and sipping at their glass of hot tea balanced on a small plate.