by Anne Garrels
Amer is still working for the Japanese, but we catch up in the hallway. He says he will always do what he can to help. He says that nothing much has changed since I was last in Baghdad. I have to have yet another driver, and yet again he’s one of Ahmed’s relatives. Majed, in his late fifties, is an uncle. We settle into the car and begin the process of divining who’s who and how this is going to work out.
Sa’ad, my minder during past trips, has dumped me and will barely speak to me. I wonder if NPR is a pariah, or if my rejection of his overtures is the issue. Amer says Sa’ad is the problem. He apparently overplayed his hand and was caught raking in too much money without sharing it with his superiors, and he has been ordered to cut back on his clients. Qadm assigns me a new minder called Daniella. It’s her first time out and she has a distinctly unfortunate ethnic background. She is half-Iraqi, half-Serb, and she declares that her heroes are Milosevic and Saddam. God help me.
JANUARY 29, 2003
Official reaction to President Bush’s State of the Union Address last night is predictably negative. Baghdad again insists that Iraq no longer has any weapons of mass destruction and firmly denies U.S. charges that it has links to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist activities in the United States. Baghdad is trying to capitalize on the growing antiwar movement in the United States and Europe and, with the encouragement of Iraqi officials, foreign peace activists are arriving in Baghdad. Today’s approved activity is an antiwar rally. However, I suspect it is not what either Iraqi officials or the Greek delegation from Doctors of the World anticipated.
It was billed at the Iraqi Information Ministry as a human chain against the war, but as it turned out, there were only a few weak links. At the Saddam Pediatric Hospital, Greek doctors unfurled a banner saying NO TO WAR, but only a few patients and medical staff joined in. I stood off to the side with young medical students who ignored the proceedings, telling me, deliberately enigmatically, that they hoped for a better life by the time they graduate in June. The parade never mustered enough strength to leave the hospital compound. Greek doctor Nikitas Kanakis was at a loss to explain why more Iraqis did not participate, saying, “It is a strange situation and actually I’m very sad.”
Here in Iraq for the first time, another Greek doctor, Kostas Kostanides, told me he was stunned at how numb the population seems after twenty years of political repression, war, and sanctions. He said every time he tried to have a political discussion, Iraqi doctors dodged the subject. I can’t imagine that he thought they would act differently. He and his colleagues were clearly uncomfortable at the staged nature of the demonstration, because they said their goal is not to support Saddam Hussein but to oppose war.
A woman who was ushered in front of the television cameras initially wailed on cue when they were turned on, but failed to utter the anticipated anti-Western, antiwar statements. Holding her dying child in her arms, she broke down screaming, “I don’t need cameras! I need medicine for my child!” She begged the foreign doctors and assembled journalists to arrange for her child to be treated overseas. Away from the cameras, Iraqi doctors blamed the Iraqi Ministry of Health, not sanctions, for the shortages. And Dr. Nikitas Kanakis acknowledged he was shocked by how grand the Iraqi government buildings are, while bureaucrats apparently can’t come up with funds to buy basic medicines with their oil revenues—legal or illegal. But whatever their feelings about the regime, the doctors remain focused on their opposition to a war. Dr. Kostanides said that it’s not for people outside to determine the future of Iraq, but for the people of Iraq to decide for themselves.
Saddam Hussein remains in control and his government remains defiant. But the views of many expressed off-microphone are now rife with contradictions. More and more make it clear that they want an end to Saddam’s brutal hold, but they’re also afraid of war and subsequent civil conflict if he goes. And while many say they would welcome outside intervention, these very same people don’t believe President Bush’s promises that he has Iraqis’ interests at heart.
JANUARY 30, 2003
This trip is going to be press-conference hell. Virtually every night there is a riposte to U.S. charges. Iraq is complying to a degree with the UN resolution but is playing games over the required reconnaissance flights. Also, Iraqi scientists are not turning up alone for the required interviews. They are insisting they have a “friend” in attendance in order, they say, to ensure that their comments are not distorted. If I were an Iraqi scientist, I would have someone with me too, given what Saddam might do if someone said the wrong thing. The UN inspectors have yet to arrange for Iraqis and their families to leave the country for interviews and insist they have not been given the necessary intelligence from Washington to back up U.S. claims that there are ongoing illegal weapons programs. Meanwhile, Iraqis live in a twilight between war and peace.
The degradation of Saddam’s Iraq can be seen every day, right smack in the center of the city, at Liberation Square. It’s been transformed into a vast flea market, with sellers of secondhand clothing, plumbing fixtures, plastic sandals, and cheap Chinese radios. The traders include teachers, engineers, lawyers—anyone seeking a few extra dinars to augment salaries that now average the equivalent of $10 a month. Twenty-three-year-old Alawi, an economics student, has been working in the market since he was fourteen. Standing in front of a table covered with telephones, he insists business is good. Daniella, my minder, is listening to every word, but when pressed on how many phones he sells, Alawi admits that no one is buying telephones.
Most here dispense with the usual praise of Saddam Hussein, whose beaming portrait looks down on the proceedings, but a merchant, Sa’ad Yassin, draws an approving audience when he asks why the United States is targeting Iraq and not North Korea. He gives his own answer. The United States wants Iraqi oil.
In the afternoon, I visit some Iraqis who will dare to see me without a minder. I jump in a cab, ask to go to a restaurant, and then walk on to the house alone. I bring along a stack of magazines that they can’t get here. The assembled group includes filmmakers and artists. They prepare mazgouf, a local dish of river fish grilled over an open fire. It’s a man’s job, like barbecuing back home, and to listen to the cook, it requires skill and precision to suspend the fish on sticks and get the flame from pomegranate wood just right. They recall the days when families would stroll down to the Tigris to a row of restaurants serving this delicacy. Now such forays are too expensive, and most of the restaurants are closed. Conversation steers clear of politics—many here have made an uneasy pact with Saddam in order to survive and produce their art. I suspect some present are members of the Baath Party, but that’s not a subject they want to discuss. They reminisce about the not-too-distant past, when, they say, Baghdad was like any European city. “We are a place of culture,” they explain. They say the city’s love affair with books became so well known that people across the Arab world used to say “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.” Inevitably, however, fears about the future seep in. If U.S. troops succeed in capturing Baghdad, as the Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and British did before them, they say they will find a city too proud to welcome an invading force. But these people are clearly torn. They are desperate for an end to the isolation brought on by Saddam’s policies. They want to be part of the world again. They want to be able to exhibit their art in Western capitals. But if Saddam goes, they are afraid fundamentalists will move into the power vacuum, isolating them yet again and quite possibly banning the art they love so much.
I come home by cab, hoping I have not drawn unwanted official attention to these people. It’s all so familiar, and memories of Moscow flood back. I would do the same thing then: flag a taxi or take the underground to escape my tail. It didn’t always work, and I would always warn my Russian friends that seeing me was risky. Once when I was driving my own car, I got lost and drove around and around looking for an exit from the maze of unidentified streets and identical buildings. I noticed I was being followed and finally pulled
to the side of the road. “How,” I asked my tail in fractured Russian, “do I get to the Ring Road?” The driver answered in perfect English with another question: “Why didn’t you ask me twenty minutes ago?” Without further comment, this KGB agent took the lead and guided me miraculously to my apartment.
FEBRUARY 5, 2003
My editor, Doug Roberts, and I discuss the wisdom of reporting on the nature of Saddam’s regime at this particular time, but given how much I have broadcast about the weapons issues and diplomacy, we agree it’s important to give some context even at the risk of being expelled.
In recent weeks, Saddam has been appearing almost nightly on Iraqi television with his military commanders. New portraits of him have been placed throughout the country, and new songs have been composed in his honor. While there is private grumbling, there are no open signs of dissent.
Saddam in military uniform wielding a gun; Saddam the father patting the head of a child; Saddam looking dapper in a three-piece suit; Saddam in traditional Arab attire defending the Palestinians. He is all things and his image is everywhere. Daniella swoons over one particular portrait, offering the unprompted comment, “He is very beautiful man.”
He can be stern, but he is never depicted as the brutal tyrant who has killed thousands of his own countrymen with chemical weapons, shots to the back of the head, or poison. That is the hidden face of Saddam, hidden in the prisons that have no names, hidden in the eyes of the women who not so long ago begged me to find out what had happened to their loved ones who disappeared into Saddam’s gulag and have not been heard from since.
Outside the Ministry of Justice, one of my favorite posters shows Saddam holding the scales of justice. All a taxi driver can do is shrug, but that shrug tells volumes. Any number of taxi drivers have now warned it’s dangerous to linger too long outside one of the palaces.
I can’t say it enough: the power of Saddam Hussein is much like that of Josef Stalin, a man he is said to revere. He has promised to make his country great. His intelligence services have infiltrated every crevice of his society. Just as the Soviets elevated the childhood snitch Pavel Morozov to heroic status, Saddam has encouraged children to tattle on their parents should they say something the least bit subversive. Western diplomats here in Baghdad say Iraqi officials never come to meetings alone. They are always in pairs, the better to report on each other.
Ahmed al-Shihabi has been painting Saddam Hussein since 1970, when Saddam was clawing his way to power. Al-Shihabi can’t recall how many paintings he’s done, and he insists artists do this for free, out of love for “Mr. President,” as he is called. Architects have also been enlisted into the glorification campaign.
At the enormous Mother of All Battles mosque built to commemorate the Persian Gulf War, the minarets resemble barrels of Kalashnikovs and Scud missiles. Inside the mosque there are 650 pages of the Koran written, it is said, in “Mr. President’s” blood. Official legend has it that Saddam donated twenty-eight liters of his own blood over two years to produce the calligraphy. His thumb print adorns a plinth outside, and story has it that another war memorial, an arch with two fists, was based on casts made from Saddam’s own hands.
While his image is everywhere, the Iraqi leader has not made a public appearance in almost two years, evidently afraid of an assassination attempt, and until recently he had not been seen often on television. But now there is the nightly Saddam Show. For two hours on a recent evening Saddam listened to his generals, interrupting them to give advice and encouragement. Smoking his trademark Cuban cigar, Saddam gave the impression of calm determination. As if to counter widespread reports that Iraqi soldiers are badly fed, poorly trained, and ill-equipped, the generals described what crack shots their men are. Saddam, the benevolent father, said morale is key and offered homespun tales of how a determined fighter can win, even against a stronger opponent.
In his twenty-three years in power, Saddam has used his strong personality, ruthlessness, and ability to play one center of power against another to retain absolute control. Artist Ahmed al-Shihabi is still banking on Saddam surviving. He’s organizing a new exhibition of Saddam portraits at the Saddam Art Center that should open in a few weeks, just when war is likely to start. He points to one portrait manufactured out of shards of aluminum. Saddam glistens in the sunshine and can be reflected by the lights at night. It’s a hit, and al-Shihabi is commissioning more, bigger, versions based on the same idea to place on buildings in the city.
And lest anyone in Iraq or elsewhere doubt the future, the news program always closes nightly with a montage of film clips of Saddam accompanied by one of the many ballads praising him. They have one theme … that Iraqis want no one but Saddam Hussein and that the people will stay with him to the end.
FEBRUARY 6, 2003
I hang around the Information Ministry until 10:00, the witching hour when Managing Director Uday al-Tae appears. I sit in the office while two babes from French television desperately try to ingratiate themselves with him. They flirt, call in food, offer everything short of a blow job under the desk. After all is said and done, so to speak, I can only mutter something about how important NPR is in the United States. Later, with Qadm, I burst out laughing, saying I am too old to compete with these beauties. I ask him to understand if I don’t try. I have to say he seems relieved and happy to receive my discreetly dispensed money without foreplay.
FEBRUARY 7, 2003
Nowhere is Iraq’s demise so clear, and so sad, as at the Symphony. The hall is shabby, the red velvet curtain faded. Seated on plastic chairs, the orchestra tunes up—but it’s a tricky task. Most of their best instruments were long ago sold abroad. Replacements are costly. Reeds and new strings aren’t always available. These musicians play for love. Their stipends have dwindled to $12 a month, so every member of the orchestra has at least one other job to make ends meet. Seventy-year-old Munther Jumil Haffit, chief violist, points to a doctor, an engineer, a retired taxi driver, and a lawyer.
They try to give one concert each month, but sometimes too many musicians miss practice because of work. Yet Munther says that whenever they play, and often there’s not much notice, the audience turns up faithfully, and the house is always full.
Abdul Razzaq al-Shekhli, who helped found the orchestra, has been its conductor since 1974. The story of al-Shekhli and his orchestra reflects Iraq’s recent history, its development and subsequent decline. In the ‘60s he had the money to study at the top music colleges in London. His eyes glisten as he recalls those days. Flush with oil wealth, Iraq was joining the developed world. Baghdad was booming. Buildings were going up on every corner. There were extraordinary improvements in education and health care. And his orchestra flourished. By the early ’70s it was a full seventy-piece orchestra with more than twenty foreign members, but it’s been downhill since 1980, when Saddam launched the devastating eight-year war with Iran.
An Iranian rocket hit al-Shekhli’s house, killing his two small children. His wife has never recovered. She still has nightmares. Nothing, he says, seems to console her. Music has helped him, and he hopes his orchestra has helped others get through the difficult times.
It’s been a struggle to keep his beloved orchestra together. With Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Gulf War, and the subsequent sanctions, the foreign musicians have left. Many of the Iraqi players, his closest friends, have also fled for political and economic reasons. Al-Shekhli can now muster only forty-five musicians. Without a full compliment, he has to rewrite the music to make it possible to play.
Munther Jumil Haffit says he dreads another war. “You are Americans. You can stop it, stop this invasion. You have your own voice.” Was this an allusion to the fact that this distinguished man doesn’t have his own voice in a police state? He does not, cannot say. It’s impossible to know. But these musicians are not defiant. They are sad. Waiting for he knows not what conductor, al-Shekhli says he dares not even hope, and he does not say what he might hope for. “I’m always waiting for
hope. We’re all waiting for hope.”
The musicians just take it day by day. Their next concert, a performance of new Iraqi compositions, is scheduled for February 27. Juggling diplomatic maneuvering and the time it might take for the United States to amass its troops, al-Shekhli thinks the concert might just take place.
BRENDA BULLETIN: FEBRUARY 7, 2003
A Snowy Norfolk day to you all.
Brenda has been in Baghdad for almost two weeks after being in Kuwait City for about one. Both places are bizarre and otherworldly. Brenda has been able to spin out several wonderful pieces that catch the essence of the absurdity that passes for daily life in Iraq, like the one about the expensive, classy emporium in an upscale neighborhood that imports crystal and elaborate glass chandeliers from France. Commerce elsewhere might be atrophied, but this shop was filled and business brisk. Fragile goblets to toast the night of the cruise missiles, perhaps. She meets a distinguished-looking gentleman inspecting the stemware. He wears a beautifully tailored green outfit with epaulettes but no insignia. She will later learn that this is the Baath Party uniform. Gesturing toward the uniform, she asks, “Is this military?” With barely disguised hostility, he sneers, “No, it is Armani.”
In this lull before leaving (she cannot extend her visa and wants to play by the book so that she can get back in later), now is perhaps a good time to talk of Brenda’s food groups when working. Basically there are three: caffeine, nicotine, and adrenaline. When on occasion she consumes something more substantial, she dispatches it with such speed that no one has actually observed her eat. Her childhood, though Brit, was not to the best of my knowledge filled with Oliver Twistian deprivation, but you would never know it.
