Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

by Tamara Chalabi

  Hassan lived in a permanent state of fear, expecting to be arrested at any moment. Rumours of the new regime’s human rights abuses were rampant, and some of his colleagues had already been interrogated roughly by the authorities. However, he dared not risk attracting unwelcome attention to himself by attempting to leave the country in the middle of the academic term, despite a desperate telephone call from his father urging him to do so. Travel was restricted, and the telephone lines were bugged. Hassan and Jamila started staying with friends in order to avoid being alone at home. They were refugees in their own city, living in a state of uncertainty.

  Hassan decided to risk travelling when the summer term ended in June; for him, leaving represented a major defeat, as there would be no one left to carry on the family name, which had existed for generations in Iraq. He was also devastated at the prospect of abandoning his academic career, which he knew from experience could not be easily resumed elsewhere. He and Jamila knew there would be no going back as long as Saddam Hussein held the reins of power.

  Unable to find a teaching post in Beirut straight away, Hassan threw his energies into contacting Iraqi political dissidents. He also found a captive audience in his youngest brother Ahmad, now a postgraduate student in America, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence. As a sixteen-year-old Ahmad, desperate to leave his East Sussex boarding school, had applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his talent for maths meant that he had been accepted. America seemed to him to promise more opportunity, freedom and energy than England, and his time there coincided with a period of great social upheaval, including the nationwide anti-Vietnam War protests, Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement and the dramatic outbreak of civil disobedience at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

  In 1969 Ahmad completed his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Before joining the American University of Beirut as a mathematics professor, he travelled with Hassan to Tehran, where they met representatives of the Iranian government to discuss the possibility of a counter-coup to the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad.

  During the trip the brothers met and forged a lifelong friendship with Mulla Mustafa Barzani, the charismatic leader of the Kurds who was fighting for autonomy for his region in northern Iraq, and had sought refuge in Iran. Any effort to foment a coup against the Ba’ath regime was of great importance to Ahmad, and he enthusiastically assisted Mulla Mustafa in every way he could, particularly through his growing political and media contacts in Beirut. In 1972 he would arrange a meeting with Saleh Samerai, an Iraqi officer and an associate of Mulla Mustafa’s who was plotting to overthrow Saddam. Samerai’s body was found dumped in a ditch two days later. That same year, an assassination attempt narrowly failed against Abdel Razzaq al-Nayif, who had led the 1968 Ba’ath coup before being ousted thirteen days later while in London. In 1979 he would be shot dead in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel on Park Lane. The message was clear: opponents of Saddam’s regime could be punished by death, wherever they were.

  As in 1968, it seemed that once again the Shah had another agenda, and was using his dealings with the Iraqi dissidents as bait to force through a treaty with Saddam. The Persian Gulf Treaty was eventually signed under US auspices in Algiers in 1975. As part of the bargaining process, autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan was reneged on, and Mulla Mustafa was expelled from Iran to the Iraqi side of the border, where he was a wanted man.

  When Sayyid Musa al-Sadr appeared in Lebanon, the family welcomed him warmly and he became a regular visitor to the Building. The Chalabis were close to his relatives, the Sadrs of Iraq. Rushdi gave him a car, and Bibi often sat with him discussing the finer points of Islam. Sayyid Musa was a powerful advocate for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised Shi’a.

  Leila and Ahmad at their engagement party, 1971.

  Ahmad had become captivated by the demure beauty of a young woman he had spotted at several social functions. Her name was Leila, and she came from a leading political Shi’a family. Her father, Adel Osseiran, was one of Lebanon’s ‘men of independence’, having fought the French occupation in the late 1930s and early forties. Later he served several times as Speaker of Parliament, the highest political position constitutionally permitted to a Shi’a in Lebanon, and held several posts as a Cabinet Minister.

  Ahmad decided to pursue Leila, but he had to take into account the conservative customs of the time and seek permission from her strict father. After a suitable period of official courting, the couple married in early 1972, with Sayyid Musa al-Sadr officiating. They rented an apartment in a building near the rest of the family with stunning views of the sea, where I was born – their first child. Both sets of grandparents were delighted by my arrival, and I enjoyed both Bibi and my grandfather Adel’s undivided attention for four years before my sister Mariam’s birth, followed by those of my brothers Hashim and much later Hadi. Many of my childhood memories are happy and warm, with my time divided between urbane Beirut, pleasant strolls with my father on the American University campus and running wild in my maternal grandparents’ orange groves by the sea.

  Tamara and Ahmad in late 1970s Lebanon.

  37

  Civil War

  A Shattered Sanctuary

  (1975–1982)

  IN THE EARLY 1970s Lebanon began its descent into civil war. The growing unrest was linked to a variety of complicated factors, including the composition of the country’s population, its political system and even its geography; and it was exacerbated by the large influx of Palestinian refugees after 1967. Beirut had become the headquarters for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been established to represent the rights of the disenfranchised Palestinians following the creation of the state of Israel of 1948. It was headed by Yassir Arafat, whose indifference to Lebanon’s sovereignty would become an issue of serious contention with the Lebanese Phalange Christians.

  The civil war in Lebanon was a melting pot that included every possible Middle Eastern ingredient, from Nasser and Arab unity to the liberation of Palestine, Christian revivalism, Nehru-style socialism and the Shi’a awakening, through to a Greek Orthodox brand of Communism. Every country in the region had a stake in the outcome, as citizens were chased out of their homes, forbidden to enter certain neighbourhoods and denied basic services, with many being forced to leave the country altogether.

  The war broke out in 1975. My earliest memories include days spent in underground shelters and seeking cover in corridors, as well as an occasion when I narrowly avoided death when a bullet hit the wall near my bed. In those early days, Beirut was still a habitable city with rich cultural diversity. Growing up there during a civil war only seemed unusual in retrospect. As a child, I felt that the outbreaks of violence that plagued Beirut were normal, because I didn’t have any other experiences to compare them to. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel fear at the sounds of bullets and explosions, but they became a part of life.

  Even the parades of militias in their makeshift uniforms, with machine guns welded onto pickup trucks, did not disrupt our everyday routines. We children still went to school, shopkeepers to their shops, employees to their jobs, teenagers to their parties and housewives to their social gatherings. However dramatic the outbreaks of fighting, life resumed almost instantly afterwards. There was more concern about the dwindling supply of water, the power cuts and the diminishing availability of goods. People’s energy was gradually consumed by the difficulty of accomplishing the most mundane tasks. Coming home with a packet of bread was often an achievement worthy of celebration. Yet, as daunting as everyday life came to be, it could still be full of pleasure.

  As a small child I was unaware of the fact that I was the product of two cultures, and I enjoyed spending time with both sides of my extended family. My mother’s family owned lands in the south which were a source of great adventure and fun for me as I played under the loving gaze of my grandfather Adel. The colourful and exotic residents of the Building spoke differently f
rom everyone else, but they didn’t appear particularly foreign to me. Even my father, whose Iraqi accent never faded, seemed to me to belong in Beirut. I knew my grandparents came from Iraq, but I did not know much about the country other than that the residents of the Building had important ties to it.

  The civil war in Lebanon was a source of much anxiety for the Chalabi family. Everyone had an opinion, a side they supported, as they argued over the lunch table or tried to anticipate future developments. As the family discussed what the Americans would do next, say, if the Syrians responded to the Palestinians in this or that manner, the names of politicians and world leaders cropped up as often as references to food or the weather.

  Bibi inevitably took the war very personally. She could not believe that this magical land had descended into violence and strife. The war was a direct attack on her life and well-being, and she resented its disruption to her daily routine; she hated having to sit in the underground shelter, waiting for the fighting to abate. She was, however, very grateful for the white-haired former doorman Khalil’s presence in the Building, imbuing him with almost supernatural powers which she believed would shield her from the fire of Palestinian Kalashnikovs from the nearby refugee camps. At the beginning of the war Khalil acquired a simple 9 mm gun for security, but he kept upgrading his weapons as the war turned more violent until he had acquired a .45 Magnum. Although he worked at my grandparents’ house, Khalil drove me each day to my classes at the Collège Protestant, and was very much part of family life in the Building.

  Bibi on a balcony in Beirut in the 1970s.

  As rockets and katyushas fell from the skies, Bibi and Hadi became a source of increasing concern for their children. Both were in good health, but access to doctors was not easy in a war-torn city. They were less mobile than they had been, and could not reach shelter readily. Their presence in Beirut became more hazardous as the random nature of the fighting increased. Snipers became a new phenomenon, positioning themselves in strategic areas around the city, especially on either side of the ‘Green Line’ – the imaginary line that divided Beirut into east, with its Christian population, and west, where Muslims were the majority. The Building was not far from the Green Line, and the neighbourhood changed dramatically during the war, attracting refugees, some of whom were armed. By the late seventies there was a gradual but steady decline in the quality of life, with a loss of public services and an influx of squatters and refugees who took over the homes of those who had fled the war.

  The physical transformation of the city was dramatic. From a flourishing cultural cosmopolitan hub, Beirut became a carcass inhabited by displaced peoples. The elegant patio furniture on the balconies gave way to lines of washing. With the refugees came armed militia men, car bombs and explosions. Civil society still functioned, but schools struggled to stay open, with teachers running the gauntlet of shootouts in the streets in order to arrive on time.

  My grandparents didn’t leave Beirut overnight. For a long time Bibi only agreed to temporary absences in London, but as soon as there was a lull in the war she would persuade the family to let her return. But by the early 1980s she could no longer resist her children’s worries for her safety, especially as most of them had already moved their own families out of Lebanon, and finally left for London. Hassan, Jawad and Hazem continued to use the Building as a home, leaving the city when the fighting became worse, and then returning as Bibi herself had done formerly.

  Bibi didn’t take well to the move, and continued to follow the war in Lebanon closely on the news. There was something absolute and traumatic about this departure. Beirut had long been a refuge for her and Hadi. To lose it at their advanced age was extremely distressing for them both.

  After Bibi and Hadi had left with Rushdi and his family, Khalil and his family continued to live in the Building, protecting it from robbery and squatters and ferrying all its precious carpets, crystals and porcelain in a disused ambulance to a safe house. One day in September 1982, during the Israeli occupation of Beirut, Christian Phalange Lebanese forces seized Khalil, one of his sons and his two brothers, Aziz and Mahmud, while Israeli soldiers looted the Building. My father Ahmad’s brothers were all out of Beirut at the time, some taking refuge in the mountains to the north, and it subsequently took Ahmad many months of investigation, of shifting through hearsay and lies, to discover that Khalil, his brothers and his sons had been killed at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp that September. Thousands of Palestinians were killed, mostly women and children as the Palestinian combatants had already left the city under an international agreement.

  Of the many episodes that occurred during the Lebanese War of 1975 to 1990, the Israeli occupation was the first that looked as if it might lead to some sort of culmination; it appeared that the battle that was raging all over the nation would finally lead to the emergence of a new Lebanon. The election of Bashir Gemayel as President in August 1982, even allowing for the blatant Israeli manipulation that achieved it, seemed to constitute for many of his Christian supporters the fulfilment of their wildest dreams. The letdown that followed his assassination less than a month later was channelled by these supporters, hungry for revenge, into the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.

  Aside from the womenfolk in Khalil’s family, only one of his sons survived the war, and that was because he was not in the Building on that fateful September day. News of Khalil’s death was received with anguish and sorrow in London, especially by Bibi, who prayed for his soul, unable to imagine how his family could survive this tragedy.

  38

  Creased Maps

  A Move to a Different Land

  (1980s)

  Thamina and Bibi during a trip to Switzerland in 1974.

  BIBI’S SECOND EXILE was as unwelcome as the first had been, over twenty years earlier. As they had done when she moved to Beirut, many of the family followed her back to London, Rushdi and Thamina’s families among them. Her daughter Najla was there to help them to settle in, having spent the years since the 1958 revolution living in Surrey. She had weathered her difficult marriage to Abdul Latif, who had proved to be a ladies’ man, and had worked hard to come to terms with her situation as an exile, and to reconcile her conservative Iraqi Muslim culture with life in Britain. She felt very vulnerable with respect to her four daughters, whose engagement with British life transgressed a multitude of sacrosanct social canons in her eyes. Whether it was the way they dressed and spoke, the friends they made or the way they addressed her, their behaviour challenged her understanding of the world. In this respect she was unwittingly her mother’s daughter. Her attempts to instil in her daughters the values that she herself had grown up with made her a far more hands-on mother than her sisters Thamina and Raifa ever were. Her exile was in many respects the hardest.

  In the late 1970s my uncles Rushdi, Hassan and Talal decided to found a bank in war-free Jordan. Their connection to the country was based solely on the family’s inherited sentimentality towards the Iraqi royal family, which extended to the royal family’s cousin, Jordan’s Hashemite King Hussein. They asked their younger brother Ahmad, my father, to help them, and he took a one-year sabbatical from his teaching post in Beirut.

  I don’t recall much of our move to Jordan in 1980; I thought we were going there on holiday until I was taken to my first day at school in Amman. In my mind, Beirut remained home, our house was still there, and we returned fairly frequently, subject to the airport’s being open – not always a given. The Iranian revolution had taken place a year earlier, taking the world by surprise. Some members of the family were shocked and saddened by the overthrow of the Shah, viewing it as further evidence of the fickleness of the West towards its friends, while others were intrigued by this dramatic revolution which brought with it a radical Islamic post-Marxist rejection of the West. The prosperity Iran had enjoyed during the 1960s and 1970s had not been shared by all; across Iranian society, social and economic resentment had been compounded by a feeling of political disenfranchisement t
hat had its origins several decades earlier. The Shah had tried to channel some of the economic benefits to the people, but his coterie had benefited far more. The revolution represented the culmination of the successful mobilization of the masses; the presence of the cleric Ayatollah Khomeini at its helm raised tensions across the region.

  My awareness of that other place called Iraq became far more acute when the Iran–Iraq war broke out on 22 September 1980. Supported by the West, Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran, which he labelled an anti-American theocratic state, thus pre-empting any potential alliance between Khomeini and a small core of Shi’a Islamists in Iraq. Until then the Lebanese Civil War had commanded most attention in our household, as many members of our family were still living in Beirut. I was familiar with the Civil War, with the names of the places I heard about on television, and with many of the images I saw on television and in my parents’ newspapers. With the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war, my father started to pore over detailed maps of the two countries in his efforts to follow the progress of the battles. However, neither my mother nor I was familiar with the places mentioned. The war would last eight years and would cost over a million lives, creating deep and insurmountable traumas in both countries.