I gradually lost confidence in the talking heads, and the same happened with the local media—another source I’d expected to frequently consult. There were stations like Al-Jazeera that were said to be relatively independent; but their news was usually about international politics, their intended audience being the entire Arab world. For local news, I was reliant on the state newspapers and television, which were censored and controlled by the regime. It resulted in some ridiculous kowtowing—for example, a twenty-four-page supplement on “an angel in the form of a president,” or the recurring headline: “Mubarak’s contribution to peace process is praised all over the world.” Egypt and some other Arab countries also had “independent” newspapers, but they were often full of nonsense: “Foreign nurses inject Libyan babies with AIDS.” These papers could be shut down at any moment, if only because the government controlled the printing presses, the distribution system, and supplies of paper and ink. It was also rumored that certain independent newspapers were instruments of the secret services, of other Arab leaders, or of prominent oil sheiks. A newspaper can be very useful when you want to harangue and attack rivals and opponents.
One of the top stories during my time in Cairo had to do with domestic terrorist attacks. If a Japanese tourist was stabbed, the Egyptian state television would simply keep quiet about it. Instead you’d get this kind of article in the state newspapers the next day:
While the BBC concentrated on an incident between an esteemed Egyptian and a Japanese tourist, the Minister of Tourism rewarded two students for their honesty, and remarkably enough their honesty was towards a Japanese tourist. The schoolchildren Abdulrahman Sayed and Yusuf Rushdi found a wallet containing credit cards, 150,000 dollars and a passport. They gave the wallet to their teacher, who immediately contacted the security services, who in turn informed the Japanese embassy. The Japanese tourist cried tears of disbelief and relief, and offered the young Egyptian citizens a reward, but to her surprise they were resolute. They said that she was a guest of Egypt and the Egyptians. The Japanese woman left yesterday for Turkey, safe and sound. The honest young Egyptians emphasized that their behavior was normal: “Honesty is the rule; theft is a rare exception.”
In fact, these honest boys represent all Egyptians who know their responsibility towards their motherland and its guests. “The schoolchildren acted out of love for Egypt,” said the Minister of Education. “It’s a practical application of the norms and values that our ministry is teaching them, and an illustration of the righteousness of all Egyptians.”
Correspondents would be faxed articles like this by the Ministry of Information. At the bottom of my fax about the “incident” with the stabbed Japanese tourist, a civil servant had added in bold letters: “Attention, this is real Egypt.” Not long afterwards, Egypt staged a presidential “referendum,” with a single candidate. The biggest Egyptian paper, Al-Gumhuriya or The Republic, offered the following commentary. It was written by the editor-in-chief, a confidant of the man who won the referendum:
The following event happened to me personally. A friend had been trying for years to get a visa for Saudi Arabia so that he could earn enough money to get married. Finally he received the liberating message that he’d been offered a job in Riyadh. My friend jumped for joy and told everyone the good news. But on the day of his departure there was a referendum in which the Egyptian people expressed their thanks to our leader Hosni Mubarak for being prepared to lead our country for another six years. My friend saw how lucky Egypt was to have such a president. He tore up his visa, realising he belonged in Egypt.8
Often my editors back home would want quotes—we call them “vox pops”—from the ordinary man in the street. What did he think of the referendum? There I was, sitting down with a certain Nabil, a twenty-something whom I’d once spent a day with in Cairo. “Every revolution, every disaster, economic crisis and war, pornography ... You’ll always discover that there are Jews behind it. The problem is that Jews only consider themselves to be human. Once, Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be His Name, took a group of Jews captive after a battle. But do you know what’s written in the Jewish holy book? Never take prisoners of war. That’s what Jews are like, it’s in their culture.” He stuck one finger in the air. “But please note, I don’t hate the Jewish. I’ve got a good friend in America who’s a Jew.” He told me about his studies and holidays in America, and how he was teaching his children English. We ordered Cokes, and he explained that the Holocaust could never have happened because “the ovens were too small.” Did I know that Hitler had been subsidized by the Jews? Did I know how much interest they’d asked? “Thirty-eight percent. Because it all comes down to money in the end with the Jews.”
What was I supposed to do with a story like this? Was he mad, or did half of the population think like this?
In a juice bar in the center of Baghdad, I push fifteen hundred lira across the counter and say, “A Hitler cocktail, please.” The cashier calls out to a young man with mixers, nets of fruit, and bottles of milk: “Ahmed! One Hitler cocktail, please, for this gentleman.” The menu also features Haiti, Mandela, and Noriega cocktails. A Hitler contains pineapple, strawberries, orange juice, cream, and honey.
“That’s an unusual name,” I say. “In Europe, your shop would probably be shut down.” The cashier nods.
“The Jews, eh? We do it to attract attention. We also call dates Monica Lewinskys.”
“But Hitler murdered millions of people.”
The cashier nods helpfully. “He put the Jews in the oven, didn’t he?” In Arabic, the word Holocaust, mahraqa, means fire or burning.
“Six million of them. And he murdered millions of other people, too. Is there a Sharon cocktail, too?”
The cashier can’t help laughing. “We’d lose our clientele. Sharon bombed Beirut, Sabra, and Shatila ... We’ve got a lot of Palestinians living here.”
“Yes. And Hitler considered Arabs to be subhuman, just like the Jews. The only reason he didn’t put you in the oven was that there weren’t any Arabs in Europe.”
The cashier slides a full glass over the counter and says rather grimly: “Israel murdered millions of Arabs though.”
The account of this incident remained a draft on my computer. I definitely would have scored with it, because Dutch readers would have gotten the shock of their lives. But how representative was this fruit-juice guy? How should I contextualize a conversation like this? In Western countries, correspondents use conversations with ordinary people to illustrate trends. First come a couple of great quotes from John on the corner and then, “John is not the only New Yorker to feel this way. At least 60 percent think ...” But I couldn’t get hold of any reliable opinion polls, and all relevant statistics were kept secret. So there I was, left with the comments of literally one man or woman on the street.
You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I attempted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. One such attempt was a success story about a Dutch development project in Fayum, an oasis that was two hours’ drive to the south of Cairo. The weekend supplement was putting together a themed issue on development aid, and as part of it they wanted an account of one failed project and one successful one. “I can do that,” I said, and via the embassy I got in touch with a Dutch hydro-engineer. I’ll call him Roland. He was a nice guy about my age, who immediately invited me to meet up with him.
Oases always made me think of three trees, a hut, and a goat, but Fayum was a stretch of green the size of Luxembourg, with 3 million inhabitants. Things were going wrong in Fayum; the population was exploding while the irrigation system was just getting worse. “They’ve got enough water, but they’re not using it correctly,” Roland told me in his office at the Ministry of Irrigation. Just like in the ministries in Cairo, the civil servants were either napping, staring into space, or pottering around and making relaxed phone calls. Roland’s room was the only one wi
th air-conditioning and a computer that worked. We drove out into the countryside in his four-wheel drive. He pointed at the rubbish: “People didn’t used to have plastic bags. They still behave as though rubbish were going to decompose. Artificial fertilizers and pesticides are great, but you have to teach people how to use them. Here you’ve got one ministry engineer per five hundred farmers, and the engineers are pricks who look down on the farmers.” Peasants or farmers? These are small and simple people.
“This is what’s going wrong.” Roland pointed to a blocked irrigation canal. “Farmers dump their rubbish and pesticides. There are increasing numbers of bloody conflicts over stolen water, and the civil servants are too lazy or corrupt to intervene.” He outlined the solution: If the farmers were to set up water boards, as the Dutch had done centuries before in their polders, these water boards could help farmers do their own irrigation, maintain their canals, raise awareness, and resolve conflicts.
Roland’s people had run a trial of this idea, and it had been a success. Roland got out of the car, walked over to two farmers, and proudly asked one of them what happened now if a Fayumi was caught stealing water. “We smash his face in!” they said. The farmers did what all Egyptians do after a joke—they shook hands. “But afterwards we call an emergency meeting of the board,” the older farmer said. “On behalf of the Egyptian people, I’d like to thank the Dutch for their help,” he said, now with disarming solemnity. “There are fewer stabbings now, and I have much more harvest.”
We said goodbye, and I showered Roland in compliments. I had my success story—who said that development aid was a waste of time? Roland smiled. But, a few weeks after my rather celebratory article was published, one of his colleagues, well-oiled at the time, told me the real story. The idea behind development aid is to render Western specialists unnecessary, as quickly as possible. People have to do it themselves. So the Dutch water managers had pushed on to the next step: Give the water boards rights, hold elections for the board, give the board an advisory council, and raise contributions for the employees. But these would be directors chosen and paid for by the farmers themselves, wouldn’t they? That wasn’t the intention, the ministries of construction and irrigation in Cairo let it be known; power should stay with them. The water boards were condemned to fail.
So I wrote some things that later turned out not to be true, and the opposite occurred, too. On one occasion, a Dutch diplomat put me in contact with a Syrian MP, Riad Sef. His brother and son had been murdered by the regime, she said, and his sports shoe factory had been destroyed. “If you want patriotism, go to Riad Sef,” she added. “He could easily seek political asylum with us, but he’s staying here. And he dares to test the limits.”
When I called him, I could go round at once, whereupon Sef shook my hand and burst out with, “Everything, everything, everything but everything here is lies. And these lies persist because the government controls everything—your daily bread, your career, your idea of the world. Did you know that you weren’t allowed to own a fax machine here until recently, or satellite dishes, or foreign currency?” Sef lit up another cigarette, and explained that he was one of the few MPs who hadn’t got his seat through a fixed election run by the regime. “Perhaps they thought I’d back down, and it was hard to get around me. I stood for election in the Damascus district, a lot of people know me, and no one would have believed it if I hadn’t won a seat. What’s more, if there’s Western criticism, the regime can always point at me and say, look, we do have opposition.”
I stopped and shook my writing hand, which had gone numb; I could hardly keep up with Sef. “Votes in parliament are fixed in advance,” Sef explained. “Just like the agenda and the speeches. A typical address begins with something like, ‘This law is fantastic—a gift to the people from the president.’” He lit another cigarette. “I’ m not exaggerating. Recently, a speaker read out his notes in the wrong order. He only noticed halfway through. The parliament here is an applause machine, and the seats are gifts for loyal servicemen.” Could he broach this abuse of power in the press? Sef sniffed, “Journalists know exactly what they can and can’t write about. I mean, they are appointed by the regime. Once in a while the press can write freely about corruption, but only at the expense of people who have fallen out of favor of the regime.”
But what if Sef could convince his colleagues in parliament to do their work—that’s to say, monitor the government? Would that be possible? “Forget it. All important data are kept secret. The military, the regime’s leaders, and the president’s family are untouchable. MPs get no expenses and no research funds. You don’t get a secretary, or an office, or Internet, or newspapers. That kind of support would cost fifteen hundred dollars a month, but you only earn two hundred fifty. I’ve got money of my own; that’s how I can do this.” I asked if he could say anything about the business interests of the president’s family, the defense budget, or the expenditure of oil profits. For the first time, he fell silent; Sef shook his head, no, and indicated with his hands, Don’t forget, we’re being listened to. There I was, a journalist from a rich country like the Netherlands, sitting opposite a man who could have been my father and yet didn’t dare to answer me. I asked whether I could write what he’d just recounted, and he nodded theatrically, Yes.
I’d just started copying it out when I bumped into a couple of Syrian human rights activists at a diplomat’s party. “Riad Sef?” one of them asked in derision. “Don’t tell me you fell for that one. That man is so much part of the secret services, how do you think he gets away with saying things like that?” Rather disconcerted, I shut up and decided to use only a part of Sef’s speech in a running story, in amongst other talking heads. A year later, I was back in Syria and filed this article:
“We’d like to have a coffee with you,” said the two men in civilian attire after they’d rung the doorbell.
“Step inside,” answered the MP, who’d just made revelations about corrupt members of the president’s family.
“The Minister of Home Affairs would also like to have a coffee with you,” the two men said as they drained their cups.
“Of course,” said the MP, who was suffering from high blood pressure.
“Bring your medicine with you,” the men said.
This was how Riad Sef was picked up three months ago. No flashing lights, no masked men, drawn weapons, or Hollywood scenes, but the consequences were no less dramatic, as Sef’s wife recounted in a Damascus restaurant. Sef can expect a sentence of between five years and life. Syrian restaurants mostly have a family section where women, couples, and families can avoid being troubled by single men. The secret services only hire men, so Reem is happy to sit in the family section; they can’t come and sit down next to her here.
“You never get used to it,” Reem says. Nowadays, if they make phone calls, there’s a man in Syria somewhere, taking down notes. “I never have any personal conversations anymore.” Almost all of her friends have broken off contact, out of fear. “I hoped they’d visit me at the end of Ramadan, like every year,” she says dejectedly. “Unfortunately ...” She only sees her neighbors now. She doesn’t know if her house is bugged. “I whisper a lot.” Recently, she was supposed to go on a silent march through Damascus along with the wives of other arrested dissidents, but the secret services intervened. How had they found out about it? Maybe one of the wives had gossiped. Maybe one of them was working as an informer so that her husband wouldn’t be tortured so much. You never knew in Syria.
It does make some difference that her husband is a former MP, Reem admits. The others are held in an underground bunker and allowed visitors only once every three weeks. Reem can visit every week, along with her four-year-old daughter. There’s a guard permanently present, and her daughter told Sef recently that she was going to buy a gun. She pointed at the guard, giggling, “I’ll shoot him so that we can take you home again.”9
The fact that Sef was going to prison for years suggested that the donor darling at the dipl
omat’s party might have got it wrong, but you could never know for sure. A Syrian journalist once told me that members of the regime in Damascus earned a lot of money selling military search warrants which, according to him, Syrians could use to get refugee status in Europe. From time to time, a refugee was sent back because the European immigration services had decided that Syria was no longer a dangerous country. This was bad for business, so the refugee would be killed on his return, and Syria would qualify as dangerous once again.
It was a horrible story, but was it true? I asked around amongst colleagues, diplomats, and others and they said, “That Syrian journalist? He’s so in the secret services—everyone knows that, don’t they?” A while later, the journalist was suddenly imprisoned, causing everyone to wonder whether they’d locked him up to enhance his credibility, whether he’d gone too far, or whether in fact he wasn’t in the secret services.
In Beirut, an Iraqi doctor, who’d fled his country, claimed that Saddam’s regime confiscated stillborn babies in the hospitals and froze them so that they could produce them as “victims of the sanctions” when reporters or left-wing European MPs came to visit. This was another horrible story, but how could I check whether the doctor was telling the truth?
People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East Page 5
