The hotel in Najaf was a desolate tower on the edge of town. Out back, the poorest merchants pushed flimsy Chinese toys and rotten vegetables from stalls of calcified wood and cardboard. When they closed down the market and faded homeward for the night, garbage blew on desert winds and packs of wild dogs snarled through the maze of locked stalls.
The hotel manager was a small, balding man. He covered the dining-room walls with mirror shards and sat daydreaming in his crazy den of infinite, broken reflections. He drank little cups of what he said was tea, the stink of liquor steaming out with each breath. He called himself Abu Adi; he was fifty-three years old, the father of five children. He was one of those people who populate Iraqi towns, a living library who kept local history stored in his mind. We discussed documents. We had been driving to bombed-out, abandoned intelligence headquarters around the south, picking through the rubble, collecting paper that painted a picture of the old regime. Abu Adi said that looted documents were now going for a price. People pored over them, discovering their neighbors had been spying on them, learning who had collaborated with the regime.
Then, suddenly: “Could you please write down the following statement: ‘What I have seen in courts and prisons, if you hear, you’ll quit your job. If I told you what happened in prison, you would quit journalism.’”
Like so many other southern Shiites, Abu Adi was a little twisted by torture. He’d been arrested for trying to escape to Syria in the 1980s, and spent three years and four months under torture in prison. Three years and four months, he told us, the number seared into memory, and when it was over they sent him to the killing fields of the Iran–Iraq front.
“As soon as the government is established, I’ll make a court case against the manager of public security,” he said.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“I don’t know his name,” he said too quickly.
It was a lie. I knew it was a lie, Raheem knew it was a lie, and he knew we knew. He was still too afraid to say the name out loud.
“I have to chase him,” he filled an awkward silence. “I’d like to see whether this man is a beast or a human being. It bothers me.”
“And now,” I asked, “do you feel safer?”
“We’re still afraid,” he said. “They are talking about liberty, but Saddam’s followers are still here among us and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
His nerves seemed to sway back and forth, blaring into bravery, then shrinking back into themselves. He grew bold and cursed the old regime stridently, or gave us a crumb of a story. Then fear would slip over him like a hood, and he’d fold back into himself.
“Saddam’s people are devils and shades of human beings,” he spat out.
But then he leaned forward and said softly, “I’m afraid. Please, if Saddam Hussein comes back, come back here and take me out.”
Then, slurping down one last glass of spiked tea, he told us how we could find a local hero: the man who survived the mass grave.
His name was Hussein Safar, and around Najaf they called him the “living martyr.” We found his cousin selling Islamic cloaks in the market, and he sent little boys scampering to find Hussein. While we waited, the cousin led us under the awning of his shop and served bottles of sticky-sweet juice. He smoked cigarettes from a gold plastic holder, stroked his graying goatee, and then he, too, told us calmly about the day he was arrested, along with his mother and three brothers, on suspicion of conspiring against the regime. They had tortured his mother and made him watch. He begged for a piece of paper to sign, eager to confess to anything. They pulled out his fingernails, hung him from the ceiling, electrified him, and set dogs upon him. He confessed to links to Iranian and Kurdish groups, hoping a false admission would make the torture stop. It didn’t. He didn’t get out until his family gave $5,000 to a well-connected neighbor.
As he spoke, his hands trembled. He grew silent. And then, shyly, he said: “Really, it is a shame upon us that we have such things.”
A shame upon us. I shivered in the heat. Yes, that was it, somebody had finally said it out loud. These people were embarrassed about what they had endured, about the parts they had been forced to play—victims or tormentors, it was all unendurably shameful. They had been co-opted, tortured, spied upon, and had spied themselves. They had sunk deeper and deeper into collective guilt until the moment of their final humiliation: they had been invaded by the Americans. They felt inferior, as if something must be wrong with themselves, in their culture or their souls. Was it liberating for this small-time merchant, admitting these torments to a young American woman with pity written all over her face? My country had just conquered his country, and he was giving me juice, offering me shade, telling me about things I had no capacity to imagine.
Then Hussein arrived. He stood at the edge of the stall and stared defiantly at us. “Salaam aleikum,” I murmured. Raheem spoke softly, rolling out more elaborate blessings, letting the man see that he too was Shiite, that he, too, was from the south. Hussein’s shoulders fell slack.
“Look at this.” He turned his back and yanked up his shirt. The crater of a bullet yawned on his left shoulder, deep pink, the size of a crabapple.
“This,” said his cousin, dragging on his cigarette holder, “is why he thought he was dead.”
“So you want to know about the grave?” Hussein’s eyes sized us up.
Raheem assured him that we did. A pause. And then:
“Do you have a car? I’ll show you.”
We slipped into the desert, wrapped in air-conditioning, blinded by sun. As we drove along, Hussein’s story spilled in broken sentences, fits and starts:
It was 1991, the year of the first American invasion and the failed Shiite uprising. Iraqi troops swarmed Najaf to crush the insurrection. Shiite blood ran in the streets. They stopped Hussein at one of the checkpoints choking the city, heard his name and tribe, and arrested him. He and scores of others were carted to the Salaam Hotel, the Peace Hotel, and herded into the garden, where they stood crammed together so tightly nobody could sit down. Lorries came rumbling to take them away with hearts shaking and hands bound. They drove out into the desert, the same road we bounced over now. Finally, deep in the stretches of dunes, they stopped. The soldiers hadn’t bothered with blindfolds. Hussein saw everything.
He saw trenches. He saw four security officers, each one holding a rifle. He understood that it was a firing squad. He understood that there were bodies in the trenches.
Four by four, the prisoners were forced to stand at the edge of a trench. Four by four, the blasts echoed over the desert, and the bodies dropped down into the graves. Hussein stood and watched while they killed four of his cousins and one of his uncles. The sun was slipping low. Hussein would be among the last killed.
He took his place on the lip of the grave. He looked down and saw men still squirming in the pit. Then the guns crashed. The bullet bore into his shoulder, sliced up through his neck and tore out through his cheek. He toppled down into the pit, cushioned by dying men.
“I lost my sense in the beginning, but then I heard something, I felt something,” he said. “They were checking if anybody was still alive, looking at people, shooting.” He heard voices at the edge of the trench. Somebody said, “Just leave them, we have other things to do.”
Hussein listened to the silence. He wondered whether he was alive or dead. Finally he crawled out and stumbled into the desert darkness. He stayed with the Bedouins at first. They patched him up, but begged him to move along. He moved from house to house, called on the aid of fellow Shiites. When he was well enough to move, he sneaked over the border into Iran and hid there for months. He finally came back with a counterfeit identity card.
Now Hussein murmured directions into the driver’s ear. We turned up a dirt road, bumped along, and stopped. We would have to walk from here. Our shoes sank in hot sand. The desert was blank as forgetting.
“I never came back to this place,” Hussein said suddenly. “I
was afraid.”
We came to a ridge. “It was here,” Hussein said, his face twisted. “Here.” It was almost a bark. He bent down, hands scooping around in the sand, throwing fists of dirt, sliding over slick dunes. His fingers pored over the grains. I glanced at Raheem, but Raheem’s eyes were fixed on Hussein. Now Hussein had turned up something in the sand. He held a bullet aloft, eyes gleaming: “See? You see?
“When I got better I went to see a man whose father was killed with me,” he said, fingering the bullet. “I said to him, ‘Your father died with me.’ I thought he should know.”
Your father died with me. As if Hussein had died that night, too.
Villagers from a nearby outpost had drifted over the sand to see what we were doing. They stood at a respectful distance and nodded as Hussein spoke. They had seen the graves. Everybody knew, but nobody dared to talk about it. One year the desert flooded and the bones came to light. The men from the government showed up with shovels and forced the villagers to dig fresh sand over the old remains.
“The families ought to know that people have been killed here,” Hussein said. “They have to come to see the graves, because this has to be part of history.”
The villagers nodded as if he were an oracle.
Hussein never got his day of justice. Two years later, in 2005, he was called to testify about the mass grave before the supreme court committee investigating the crimes of Saddam’s regime. He traveled to Baghdad and gave his testimony. As he drove back down to Najaf, a taxi pulled abruptly in front of his car, forcing the driver to jam on the brakes. Gunmen leapt from the taxi, hauled Hussein from the car, and shot him dead. They dumped his corpse at the side of the road, and drove on. They didn’t bother with the other passengers. They only wanted Hussein, to silence a voice that had spoken out.
He had survived Saddam by a miracle, but the U.S. invasion and resulting civil war swallowed his life down. Iraq gets you in the end, one way or the other. One after another, people we met during that ominous and heady voyage through the south have since been killed.
When Raheem told me about Hussein’s death, I remembered the last thing he said to us as we pulled back into the market to drop him off.
“Yesterday a car passed in front of me and I saw two police officers. I know them very well. They were torturers. We are thankful to the American government because they got rid of Saddam. But the Americans have left those who tortured and those who wrote accusations. The power of Saddam was the public security officers and intelligence people. They are still here. We’re afraid they are going to join the new government. We don’t even—we don’t prefer people to be killed, but we think the government should kill them.”
Those words held the presage of Hussein’s death and the seeds of civil war. At the time, I wrote them mutely, hurriedly, the letters smearing together. I’ll sort it out later, I thought. For now, just write it down.
SEVEN
THE LEADER
When countries make difficult strategic choices, the United States responds. And of course, I hope that others will see that lesson and learn from it. It’s why it’s important to reach out to Libya.
—Condoleezza Rice
I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much.
—Colonel Moammar Qaddafi
The war rolled right over President Bush’s announcement that major combat operations in Iraq had ended and raged down into the oven blasts of summer as soldiers combed the sands for weapons of mass destruction. In Washington, questions started to surface—political, procedural inquiries about who knew the intelligence was bad, and when did they know and who did they tell. Meanwhile, there was a bigger demand. The war had been sold to the American public as a bold response to the threat of unimaginable attack, and now a costly occupation had to be justified anew. The bloodier Baghdad grew, the more the question gaped—insurgents bombed the Jordanian embassy and truck-bombed the UN headquarters. Bodies poured into Iraqi morgues. And why had we gone?
To answer the great and growing question, U.S. officials launched into a rhetorical crusade against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. We stopped hearing so much about preemptive strikes and U.S. security. Instead, we heard that the war had been necessary because of our rigorous American ideology and morals. Saddam was an oppressor and a tyrant and so we had deposed him. But other Arab dictators still sat among their riches and their torture chambers. If the United States was in the business of clashing with tyrants, how bad was too bad?
I landed in Libya nearly six months after the war began. It was still illegal for Americans to travel to Libya, and the withered man at the passport counter summoned his friends to watch the stamp come down with a gleeful smack on my U.S. passport. Libya was still under American sanctions, and only recently freed from UN sanctions. Yellowing countryside slipped past the taxi windows on the road to Tripoli. It was the crisp end of a burned African summer, all the lives driven indoors, in hiding from a punishing sun.
Rearing grandly in steel and glass over Tripoli’s fading downtown, the hotel had recently claimed distinction as the only establishment in town to accept credit cards. The clerks hovered over the card, whispered instructions to one another, and bustled nervously before, finally and proudly, presenting me with something to sign.
The bellhop sweated unabashedly, pounding at the elevator buttons. He was a round man, hair gone to drab gray. When the doors clamped shut, he eyed me.
“You are a journalist?”
“Yes.” I hadn’t told him that.
“The things journalists say about Libya, all lies,” he recited sternly. “Libya is great country. Good country.”
“It’s my first time here.”
“They are lying always about Libya,” he repeated. This was the full elasticity of his English.
The room was opulent, tiny, and overstuffed. The phone was scratchy and probably bugged. Maybe it was the weird little bellhop, or the general air of lassitude, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I was being watched. I wandered around the bed, glaring at the vents, staring into the light fixtures. I remembered stories about Saddam’s intelligence officers videotaping reporters’ hotel rooms. I stood against the window, pressed my forehead to the pane, and looked down at the sea.
Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi of Libya were a matched set, the two leaders known in the West as madmen. They belonged to the same generation of Arab potentates: the ones who had used their wits to grab power, who had been molded by the pan-Arab philosophies of Nasser, by global Cold War chess games and the Arabs’ morale-shattering military losses to Israel. Qaddafi and Saddam had dominated their lands because they were cruel, ruthless men, wily manipulators who kept their power no matter how many of their own people had to be killed, tortured, or terrified. There is no Arab leader who has not done these things, done them a lot or dabbled in them. But these two were dictators who wouldn’t be dictated to, not even by a global superpower. They had stood up to the Americans and taken sanctions for their rebelliousness. Now Saddam had been driven from his palaces by American tanks. Qaddafi was the biggest scofflaw still standing.
In Iraq, I had seen the lid snatched away and dark secrets freed. People had told me what they had suffered, and they had told me what they would have said if we had met when Saddam was still around. Now I was in Libya with those memories clanking in my thoughts. From the rogue dictatorship smashed, I had moved backward in time, into the rogue dictatorship preserved under glass.
After pacing for a while, I called a man. Somebody had given me his name as a potential translator. He picked me up and drove me through the salt-gnawed streets to meet his wife, who wore hijab and glasses and smiled sweetly. They pressed tea upon me and spun a web of flowery greetings until, through a thick mustache of sweat, he finally choked out the news that he was afraid to work with a Western journalist. That information came camouflaged in a fore
st of Arab hospitalities and salutations, and by the time I got it I had realized that the man didn’t really speak English, anyway. So I went back to the hotel and called the official in charge of foreign press to announce myself. He hadn’t been expecting me, and wasn’t entirely glad to hear of my arrival. I’d been granted a visa earlier in the month to cover the thirty-fourth anniversary of Qaddafi’s power grab, but had skipped the celebration and saved the visa for an unscheduled visit. It was preferable, I reasoned, to bump around alone than to be herded along with the other reporters, crammed into buses and ferried from one staged event to the next, frustrated and scrapping for stories. I was gambling that I could appear flustered and harmless enough to avoid getting kicked out, and it worked. The foreign press official brought me down to his office for tea, and assigned a minder to keep an eye on me. I was in Libya, and in the system.
Nobody in the world drives like Libyans. They slam the doors, turn the key in the ignition, and press the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. They shred the highways, scream through backstreets, hurtle like mad fish chased by some unseen shark. There is no middle speed. Never mind that the economy was almost dead, that nobody I met ever had anything to do. They were going nowhere at breakneck speed.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 9
