The As It Happens Files

by Mary Lou Finlay

  Our French professor at Baghdad University was equally unhappy with the security situation. The streets were full of common criminals as well as resistance fighters, she said. After nine o’clock at night, it wasn’t safe for even the men to go out. She wasn’t sad to see Saddam go—she couldn’t imagine ever talking to foreign radio and saying what she thought while Saddam was around, she told us—but good as it was, freedom didn’t trump security. She was looking to a strong Iraqi government for relief, the sooner the better.

  Five years into the war, the pessimists appear to have more grounds for complaint than ever. When CBC’s Gillian Findlay interviewed Zuhair Dhuwaib again on March 19, 2008, the electrical engineer in Baghdad told her that he had become convinced that the President of the United States was doing harm to the Iraqi people on purpose. How could it be otherwise? he thought. The people who had replaced Saddam were 20 times worse than Saddam had been. Five years after the invasion, Dhuwaib had no water, no phone line and power for only one hour a day. The area where he lived was surrounded by barbed wire. His 5 children and 11 grandchildren and his wife had all left the country, and he was alone.

  Salam Pax was similarly discouraged when I spoke to him again. There was nothing left of his hopes for a better future in Iraq.

  You know, I sometimes look at some of the television diaries I did for the BBC and I feel so stupid about them now. How could I be so optimistic? But I believed it. I believed that we could do it. You could see things going wrong, but you just think, this is part of the process. I think I bought the whole package of “This is part of the process.”

  I was mistaken, I was wrong, and it just takes a while to be able to admit it. But I can’t watch them [the TV diaries]; they are painfully, stupidly optimistic. It’s a pity; they were really exciting times. And now … it’s just very scary.

  They’d had elections, Salam said, and elected the wrong people. They had a new Constitution and it was terrible. The violence in Baghdad had reached the point where most of his family had been forced to abandon their homes and flee.

  And the man who, during our earlier interview, had laughed at the notion of becoming a journalist had been making documentaries for the BBC and was now pursuing a Master’s degree in journalism at City University in London. Here’s part of the conversation we had on the phone one night:

  ML: No work in architecture?

  SP: Right after the war, a couple of friends of mine, we thought this is going to be very good for our profession as architects—to rebuild—but nothing was built; nothing happened. The three of us ended up doing things for media.

  ML: You also told me that your family was scattered to the four corners of the world.

  SP: It actually took us quite long to leave Iraq, I think. Lots of people had given up much earlier. We thought it had to turn at one point and get better. But that moment never came, so about a year ago, we all thought, It’s getting really bad. … And it felt like it was time for everyone to leave.

  So I ended up here in this course. My mother is in Jordan; my father is working on several policy consultancies based in Beirut; my brother is working in Dubai—so, absolutely, we’re sort of in four corners of the world. Getting everybody together takes a lot of planning now.

  ML: Do you miss them?

  SP: Actually, I miss not just my parents but everyone, the whole family. It has been a really long time, probably since the second year after the war—the second year after the fall of Saddam—we couldn’t really get together anymore. And then people started leaving, and we don’t really know when we’re ever going to be able to be going back. This whole surge thing—“The situation is calming down”—this is just … The numbers might drop, but in reality, peoples’ lives are just as bad as ever.

  ML: So this surge thing [U.S. troop build-up] is not going to solve the problem, you don’t think.

  SP: No. I’ve still got an uncle living in Baghdad, and what’s happened, apparently, is that they partitioned the city either with brick walls or they subcontracted the protection of certain districts to local militias, basically, so you end up not really being able to go from one street to the next. Because nobody can move around, whoever’s going to plan something, it makes it very difficult for them to move to another district—the car bombers or suicide attacks.

  But at the same time, [ordinary] people can’t move

  Anymore.… If you want to shop somewhere else, it’s

  very difficult to move. If you need to go to a job somewhere else, it’s very difficult.… So it looks better on paper, but if you live there, it’s still bad.

  You reach the point—you had all your hopes, you kept denying, kept saying, “No, no, it will be okay”—and you hate to admit you were just naïve or foolish. It takes a while to transmit it to yourself first and then to say, “Okay, it’s about all we can take,” which is really, really hard.

  And you’re sort of stuck in the middle of a situation where you think, “So if I say this is bad now, would I want it to be as it was before the war?” And you can’t answer this question! Of course, you don’t want that, but then again, you don’t want this either.

  And I get asked this a lot. It’s a very difficult question—almost unfair to ask.

  ML: So how is it going to end, do you think? I mean, will the country ever be a country again or will it split into three countries or what’s going to happen?

  SP: I have no idea. There is absolutely no advance on the political project. The whole idea of the surge was to give Iraqi politicians a chance to do something. Unless there is an Iraqi government that really can start the process moving again, I don’t see it getting any better. At the moment, you hear very little news from the southern provinces that have been handed back to Iraqis. This is very worrying, because I think if it were going well, you’d actually have Iraqi reporters there. If there’s nothing, it means that reporters are really scared to go there. It’s very worrying.

  A swamp, a morass, a quagmire. This is Iraq today, except for the people for whom it’s a killing field. Salam Pax is an honest witness, I think, and his words fill me with sadness.

  Someone once said that we would be sorry when the Cold War ended, for then we would see how important the threat of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, was as a deterrent to war. I thought at the time that they were mad, but it turns out they were right. When the fear of nuclear war faded and no one had to worry that a small war might become a totally annihilating war, people felt free to go at each other again with renewed vigour. And so they have—in the Balkans, in the Caucasus, in Africa. A recent report estimates that over 5 million people have died in Congo in the last ten years as a result, directly and indirectly, of fighting. If those figures are accurate, that works out to almost one Rwanda genocide every single year. In Congo alone.

  Nor have our much-vaunted peacekeepers in the U.N. or in NATO been very successful at stopping the carnage. There are seventeen thousand U.N.-sanctioned peacekeepers in Congo as I write, and yet there is fighting. NATO went into Kosovo to keep ethnic Albanians safe from Serbs, and now the international force can’t leave because they’re needed to keep ethnic Serbs safe from Albanians. Bosnians are safer now than when they were in the process of breaking away from Yugoslavia, but international forces are still there, propping up the economy, as well as the peace.

  And Canadians are no longer just peacekeepers but also peace-makers—a much bloodier business. Our efforts to bring some security to the Kandahar region of Afghanistan claim a few more young lives every week. The Manley Report, commissioned by Prime Minister Harper, recommends that we not give up on the people of Afghanistan, but neither should we press on, it warns, unless Canadian troops can be given better equipment from Ottawa and more troop support from NATO allies. It would be wonderful if their efforts to bring peace and security were rewarded in Afghanistan, but those goals, even if achievable, may be many hard years away.

  As for Salam Pax, I hope that he and his family will some day be r
eunited in Baghdad and enjoy peace and prosperity there. And, of course, I hope he gets to play a part in the bricks-and-mortar rebuilding of his country, too, if that’s what he wants. For the moment, however, the world may be more in need of his reporting skills than of his drafting skills—so I wish him success there, too.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mike the Music Man

  Radio with a heart the size of Labrador

  Here’s a good example of what can happen when you take someone who cares and get him to tell his story on the radio. Photojournalist Ted Ostrowski called the As It Happens offices from Goose Bay, Labrador one day in September 2000 to suggest that we have a chat with a musician who had a story to tell about his encounter with some native children in a village called Sheshatshui (pronounced SHESH-a-shee). Harmonica player Mike Stevens was on his way to play for the Canadian Forces in Bosnia when the tour stopped in Goose Bay to do a few shows there. But why don’t we let Mike tell the story in his own words? We reached him at Canadian Forces Base Alert on Ellesmere Island.

  ML: Mr. Stevens, where were you when you learned about the gas-sniffing problem at Sheshatshui?

  MS: I’d heard probably a week or two before I left. I started to hear stories about it but didn’t really geographically put two and two together about how close I would be to Sheshatshui when we were in Goose Bay, Labrador.

  ML: So what did you do then?

  MS: Well, when I got to Goose Bay, the first thing I did was I went out and got a local newspaper and it all hit home as to how close we really were to where the problem was going on, and then it seemed to me that if there was any way possible that I could do anything and—you know, not that I could do anything. I didn’t know what I could do, but I thought that in the three concerts that we did there, I would dedicate “Amazing Grace” to those kids, because music can speak to you sometimes when words can’t. And even if it could create an awareness in the area and get people thinking about it—who knows?

  ML: Their stories had really tugged your heartstrings, I guess.

  MS: Oh boy, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I think this will change my life.

  After I played in Goose Bay, a journalist up there came up and he said, “Well, if you have any time off, I’ll take you up there to play for the kids.” That kinda doesn’t fit with the regime, because we’re on a tour, but by hook or by crook, I was going to go. So I got up early in the morning the next day, and Ted came and picked me up in his four-by-four and took me out to the Sheshatshui community.

  ML: How long did it take you?

  MS: I think it took about 45 minutes to get out there. And along the way, there were these really incredible monuments they’d built there—they looked like Catholic kinds of statues—and Ted explained that these were places where there were either car crashes or possibly even a suicide and that kind of thing. And as Ted drove me through the town of Sheshatshui, there were monuments up there as well, where—well, at one home that he pointed out, there was a family of five killed indirectly as a result of the sniffing. Then he talked about how there was a kid here who had hung himself and a kid here who had blown his head off—it was terrible. It was eye opening. I didn’t feel like I was in Canada anymore. It just was unbelievable.

  ML: And then, once you got into the community itself—what then?

  MS: When we got into the community, Ted drove around to look for the sniffers. It was about minus 20 [degrees Celsius]. He drove through the houses to this one area—kind of remote, a bush-like area—and there was a trail leading off the road that was littered with what looked like garbage bags and plastic bags, and the stench of gasoline and fuel was really, really strong. We followed this winding trail back in through the bush, and there were running shoes and there was a shirt here and debris, and the smell of fuel was really, really strong.

  And we rounded a corner in the bush, and there was a mattress out in the middle of the bush and kind of a lean-to and a tarp beside it, and there just were bags everywhere.

  This was apparently where a lot of the kids would sniff until they’d pass out, and they would spend the night there. And this was minus 20. Kids as young as six years old this was happening to. There were no sniffers there then, so we walked back out, and Ted said, “Would you like to see if you can play at the school?”

  So he took me over to the school, and they gave us permission and we ended up doing, I guess it was about three one-hour shows for maybe five or six different grades at the school—and it was wonderful. It was incredible. Eyes lit up and there were just tons of questions, and it was really working. It felt like the music was doing its job; it was just the most perfect thing.

  So what I’m going to do is—I have a bunch of harmonicas at home, old ones—and what I’m going to do is mail them all to the school, so they’ll be making a lot of racket down there when I get back off this tour.

  ML: I’ll bet they don’t get many live musical shows.

  MS: I guess they don’t; they’re so remote. Now, after we left the school, Ted went on another hunt for the sniffers, and sure enough, we were driving around down by the lake and we turned a corner and right there, in broad daylight, in front of everybody, were a group of about, oh, I would say six or eight of them, probably as young as 8 years old, maybe up to 14 or 15. Ted stopped the truck and he got out first—he knows them—just to go talk to them.

  Then I got out and got my harmonicas out. You know, it’s so cold that a harmonica generally won’t even work in that temperature—they freeze up, the reeds don’t work—but for some reason, they worked, and I played music for them. I was actually scared at first, and then after about one song, I realized that I had nothing to be scared about.

  ML: Why were you scared?

  MS: I was scared because it was a vision that I’d never seen before. I’ve seen crackheads and I’ve seen addicts, but I had never in my life seen kids or anybody with bags pasted to their faces like this and holding them up, and drool and filth. I just—I’ve never seen anything like it. It was way too real.

  So when I got there and started to play, the first thing that hit me was the stench of the gasoline or the fuel. It was so strong, and they were so close while I was playing that it actually burnt around my lips and underneath my eyes, and I ended up getting a terrible, pounding headache, which I had for about a day afterwards.

  I played and then I started to talk to them. I asked them what it was like, what it felt like, what sniffing the fumes did. By this time, they trusted me enough and were opening up enough that we could talk a little bit about it. I asked them if it made you sick. Did you get dizzy? A couple of kids shook their heads, “Oh no, you don’t get dizzy.” And someone else said, “Yeah, you do get really, really dizzy.”

  And I asked another if you get terrible, pounding headaches, because I just wanted to see where they were at, to try and understand it. And they all shook their heads like, “No, no, you never get a headache.”

  And another fellow who was standing there, who was a sniffer, told me that they do get horrible, horrible headaches, the worst you could ever imagine. It’s like, how could anybody have things so bad in their life that they would go through that just as an escape? It was unbelievable.

  But after we’d played a while and talked, they started to put the bags down. There was one tune in particular, “Amazing Grace,” where they broke out into big smiles and then put the bags down. It seemed to touch them, even for a few seconds. Who knows? But it was just really incredible.

  I just hope and pray that there’s a way that musicians or artists can find a way to either send them things or get out there and make a difference. Someone going without their hand out or without their agenda, without any strings attached, just to go maybe play music or to show them that you care a little bit, because I really believe it’ll make a difference. I mean, even for a second, it did.

  ML: Just to show that somebody cared.

  MS: That’s what it was: just showing that somebody cared and knew the
y were there and knew what they were going through. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think it’ll change my life. I just have a totally different opinion on human rights in Canada now. I’ll never feel the same way about it ever again.

  ML: Have you got your harmonica?

  MS: Yeah, I got a harmonica with me.

  ML: Can you play a little bit?

  MS: Want me to play a number for you?

  ML: Sure.

  MS: All right. I’ll get the Sergeant to hold the phone here.

  Then Mike played “Amazing Grace” for all of us, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  Ted Ostrowski told me later that Mike Stevens was the first person he’d met in Labrador who seemed genuinely moved by the plight of these children, who wasn’t using them to advance his own causes. He seemed genuinely to want to help. I think that’s what moved us, too, when we heard him.

  As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones who were moved as we learned three years later, when Mike Stevens joined us on stage in the Glenn Gould Studio for our 35th-anniversary show.

  We had a stellar lineup that day. Former host Michael Enright joined us again, as did former producers Mark Starowicz and George Jamieson. Pam Wallin, who in 2003 was the Canadian Consul in New York, joined us by phone as did Irish peace broker and Nobel Prize winner John Hume and American radio star Garrison Keillor. We even had a live band with us on stage, led by the great Doug Riley (now the late, great Doug Riley, sadly).

  But the guest I was most looking forward to talking to again was Mike Stevens. I wanted to let him know he made a lasting impression on us back in 2000, and was curious about what he’d been up to since. He picked up the story again from Bosnia, where he’d gone after talking to us from Ellesmere Island.