Rene — A latte – and a rifle to go
Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Rene — A latte – and a rifle to goThe Guardian (UK)
June 8 2003
A latte – and a rifle to go
Baghdad’s cafes are busy but there’s no clean water. Galleries are
opening, but visitors are armed. Patients freed from the bombed
psychiatric hospital are returning there – because they feel it’s
safe. In this powerful dispatch, we reveal the reality of daily life
in an upside-down city.
Euan Ferguson
Can dust smell? A daft question, but it was instructive, going
through my notebook afterwards, to come across a dispiriting little
paragraph of jottings made at the end of my first night in Baghdad.
Sitting in about the safest place in the city, outside the Palestine
Hotel, which American tanks are now stringently guarding rather than
shelling, and musing on the decision by the adjoining Sheraton to
forgo that chain’s usual dull corporate anonymity for a wholly new
theme excitingly reliant on linoleum and fear and cockroaches, I
watched as the full moon of Arabia competed in vain with the high
romance of CNN’s satellite dishes, and made a list.
I called it ‘Smells of Baghdad’, and this is what it said. ‘Diesel.
Burning rubbish. Non-burning rubbish, rubbish just very busy getting
on with stinking. Shit. Dust, all over the trees. NB can dust smell?
Nothing green, nothing growing. Cheap chemical disinfectant. Old
sweat, goaty old sweat. Petrol. More dust.’
Instructive because, as the notebook rambled on over the next few
days, I then began writing down other questions, the really important
ones; or at least writing a word or two to remind myself of them.
Aid. Rumsfeld. Sewerage. US interests. Heat, July. Jobs, money,
trust, stupidity. The last got quite a few mentions; it would of
course have been quicker, if short on gravitas, simply to write
‘D’oh!’ The questions were much as you would expect, and far more
relevant to the land we have just conquered than anything about WMDs.
How, for instance, can the Americans still be failing, weeks after
the fall of Baghdad, to keep any kind of electricity running for more
than about an hour at a time, leaving the streets insanely,
medievally dark? What are the aid agencies playing at and why, while
we’re at it, when it’s about 40 in the shade, have the mad Koreans
just sent a few tons of winter blankets? How hot will it have to get
– and it hits 60 and above in July – before, still painfully short of
clean water, normal Baghdadis take to the streets and finally do what
Saddam wanted – go for the occupying troops with the many thousands
of guns now looted from Baathist armouries?
And didn’t anyone realise that, if you can surgically take out almost
every ministry (the oil building was left strangely untouched), it
might be an idea to have a vague plan to put something in their
place? And why on earth are the Iraqis here, where nothing works,
apologising to me ?
It was when I met the poet and the painter that I first began to
question aspects of my tottering grasp on reality, but it was
poisonously hot and I was, after all, in an insane asylum, which is
actually a fine place to be if you’re going to go mad.
Abed al-Kareem, now 44, is perky and wise and speaks perfumed English
with an endearing lisp. Hagop Ouzourian, a Christian Armenian, used
to help run his father’s wine business in Mosul, and is apparently a
fine draughtsman, trained at LA’s Pierce College. Both were put into
the al-Rashad Psychiatric Hospital during the Saddam years for tiny
and tawdry reasons, which seemed closely connected to Baathist
exploitation of fallings-out within their respective families. Both
are toweringly sane.
As Baghdad was falling in early April, a detachment of US tanks made
a couple of holes in the hospital’s 15-foot walls, stayed for a day
and then left. The looters poured in, and 1,400 inmates, among them
several of Iraq’s most dangerous psychotics, which is saying
something, poured out. The looters, all armed, took everything. Every
air conditioning unit, every fan. They raped six female inmates. I
was walking round the female compound, trying to come to terms with
the state of the women there, in this heat, without any drugs, as I
was told this, and I have to say it opened up a whole new perspective
on just how tissue-thin is, and probably always has been, our claim
to civilisation.
They stole all the drugs; the floor of the pharmacy was left white
with trampled pill-dust. The hospital authorities now have a few
generators up and running: not enough to provide any respite from the
heat, but enough to apply ECT to those patients now denied their
medicine (mainly chlorpromazine); although doctors are swift to point
out that for some patients ECT can be far more therapeutic and
harmless than is imagined in the West after some fearsome Nineties
propagandising. Still, no drugs, no moving air, not a whole lot of
hope, a terrible many buzzing things, chiefly flies and electrodes:
it’s not the world’s prettiest place.
Not all the inmates fled. (One of the very few who stayed, a murderer
named Ali Sabah, apparently remained because, in his own words, ‘I
don’t want the monkey to see me, and I don’t want to see the
monkey.’) But both Kareem and Ouzourian, our very sane poet and
painter, took the chance and legged it, keen to pick up their lives
in Baghdad.
Now here’s the thing. Both chose, after a few days in the city just
liberated by the Americans, to come back. Each, of their own free
volition, decided that the safest and sanest place in postwar Iraq
would be a steaming cell in a state mental hospital.
Kareem tries in his kindly way to guide me past the worst of the main
holding-cell, as the bars shut behind us and we aim for the relative
peace of his own section of corridor. It is hard, however, not to
look. There are many naked men. There are others half-dressed in what
it would be an exaggeration to call filthy rags. Their hands are busy
between their legs, but still not quite as busy as the flies.
‘I am in paradise,’ says Abed al- Kareem, not that ironically. ‘Out
there is where it is crazy. A kid boy of 11 has pistols and wants to
shoot me? In here, the Americans are back at the gate, and, for the
moment, we are safe. Baghdad was not safe. And I am free, I can go
when I want. I want to see another country, help others, marry a
beautiful girl. I can go when it is safe.’ Ouzourian nods in
agreement. ‘This is the only place in Iraq that takes care of the
people. Three meals a day, and it is safe.’
Kareem is terribly keen, though, not to blame the Americans. Not to
blame them too much, anyway. ‘You must remember how much we hated
Saddam, how happy we are that he is gone. Saddam not only damaged us
physically, but he damaged the … the grain of ourselves. So much
that was good and beautiful about the Iraqi people. There was no
culture, no teaching, and he turned humans into animals, which is
what you see in the streets of Baghdad. This is not true Iraqi people
. These are people made mad by Saddam.’ And then he writes me a poem.
Not a brilliant poem but still a poem, and about Saddam. It ends
something along the lines of, ‘Butterflies will be dancing/ Sometimes
solo, sometimes together/ And the heart that tastes freedom will be
fresh.’ He happily signs and dates it, and adds, with something
approaching pride: ‘Al-Rashad Hospital. Section 8’. And then he says
quietly, as we field our way back through the throng of patients, who
have decided that they want to kiss me for luck: ‘We still dream of
him, Saddam. Always, we dream of him.’
They don’t dream of him, not much, in the café, the famous old café
at the end of al-Mutanabbi Street, but they do talk about him.
Whether he’s still alive (yes), where he’s hiding (Russia), whether
he can ever come back to power (a resounding and joyous no). They
have always talked about him, the poets and writers and artists who
have for many years met here, in the al-Shah Bender, on Friday
mornings, but in distinctly muted tones. Since the café reopened, the
talk has been open and occasionally argumentative, and frankly the
Americans aren’t coming out of it at all well.
To reach the al-Shah Bender you walk, in the stifling noon heat, past
a burnt-out fire-engine and then down past the Friday morning
book-market which at first sight looks colourful and exciting. Then
you start looking, properly, at the very few books in English, their
covers blued and yellowed after many years in the sun. Dated, motley,
vaguely pathetic. The Glory of Amsterdam. The Anglo-American Threat
to Albania. Advance Training Course for Customs Officers in African
Countries, 14 Mar-15 July 1973: Course Report. Something called
Dynamic Vibration Absorbency, by J.B. Hunt. Aids: You Can’t Catch it
from Holding Hands.
And you realise, belatedly, just what a cultural as well as physical
effect sanctions brought to Iraq: not one single English-language
book came into the country after 1992. The national literacy rate was
89 per cent in 1985; by 2000 it was down to 58 per cent. This is a
theme I am going to hear repeated in the café, often: they talk not
about ‘before the war’ or even ‘before Saddam’, but about ‘before
sanctions’.
They’re pragmatists, all of them, sipping vanilla tea and waiting for
the hookah to come round, as has happened in all the years since the
café first opened. There is undoubted, repeated condemnation of
Saddam and delight at his departure, but there is nothing at all
approaching blind gratitude.
Hussein al-Araji was a teacher and football coach in Kut who fled to
Baghdad, and a job selling clothes, when the Baathists asked him to
spy on his players: you could disappear yourself, in the old Iraq, if
you didn’t want to be disappeared. ‘Of course we are glad the
Americans have done this, at last. Maybe sanctions will now end,
maybe we can live like a free people. And Saddam was terror, simply
terror. A man could not say anything. He fell from the wall when he
spoke anything. Have you seen the cemeteries? No one did this but
him.
‘But you must also look today at Baghdad. We do not understand it.
There are different prisons. There is a prison now where we don’t
have food. Where we don’t have safety, or enough water, and our women
cannot walk alone, and no one can go out after dark. What kind of
freedom, yet, is that? We simply do not understand. They can do
anything, says America. And yet it looks they can do nothing.’
He’s joined at our table by young Mansour Hassein al-Raikan, a
published poet, who is, of course, infinitely safer now to write what
he wants, but human enough to resent the slow failure of the
coalition to restore anything Iraq needs in the here-and-now. ‘No
salary, no water, no safety, nothing but confusion. Of course we are
starting to resent it all. We would like the Americans to go now,
please, and begin to let us run our country. I do not see how we
could do a worse job than at the moment.’ The café’s owner, Haji
Mohamed, shakes his head at the situation. ‘No security, fuel,
electricity. We are growing very worried for us now. We are not
without experience. The British came here in 1917 and did the same
thing – but there was never this feeling of danger, never. We cannot
understand it. People are going to get angry. We do not want Saddam
back. But we do want a government, some order.’ Hussein al-Araji, the
teacher, is about to leave, with a book under his arm. Shakespeare,
the Complete Works, edited by G.B. Harrison. He is hoping to sell it
for perhaps three dollars, to get some food for the weekend. I give
him $20 and tell him to keep the book, which I am sure he will. For
perhaps a week.
It’s not all grimness and misery, not quite. I went one day to the
first art opening since the war, a little gallery called al-Ufuq (the
culture). ‘Arassat Street,’ said the invite, ‘opposite branch of
pizza rest. The seventh house No.8/1, Lane 27, Babylon Quarter 929’.
There have been easier art galleries to find. But inside was a little
oasis, of some rather fine art and tentatively happy people: cake and
Pepsi was handed round, and I saw the first women in perhaps five
days, certainly the first without veils.
Nizar Arrawi, the bubbly owner, showed me some of her own sculptures,
and then explained that she had recently owned better ones but her
workshop had just been looted. But at least this gallery was open,
and they were proud to welcome the good Dr Ayad Alawi, long-exiled
leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a charmer of a man, who asked,
passionately, that the West act quickly to trace all the looted art.
And for a moment, although the streets outside are still rich with
rubbish and choking with smelly dust, you realised a little of this
ancient country’s cultural heritage and began to hope for the future;
and then the doctor’s entourage left, guns waving busily, and the
faint sounds of another firefight came from across town, and we were
back in modern-day Iraq, after the fall.
Ah yes, the bloody guns, always the guns. It’s estimated now that
about 75 per cent of Baghdad’s population are armed, and the
percentage is increasing as the remaining quarter realise that they
probably need a gun for their own and their family’s protection. A
hundred and fifty dollars or so for an AK-47, double that for a
pistol because it’s easier to hide. You can buy them rather easily
from the street-markets. These are patrolled hourly by US forces
whose job is to check for people selling guns. The traders get round
this with diabolical cunning by looking at their watches and, once an
hour, hiding all the guns. The liberating forces offered a
cross-Baghdad amnesty a couple of weeks ago: the grand total of guns
deposited was a magnificent none.
It’s almost bearable, during the day, although if a silhouetted
someone tries to wave you down, with a gun, in a long hot road full
of heat-mirage and six-year-olds siphoning petrol, you have to
choose: chances are it’s a Bad Person so you keep the foot down, but
if it’s the Americans and you race past, they’ll shoot at you, lots,
because they’re as scared as everyone else in this shambles of a
city. No girls are going to school. No women are going to the
markets. After dark it becomes a fast shade of worse.
One night I visited a friend about a mile away, and foolishly stayed
up talking, and ended up trying to get a late taxi home. Outside the
hotel they shrugged, and then one brave young thing disappeared for a
minute and came back carrying lots of guns and walked me through the
blackout for 10 minutes until we came across a darkened little street
party of severely scary drivers, the fat moon winking its light off a
battery of gold teeth and metal teacups and, for all I’m really sure,
recently bloodied scimitars. Not for $10,000, I was told. ‘Ali Baba,
Ali Baba,’ they repeated. Some Iraqis get annoyed by this – the thief
of the 1,001 Nights was Kuwaiti – but the verbal shorthand is fast
and always works: the thieves are out, and have guns, and even though
we have guns too we’re not going to risk it. Are you mad? Where are
you from?
I mention Scotland, and we have one of those extremely odd late-night
conversations, this time about Mel Gibson. Apparently one of the very
favourite films in Baghdad is Braveheart, because Saddam used to show
it repeatedly, nightly, with furious subtitles, to demonstrate just
what bastards the English were. I explain that few Scots have a
television because most are still running around in woad, thanks to
the English. We raise a happy toast – sticky, sweet tea – to the
general fog of historical propagandising and the more specific idea
of ‘Freedom!’. Somewhere nearby – a mile away? A street away? –
another stupid pop-pop gun battle breaks out, and they really won’t
take me home, and so I say I might walk, and they raise their teacups
again and say you must be either very brave or very stupid, when the
truth of course is that I am neither, but something else again
relatively new to them, which is very quietly drunk. I bravely wake
up my friend and sleep on the sofa.
No one sane could doubt the rich monstrousness of Saddam’s many years
climbing to power and hanging on with cunning and thuggery. One trip
banishes all doubts. The former palace of Saddam’s great chum General
Maher Mustafa al-Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris, has been
appropriated as one headquarters of the Committee for Free Prisoners,
set up to try to track down the whereabouts, or more honestly to
confirm the deaths, and match names with graves, of the staggering
numbers who began disappearing from the face of Iraq when Saddam
began his rise. Outside in the courtyard mothers in black are holding
wet wipes, against the heat and the stink of rubbish, and studying
lists of names on the wall, hoping to see a mention of their son. The
lists are held up with brown duct-tape. There are about 14,000 names.
Inside, the committee has turned the basement into a haphazard
research room, trying to match more names. Battered filing cabinets
tumble over each other, lying on top of a broken WC: they contain
many more thousands of files detailing what happened to ‘political
prisoners’. This is just the start. One of the staff, Abd al-Ratha
Alekabi, has spent the week digging up graves. On Friday he gives his
hands a good wash and comes here to dig up names.
And then you drive back, through the centre, and see what has
happened to the ministries and powerhouses that used at least to keep
some of the country alive, and realise that they have not merely been
looted but invaded, lobotomised, trepanned. The Americans are hardly
in evidence, and soon it will be dark again, and the guns will begin
again: and you can’t help but wonder how, when we managed to get the
surgical excision of Saddam so right, we have apparently managed to
get everything else so wrong in this country. An old and an
interesting country, and one in which everyone has been unfailingly,
unaccountably courteous and helpful, apart from the ones who are
trying to shoot you. They welcomed me into one mosque for Friday
prayers, this know-nothing Westerner whose country had just helped
bring their city to a halt, careful as they washed their feet not to
use too much water. Prayers were all-male: women have stopped coming
out for the moment.
Others offered me their bottled water, as they always offer it to
each other. It is sweet to see the way in which old men
unembarrassedly hold hands on marches, quick to pull each other out
of the way of traffic (or perhaps it’s just in case they’re hit by
one of the cacophony of toots: they laugh, here, about their drivers’
propensity for the horn, and call it ‘Baghdad music’.) A kindly and
spectacularly ravaged people, and I’m not sure quite what’s about to
happen to them.
Madeeh, my self-effacing driver/translator, goes off to buy us some
juice. We have just been debating what he might use my dollars for:
he wants a TV satellite dish, but is tempted to buy a pistol, to
protect his family, even though he hates the idea and has never owned
a gun. I notice he has left a notebook open, where he has been
writing down new words, Arabic aligned on one side with halting
English from a leaky biro, to help him in his command of the
language. His new words for the day are ‘retreat’, ‘struggle’,
‘clashed’, ‘invaders’ and ‘criminals’.
That night Karim, a friendly ex-hairdresser who was forced to stop
when Saddam decreed that women’s hair could no longer be styled – he
made this lucrative career the preserve of friends and family –
remembered the 60 heat of last July. ‘A friend of mine was out in the
countryside and came across some travellers. They were making their
tea without fuel: simply putting the water into a can and letting the
sun boil it. And there was a water crisis. And I hate to say this,
but at least Saddam was appearing on television, telling us what to
do, telling us there would be tankers. I am very scared what will
happen this July, if the Americans have not got something right. And
I am a little scared for the Americans.’
Baghdad has turned into Afghanistan faster than Afghanistan. As I
write this, the UN weapons inspectors are going back in to see
whether the looting of the city’s main nuclear power station has
given Baghdad a radioactive water supply. Could this really
imaginably be, in the minds of those who went to war for even the
best intentions, the preferred legacy? A land where all the children
smell of petrol? A land fit only for flies?