Denial or Despair
A bookstall on Baghdad's Mutanaby Street
News: Is it really possible that I know more than most Iraqis about what's really going on in Iraq?
February 11, 2005
|
|
About six months after the US invasion of Iraq, I was working with a Christian translator, an Iraqi woman of 24. We were in a slummy neighborhood somewhere in northern Baghdad, trying to track down a street kid who had been picked up by a local home for orphans and was presumably being held against her will.
We didn't manage to find the girl, but Ator, the translator, sat and chatted with some of the other kids. Near the orphanage we stopped and talked to some squatters (which most of the people in the neighborhood around the orphanage were), and as we got back in the car, Ator said something that surprised me.
"Thank you for bringing me here. I would have never come here," she said. A few days later, we returned to the squatter camp to drop off children's clothes Ator's nieces and nephews had outgrown.
That's when I began to realize how divided Iraqi society is. Many people rarely -- if ever -- seem to leave their neighborhoods, social circles, and, these days, their houses. For all intents and purposes, the journalists who do get out meet a broader cross- section of Iraqi society than do most Iraqis. Every time I talk to a liberal politician or citizen who assures me that elements of sharia (Islamic law) couldn't possibly be written into the new constitution, I want to ask them: "when was the last time you went to prayers in Sadr City? Have you been down to Najaf or Basra lately?"
On Mutanaby Street in central Baghdad, where booksellers lay out their wares every Friday and the cafes fill with all sorts -- wizened old poets, college professors, artists, religious scholars -- one is infected with the sense of what Baghdad was before -- secular, eclectic -- and what it might, possibly, make of its "liberation." A large painting of two martyred clerics, Moqtada Al-Sadr's father and uncle, hangs near the entrance to the market, but no one seems to mind. The street has a tolerant air. In the stalls and shops, the collected works of Saddam Hussein, in both French and English, as well as a bootleg Arabic translation of Bob Woodward's Bush at War, translated slightly more literally in the Arabic as harb Bush (Bush's War) -- mingle with copies of Louis L'Amour novels, modern Iraqi poetry, and piles of back copies of Popular Mechanics.
Many of the old men sitting in the cafes remember the days when Baathism was a doctrine of brotherhood and socialism; others reminisce about the years, between 1958 and 1963, when the communist party held power. Hiba and I have come to Mutanaby Street to look for reactions from secular Iraqis to the notion that sharia might soon govern their lives. Strangely, no one seems terribly worried. "Sistani doesn't represent all of us," a biology teacher tells me as he sits sipping tea in one of the cafes.
Usually Hiba, my translator, lets me ask the questions, but today she is going after people on her own. A secular, determinedly nonconformist Iraqi woman in her early thirties, she's still fuming from earlier this week, when we interviewed people from the new government intent on pushing sharia. "But the Governing Council did it before, and the only thing that stopped them was Bremer vetoing it." For Hiba it is particularly maddening -- she's convinced it's coming. "Why can't anyone see it?"
The answer, perhaps, is to be found in Iraq as it was before the invasion, when most of the citizens mastered the art of shutting themselves off, resigning themselves to something they couldn't alter, rebelling in small ways -- satellite television, a forbidden photocopied book passed around a circle of friends. How hard is it for many to go back to the way they've lived most of their lives? Under Saddam they either held their breath and waited, left the country, or went underground. The oppression now is different, but it seems to be producing much the same effect. Before it was a police state; now the lack of social order has become the new order.
I can't stand when people -- and they come from all sectors of Iraqi society -- tell me things are going to be better now that the elections have taken place. How many Iraqis have bothered to interview the doctor at the central morgue, to hear him talk about the 40 to 60 murder victims he receives each day? (That's not including Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed by bombings, who, through an agreement with the Ministry of Health, are taken elsewhere?) How come the ministry of health gives me such ridiculously low numbers when I ask its spokesman what the death toll is? (About 5,000, from natural and violent causes, he says, in eight months. Impossible.) As we are leaving the morgue, a police car drives in, one of the officer's legs hanging out of the trunk at what would normally be a very uncomfortable angle.
On the way into Najaf, the police stop my car and confiscate my camera, though I haven't taken any pictures yet. I argue, but it's no use. I reluctantly hand it over, more interested in getting to Najaf than in taking pics once I'm there; but, because I've argued, the police lieutenant who has taken the camera launches into a rant. I begin writing down what he's saying.
"… we think showing pictures of what's going on just makes people mad and encourages them against the government… we have to do this, because we have to stop the terrorists… hey, stop writing."
"Why?"
"Because you're writing bad things about us."
"I just want to show people in the States how Iraqi people are defying the terrorists. It is because of the situation with the terrorists that you must do this to journalists. I understand."
He hands my camera back, insisting he had only taken it in the interests of the state. He tells me of his two brothers and father, killed for their participation in the 1991 intifada, of the horrors under Saddam ... how much he doesn't want it to be like it was under Saddam again ... everyone afraid ... no freedom ...
If normalcy and negotiations are on their way, I'm not seeing them. Earlier this week, Adel Abdul Madhi, one of the leading candidates for prime minister, told me that he and members of his (Shiite) party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had held "a very good meeting with the Muslim Scholars [a group of Sunni clerics that have been at the forefront of opposition to the occupation and the new government]. We had a very positive message coming from them encouraging the whole process, and even differences could be discussed in meetings rather than having opposite attitudes and views."
The response from a Muslim Scholars spokesman this morning: "Under the occupation, we will never participate in [discussions about] writing the constitution," the spokesman said. "We have had no meetings or phone calls from [Mahdi] or other members of his party."
I ended my day interviewing a 20-year-old physics student who got out of prison a month ago. He was arrested in November when US troops raided his house. Standard story — the garden door knocked in with a humvee, troops bust in, bag over the head (a practice US army spokesman Mark Kimmet said was stopped more than a year ago), loaded on to a truck, gone. First he was held at a base at the south end of Baghdad. He says he was there for about a month, interrogated and beaten daily. He points to his nose, which he says wasn't crooked before he was arrested. He said the prisoners were shocked repeatedly with tasers, forced to spend 24 hours at a time in cells too low to stand and too narrow sit, forced to sit for two days. After that he was moved to the airport where he was held for another month, unceremoniously dropped from a humvee in Amariya, a fairly rough neighborhood -- fearing, though now free, that he'd be killed as a spy.
(The US military, though it has never controlled an inch of this city outside of the Green Zone, contributes heavily to the lack of social order -- a hard reality that shows no sign of changing any time soon, whatever the vague talk of "timetables" and "withdrawal".)
Across the room, the young man's cousin pipes up. "He's been staying at his cousin's house since he was released, he's too afraid that if he returns to his own house he'll be arrested again. We just want to leave the country. Go to Syria. Lebanon. Anywhere but Iraq."
The violence touches too many lives, the breakdown of social order has become a way of life -- which only increases the likelihood that sharia, with its unbending dictates, its promise of strict order, will deeply inform the new Iraqi state.
"Why can't some people see what's happening around them?" Hiba asks me, more and more frequently these days.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis on Mutanaby Street know what it's like to keep to themselves and hope for better days ahead.
David Enders is a 24-year-old freelance journalist who has spent more than a year reporting from Iraq since the end of the invasion. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation, will be released by the University of Michigan Press in April.
