In
An Upside-Down City
By Euan Ferguson
10 June
, 2003
The Observer
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?