We went to look for a family we met last year in the hospital just after their farmhouse was bombed, to find out how they are and to look, again, for the intended military target.
March 17th
The Farm (2)
“We are farmers. We are farmers.” Fatima kept screaming it, over and over, cradling one child after another, the fourth dead in the rubble of the farmhouse they fled to for sanctuary from Baghdad. It was almost a year ago, March 23rd, at four in the afternoon. Three people were killed: Fatima’s 8 year old daughter, Zahra, her sister Hana and her brother’s new wife Nahda, who was 18.
Surviving family members and neighbours said they saw the plane circling overhead for some time before it fired three rockets, one of which hit the house, destroying the entire upper storey. Everyone said at the time that there was nothing military in the area, nor anything that they could imagine was the intended target. We always wondered though, even after we drove around the area and couldn’t find anything, whether they were told by the security services what to say to us.
The school we went to in the morning was in Diyala Bridge, near to where the farm was so we decided to go and look for them, find out what had happened. Taalib drove us there last time and he gave us approximate directions and said to ask when we were nearby for the house that was bombed in the war.
We drove down the track past a few houses, none of them familiar. We stopped and asked and were directed back to the first house we passed. We didn’t recognise the woman outside, nor the children who peered out through the windows. They talked about most of the family being killed. Their bombing was at midnight, demolishing three houses, on March 29th, six days after the attack that we knew about.
Layla pointed out the remains of the houses. Sixteen or seventeen people died altogether. She is the second wife of the brother of the owner of the house that’s now been rebuilt. The first wife was killed in the attack. He’s in the UK now staying with family members and receiving treatment after losing his arms in the bombing.
Mustafa Taha, a sixteen year old boy, listed eight of his family who were killed. Kamila Abid Kadem, his 50 year old mother, his sisters Muna and Abir Taha, 24 and 20, his 13 year old brother Mohammed Taha, 50 year old Ismail Abbas, 11 year old Abbas Smail and Mustafa’s cousins Ezhar and Sabiha, both 27 year old women. Mustafa had shrapnel wounds in his shoulder but he’s physically OK now.
“We heard the plane above us for about 15 minutes and suddenly we were underground.” He pointed to a smaller boy, fourteen years old, sitting on the edge of a step from the house. “He lost all of his family.”
Nabil Sabah stood up very straight. “I was at the house of my uncle and I came back at noon and the house was destroyed. My mother and father and all my five brothers and sisters were dead. The rocket hit the house directly.” Speechless, I looked around at the family, their faces still devastated, their bodies still weighed down with grief.
“Asafa” I said to Nabil. I’m sorry, although it was a pointless thing to say..
He nodded, dignified, and he didn’t cry but his little body slumped somehow as if something was crumbling inside him, consumed by the pain which was undiminished, still raw and unaddressed.
Taha Abbas, the uncle who Nabil lives with now, said, “We came back to the house and there were many people missing. We searched in the rubble and there were pieces of them everywhere. Some of them we found with their heads off. We are farmers. We have lived here since 1958.”
He’s rebuilt his own house and his brother’s. There are 8 in the house now, with water and occasional electricity. He thinks the military base three kilometres away might have been the intended target, although after 15 minutes of circling he’s unsure how they could have hit the house instead, how they could miss by three thousand metres.
“The tanks and troops come through here all the time. It is hard for us to like them after what they have done to us. We have nothing. We are just hanging around trying to live. The Iraqi government has never asked about us, nor the Americans. No one has come and asked about us until you.”
They had no knowledge of another house in the area being hit, so we crossed the river and asked more people. “Do you mean the house where two women and a child were killed?” someone asked. That was the one.
Though the house was in pieces last time, we knew it when we saw it. There’s a drop from the dirt track down to the house. I knew the man who came out. When I first saw him I thought he was smiling. He was on the far side of the emergency room, covered with blood and grime. An older man, his father, the owner of the house, was brought through in a wheelchair and he came to him, held the arm of the wheelchair, asked him a question I couldn’t understand. It was a grimace, not a smile, his face desperate.
Ajama shook his head and Khalid collapsed, gasping for breath as if his was tied to Nahda’s, still under the wreckage of the house. When we went the next day to get directions to the house, he was hunched in the corridor, still bloody, head on his knees, tears falling silently, endlessly.
They welcomed us into the house, Khalid, his brother Omar and their mum. Walking in I found the memory transposed onto the present, the rubble now swept away, the second storey replaced and the walls repainted, the windows whole and cushions laid around the outside of the room. Khalid fetched some photos of the house before it was repaired but for me, that was still more vivid than the clean building around me.
Among the photos was one of Hana, Khalid’s sister. “She was in the last year of her studies,” Umm Khalid said. “She was studying to be a teacher of Arabic. She would have finished in the summer.” Khalid hasn’t got any photos of Nahda. They were all destroyed in the bombing. The only one is a passport photo in her ID papers, a very young woman. “She was only eighteen years old and they murdered her,” Umm Khalid said and had to wipe her eyes.
“Can you imagine how we felt?” Umm Khalid asked. “It was the seventh day after the weeding. We brought the bride to the house at four o’clock and at four o’clock we were bombed.”
Umm Khalid talked about Nada, Fatima’s oldest daughter. She was speaking in Arabic but her gesture, a long sweep of the hand along the thigh, was unmistakeable, the gouge in Nada’s leg unforgettable and still, she said, causing her problems. How is Rana, I asked. Rana was eight when the bombing happened, suffering badly with concussion and struggling to breathe when we met her.
“Rana is alright. For us, we are all alright,” Umm Khalid said. “You can see we are alright. But for them, they are broken. Their family is broken.” Fatima has gone back to Baghdad with her three surviving children, Nada now 15, Rana 9 and Mohammed 5. “They came from Baghdad because their home was close to the Air Force Centre and the National Theatre and they thought the Air Force Centre would be bombed. Of course it was bombed, but how could they have expected that we would be bombed as well?”
We asked them again what they thought was the intended target. Still they said there is nothing military in the area, nothing related to communications or electricity generation. We’d driven all over the area looking for the house and again found nothing that explained the attack in terms of a mistake, an attempt to hit a legitimate target. We passed the Tuwaitha nuclear power station quite a distance away, drove around its heavily wired perimeter wall but, even had that been within ten kilometres of the farmhouse, it didn’t explain the attack. Even in the furthest reaches of lunacy I can’t believe anyone aims to blow up a nuclear power station close to a city they plan to occupy.
Ajama came back from a funeral. One of his relatives was killed in the crossfire of an ambush, some Iraqi militiamen, some US troops; he happened to be travelling along the road. He was friendly, polite, thanked us for coming. No one has been to ask about us since you last came, he said, not the new Iraqi government, not the Americans, nobody has offered any help.
“But we are afraid. We welcome you but I am afraid that if we are seen with foreigners in our home people will tell the Americans we are working for the resistance or tell the militias we are working for the Americans. They will ask who are these people, how did you have communication with them, how did they know where to find you to come and visit your house. I don’t know anyone who this has happened to but we hear stories. We hear of it happening.”
He runs a small company with a few employees. Khalid works as an engineer in the electrical plant which took him on after he graduated a couple of years ago, in Karrada, a long journey to work each day. They are somewhere between the traditional and the modern, still farmers but also working outside in professions. The entire area is Shia.
Before we left we had to know whether they were told by Mukhabarat, the security police, what to say to us. “They did not tell us anything. They did not come to us.” There’s no reason, now, to disbelieve him. Yet he is more afraid now that he was before the war, more afraid to talk to foreigners, more afraid to draw attention to himself. Ajama thanked us repeatedly, kept apologising for his fear.
We went looking for the bereaved family of three dead and found the still devastated remnants of the families of seventeen more. Raed worked on a survey of deaths and spoke to a doctor in Nasariya who gave him the details of casualties who came into the hospital but estimated that perhaps a quarter to a third of the dead actually came to the hospital; the rest were simply buried.
The survey was never properly published, thousands of forms still awaiting analysis. Marla, the American woman who set up CIVIC, the organisation which started the survey, is the darling of the US liberal media, utterly unchallenging to the status quo, but always willing to talk about her crusade for compensation for the victims. She talks about how she went door to door asking about casualties and deaths, a version which irritates the people who set up the teams of volunteers who actually did go door to door carrying out the research.
The result of it all has been a paltry $10 million (about 5.5 million pounds) to USAID, the US Agency for International Development, the department responsible for awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq exclusively to US companies.
It hasn’t reached, and will never reach, Nabil in his uncle’s house, still grieving for his entire family. It will not reach Khalid, widowed within a week of his wedding, Fatima, whose family was broken by the loss of Zahra at the age of nine, nor ease the disability Nada is still suffering with her leg, never mind the psychological pain that hasn’t healed.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
Schools
We took the circus into some poor Shia schools around Baghdad. Arrests of women bank clerks and eviction threats in some of the squatter camps.
Headmaster Mohammed looked out at the horde of kids outside the school gate and mused that quite a lot of them might come back now they’d seen the circus. They wouldn’t want to miss it if it came back again, he said. Loads of kids dropped out because of poverty in the family, the dangers and difficulties of getting to school or the poor conditions of the school itself. Kids from other schools have been kidnapped for money or attackers have come into the school. There’s nothing to keep anyone out, Mohammed said, looking at the feeble gates.
Part of Mohammed’s problem is the lack of text books. They’re still working with the old ones, with Saddam’s picture in them and they haven’t got nearly enough for all the kids, so the teachers can only lecture. Unicef was close to giving contracts for the printing of new books to local Iraqi printers, who had started buying the inks and materials, before Unicef pulled out leaving nothing but ill-feeling between the different companies.
They’ve got no other teaching materials at all. There are a thousand boys in the morning shift and a thousand girls in the evening shift so there’s no time or space for any sort of training for the 30 teachers. Each child is allocated twelve pencils per year, an average of one and a half per month of school. “But the children do not keep a pencil for a month. They keep a pencil for a few days and then it is broken or lost or finished.” It goes without saying that there are no art materials in the school.
Mohammed has a masters degree in education and was studying for a PhD but the programme has been stopped so it’s on hold for now. To me, in pigtails, face paint, a silver dress and extra-long green, purple, yellow and orange trousers, he asked, “What are the latest methods and systems of education in the UK?” I did a few modules of education in a degree I finished almost eight years ago but that’s my limit. Part of Mohammed’s problem is that he’s so starved of professional support that he’s got to ask a clown.
Then there is the lack of running water, so that even the single hole-in-the-ground toilet is unsanitary. Classroom furniture is scarce. But Mohammed’s problems don’t end there. The teachers are only just, in mid March, being paid their salaries for February, which has left them broke for the last couple of weeks. As headmaster, working full time, with a masters degree, he is paid only the same as the cleaner; all the teachers struggle to live on their wages.
We talked about Unions and he said there have been thoughts of setting one up but nothing is yet established. I promised to bring more information and we talked about the kind of support he would like from teachers outside Iraq. “We need a teacher exchange with other countries, especially the UK, for a few Iraqi teachers to visit the UK and spend time with teachers there, spend time in the schools and learn about the latest methods and curricula. Those teachers can share the information with others when they return. It will be more effective than bringing teachers from the UK to Iraq because we need to see the way they work.” At the moment he does not even have internet access to communicate with teachers abroad.
We hadn’t expected to do a second show, hadn’t realised a second shift of children would be coming, but Adnan came in laughing, telling us the departing boys were all talking about the very tall woman and the men who made things disappear. We checked with Saba, Mohammed’s counterpart for the girls’ shift and began a second show.
The girls were incredibly loud. The noise of them shouting “Boomchucka” was immense, a huge buzz, a thousand little girls happy and excited. In the end they got a bit too manic and we cut the show short. The ones at the back, standing, were pushing forward, the ones sitting at the front and those squeezed in the middle looking likely to get hurt.
I thought the teachers would be furious with us but they weren’t at all. “They have never had anything like this, something happy, something fun in this yard. In this yard they used to have to sing songs praising Saddam. They are especially happy to see a woman in the show. They have never thought a woman can do this,” Saba said.
Bremer, she said, is not at all interested in women’s rights. He hasn’t done anything for women and nor has the Governing Council, overturning women’s paper protections. Too many groups have only lobbied for 40% representation of women on the Governing Council rather than taking on grassroots work with women. All urban schools have been segregated since 1999 when Saddam was trying to appease religious leaders. There’s no sign of that law being dropped under the new leadership.
She also talked about attacks on the school straight after the fall of the old regime, armed men storming in, making threats, accusing her and other teachers of being Baathists. Like Mohammed, she has seen a high drop out rate among her pupils because of security problems, both on the journey to school and within the building, which is unprotected. They would like an armed guard, one who could escort the pupils to school and mind the place while the kids are there. With a thousand children coming from a wide area of narrow streets, a school bus is impractical.
The “Green Zone” is the name given to the part of town occupied and fortified by the coalition forces and the accompanying civilian-military administration, the only place they feel safe and most commonly heard in the sentence, “They’re attacking the Green Zone.” Our contacts were unable to tell us whether there is or is not an Amber Zone but the Red Zone constitutes most of the rest of Baghdad and Sadr City is the wilderness, the Black Zone.
It’s not because I’m fearless or have some idea of my own invincibility that I’m so flippant, but just because it’s ridiculous. The people who are making the decisions and guiding the policies do so from the far side of a dozen checkpoints from Sadr City, or any other civilian district. Constantly under attack and barely allowed out of their own Zone, a lot of the people in there start to fear the Iraqi people.
And if our contacts were right, that Sadr City is really known as the Black Zone, then it’s a measure of how twisted this situation has become. Densely populated, entirely Shia, extremely poor and persecuted by Saddam, this district might reasonably be expected to be called the “We Love America” Zone but apparently it’s not.
Monday’s school in Afdhalia, likewise, had no windows, nothing at all to work with. A tank is graffitied on the playground wall. Teachers say the 800 or so kids won’t listen to anyone except the headmaster. They carry little blue Unicef backpacks, presumably given out to get them to come back to school if their parents couldn’t afford a bag for them to carry their books in. A woman in an abaya stood watching the show with one of the backpacks on her head. A dog barked in the school and small crowds of kids gathered at the ends of the corridors to look out over the barriers, high enough to see over the crowd. As I took off my stilts a boy came down the steps carrying a colourful cockerel to show me.
As we arrived at the school in Diyala Bridge on Tuesday, a teenage boy wheeled a barrow past full of neon squeaking things. I took them to be fluffy toys that squeak when shaken till a younger boy picked out a handful, paid a little money and left with his dyed chicks. It must make good business sense to colour them for the young ones who get sent out to fetch the chicks for the family.
As with the last two days there were dozens of primary school age kids on the way there, not in school. Skinny dogs scavenged in the rubbish heaps, the pickings still not rich enough even among all this debris. The toilet here had running water; constantly running, so the toilet was overflowing. Several of the women teachers had tiny babies like six month old Zahra in Soulav’s arms, her four year old brother Abdullah leaning on their mum’s knee. The English teacher has no choice but to bring them to work.
Away from the schools, a thousand bank clerks, mostly women, have been threatened with arrest over the money that’s been lost in the currency changeover. When the old Saddam notes were being phased out for the new money - Bremer’s money, as everyone called it in Kurdistan - the clerks were told to exchange all the notes, even those they suspected were fakes. In any case there was no real way of knowing which were fake because it was all just printed on ordinary paper without security marks of any kind.
Sixteen clerks have been arrested, fifteen women and one man. There’s no suspicion that they stole money or committed any fraud but there is a discrepancy between the amount of genuine money received and the amount of new money given in exchange. Now the clerks are to be forced to pay for the difference. Some have already, under threat of arrest, signed papers agreeing to ‘pay back’ the money in instalments from their wages.
The families of the jailed women and man have been trying to get all the papers signed, all the procedures fulfilled for bail. A Baghdad traffic jam prevented them getting the papers to the judge in time the day before yesterday, the judge was on holiday the next day, nothing has happened today either so they’re still in prison. Arrest, however wrongful, is shameful for a woman. Their families are devastated.
The Minister of Finance is a close associate of Ahmed Chalabi. His deputy is Chalabi’s driver, a former associate of Saddam. Chalabi is the man with the proven track record of embezzlement, defrauding Iraqi people of millions through the Petra Bank, convicted in his absence when he refused to attend court in Jordan and now a member of Iraq’s Governing Council.
Faleh Maktuf, the lawyer acting for the arrested clerks, says the legal procedures for bail are nearly done but it’s a tortuous process. There’s no legal basis whatsoever for the arrests but the still flimsy framework, without real laws and guidelines, allows police, ministers and judges almost unconstrained power to do as they like. Many, especially the judges, were part of the old regime.
Several of the squatter camps are under threat of evicition. There was a rumour that Shuala is one of them so we went to find out. Abu Ahmed at first said there was no threat at all but then told us a contractor came but they didn’t let him near the camp, threatened to kill him or his colleagues if they came back. He said they will fight for the place, they won’t leave just because they’re told to.
He said the man was from an animal welfare dept of the Agriculture Ministry. He believes the land belongs to the Ministry of Finance but is operated by the Ministry of Agriculture. Abu Abdullah, at the Workers’ Communist Party which has been supporting the squatter groups, explained that the land, which used to belong to Saddam’s son Uday, has now reverted to the Iraqi government, under the auspices of the Government Lands Department, part of the Ministry of Finance.
Abu Abdullah agreed there was no specific move to evict the camp though all the camps are under a general threat. The people at Al-Sheikh Nasser al-Sa’adi camp in Thawra were given till 10am on March 16th to leave. The building on Mudhafa Square used to belong to the Fedayeen. Hamed Selman Majid, a 33 year old father of ten, went out looking for alternative accommodation for his family but couldn’t find any. He came back, collapsed and died of a heart attack.
Proper housing, a legal framework, justice, security and schools with windows, sanitation and teaching facilities have still not been established.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
Please also see some other selections from Jo Wilding's Diary in our War of the Shadows Section.
Please also see:
Jo Wilding, Iraq-based British anti-war activist and former human shield
Subject An Eye on Iraqis: One Clown's Account
Date Monday,Mar 15, 2004 (Please note the DU references.)
http://www.islamonline.net/livedialogue/english/Browse.asp?hGuestID=P70A9p
Please also visit:
The Traprock Peace Center http://www.traprockpeace.org
Voices In The Wilderness http://www.vitw.org
Electronic Iraq http://www.electroniciraq.net
March 17th
The Farm (2)
“We are farmers. We are farmers.” Fatima kept screaming it, over and over, cradling one child after another, the fourth dead in the rubble of the farmhouse they fled to for sanctuary from Baghdad. It was almost a year ago, March 23rd, at four in the afternoon. Three people were killed: Fatima’s 8 year old daughter, Zahra, her sister Hana and her brother’s new wife Nahda, who was 18.
Surviving family members and neighbours said they saw the plane circling overhead for some time before it fired three rockets, one of which hit the house, destroying the entire upper storey. Everyone said at the time that there was nothing military in the area, nor anything that they could imagine was the intended target. We always wondered though, even after we drove around the area and couldn’t find anything, whether they were told by the security services what to say to us.
The school we went to in the morning was in Diyala Bridge, near to where the farm was so we decided to go and look for them, find out what had happened. Taalib drove us there last time and he gave us approximate directions and said to ask when we were nearby for the house that was bombed in the war.
We drove down the track past a few houses, none of them familiar. We stopped and asked and were directed back to the first house we passed. We didn’t recognise the woman outside, nor the children who peered out through the windows. They talked about most of the family being killed. Their bombing was at midnight, demolishing three houses, on March 29th, six days after the attack that we knew about.
Layla pointed out the remains of the houses. Sixteen or seventeen people died altogether. She is the second wife of the brother of the owner of the house that’s now been rebuilt. The first wife was killed in the attack. He’s in the UK now staying with family members and receiving treatment after losing his arms in the bombing.
Mustafa Taha, a sixteen year old boy, listed eight of his family who were killed. Kamila Abid Kadem, his 50 year old mother, his sisters Muna and Abir Taha, 24 and 20, his 13 year old brother Mohammed Taha, 50 year old Ismail Abbas, 11 year old Abbas Smail and Mustafa’s cousins Ezhar and Sabiha, both 27 year old women. Mustafa had shrapnel wounds in his shoulder but he’s physically OK now.
“We heard the plane above us for about 15 minutes and suddenly we were underground.” He pointed to a smaller boy, fourteen years old, sitting on the edge of a step from the house. “He lost all of his family.”
Nabil Sabah stood up very straight. “I was at the house of my uncle and I came back at noon and the house was destroyed. My mother and father and all my five brothers and sisters were dead. The rocket hit the house directly.” Speechless, I looked around at the family, their faces still devastated, their bodies still weighed down with grief.
“Asafa” I said to Nabil. I’m sorry, although it was a pointless thing to say..
He nodded, dignified, and he didn’t cry but his little body slumped somehow as if something was crumbling inside him, consumed by the pain which was undiminished, still raw and unaddressed.
Taha Abbas, the uncle who Nabil lives with now, said, “We came back to the house and there were many people missing. We searched in the rubble and there were pieces of them everywhere. Some of them we found with their heads off. We are farmers. We have lived here since 1958.”
He’s rebuilt his own house and his brother’s. There are 8 in the house now, with water and occasional electricity. He thinks the military base three kilometres away might have been the intended target, although after 15 minutes of circling he’s unsure how they could have hit the house instead, how they could miss by three thousand metres.
“The tanks and troops come through here all the time. It is hard for us to like them after what they have done to us. We have nothing. We are just hanging around trying to live. The Iraqi government has never asked about us, nor the Americans. No one has come and asked about us until you.”
They had no knowledge of another house in the area being hit, so we crossed the river and asked more people. “Do you mean the house where two women and a child were killed?” someone asked. That was the one.
Though the house was in pieces last time, we knew it when we saw it. There’s a drop from the dirt track down to the house. I knew the man who came out. When I first saw him I thought he was smiling. He was on the far side of the emergency room, covered with blood and grime. An older man, his father, the owner of the house, was brought through in a wheelchair and he came to him, held the arm of the wheelchair, asked him a question I couldn’t understand. It was a grimace, not a smile, his face desperate.
Ajama shook his head and Khalid collapsed, gasping for breath as if his was tied to Nahda’s, still under the wreckage of the house. When we went the next day to get directions to the house, he was hunched in the corridor, still bloody, head on his knees, tears falling silently, endlessly.
They welcomed us into the house, Khalid, his brother Omar and their mum. Walking in I found the memory transposed onto the present, the rubble now swept away, the second storey replaced and the walls repainted, the windows whole and cushions laid around the outside of the room. Khalid fetched some photos of the house before it was repaired but for me, that was still more vivid than the clean building around me.
Among the photos was one of Hana, Khalid’s sister. “She was in the last year of her studies,” Umm Khalid said. “She was studying to be a teacher of Arabic. She would have finished in the summer.” Khalid hasn’t got any photos of Nahda. They were all destroyed in the bombing. The only one is a passport photo in her ID papers, a very young woman. “She was only eighteen years old and they murdered her,” Umm Khalid said and had to wipe her eyes.
“Can you imagine how we felt?” Umm Khalid asked. “It was the seventh day after the weeding. We brought the bride to the house at four o’clock and at four o’clock we were bombed.”
Umm Khalid talked about Nada, Fatima’s oldest daughter. She was speaking in Arabic but her gesture, a long sweep of the hand along the thigh, was unmistakeable, the gouge in Nada’s leg unforgettable and still, she said, causing her problems. How is Rana, I asked. Rana was eight when the bombing happened, suffering badly with concussion and struggling to breathe when we met her.
“Rana is alright. For us, we are all alright,” Umm Khalid said. “You can see we are alright. But for them, they are broken. Their family is broken.” Fatima has gone back to Baghdad with her three surviving children, Nada now 15, Rana 9 and Mohammed 5. “They came from Baghdad because their home was close to the Air Force Centre and the National Theatre and they thought the Air Force Centre would be bombed. Of course it was bombed, but how could they have expected that we would be bombed as well?”
We asked them again what they thought was the intended target. Still they said there is nothing military in the area, nothing related to communications or electricity generation. We’d driven all over the area looking for the house and again found nothing that explained the attack in terms of a mistake, an attempt to hit a legitimate target. We passed the Tuwaitha nuclear power station quite a distance away, drove around its heavily wired perimeter wall but, even had that been within ten kilometres of the farmhouse, it didn’t explain the attack. Even in the furthest reaches of lunacy I can’t believe anyone aims to blow up a nuclear power station close to a city they plan to occupy.
Ajama came back from a funeral. One of his relatives was killed in the crossfire of an ambush, some Iraqi militiamen, some US troops; he happened to be travelling along the road. He was friendly, polite, thanked us for coming. No one has been to ask about us since you last came, he said, not the new Iraqi government, not the Americans, nobody has offered any help.
“But we are afraid. We welcome you but I am afraid that if we are seen with foreigners in our home people will tell the Americans we are working for the resistance or tell the militias we are working for the Americans. They will ask who are these people, how did you have communication with them, how did they know where to find you to come and visit your house. I don’t know anyone who this has happened to but we hear stories. We hear of it happening.”
He runs a small company with a few employees. Khalid works as an engineer in the electrical plant which took him on after he graduated a couple of years ago, in Karrada, a long journey to work each day. They are somewhere between the traditional and the modern, still farmers but also working outside in professions. The entire area is Shia.
Before we left we had to know whether they were told by Mukhabarat, the security police, what to say to us. “They did not tell us anything. They did not come to us.” There’s no reason, now, to disbelieve him. Yet he is more afraid now that he was before the war, more afraid to talk to foreigners, more afraid to draw attention to himself. Ajama thanked us repeatedly, kept apologising for his fear.
We went looking for the bereaved family of three dead and found the still devastated remnants of the families of seventeen more. Raed worked on a survey of deaths and spoke to a doctor in Nasariya who gave him the details of casualties who came into the hospital but estimated that perhaps a quarter to a third of the dead actually came to the hospital; the rest were simply buried.
The survey was never properly published, thousands of forms still awaiting analysis. Marla, the American woman who set up CIVIC, the organisation which started the survey, is the darling of the US liberal media, utterly unchallenging to the status quo, but always willing to talk about her crusade for compensation for the victims. She talks about how she went door to door asking about casualties and deaths, a version which irritates the people who set up the teams of volunteers who actually did go door to door carrying out the research.
The result of it all has been a paltry $10 million (about 5.5 million pounds) to USAID, the US Agency for International Development, the department responsible for awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq exclusively to US companies.
It hasn’t reached, and will never reach, Nabil in his uncle’s house, still grieving for his entire family. It will not reach Khalid, widowed within a week of his wedding, Fatima, whose family was broken by the loss of Zahra at the age of nine, nor ease the disability Nada is still suffering with her leg, never mind the psychological pain that hasn’t healed.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
Schools
We took the circus into some poor Shia schools around Baghdad. Arrests of women bank clerks and eviction threats in some of the squatter camps.
Headmaster Mohammed looked out at the horde of kids outside the school gate and mused that quite a lot of them might come back now they’d seen the circus. They wouldn’t want to miss it if it came back again, he said. Loads of kids dropped out because of poverty in the family, the dangers and difficulties of getting to school or the poor conditions of the school itself. Kids from other schools have been kidnapped for money or attackers have come into the school. There’s nothing to keep anyone out, Mohammed said, looking at the feeble gates.
Part of Mohammed’s problem is the lack of text books. They’re still working with the old ones, with Saddam’s picture in them and they haven’t got nearly enough for all the kids, so the teachers can only lecture. Unicef was close to giving contracts for the printing of new books to local Iraqi printers, who had started buying the inks and materials, before Unicef pulled out leaving nothing but ill-feeling between the different companies.
They’ve got no other teaching materials at all. There are a thousand boys in the morning shift and a thousand girls in the evening shift so there’s no time or space for any sort of training for the 30 teachers. Each child is allocated twelve pencils per year, an average of one and a half per month of school. “But the children do not keep a pencil for a month. They keep a pencil for a few days and then it is broken or lost or finished.” It goes without saying that there are no art materials in the school.
Mohammed has a masters degree in education and was studying for a PhD but the programme has been stopped so it’s on hold for now. To me, in pigtails, face paint, a silver dress and extra-long green, purple, yellow and orange trousers, he asked, “What are the latest methods and systems of education in the UK?” I did a few modules of education in a degree I finished almost eight years ago but that’s my limit. Part of Mohammed’s problem is that he’s so starved of professional support that he’s got to ask a clown.
Then there is the lack of running water, so that even the single hole-in-the-ground toilet is unsanitary. Classroom furniture is scarce. But Mohammed’s problems don’t end there. The teachers are only just, in mid March, being paid their salaries for February, which has left them broke for the last couple of weeks. As headmaster, working full time, with a masters degree, he is paid only the same as the cleaner; all the teachers struggle to live on their wages.
We talked about Unions and he said there have been thoughts of setting one up but nothing is yet established. I promised to bring more information and we talked about the kind of support he would like from teachers outside Iraq. “We need a teacher exchange with other countries, especially the UK, for a few Iraqi teachers to visit the UK and spend time with teachers there, spend time in the schools and learn about the latest methods and curricula. Those teachers can share the information with others when they return. It will be more effective than bringing teachers from the UK to Iraq because we need to see the way they work.” At the moment he does not even have internet access to communicate with teachers abroad.
We hadn’t expected to do a second show, hadn’t realised a second shift of children would be coming, but Adnan came in laughing, telling us the departing boys were all talking about the very tall woman and the men who made things disappear. We checked with Saba, Mohammed’s counterpart for the girls’ shift and began a second show.
The girls were incredibly loud. The noise of them shouting “Boomchucka” was immense, a huge buzz, a thousand little girls happy and excited. In the end they got a bit too manic and we cut the show short. The ones at the back, standing, were pushing forward, the ones sitting at the front and those squeezed in the middle looking likely to get hurt.
I thought the teachers would be furious with us but they weren’t at all. “They have never had anything like this, something happy, something fun in this yard. In this yard they used to have to sing songs praising Saddam. They are especially happy to see a woman in the show. They have never thought a woman can do this,” Saba said.
Bremer, she said, is not at all interested in women’s rights. He hasn’t done anything for women and nor has the Governing Council, overturning women’s paper protections. Too many groups have only lobbied for 40% representation of women on the Governing Council rather than taking on grassroots work with women. All urban schools have been segregated since 1999 when Saddam was trying to appease religious leaders. There’s no sign of that law being dropped under the new leadership.
She also talked about attacks on the school straight after the fall of the old regime, armed men storming in, making threats, accusing her and other teachers of being Baathists. Like Mohammed, she has seen a high drop out rate among her pupils because of security problems, both on the journey to school and within the building, which is unprotected. They would like an armed guard, one who could escort the pupils to school and mind the place while the kids are there. With a thousand children coming from a wide area of narrow streets, a school bus is impractical.
The “Green Zone” is the name given to the part of town occupied and fortified by the coalition forces and the accompanying civilian-military administration, the only place they feel safe and most commonly heard in the sentence, “They’re attacking the Green Zone.” Our contacts were unable to tell us whether there is or is not an Amber Zone but the Red Zone constitutes most of the rest of Baghdad and Sadr City is the wilderness, the Black Zone.
It’s not because I’m fearless or have some idea of my own invincibility that I’m so flippant, but just because it’s ridiculous. The people who are making the decisions and guiding the policies do so from the far side of a dozen checkpoints from Sadr City, or any other civilian district. Constantly under attack and barely allowed out of their own Zone, a lot of the people in there start to fear the Iraqi people.
And if our contacts were right, that Sadr City is really known as the Black Zone, then it’s a measure of how twisted this situation has become. Densely populated, entirely Shia, extremely poor and persecuted by Saddam, this district might reasonably be expected to be called the “We Love America” Zone but apparently it’s not.
Monday’s school in Afdhalia, likewise, had no windows, nothing at all to work with. A tank is graffitied on the playground wall. Teachers say the 800 or so kids won’t listen to anyone except the headmaster. They carry little blue Unicef backpacks, presumably given out to get them to come back to school if their parents couldn’t afford a bag for them to carry their books in. A woman in an abaya stood watching the show with one of the backpacks on her head. A dog barked in the school and small crowds of kids gathered at the ends of the corridors to look out over the barriers, high enough to see over the crowd. As I took off my stilts a boy came down the steps carrying a colourful cockerel to show me.
As we arrived at the school in Diyala Bridge on Tuesday, a teenage boy wheeled a barrow past full of neon squeaking things. I took them to be fluffy toys that squeak when shaken till a younger boy picked out a handful, paid a little money and left with his dyed chicks. It must make good business sense to colour them for the young ones who get sent out to fetch the chicks for the family.
As with the last two days there were dozens of primary school age kids on the way there, not in school. Skinny dogs scavenged in the rubbish heaps, the pickings still not rich enough even among all this debris. The toilet here had running water; constantly running, so the toilet was overflowing. Several of the women teachers had tiny babies like six month old Zahra in Soulav’s arms, her four year old brother Abdullah leaning on their mum’s knee. The English teacher has no choice but to bring them to work.
Away from the schools, a thousand bank clerks, mostly women, have been threatened with arrest over the money that’s been lost in the currency changeover. When the old Saddam notes were being phased out for the new money - Bremer’s money, as everyone called it in Kurdistan - the clerks were told to exchange all the notes, even those they suspected were fakes. In any case there was no real way of knowing which were fake because it was all just printed on ordinary paper without security marks of any kind.
Sixteen clerks have been arrested, fifteen women and one man. There’s no suspicion that they stole money or committed any fraud but there is a discrepancy between the amount of genuine money received and the amount of new money given in exchange. Now the clerks are to be forced to pay for the difference. Some have already, under threat of arrest, signed papers agreeing to ‘pay back’ the money in instalments from their wages.
The families of the jailed women and man have been trying to get all the papers signed, all the procedures fulfilled for bail. A Baghdad traffic jam prevented them getting the papers to the judge in time the day before yesterday, the judge was on holiday the next day, nothing has happened today either so they’re still in prison. Arrest, however wrongful, is shameful for a woman. Their families are devastated.
The Minister of Finance is a close associate of Ahmed Chalabi. His deputy is Chalabi’s driver, a former associate of Saddam. Chalabi is the man with the proven track record of embezzlement, defrauding Iraqi people of millions through the Petra Bank, convicted in his absence when he refused to attend court in Jordan and now a member of Iraq’s Governing Council.
Faleh Maktuf, the lawyer acting for the arrested clerks, says the legal procedures for bail are nearly done but it’s a tortuous process. There’s no legal basis whatsoever for the arrests but the still flimsy framework, without real laws and guidelines, allows police, ministers and judges almost unconstrained power to do as they like. Many, especially the judges, were part of the old regime.
Several of the squatter camps are under threat of evicition. There was a rumour that Shuala is one of them so we went to find out. Abu Ahmed at first said there was no threat at all but then told us a contractor came but they didn’t let him near the camp, threatened to kill him or his colleagues if they came back. He said they will fight for the place, they won’t leave just because they’re told to.
He said the man was from an animal welfare dept of the Agriculture Ministry. He believes the land belongs to the Ministry of Finance but is operated by the Ministry of Agriculture. Abu Abdullah, at the Workers’ Communist Party which has been supporting the squatter groups, explained that the land, which used to belong to Saddam’s son Uday, has now reverted to the Iraqi government, under the auspices of the Government Lands Department, part of the Ministry of Finance.
Abu Abdullah agreed there was no specific move to evict the camp though all the camps are under a general threat. The people at Al-Sheikh Nasser al-Sa’adi camp in Thawra were given till 10am on March 16th to leave. The building on Mudhafa Square used to belong to the Fedayeen. Hamed Selman Majid, a 33 year old father of ten, went out looking for alternative accommodation for his family but couldn’t find any. He came back, collapsed and died of a heart attack.
Proper housing, a legal framework, justice, security and schools with windows, sanitation and teaching facilities have still not been established.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
Please also see some other selections from Jo Wilding's Diary in our War of the Shadows Section.
Please also see:
Jo Wilding, Iraq-based British anti-war activist and former human shield
Subject An Eye on Iraqis: One Clown's Account
Date Monday,Mar 15, 2004 (Please note the DU references.)
http://www.islamonline.net/livedialogue/english/Browse.asp?hGuestID=P70A9p
Please also visit:
The Traprock Peace Center http://www.traprockpeace.org
Voices In The Wilderness http://www.vitw.org
Electronic Iraq http://www.electroniciraq.net