April 3rd - When do the clocks change?
Daylight saving confusion, the other clowns leave Iraq and stuff about Falluja.
The clocks changed yesterday. Or the day before. Or possibly tomorrow. They went forward an hour. Probably. It depended on which newspaper you read. That more or less sums up Iraq in spring 2004, even time only staggering forward, no one knowing what hour we’re on because there’s no one to tell them.
Yesterday was a day of goodbyes for the rest of the clowns: the Mother Teresa orphanage, the camp at Shuala, the boys in the Kurdish house, Mama and Damia and Happy Family, the kids on our street, in the falafel shop, in the juice shop.
Their last meetings – for now anyway – coincided with Jenny’s first, introduced in a single day to several crowds of kids who know that the word “Boomchucka” means colour and laughter and any friend of the circus is a friend of theirs.
We took a load of modelling balloons to the kids in the orphanage and made an animal for every child. When we left, after maybe three quarters of an hour, we collected all the bright rubber fragments from the floor, bitten, beaten and sat on till they burst. Neither the nuns nor the kids care that they don’t last long: all that matters is that they were there. For Little Omar it had to be a bird: they call him Asbur, Bird, because he’s always flying from cot to cot, clambering out of one and into another, visiting all the other kids.
Ilyas called Donna’s name and Donna and I started singing the Ritchie Valens song, “Oh Donna”, holding her hands so that first her arms and then her whole body danced with us. She’s got very little language and has trouble putting words together but after we finished Ilyas kept singing, putting a tune to the two words, “Oh Donna”.
I gave Aala the small pot of bubbles and for several minutes his head crumpled in concentration, twisted arms working hard to bring the plastic bubble blower to his mouth at the right angle. Perhaps a dozen times he tried, blowing at the loop and making nothing but a soapy splatter. Eventually a single bubble emerged and floated away. Aala’s eyes widened with pride at his own achievement. There’s nothing wrong with his mind, but his body makes it difficult.
Shuala was the same as always. We get out of the car and the shout goes up. Kids come running from every direction and Saba and the littlest Marwa usually land in my arms first. Abdullah gets bolder and cheekier every time he sees me. Abbas is running about, his toes still not quite healed from the burns but his legs are good now. Marwa the older didn’t come out. I saw her looking through the window of their house. We went through the details of the water project – the lengths and diameters of pipes needed to extend the water supply to everyone in the camp.
The boys were playing football in the garden at the Kurdish House. They’ve replaced the grass and bare earth with sand because it’s better for the boys to play football on. The karate lessons at the Childhood Voice youth centre are going well, giving the boys loads more confidence in their movements. They’ve all had their hair cut really short: It shows all the scars on Aakan’s head from when he was living on the streets. He came for cuddles and tickling as always.
It’s been better than I dared imagine it could be. We’re setting up the circus long term to do the shows and games and skills teaching but also to maintain and coordinate the twinning links, to build capacity among Iraqis working with kids to do this kind of work and to take on projects like the school and the drainage and water systems in Shuala. We decided to call the organisation Boomchucka Circus, with Circus2Iraq being the first project.
We arrived back just after the incident in Falluja where the contractors were shot, burnt, mutilated and dragged through the streets. The scenes themselves, on satellite TV in a friend’s house, were shocking, all the more so because the dead men were described as civilians.
But what if they were soldiers, armed men who signed up for war and were paid to fight it. They were shot dead in an ambush. What was done to their bodies afterwards was distressing no matter what, but if they wee soldiers, they were killed in action. The truth, of course, is that they were somewhere in between, mercenaries from a US company called Blackwater Security, given a contract by USAID to protect contractors.
They travel in armoured vehicles, ostentatiously carrying powerful weapons and they shoot people and arrest people, precisely like the soldiers do but without the uniform. They’re paid about $1000 a day for the job, considerably more than the regular soldiers which most, if not all, of them used to be. The advantage for the US is that their deaths and injuries don’t show up on the figures for troop casualties.
The legal position, as if it mattered, is unclear. Not being regular soldiers, they don’t fit into the protection of the military parts of the Geneva Conventions. Not being unarmed civilians, they are not covered by the Fourth Convention either, relating to non-combatants. Nor could they be classified accurately as spies or intelligence agents. Perhaps the new category invented by the US for its prisoners of war from Afghanistan: unlawful combatants.
I’ve talked a little about unionisation with some of the people I’ve met because workers, including professionals, are struggling with things like the CPA trying to set a wage scale whose bottom two levels were unliveable. Order 39 of the CPA opened Iraq’s utilities and industries up to 100% foreign ownership. Protests forced the change to permitting 100% foreign leaseholding rather than ownership, with the lease locked for forty years.
The managers who collaborate with the American administration on privatisation are being threatened and assassinated. Bit by bit, the theory goes, the will to privatise, given the cost, will be dismantled. Unions, despite international labour law, are much more vulnerable, much less immediately effective than a bullet.
Yesterday was a day of goodbyes for the rest of the clowns: the Mother Teresa orphanage, the camp at Shuala, the boys in the Kurdish house, Mama and Damia and Happy Family, the kids on our street, in the falafel shop, in the juice shop.
Their last meetings – for now anyway – coincided with Jenny’s first, introduced in a single day to several crowds of kids who know that the word “Boomchucka” means colour and laughter and any friend of the circus is a friend of theirs.
We took a load of modelling balloons to the kids in the orphanage and made an animal for every child. When we left, after maybe three quarters of an hour, we collected all the bright rubber fragments from the floor, bitten, beaten and sat on till they burst. Neither the nuns nor the kids care that they don’t last long: all that matters is that they were there. For Little Omar it had to be a bird: they call him Asbur, Bird, because he’s always flying from cot to cot, clambering out of one and into another, visiting all the other kids.
Ilyas called Donna’s name and Donna and I started singing the Ritchie Valens song, “Oh Donna”, holding her hands so that first her arms and then her whole body danced with us. She’s got very little language and has trouble putting words together but after we finished Ilyas kept singing, putting a tune to the two words, “Oh Donna”.
I gave Aala the small pot of bubbles and for several minutes his head crumpled in concentration, twisted arms working hard to bring the plastic bubble blower to his mouth at the right angle. Perhaps a dozen times he tried, blowing at the loop and making nothing but a soapy splatter. Eventually a single bubble emerged and floated away. Aala’s eyes widened with pride at his own achievement. There’s nothing wrong with his mind, but his body makes it difficult.
Shuala was the same as always. We get out of the car and the shout goes up. Kids come running from every direction and Saba and the littlest Marwa usually land in my arms first. Abdullah gets bolder and cheekier every time he sees me. Abbas is running about, his toes still not quite healed from the burns but his legs are good now. Marwa the older didn’t come out. I saw her looking through the window of their house. We went through the details of the water project – the lengths and diameters of pipes needed to extend the water supply to everyone in the camp.
The boys were playing football in the garden at the Kurdish House. They’ve replaced the grass and bare earth with sand because it’s better for the boys to play football on. The karate lessons at the Childhood Voice youth centre are going well, giving the boys loads more confidence in their movements. They’ve all had their hair cut really short: It shows all the scars on Aakan’s head from when he was living on the streets. He came for cuddles and tickling as always.
It’s been better than I dared imagine it could be. We’re setting up the circus long term to do the shows and games and skills teaching but also to maintain and coordinate the twinning links, to build capacity among Iraqis working with kids to do this kind of work and to take on projects like the school and the drainage and water systems in Shuala. We decided to call the organisation Boomchucka Circus, with Circus2Iraq being the first project.
We arrived back just after the incident in Falluja where the contractors were shot, burnt, mutilated and dragged through the streets. The scenes themselves, on satellite TV in a friend’s house, were shocking, all the more so because the dead men were described as civilians.
But what if they were soldiers, armed men who signed up for war and were paid to fight it. They were shot dead in an ambush. What was done to their bodies afterwards was distressing no matter what, but if they wee soldiers, they were killed in action. The truth, of course, is that they were somewhere in between, mercenaries from a US company called Blackwater Security, given a contract by USAID to protect contractors.
They travel in armoured vehicles, ostentatiously carrying powerful weapons and they shoot people and arrest people, precisely like the soldiers do but without the uniform. They’re paid about $1000 a day for the job, considerably more than the regular soldiers which most, if not all, of them used to be. The advantage for the US is that their deaths and injuries don’t show up on the figures for troop casualties.
The legal position, as if it mattered, is unclear. Not being regular soldiers, they don’t fit into the protection of the military parts of the Geneva Conventions. Not being unarmed civilians, they are not covered by the Fourth Convention either, relating to non-combatants. Nor could they be classified accurately as spies or intelligence agents. Perhaps the new category invented by the US for its prisoners of war from Afghanistan: unlawful combatants.
I’ve talked a little about unionisation with some of the people I’ve met because workers, including professionals, are struggling with things like the CPA trying to set a wage scale whose bottom two levels were unliveable. Order 39 of the CPA opened Iraq’s utilities and industries up to 100% foreign ownership. Protests forced the change to permitting 100% foreign leaseholding rather than ownership, with the lease locked for forty years.
The managers who collaborate with the American administration on privatisation are being threatened and assassinated. Bit by bit, the theory goes, the will to privatise, given the cost, will be dismantled. Unions, despite international labour law, are much more vulnerable, much less immediately effective than a bullet.