November 8th - Welcome to Iraq
Modified: 12:13:30 PM
I’m safely in Baghdad. As if in welcome a bright orange sun was just easing over the horizon as I crossed the much slimmed-down border from Jordan.
November 8, 2003
Welcome to Iraq
I’m safely in Baghdad. As if in welcome a bright orange sun was just easing over the horizon as I crossed the much slimmed-down border from Jordan. No more the endless glasses of sugary tea in the “VIP lounge”, a riot of tinsel and paper chains with a giant Saddam gazing benevolently across the room at the TV watching Caspar the Friendly Ghost or some other cartoon. No more the 10 Euro bribe not to search your luggage too carefully, because they only opened the boot of the car, glanced in and closed it when there were no obvious rocket launchers or assault rifles.
It’s too soon to tell you all that’s changed here. Superficially little is different. The streets are not teeming with troops. Now and then you pass a few carriers of them. Those are the Poles, a companion remarked. Apparently you can tell the difference. People are still selling clothes, food and tools on the streets. Kids selling petrol at the roadside are a new sight, standing around a metal can with a funnel waiting for customers, who are many, presumably avoiding the immense queues at petrol stations which began shortly before the war and have continued.
The roads are still crowded with cars. Roads have been closed off around government buildings, hotels, all manner of things, so the roads left open are ever more tightly packed. No one bothers about traffic lights anymore because there is no enforcement and no penalty. Wasef shook his head in despair at the other drivers and explained: before the war a lot of people couldn’t afford cars. Now they have money because they looted the palaces and government buildings and they’ve bought cars and they think they’re big shots and so they drive like shit.
He pointed out a cubicle on the roadside – one of many white and blue concrete sentry boxes for the traffic cops to stand in when not directing traffic. There was a huge jam a few days ago and everyone assumed it was another roadblock which, from time to time, the troops put up. The tanks, though, stopped a little distance away from the cubicle which, they said, was booby trapped.
Why would anyone booby trap a traffic cop cubicle, he wanted to know. It wasn’t going to cause the troops any trouble. It wasn’t even a very busy street, let alone an important one. And how was it that after the “booby trap” was discovered there was time to call the troops and they had time to arrive, through all the morning traffic in Baghdad, before it went off? But the next day in all the newspapers there were pictures and accounts of the heroic American soldiers who defused the bomb. It was all staged, he concluded, as propaganda.
It’s still cheap to get a taxi to anywhere but there are less of them about. Before the war, when petrol was cheaper than water – many times cheaper – men would just drive around looking for people who needed a taxi. Now a lot of the cars are full already. Waiting near the Palestine Hotel (of which more later) one of the hotel workers asked where we were going. In Arabic Imad explained and his eyes lit up. Were we going to see the English girl with blonde hair to about here – he indicated his shoulders – who works with the workers? We weren’t – Ewa is in Basra, but Imad laughed. Everyone knows Ewa, he said. I’ll write more about her work when I’ve had a chance to talk properly to her about it.
There are almost no working telephones, so you have to go by taxi to the usual places of anyone you want to see. I tried to phone Michael yesterday: I came to the Fanar to get his number and Luay gave it to me but, he said, “You cannot call from here. There is no operator.” From the internet center around the corner I had to dial the full international code to call a few miles across the city. Calls within Iraq were free before the war. Bugged, of course, but free. If you know the address it’s cheaper, though much, much slower, to just go and see if they’re in but, if you don’t, you have no choice but to try to call and to pay over $1 a minute.
I tried again from the Kandeel Hotel where I stayed last night but the phone in my room just beeped at me. “There is no operator here,” said Mohammed, at reception, “because… bombing, you know.” Still only a few exchanges are working. Even if your phone is working the chances are that the person you want to call is not connected. Still most people in the city can’t call an ambulance or fire engine if they need to.
Today I was on my way to Al-Muajaha and Emar’s offices when I spotted Michael on his way to find me, so he jumped in and we went for falafels. He’d been staying with a couple of Palestinian families about to be evicted from their homes, but they were made homeless yesterday. Palestinians were seen as receiving preferential treatment from Saddam in his attempts to build up his image as the great Arab leader, so landlords were forced to accept lower rents from Palestinian refugees. Now a lot of them are getting kicked out, as are other people for a whole variety of reasons because there’s no protection from eviction here.
No one was in at Emar’s offices, nor in the internet café they use, so we carried on to Al-Muajaha. Again I’ll write more about their work when had chance to spend some time with them but essentially Muajaha is a newspaper and website set up by some Iraqi people I met here last time and Emar is Arabic for ‘rebuild’ and is setting up teams to assess their own reconstruction and other needs, again set up by some Iraqi friends I met before the war.
At the Muajaha office Muthanna was looking for Salam. The two of them have been invited to Geneva for some web posting training as part of the Indymedia network. He’s really excited but as yet they haven’t got passports. Previously passports had to be approved by Saddam, so now they’re invalid, even if you had one, and the Americans are not issuing any at the moment.
Muthanna’s in his final year of a film degree at university. He went today with a journalist and a member of a European NGO (non-governmental organization) to translate for them in an interview with the dean of the film college. It was a terrible interview, he said. The dean was really rude to them and he told them lies. He told them there were a thousand Iraqi films. Muthanna says there are only a hundred and the last Iraqi film came out in 1992. Films had to include directly and indirectly things about Saddam, pro-Saddam, so all the respected artists went abroad and only – he consulted Imad in Arabic for the right word in English - only the bullies were making films in Iraq.
The taxi driver who brought me back here used to be a major in the Iraqi army. It was bad, he said. Saddam used to force them to be in the army and then to join the Ba’ath party and if they wouldn’t join they were fired and then jailed. He made the army do things that were bad for Iraq – to go to war and to attack other Iraqi people in the north and south. During the ‘Anfal’ campaign against the Kurds he was sent up to the north. He was an engineer, so he was only mending cars and the large guns but his friends were sent to go and gas people. I hope to interview some of those people about what happened during that time. It was a brief conversation but one which would have been unlikely before the war.
Mohammed in the Kandeel agreed some things are better now, but it’s extremely unsafe and they don’t have enough money. The new currency is in bigger denominations than the old, which is still in use, in the familiar bundles of 250 Dinar notes. The crisp, waxy 5000, 10000 and 25000 Dinar notes fit into wallets but, Mohammed and Sura explained, you go to the market and you can’t afford anything with your salary. The food ration has dwindled to almost nothing. The electricity situation is better than over the summer because the weather is good – not so hot they need air conditioning but not yet cold enough to turn on heaters. There’s less demand for electricity so there are fewer cuts and the loss of power when it happens matters less.
The falafel seller, the kids in the street, the taxi drivers and so on still ask where I’m from and say ahlan wa sahlan fi Iraq – welcome - as they always did. An English woman can still find a welcome in Baghdad. The dashboard kitsch hasn’t changed either: one taxi driver had nodding dogs next to the steering wheel grooving along to Justin Timberlake.
Kamil is still working in the Al Fanar. He gave me a big hug when he saw me and brought me a glass of numb basra, the hot sweet lemon drink I loved last time I was here. But the Fanar has now extended into the street, which is closed, with an outdoor café called The Meeting Point, between the fortress walls and razor wire which now surround the Palestine, Ishtar Sheraton and recently-bombed Baghdad hotels, the closed-down UN Development Project building and the whole of Abu Nawas Street.
The familiar view from the window is filled with strangeness. Concrete walls ten feet high or lower ones with spikes on make an alleyway that, after a frisking and a bag search from Iraqi policemen backed by four US soldiers in full kit, people can pass down. The roll of razor wire is moved aside, now and then, for an approved vehicle to pass down, before joining the gleaming rows of the car park on what was once one carriageway of Abu Nawas.
As I write there’s a gun battle going on. I can hear the crackles of smaller weapons and the roar of heavier fire. Red flares are rising from all sides, reminding me of the tracers of anti-aircraft fire the last time I stood on this balcony. Three tanks trundled out from the Palestine and then steamed along Sa’adoon street, parallel with Abu Nawas. A helicopter silhouetted against the dark blue of the sky and disappeared behind the building. It’s either a gun battle or they’ve caught Saddam.
Over tea I saw a journalist, Boris, who I met before the war, writing for Die Welt. Casually he mentioned that on his trip to Ramadi today he caught the back end of the attack near Falluja. The usual, he said: smoke everywhere, helicopters overhead and Americans running about shouting at everyone to go away. He got to Ramadi where, it was reported, students were too scared to go to the university because of the resistance. He asked them about it. “We are the resistance.”
Welcome to Iraq.
• A group in Canada has raised the money to take 5 people from Iraq to the World Social Forum in India in January (15th to 21st). The people who the organizers think would benefit and contribute the most don’t speak English. Is there anyone out there who speaks fluent Iraqi Arabic and English who would be able to get themselves to the WSF and be there for those dates who’d be up for going and translating. The possible group includes a bakery worker and a textile factory worker – not sure of any other details but please e-mail wildfirejo-owner (at) yahoogroups.com if you think you can help.
• There’s a woman here trying to set up a shelter for women who have fled domestic violence. I’ll have more details of the project soon but if there’s anyone who works in that field and / or knows about grant making bodies which might be able to help, please let me know as she needs funding sources to get it going.
Welcome to Iraq
I’m safely in Baghdad. As if in welcome a bright orange sun was just easing over the horizon as I crossed the much slimmed-down border from Jordan. No more the endless glasses of sugary tea in the “VIP lounge”, a riot of tinsel and paper chains with a giant Saddam gazing benevolently across the room at the TV watching Caspar the Friendly Ghost or some other cartoon. No more the 10 Euro bribe not to search your luggage too carefully, because they only opened the boot of the car, glanced in and closed it when there were no obvious rocket launchers or assault rifles.
It’s too soon to tell you all that’s changed here. Superficially little is different. The streets are not teeming with troops. Now and then you pass a few carriers of them. Those are the Poles, a companion remarked. Apparently you can tell the difference. People are still selling clothes, food and tools on the streets. Kids selling petrol at the roadside are a new sight, standing around a metal can with a funnel waiting for customers, who are many, presumably avoiding the immense queues at petrol stations which began shortly before the war and have continued.
The roads are still crowded with cars. Roads have been closed off around government buildings, hotels, all manner of things, so the roads left open are ever more tightly packed. No one bothers about traffic lights anymore because there is no enforcement and no penalty. Wasef shook his head in despair at the other drivers and explained: before the war a lot of people couldn’t afford cars. Now they have money because they looted the palaces and government buildings and they’ve bought cars and they think they’re big shots and so they drive like shit.
He pointed out a cubicle on the roadside – one of many white and blue concrete sentry boxes for the traffic cops to stand in when not directing traffic. There was a huge jam a few days ago and everyone assumed it was another roadblock which, from time to time, the troops put up. The tanks, though, stopped a little distance away from the cubicle which, they said, was booby trapped.
Why would anyone booby trap a traffic cop cubicle, he wanted to know. It wasn’t going to cause the troops any trouble. It wasn’t even a very busy street, let alone an important one. And how was it that after the “booby trap” was discovered there was time to call the troops and they had time to arrive, through all the morning traffic in Baghdad, before it went off? But the next day in all the newspapers there were pictures and accounts of the heroic American soldiers who defused the bomb. It was all staged, he concluded, as propaganda.
It’s still cheap to get a taxi to anywhere but there are less of them about. Before the war, when petrol was cheaper than water – many times cheaper – men would just drive around looking for people who needed a taxi. Now a lot of the cars are full already. Waiting near the Palestine Hotel (of which more later) one of the hotel workers asked where we were going. In Arabic Imad explained and his eyes lit up. Were we going to see the English girl with blonde hair to about here – he indicated his shoulders – who works with the workers? We weren’t – Ewa is in Basra, but Imad laughed. Everyone knows Ewa, he said. I’ll write more about her work when I’ve had a chance to talk properly to her about it.
There are almost no working telephones, so you have to go by taxi to the usual places of anyone you want to see. I tried to phone Michael yesterday: I came to the Fanar to get his number and Luay gave it to me but, he said, “You cannot call from here. There is no operator.” From the internet center around the corner I had to dial the full international code to call a few miles across the city. Calls within Iraq were free before the war. Bugged, of course, but free. If you know the address it’s cheaper, though much, much slower, to just go and see if they’re in but, if you don’t, you have no choice but to try to call and to pay over $1 a minute.
I tried again from the Kandeel Hotel where I stayed last night but the phone in my room just beeped at me. “There is no operator here,” said Mohammed, at reception, “because… bombing, you know.” Still only a few exchanges are working. Even if your phone is working the chances are that the person you want to call is not connected. Still most people in the city can’t call an ambulance or fire engine if they need to.
Today I was on my way to Al-Muajaha and Emar’s offices when I spotted Michael on his way to find me, so he jumped in and we went for falafels. He’d been staying with a couple of Palestinian families about to be evicted from their homes, but they were made homeless yesterday. Palestinians were seen as receiving preferential treatment from Saddam in his attempts to build up his image as the great Arab leader, so landlords were forced to accept lower rents from Palestinian refugees. Now a lot of them are getting kicked out, as are other people for a whole variety of reasons because there’s no protection from eviction here.
No one was in at Emar’s offices, nor in the internet café they use, so we carried on to Al-Muajaha. Again I’ll write more about their work when had chance to spend some time with them but essentially Muajaha is a newspaper and website set up by some Iraqi people I met here last time and Emar is Arabic for ‘rebuild’ and is setting up teams to assess their own reconstruction and other needs, again set up by some Iraqi friends I met before the war.
At the Muajaha office Muthanna was looking for Salam. The two of them have been invited to Geneva for some web posting training as part of the Indymedia network. He’s really excited but as yet they haven’t got passports. Previously passports had to be approved by Saddam, so now they’re invalid, even if you had one, and the Americans are not issuing any at the moment.
Muthanna’s in his final year of a film degree at university. He went today with a journalist and a member of a European NGO (non-governmental organization) to translate for them in an interview with the dean of the film college. It was a terrible interview, he said. The dean was really rude to them and he told them lies. He told them there were a thousand Iraqi films. Muthanna says there are only a hundred and the last Iraqi film came out in 1992. Films had to include directly and indirectly things about Saddam, pro-Saddam, so all the respected artists went abroad and only – he consulted Imad in Arabic for the right word in English - only the bullies were making films in Iraq.
The taxi driver who brought me back here used to be a major in the Iraqi army. It was bad, he said. Saddam used to force them to be in the army and then to join the Ba’ath party and if they wouldn’t join they were fired and then jailed. He made the army do things that were bad for Iraq – to go to war and to attack other Iraqi people in the north and south. During the ‘Anfal’ campaign against the Kurds he was sent up to the north. He was an engineer, so he was only mending cars and the large guns but his friends were sent to go and gas people. I hope to interview some of those people about what happened during that time. It was a brief conversation but one which would have been unlikely before the war.
Mohammed in the Kandeel agreed some things are better now, but it’s extremely unsafe and they don’t have enough money. The new currency is in bigger denominations than the old, which is still in use, in the familiar bundles of 250 Dinar notes. The crisp, waxy 5000, 10000 and 25000 Dinar notes fit into wallets but, Mohammed and Sura explained, you go to the market and you can’t afford anything with your salary. The food ration has dwindled to almost nothing. The electricity situation is better than over the summer because the weather is good – not so hot they need air conditioning but not yet cold enough to turn on heaters. There’s less demand for electricity so there are fewer cuts and the loss of power when it happens matters less.
The falafel seller, the kids in the street, the taxi drivers and so on still ask where I’m from and say ahlan wa sahlan fi Iraq – welcome - as they always did. An English woman can still find a welcome in Baghdad. The dashboard kitsch hasn’t changed either: one taxi driver had nodding dogs next to the steering wheel grooving along to Justin Timberlake.
Kamil is still working in the Al Fanar. He gave me a big hug when he saw me and brought me a glass of numb basra, the hot sweet lemon drink I loved last time I was here. But the Fanar has now extended into the street, which is closed, with an outdoor café called The Meeting Point, between the fortress walls and razor wire which now surround the Palestine, Ishtar Sheraton and recently-bombed Baghdad hotels, the closed-down UN Development Project building and the whole of Abu Nawas Street.
The familiar view from the window is filled with strangeness. Concrete walls ten feet high or lower ones with spikes on make an alleyway that, after a frisking and a bag search from Iraqi policemen backed by four US soldiers in full kit, people can pass down. The roll of razor wire is moved aside, now and then, for an approved vehicle to pass down, before joining the gleaming rows of the car park on what was once one carriageway of Abu Nawas.
As I write there’s a gun battle going on. I can hear the crackles of smaller weapons and the roar of heavier fire. Red flares are rising from all sides, reminding me of the tracers of anti-aircraft fire the last time I stood on this balcony. Three tanks trundled out from the Palestine and then steamed along Sa’adoon street, parallel with Abu Nawas. A helicopter silhouetted against the dark blue of the sky and disappeared behind the building. It’s either a gun battle or they’ve caught Saddam.
Over tea I saw a journalist, Boris, who I met before the war, writing for Die Welt. Casually he mentioned that on his trip to Ramadi today he caught the back end of the attack near Falluja. The usual, he said: smoke everywhere, helicopters overhead and Americans running about shouting at everyone to go away. He got to Ramadi where, it was reported, students were too scared to go to the university because of the resistance. He asked them about it. “We are the resistance.”
Welcome to Iraq.
• A group in Canada has raised the money to take 5 people from Iraq to the World Social Forum in India in January (15th to 21st). The people who the organizers think would benefit and contribute the most don’t speak English. Is there anyone out there who speaks fluent Iraqi Arabic and English who would be able to get themselves to the WSF and be there for those dates who’d be up for going and translating. The possible group includes a bakery worker and a textile factory worker – not sure of any other details but please e-mail wildfirejo-owner (at) yahoogroups.com if you think you can help.
• There’s a woman here trying to set up a shelter for women who have fled domestic violence. I’ll have more details of the project soon but if there’s anyone who works in that field and / or knows about grant making bodies which might be able to help, please let me know as she needs funding sources to get it going.