November 15th - Talking Politics in Baghdad
16 Nov 2003
It’s truly a joy to walk down the street talking openly about politics with an Iraqi person in Baghdad. Less joyous, of course, are the “Please mind the bomb” posters pasted to bus stops and walls...
It’s truly a joy to walk down the street talking openly about politics with an Iraqi person in Baghdad. Less joyous, of course, are the “Please mind the bomb” posters pasted to bus stops and walls, depicting an alarmed man, hands raised in horror like a pantomime dame, and a catalogue of unexploded bomb types of which the passer-by should beware. Lest anyone should miss the point, the different shaped bomblets are each accompanied by a puce skull and crossbones.

It seems there are two things all Iraqi people are unanimous about: that “security is very bad” and that, whatever their own opinion is, “Every Iraqi person will tell you this.” If you mention that another Iraqi person has told you something else entirely different, they will shake their heads and tell you this other person is only telling you that because they just want to blame everything on the US or because they always grumble, or because they are too scared of the Americans to tell you what they really think or because they have lived their entire lives saying what they think they’re supposed to say, but really they feel exactly the same as your current informant.

Saif came round yesterday, having heard I was back in town. He declared that things were better when Saddam was here. I reminded him of how, when we first met, he used to clean shoes on the street and he and his friend Ahmed were scared to have their photos taken outside in case they got arrested. They used to invite us to their houses but if we’d gone their families would have been in trouble.

Yes, he agreed, we were scared of Saddam. It was like he lived in your house, because he was always there, listening, watching, and it wasn’t that he wanted Saddam back, but now people are scared of everything. They’re scared at home, scared in the street; nothing functions and the Americans are taking everything, selling everything the country ever had. He looked at the clock. “Before… 8 o’clock you will hear the guns.” Sure enough, before he left, there was gunfire. He’s not fond of the soldiers – they once wanted to beat up his friend for having an obviously plastic gun and only let him go after Saif intervened and made them laugh in his broken English.

At the beginning of the war, soldiers came to his house just outside Thawra [formerly Saddam City] and demanded to know where he was. They left a message with his mum that he was to report to the Baath party HQ. They came back later. His papers which prove that he’s sick, they said, he could put in water, drink it and then shut up and go with them. He was shown how to use a gun, before he ran away. The war ended before they could catch him. Surely then, I suggested, he must be glad the Americans had arrived just in time. Still he was adamant that the war and occupation have made things worse.

Muayad has lived 21 years in England. He owns a hotel and used to come back periodically, spend a year in Iraq, a year in the UK. Political discussion was impossible under Saddam, he said. If he and I had sat like this drinking tea and talking there would be government agents at the next table listening. I remember it all too well. There were always secret police in his hotel, he told me, keeping an eye on the guests. They hid cameras in the rooms, he explained. There was no privacy even for the ladies – there would be men in the next room observing.

Saddam, he says, is physically gone now but is still there in people’s heads. I think he must be. I remember how the feeling of being watched lingered after I got home from spending a few weeks here. An entire lifetime under scrutiny must take a long time to shed. Muayad didn’t think elections would be feasible here yet. People need to learn to live as a civil society. Anyone could come and set up a party and, if they had the money, buy a few votes.

The US-installed Governing Council he calls corrupt. The benefits go only to their cronies. For the most part, they came back from abroad for the prizes, not for the good of the Iraqi people. He acknowledged the role the UK, US and other countries played in installing and maintaining Saddam but shrugged it off as inevitable. There has always been empire. There have always been countries with the power to control others. That power has rarely taken account of the welfare of the people living in the places seized.

Sura, a secretary, was less adamant than most. She was really glad to be rid of Saddam but was finding things very difficult now. You make your plans, then someone changes everything and you have to plan all over again. You just have to cope, you can’t give up. She talked about a constant fear of troops and violent crime. Everywhere is unsafe, jobs are hard to come by and the salary isn’t worth much. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, struggled to find a coherent feeling to express – everything is still too uncertain to form a sense of what’s going on.

Opinion is divergent, and that’s a start. There’s no way to summarise or quantify, even for the few people I have met, let alone the millions I haven’t, except for this: everyone says security is very bad, the internet says it’s been “the bloodiest week yet” for the US in Iraq and some American civilians here say the taxi drivers don’t speak to them any more.