People Like Us (10 page)

I sometimes imagined I was taking part in a reality-TV show where participants were given impossible assignments. Mine was to play a journalist in a system where good journalism is a contradiction in terms. It produced some droll images, but the worse the dictatorship, the less funny it became.

A little less than a year after I’d arrived, the Cairo Foreign Press Association arranged a group trip to Iraq via the Ministry of Information in Baghdad. It was complete madness. The secret-service minders practically sat on our laps. They’d regularly leave us waiting in lobbies for hours on end without any explanation, and then shove us into taxis for an excursion. Slipping away wasn’t possible because then you’d put people in danger. If an Iraqi saw his neighbor (whom he’d hated for years) chatting to a Westerner, he might make a call to his “friend” in the secret services: “My neighbor has been recruited by a spy.” Could the neighbor prove his innocence? And to which authorities? Perhaps that sly journalist from Hulanda was an informant or agent provocateur himself? You do hear such funny things; and if he was an agitator and you didn’t report him immediately, he might report you.

Part of the trip was an excursion to the south, thirty or so of us in a bus, leading to unavoidable jokes about school trips. Soon, everybody was playing I Spy—“... an absurd wall painting of the Leader.” There was a portrait of Saddam wearing a black toga in front of the Law Courts. Then he was in front of a five-star hotel, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and smoking a Cuban cigar; in front of a print shop, dressed as a tourist with a big camera dangling over his beer belly; in uniform next to some barracks; and outside an adventure park, against a backdrop of snow, forests, and mountains, dressed as an Alpine hunter, complete with silly hat.

In Kerbala, the fun stopped. At the world famous Al-Abbas mosque, we were guided around a small museum that the regime had set up to commemorate the victims of the 1991 uprising. Shiites had tried to topple Saddam’s regime, and had been quickly and ruthlessly put down. The dead being remembered were supporters of the regime who had been chopped to pieces by the rebels at the beginning of the uprising. We saw authentic nooses, a meat hook, dried-up pools of blood displayed behind glass, and pictures of children’s heads that, according to the minders, had been hacked off by “agents from the other side of the fence”: Iran. The museum was on every school trip’s itinerary.

There we were, guardians of free speech, listening to the keeper of the Syed Madhi Fadhil al-Ghurabi mosque after having carefully written down his name. Al-Ghurabi with a G-H cleared his throat and said, in classical Arabic, translated by one of our minders, “Our Leader, Mr. Saddam Hussein, may Allah protect him, has set aside fifteen kilos of gold, and 150 kilos of silver, for the restorations, despite the continuing aggression against Iraq by Iran and the West.” On the wall there was a picture of a praying Saddam, and a
family tree proving that the Leader was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. The late King Hussain of Jordan, also a relative, had had this family history “researched” by scripture scholars. Al-Ghurabli looked at the minders—was his rendition alright?

We’d been told that we could ask questions, and some thought it was worth trying. Was it true that, while putting down the uprising, random civilians were tied to tanks so that the rebels wouldn’t shoot at them? That the Friday afternoon sermon hadn’t been held for years because the regime was afraid of gatherings? Under the shadow of the meat hook, Al-Ghurabi began to pour with sweat, and the minders quickly ended the talk.

They led us on to the Saddam Hussein hospital—you didn’t need a notebook to remember the names of the institutions in Iraq. A photographer in our group had been coming to Iraq every six months for years, and recognized one of the doctors from previous visits.

“Good to see you! How is the hospital?”

“Alhamdulillah,
God is great, as we say.”

Nearly all the equipment on the ward was broken, and spare parts couldn’t be obtained because of the sanctions. At least that’s what the regime said. Another doctor explained that all the cancer patients had to be sent home because there was no money for medicine; with a glance at the bored but happily nodding minders, he continued angrily, saying that the sanctions had turned Iraq into a refugee camp. “And why? Because Iraq is supposed to be harboring weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knows that we haven’t had those weapons for a long time and that America just wants to destroy Iraq, don’t they?”

A German journalist from our group decided to act as
if we were in a democracy. He pointed out that, in the area where the top party leaders lived, he’d seen a swimming pool installed, as well as Mercedes cars and satellite dishes ... The regime had money for that, didn’t it? The doctor faltered, Oxford accent and all. “I’m certain our worthy president has a plan to break the back of this crisis,” he said. And then he was gone.

“Have you got your quotes?” the head minder asked. We nodded, and then we were gone, too.

 

 

T
his was dictatorship laid bare again. I quickly came up with a background story entitled, “Angst rules in Kerbala.” But is that what came across? If it had taken me so long to see through dictatorship, what would it be like for readers living in the safe Netherlands?

In any case, the boss gave me his compliments on a different piece. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tareq Aziz, had been able to make time for us because we’d been a group. It had been a stage play with standard answers to standard questions—sanctions, UN resolutions, diplomatic maneuvers ... For anyone who kept up with the news agencies, nothing new was said. But Tareq Aziz was a famous name, so I’d scored. But a couple of reactions stayed with me. Someone from head office asked why I hadn’t been able to get a visa more quickly, and one editor was annoyed that I hadn’t responded to his urgent email. “Didn’t you know I was in Iraq?” I answered.

“Yes, and ...?”

At which point, I had to spell out the fact that you can’t send emails in a country where fear rules. It was rather embarrassing, but I couldn’t reproach my colleagues too
much, because they’d based their ideas partly on my work. In two years, I’d made the front page ten times, I’d written hundreds of articles, and had been on the radio at least two hundred times, but the reality of dictatorship was pretty much only apparent in my subordinate clauses. And, for the sake of clarity, I’d continued to use the word “president” instead of “head crook”; “parliament” instead of “applause machine”; and “commentator” instead of “inciter,” “goad,” or “arse-licker.”

 

 

T
hen, one day, Egypt hit the news again. European and African heads of state were coming to Cairo for the first Euro-African summit—an attempt by the Egyptian regime to act as a “bridge between the continents.” The city creaked under the security measures, and I was happy because “my” area had been out of the news cycle for a while. But that happiness was to be short-lived.

Just before the opening, all of the journalists were brought together in a room in the Cairo Conference Center. Our mobile telephones were confiscated, and we were told that we wouldn’t be able to leave until the closing address. The journalists who’d flown in from Europe were the most furious, but protest was futile.

There we sat, and I felt like yelling out, “What are we doing here while a band of crooks is bleeding this country dry?” Later that day, the European and African leaders would feed us their great quotes, which we would have forgotten before we’d even broadcast them. Imagine if a people’s uprising had happened right outside the door. The correspondents would all have chimed, “Nobody expected this.” But why would nobody have expected this? Because we’d
had other notions, or because we only looked at what the news agencies had indicated was “the story?”

I had already abandoned the idea that you would know what was going on in the world if you followed the news. But now, in the Cairo Conference Center, I realized that the most important element was missing from the news about the Middle East. A dictatorship is not an obstacle to good journalism in the same category as, say, the routine incompetence of travel agencies that drives you crazy. Dictatorship itself was the most important thing to report about in the Arab world. In some countries, it was harder to see just how dreadful it was through the thick clouds of propaganda and misinformation, but in essence all of the twenty Arab dictatorships were set up in the same way. Writing “around” this was like reporting on France or the Netherlands in 1943 without mentioning the occupation. In reportage, analysis, and cross-talk, I now felt, you should first highlight the dictatorship, and only then talk about the exceptional events—the news.

Locked up in the Cairo Conference Center, I decided to change course and from then on to cover everyday life in a dictatorship as a central part of my work. Over the ensuing months, I discovered just how difficult that was.

The problem lay in the basic principles of quality journalism. People watch the news, listen to the radio, and read the papers because they want to understand more about the world. What they read and see has to be correct. That’s why you need a first name, a last name, both sides of the story, proper checking, and double-checking—you need verifiable information. As The
New York Times
boasts on its front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” In a democracy, it’s an extremely useful and lovely principle. But in a dictatorship,
only a minuscule part of reality is verifiable and fit to print; the rest gets stuck in four big filters.

The first filter is fear within the resident population, which prevents correspondents from finding out very much at all. As an Iraqi girl said to the BBC after the fall of Baghdad years later, her life under Saddam was “like having someone inside your head checking every time you wanted to say anything, whether it was risky or not.”

The fear differed from country to country; but even when smoke-screen-free or brave people told me things, I couldn’t get any further because I couldn’t check anything. There were virtually no reliable and verifiable figures or statistics against which I could set these cases in a broader perspective—which was the second filter.

But newspapers also have background or feature sections where correspondents can air their views, don’t they? It’s true that I could get some things off my chest there; but that also had its limitations, and the best stories in particular stayed out of shot. When I decided to write a background article about the vulnerability and powerlessness of ordinary people, I realized it was only worth doing if I could give an example that would touch readers’ hearts. So, in one instance, I scrolled through my files and came up with a Dutch woman living in Baghdad—she would let readers feel what dictatorship was like.

She was one of the last remaining Dutch people in Baghdad; I had met her on my first trip to Iraq. Due to the sanctions, there was no Dutch embassy in Baghdad, so the consul in Amman had given me her number. He told me that she was an old lady who had married an Iraqi Christian in the early 1950s. She hadn’t left Iraq for decades, and still spoke Dutch like the Queen. At first, she refused to meet me.
“We don’t associate with Catholics,” she said tartly down the telephone, and she clearly only half-believed me when I told her that
de Volkskrant
had swapped its Catholic colors for a more progressive outlook before I’d even been born. Eventually, she agreed, and a few hours later we were standing outside her house in the rain. A shutter opened and I stepped forward, but the door remained closed. My minder, Mazjdi from the Ministry of Information, looked at me, and I looked at him. We were in an area that obviously used to be quite well to do, with nice trellis-work and an expansive but empty garden.

Finally, the door opened and an awkward greeting ensued. She probably hadn’t dared to turn me down. We were offered a glass of lemonade, and Mazjdi leafed through a few magazines. I had told him that I was conveying the best wishes of the embassy, and he didn’t mind us speaking Dutch. The old lady began to tell me that she couldn’t leave the country because the regime was asking for twenty thousand dollars per exit visa. Her husband was ill, and the necessary medicines weren’t available. Her own heart problems were simple to treat in the Netherlands but not in Iraq, so she’d been served a death sentence.

Because Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors, Iraq could not trade. In order to prevent the country from starving, it was allowed to export oil, with the income being controlled by the UN—the so-called Oil for Food program. Did she have enough to eat? Without betraying any emotion, the lady explained that everyone in the neighborhood received the food distribution correctly, at least until the UN functionary left—if he turned up in the first place. If he wasn’t there, everyone handed everything back in, and the regime’s offices had first choice. The rest went to
the most loyal families, and the other neighbors had to go and beg from them. I talked about the Netherlands for a while, but she clearly wanted to get rid of us. One last thing then: Why had the front door remained closed for so long? She nodded icily at Mazjdi. “You didn’t say you were bringing him. He was on the television recently. Secret service, high up. My seventeen-year-old granddaughter is staying here. If he sees her, he’ll come back later to ... you understand? First, I had to let her escape through the back door.”

That was dictatorship. By Allah, how I wanted to use this story. I’d got it reasonably fact-checked, but then Mazjdi handed me over to another minder for a day. He was a former ambassador who’d returned to the Ministry of Information and had been working for a Japanese correspondent for years. They trusted one another, the Japanese correspondent trusted me, and so we could talk. I discussed the Dutch lady in veiled terms. “She certainly won’t have exaggerated,” he said decisively. “That’s why so many people become informants, and why every father sends one son into the army. That’s how you build up connections, in case you get into trouble.”