The As It Happens Files (27 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
Our next encounter with Salam Pax came in February 2004, 11 months after the Americans had shown up. He was back home in Baghdad, and it was becoming clear that things weren’t going very well for the invader/liberators—and not at all well for many Iraqis. For Salam, too, the bloom was off the rose, but he remained hopeful that it would all work out in the end. The main thing was that Saddam was gone and the Iraqi people were free to write their own future. I asked him what had changed in the months since we’d last spoken.
SP: Quite a lot. You know, it’s kind of—Whenever something really bad happens, like the last bombing near the Green Zone, you go through a week where you’re really down. You think it’s never going to get better. But usually, you kind of get over that, and it’s great to see people just
getting on with their lives and trying to do something. Business is going great. You go through the streets of Baghdad and they’re full of merchandise, and people are buying and selling like crazy. And they’re seeing so much prosperity and money coming in, it’s unbelievable.
So, it’s good and bad. Like today, with the bombing—that was really bad. But you know, you deal with it—and it’s great to see people going on with their lives.
ML: Do you think the bombing will ever stop, though?
SP: It has to at a point. I mean, look: what happened today, for example. It’s clearly to scare people off from joining the new police force, the new Iraqi army.…
It’s so important for us to see the Iraqi police on the street. They are really, for most Iraqis, heroes at the moment, and you know, there are hundreds of people there at the moment, trying to get into the new police force. When these terrorists see that what they are doing is really not stopping people from trying to rebuild their country … it just has to stop. I mean, okay, they might be not the most rational people, these terrorists, but at one point, you kind of see how futile what you’re doing is.
ML: Are you back at work?
SP: Actually, yes. The great thing that happened just a week ago is that the firm I used to work with is now back to building the hospital they were building before the war, and they asked me to come and get my job back, which is great! Yes, excellent.
ML: You’re very happy about that.
SP: Oh yes, absolutely.
ML: You’ll have a salary, for one thing.
SP: [He laughs] Yes.
ML: How are your family, then? Are they all trying to resume their normal lives as well?
SP: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I mean, my mom, at one point after the war, decided she’s never going to leave the house. Now, though, she goes out, shops with her sister and goes around the city and everything.
My brother is back to his work. You have to be involved, you have to do things, and part of it is participating in your daily lives, your daily duties, and that’s the way everybody brings normal life back to the city. It’s been—it’s been a year now!
ML: Mm. So are you talking at all about the Iraqi caucuses, about the possibility of a total handover to Iraqis? About elections?
SP: Oh yeah, absolutely. This is the big discussion now, you know: how to do it, when to do it. Does Ali Sistani agree with what people are proposing? Are we ready for elections? This is really the next thing, because we realize that maybe we’re not totally ready to do things on our own, but this is the first step. We will have some sort of election to choose representatives who will actually govern the country—because the governing council at the moment can’t do much at all. I mean, everybody goes and says, “Why is the governing council not doing anything?” Because they don’t have the authority to do anything. We need actually a governing body which has authority. So yeah, absolutely—very excited about this, and everybody’s waiting for this to happen.
ML: Why do you say the country maybe isn’t ready to completely govern itself?
SP: You know, we’ve been like this closed room with no windows for 30 years. Now the doors are open and you’re blinded with the light; you cannot really find your way. It takes time to realize what sort of representation we need, who to choose for this very important role—leading the country through this very difficult time.
And people in this stage, in this chaos, are so easily influenced by certain figures or people who are very—you know, politicians. I worry about the influence certain parties, political parties, will have on people—whether we will actually have honest elections. Fraud is a huge issue, because how are we going to control all of this? We don’t have the personnel to actually deal with this. I don’t think we’re ready for a one-vote-per-citizen thing; I think it’s still too early. We need to go through the process of electing neighbourhood councils who will elect representatives from them—this way everybody gets to learn something.
ML: Your lives have all changed radically, have been changed, for better or worse, by the Americans and the British, notably, and there’s a lot of talk in London and Washington now about whether Tony Blair and George Bush were lying or were misled about the weapons of mass destruction. What are your thoughts about that?
SP: Look, this whole discussion about the weapons of mass destruction and whether Saddam actually had them or not—it is so unimportant for Iraqis! I mean, we’re very glad that things have changed. We got rid of Saddam and we have hopes for a much better future. Now, the weapons of mass destruction—that’s really the problem of the governments of the U.S. and the U.K. I mean, if these people lied, then they have responsibility toward
their people. For us Iraqis, we were never sure whether he actually had them or not, and to tell you the truth, most Iraqis would say, “If he had them, he would have used them.” Saddam was crazy enough to do it. So when the U.S. and U.K. troops came in and there were none, Iraqis went, “Okay, he doesn’t have them—and we’re very glad that he’s gone.”
While the Iraqis were trying to sort out their future, Western reporters on the ground in Iraq were telling us about infighting among Iraqis, about problems with foreign agitators, with security. And coalition leaders were saying that progress was being made and the day was just around the corner when they’d be able to hand over the reins to the Iraqis and go home, although no one should be in too much of a hurry; the main thing was to do it properly.
On the first anniversary of the invasion, we went in search of other Iraqi civilians to talk to, to see how things looked from their point of view. Hopefully, this would give us a clearer picture of what was happening than we were getting from either the military spokesmen or the reporters, who were mostly confined to the Green Zone in Baghdad. Finding these “ordinary Iraqis” wasn’t going to be easy—for one thing, the phones still weren’t working very well—so we gave the job to Gord Westmacott.
Gord had come to
As It Happens
about the time that Chechen terrorists were storming a theatre in Moscow, taking hundreds of men, women and children hostage. The drama ended when a Russian SWAT team rushed in and gassed everybody, killing all the hostage takers and also a significant number of the people they were supposed to be rescuing. There were difficulties inherent in calling Russia and
talking to people who only spoke Russian (Gord didn’t, but our technical producer Sinisa Jolic did, so that helped), and then, if you found someone, trying to persuade them to persuade someone in authority to come to the phone and talk to a Canadian about this big mess, in English. But in spite of all this, Gord got his man, and we scored the first interview with someone who was willing to identify the gas they’d used in the assault.
Now we figured that Gord was the man to land us an assortment of Iraqis (phones or no phones), and he did. In early March 2004, we talked to a female French professor, a medical resident at Al-Mansoor Hospital, an electrical engineer and a senior high school student—all in Baghdad. We also interviewed a plastic surgeon in Basra and a telecommunications engineer in Erbil. The interesting thing is that the thrust of what they were saying—most of them—wasn’t so very different from what Salam Pax had told us: life was difficult but getting better, and they were really very glad to be rid of Saddam.
Dr. Ali Fadhl Ali Nadawi, for instance, the medical resident, said that on the whole, conditions in his hospital were much better than before the war—better than they had been for a long time. I asked him about the resistance fighters, and he said, “I don’t call them resistance fighters; I call them terrorists. I am Sunni and I did not benefit under Saddam.” He added that people did not want the U.S. to leave at that moment.
Dr. Nadawi shared Salam Pax’s reservations about a rush to democracy.
“We don’t have proper parties,” he told us, “or political organizations.”
He was afraid that too much haste would only produce a weak democracy, like Turkey’s.
Zuhair Dhuwaib, the electrical engineer, informed us that the power grid was delivering power to Baghdad residents for about three hours at a time—three hours on, three hours off. The problems, he said, were mainly inherited from “the old Iraq,” the result of poor maintenance and the damage done during the 1991 invasion and the fact that they’d built no new generators for the past 10 to 15 years. But there was sabotage as well; people were taking down the transmission towers in order to get their hands on the conducting metals, which they were selling on the black market. I asked him if people were angry about not having power. Some were, some weren’t, he said; it depended on your politics.
“What about elections?” I asked Zuhair.
“Impossible,” he said. They had no electoral system, no voters’ lists, no knowledge about the workings of democracy. It would be very dangerous, he thought, to have elections too soon. It would also be dangerous if the coalition forces left too early; if they left, there would be massacres. But he was optimistic about the long run.
“I’m sure Iraq will be the greatest country in the Middle East. It’s just a matter of time. We have the people, the resources, the culture—everything except luck.”
North of Baghdad, in Erbil, our Kurdish telecommunications engineer also felt it would take time to rebuild Iraq as a proper country. Iraq was a complicated place, with many religions and many ethnicities. What had happened in the past 35 years would not be undone overnight, he thought. He wasn’t plumping for Kurdish independence, because he believed Iraq’s neighbours would find this intolerable, but he did want a good deal of autonomy for Kurds within an Iraqi state. The plastic surgeon in Basra told us it was pretty quiet there at the time. He said they were grateful for British help in getting rid of Saddam, but now they should leave. He hoped the new
Iraq would be a more tolerant place; he was Presbyterian himself.
The most pessimistic readings of the situation came from two women. Quitaf Ahmed, our graduating high school student, told us her life was horrible. She dared not go out in the street for fear of being kidnapped. She said she was tired of war, tired of being scared and not at all grateful to the coalition forces for freeing them of Saddam. She wanted the Americans to leave within six months, just as soon as they had fixed everything they’d damaged. Nor did she think things would be better five years down the road. Quitaf said she was hoping to study dentistry at Baghdad University and had no plans to leave the city, but oddly, if she did leave, the place she wanted to go to was the United States!
Our French professor at Baghdad University was equally unhappy with the security situation. The streets were full of common criminals as well as resistance fighters, she said. After nine o’clock at night, it wasn’t safe for even the men to go out. She wasn’t sad to see Saddam go—she couldn’t imagine ever talking to foreign radio and saying what she thought while Saddam was around, she told us—but good as it was, freedom didn’t trump security. She was looking to a strong Iraqi government for relief, the sooner the better.
Five years into the war, the pessimists appear to have more grounds for complaint than ever. When CBC’s Gillian Findlay interviewed Zuhair Dhuwaib again on March 19, 2008, the electrical engineer in Baghdad told her that he had become convinced that the President of the United States was doing harm to the Iraqi people on purpose. How could it be otherwise? he thought. The people who had replaced Saddam were 20 times worse than Saddam had been. Five years after
the invasion, Dhuwaib had no water, no phone line and power for only one hour a day. The area where he lived was surrounded by barbed wire. His 5 children and 11 grandchildren and his wife had all left the country, and he was alone.
Salam Pax was similarly discouraged when I spoke to him again. There was nothing left of his hopes for a better future in Iraq.
You know, I sometimes look at some of the television diaries I did for the BBC and I feel so stupid about them now. How could I be so optimistic? But I believed it. I believed that we could do it. You could see things going wrong, but you just think, this is part of the process. I think I bought the whole package of “This is part of the process.”
I was mistaken, I was wrong, and it just takes a while to be able to admit it. But I can’t watch them [the TV diaries]; they are painfully, stupidly optimistic. It’s a pity; they were really exciting times. And now … it’s just very scary.