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First-Hand Report from the Middle EastAli Hussein: "Whoever sees death would accept sickness"Three War Times staff members recently returned from Jordan and Syria where they met with people and groups, mostly Iraqi, to hear their experiences and views of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They were part of a June 12-20 delegation of peace activists organized by Global Exchange, and they will be sharing what they learned in a series of messages to War Times listmembers (and others - please forward this to friends!) over the coming months. Below is one Iraqi's story; for others, please go to http://happening-here.blogspot.com/. I'm in Damascus with my friend Gary and our translator and guide, Muna. Gary and I are part of a delegation of peace activists visiting Jordan and Syria to talk with Iraqi refugees. Gary's finishing up his M.F.A. in documentary film-making at Hunter College in New York City. When we're out on the streets he always has this look of determination on his face, making him appear tough and thoughtful at the same time. Muna is a young Iraqi woman who is herself a refugee: she fled Baghdad to get away from both the escalating violence and a bad personal situation, and ekes out a living working for an NGO while translating on the side. It's Sunday, the first day of the work week in Syria. The street we are on is bustling, packed with people window-shopping at the small stores that line the road. We're here to meet Ali Hussein, an Iraqi who's been living in Syria for about a year. We ran into him the night before while exploring Damascus, and he invited us to his house to talk about his experience in occupied Iraq. We've just bought some sweets for him as a gift, and now we're looking for Ali among the streaming lunch-hour crowd. After some confused back-and-forth over cell phone we finally end up on the same street corner and follow him to his house. Ali lives just off a busy road nicknamed "Iraqis Street". The invasion and occupation of Iraq has created an enormous number of displaced persons; estimates for Jordan, Syria's southern neighbor, range up to one million. For now, Syria is welcoming of these refugees, but as more and more Iraqis try to escape that may change. Here in Damascus, the poorer refugees live around Iraqis Street. It's like the ghettoes of US metropolises or, Muna tells us, the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City. PART ONE: Sickness and Death in IraqWe head into Ali's living room. Ali introduces us to his mother, who has just come from Baghdad in order to see her son after their year-long separation. Ali's young son brings us tall glasses of orange juice and then settles down in a cushy chair in the corner, while his five year-old daughter Mariam wanders in and out. Muna advises us to place the sweets we have brought on the small coffee table instead of presenting them as a gift. Eventually, we sit down, and Ali begins to tell us about Iraq. "Whoever sees death would accept sickness," Ali says. It's an Iraqi proverb. For Ali, Saddam Hussein was a sickness, an oppressor and tyrant. But his dictatorship was preferable to the chaos and violence of present-day Iraq. "Before," he says, "the country used to be very safe. Now it's all misery." Ali's family lived in Baghdad. After the invasion, as state power disintegrated, militias began to control more and more of social life in Iraq. The militias were organized along sectarian lines, increasing Sunni-Shia tensions. Ali's family got caught in the middle, when a Shiite militia kidnapped his Sunni uncle. They found his body in the morgue days later. Ali shows us the photos he took in the morgue of his uncle's body; the evidence of torture is obvious. He has two whole books filled with snapshots taken from different angles, as if documenting the crime might bring some kind of justice. Sometime after his uncle was killed, an explosion occurred near Ali's house in Iraq. Neighbors told the U.S. military that Ali's brother had been involved in planting the explosives; soon thereafter, soldiers came and took his brother. Ali claims that his brother had nothing to do with the explosion, and indeed many Iraqis do inform on neighbors merely to settle personal vendettas. The soldiers didn't tell any of Ali's family where they were taking his brother, so Ali went to the nearest American base to track his brother down. There, they told him they didn't even have his brother's name in the system, much less his current location. Then, Ali was leaving the base disheartened when a group of Iraqis began to shoot at him. Ali figures they must have seen him enter the base and assumed he was a collaborator. Ali didn't recognize any of them, but they figured out where he lived and left a message on his front lawn. "Your blood is wasted," it read, meaning that it would be right to kill him. After the parade of US drones, Garner, Bremer, Allawi, Negroponte, and Khalilzad, after Bush's “Mission Accomplished” banner and endless “turning points,” liberated Iraq had become a weird mixture of irony and tragedy, where Ali could be targeted for supposedly collaborating with a military that had kidnapped his brother in the name of democracy. And so Ali chose the sickness of exile over the literal death he faced if he remained in his homeland. He left for Syria. PART TWO: Shadows in SyriaLeaving Baghdad was difficult and expensive. Ali was a taxi driver, so he had a small car. He sold that and most of his other possessions to be able to travel. Still, he did not have enough money to take his family with him. He left them in Baghdad and lived alone in Syria for three months. "I wish I could put Bush in that situation," he muses. When he got to Damascus he found a job at a cellular phone store. The pay is meager and Ali barely makes it through each month. For a while, his family sent him part of their allotted food rations so he could have enough to eat. Ali's family was eventually able to join him. He found a wealthy Iraqi in Damascus who became his friend, bought him some basic goods, and then financed his family's relocation to Syria. Ali explains that he didn't have anything to reward the man with, so he gave him his daughter. Ali's daughter is the man's second wife. Later, Muna tells us that she feels awful for the daughter, speculating that the daughter probably didn't know the man before her marriage, and is probably very young -- Ali himself is only 39. Even now, with his family there, life is not easy. "In Syria," Ali says, "you become a shadow of yourself. Even though you know the culture here, you never feel part of it. Because you're not here by choice, and because of all the financial hardships." Part Three: A Future?Ali blames the Americans for the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and sees himself as a casualty of US geopolitical machinations. He doesn't believe Bush is really trying to implement freedom and democracy. "They want to be here so they can frighten the Islamic countries," he says. Ali also thinks the Americans are causing and purposefully exacerbating sectarianism in Iraq, and claims that his friends have seen American soldiers planting bombs in both Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. This was not an uncommon thing to hear from the Iraqi refugees we met with. It's a testament to the Iraqis' deep mistrust of the American military, and suggests the degree to which the occupation has lost any legitimacy for them. Ali is grim about Iraq's future. He tells us that if the U.S. troops stay in Iraq, there will only continue to be more killing. If they leave, he is worried about the possibility of civil war. But if the troops leave, he adds, "Iraqis will deal with the situation and maybe it will be better. The different factions would calm down, and then their leaders would negotiate." We ask Ali about his hopes for himself and his family. His answer is simple: "I have lost hope." Syria for him seems like a dead end, an interminable procession of desperate months. He is saving money so he can get into Greece, where it is cheaper to live. He will have to be smuggled in a cargo container, and he isn't sure whether or not he will survive the trip. But he is going to try anyway. After we thank Ali for his time and begin to leave, he invites us to eat lunch with his family; we can smell it cooking in the kitchen down the hall. Muna suggests declining the invitation, because they are a very poor family and have trouble feeding their own children. After some debate, Gary and I agree. But Ali insists. As an Iraqi, he says he is ashamed not to eat with his guests after hosting them. It isn't proper. After a moment, we decline again, uncomfortably. We are making our way down Iraqis street again when Gary feels a small tug on his shirt. It's Ali's young son, with the sweets we left on their table. "No," Muna says, "these are sweets for Mariam." She doesn't want to hurt Ali's dignity by suggesting the sweets are for him, as if he couldn't afford it himself. The boy scurries back and we keep going. After a while, Muna turns to us. "They knew it was a gift," she tells Gary and me. "It just, you know, reminds them." We invite you to sign on to the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras announcement list (3-4 messages per month) to receive regular reports, interviews, flyers and news recaps. Go to the "get email updates" section, above left. War Times/Tiempo de Guerras is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Third World Organizing. |
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