Naked in Baghdad

by Anne Garrels

  Like many in the Iraqi middle class, Huda grew up in a secular atmosphere, but Islam has come to play a much more important role here in recent years, a result, she explains, of despair. The government has encouraged and reflected this shift toward religion, justifying its rule on Iraqi patriotism, defense of Palestine, and Islamic solidarity. It was only ten years ago, when she was in her thirties, that Huda began to wear a head scarf. But while she has sought refuge in religion, she is quick to say this should not be mistaken for fundamentalism. “I am from an educated family,” she says. “I respect all human beings.”

  We disappear into the kitchen, away from Sa’ad, who once again seems bored with the proceedings. As she prepares Turkish-style coffee, a thick strong brew, conversation turns to girl talk. She pulls off her head scarf. She laughs that a scarf, a sign of devotion, also has its practical aspects. Her blondish-red hair is in need of a dye job that costs money she doesn’t have. Her daughter, a serious child, chides Huda to cover her hair completely. I can see that, proud as she is of her daughter’s anger at Israel and concern for Palestinians, Huda is uncomfortable with the degree to which Quds has taken to her religion. This attractive, vivacious woman rearranges the scarf her own way, trying out various styles for me. She pointedly leaves some strands of hair visible, flouting strict religious convention.

  She too has a nostalgia for the golden age of the ‘70s, when oil wealth dramatically improved people’s lives and Iraq appeared to be joining the rest of the world, but then came the ’80s and the Iran-Iraq war. Money grew tight even before the UN punished Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Huda once traveled to Europe. She dreamt of studying in the United States, but she can’t afford any of that now. And anyway, she points out sadly, it’s unlikely that a Western country would give her, an Iraqi, a visa,

  She wants her children to see many civilizations, different people, different cultures, so that they can learn to respect others. For now, though, this family is mired in its isolation and growing bitterness at a world that has rejected them.

  It’s at moments like this that I revel in being a female reporter, which on balance has been a distinct advantage. Men generally deal with me as a sexless professional, while women open up in ways that they would not with a man. Hard as it was to break into journalism back in the dark ’70s, and with few role models out there to follow, I have only benefited from my sex, reporting from overseas especially, ironically in societies where women are sequestered. Whether in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, I can walk both sides of the street, talking the talk with male officials while visiting the women’s inner sanctums, which are often off-limits to foreign males. And being an older woman has its advantages too. I would never have been able to interview a mullah along the Pakistan-Afghan border were he not assured in advance that I was an “old woman.” He had tutored the young American muslim John Walker Lindh, who then went to fight for the Taliban until he was captured by U.S. forces. However, I apparently did not look as old as the mullah had anticipated, and on my arrival his aides demanded I wear a burka for the entire interview because “he had the natural feelings of a man,” which he apparently could not control. Enveloped in the burka’s stifling blue nylon pleats and peering through a square of mesh while trying to push buttons on the tape recorder and take notes was not pleasant, but it certainly wasn’t impossible.

  As for covering wars, the dangers are basically the same whether you are male or female. Bullets don’t discriminate, and while some of my bosses in the past have expressed concerns about the risk of rape, my response has been that men can be tortured just as badly, if in different ways.

  At the hotel tonight I spot a group of prostitutes, imported from Russia. According to Amer, they are here to service Saddam’s elder son Uday and his friends. They are scantily dressed and cause quite a stir with some of the male reporters, who would be well advised to stay clear. Bored with their assignment, these young women perform an erotic dance out in the hotel gardens. I wander out to talk to them. They are delighted to chatter in Russian, but a security guard comes up and cuts off the conversation before I am able to find out more about their backgrounds or collect any juicy tidbits.

  NOVEMBER 2, 2002

  A visit to Saddam City, the part of Baghdad where more than two million of Iraq’s Shiites live, has been nixed, so instead we head for al-Adhamiya, a middle-class neighborhood and bastion of Baathist support. The girls school we are taken to seems pretty well appointed. The students in their navy-and-white uniforms primp and giggle as they prepare to have their senior photograph taken. But when a microphone appears, they miraculously refer to notes tucked in their pinafores on why America should not invade Iraq. They spout well-rehearsed answers regardless of the question. Asked if they might have been advised about our arrival in advance, the girls respond vehemently with “No,” but they aren’t very good at lying and the truth quickly emerges.

  Once they have performed their assigned declarations, they can’t hide their curiosity about how girls their age live in America. They want to know how I have a family and do the job I do, a question I am hard-pressed to answer. Seventeen-year-old Noor, one of but a few who is not wearing a headscarf, pipes up, “I want to be a lawyer,” and adds, “I think the most important priority now for women in society is to take part and get what we wish. Only second is marriage.”

  Saddam’s secular revolution gave women in Iraq a remarkable degree of freedom compared to others in the rest of the Arab world. Despite the continued constraints of tradition, they prided themselves on their education, but Saddam’s spending on wars, the subsequent sanctions, demographics, and the shift to a more conservative religious atmosphere are cramping their style. Overall literacy rates, which reached an impressive 87 percent by 1985, began to plummet as Saddam expended billions on the Iran-Iraq war. Following the imposition of UN sanctions in 1991, only 45 percent of girls can now read. Twenty-three percent of Iraqi children of primary-school age are not enrolled in school now, with twice as many girls dropping out as boys. There is the specter of a lost generation, with girls taking the bigger hit.

  These girls are among the fortunate ones, and when the subject turns to their future professions they shout out “engineer,” “doctor,” or “teacher,” but even here the headmistress says she is struggling to stem a soaring dropout rate. With so many men killed during recent wars or going abroad to make a living, girls are under pressure to marry early or risk finding no spouse at all. Given that more and more families are in economic distress, the school tries to raise money among the wealthier parents to help keep those in need from quitting.

  The discussion is veering in too many directions for Sa’ad’s peace of mind. The effect of UN sanctions is the accepted topic, and he tries to keep questions and answers in that box. Headmistress Selwa al-Sharbati obliges and pulls out a photograph. “This is my big sister,” she says. “She was also a headmistress, but she died of breast cancer because of the UN sanctions.” The UN has not permitted the importation of spare parts, let alone new radiation machines, because they might be diverted for military uses.

  Later on at a Baghdad hospital, Dr. Saad Medi Hasani links Iraq’s high infant-mortality rates to both sanctions and the crisis in education. He says illiterate mothers don’t know what is harmful and what isn’t. He says they don’t know about vaccines. As we stand talking in one of the wards, a woman from a nearby village, one of the poor Shiite majority, cuddles her child. She is draped in black. Her face has smeared blue markings on it—tribal tattoos. She doesn’t know her age but guesses she’s about twenty-two. Dr. Hasani translates, saying she never went to school. She can’t read or write, and she doesn’t plan to send her children to school.

  Her youngest, a one-year-old son, suffers from parasites transmitted by dogs and sand flies. Dr. Hasani says this could have been avoided by using repellent or sleeping nets, but that the family had neither the knowledge nor the money. Now he says there’s no hope. He says the only treatment is a drug ca
lled Pentostan, another one of the items on the UN proscribed list. This woman doesn’t have the money to find it on the black market. Her child is going to die.

  NOVEMBER 3, 2002

  As anticipated, there’s no visa renewal. I go through the departure ritual, which requires paying the hotel with shopping bags full of Iraqi dinars and forking out vast sums of dollars in accumulated fees to the Information Ministry. The serial number of each bill must be listed, presumably to ensure the money is not stolen before it reaches Uday’s office. The process takes hours, and is not made any faster by the cashier, who lost most of his fingers in the Gulf War. Then there are the necessary letters and stamps to confirm that I am not skipping the country without settling my accounts. The last step is taking in my satellite phone so that it can be sealed and documented, lest I leave it behind for some Iraqi to have fun with.

  I leave Mr. Mohsen $100, a modest contribution, but I hope he will look favorably on my next visa application. The Information Ministry wants to clear the decks for the moment. The staff is exhausted from monitoring us. I am exhausted from being monitored. As the milling horde waits outside his office to demand visa extensions, Mohsen is relieved that I have chosen to go without a fight. He closes my expanding file, saying, “You are very well behaved.” Little does he know, but may he believe it.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: NOVEMBER 4, 2002

  Brenda, ever mindful of her local civic responsibilities, landed in New York late today from Amman in time to vote here on Tuesday. She is on her way to Norfolk as I finish this.

  “Surreal, difficult, and expensive” best describes the past two weeks. She will tell you that working in Baghdad was as difficult as anything that she has ever done. Everywhere Brenda went, her government minder was sure to go—making her job all but impossible. Pleasant enough in person, her constant shadow cast a pall on virtually every conversation. Occasionally, she would slip the leash, but even when on her own the most that she could get out of the people was that they were tired of war, tired of the struggle to retrieve a modicum of what they had before the Gulf War, and fearful that they would lose it all over again. By language unspoken, some made clear that they were also tired of Saddam. But U.S. threats had solidified popular support for him. Did you know that in Iraqi Arabic “BUSH” means “empty” or “nothing”?

  The only bit of levity came after a long, hot marginal morning of interviews when her minder and Brenda had the following colloquy:

  Annie, why are you so thin? You don’t eat. Don’t you ever get hungry?

  Not when I’m working.

  Oh, some people have to eat sometimes.

  Does that mean that you want to get something to eat?

  Oh, that is a very good idea.

  So between constantly buying everyone food, paying exorbitantly for her minder and driver, shelling out daily to the Ministry of Information just for the privilege of being there, and paying for her dingy but pricey hotel room, it was an expensive two weeks. Oh yes, and then there were the hundreds of dollars in bribes that Brenda had to pay at the airport just to get out of the country. Once in Amman and looking back, Brenda was unsure, all in all, if it had been worth it. It was, for one of Brenda’s redeeming virtues is that she has never quite figured out how good she is. Ah, I think I hear the taxi.

  Ta-ta,

  V

  BRENDA BULLETIN: DECEMBER 1, 2002

  Brenda spent the past couple of weeks getting some sleep, reveling in the domesticity foreign travel denies her, and packing up again. She was also, once again, constantly on the phone at strange hours coaxing a visa out of unenthusiastic Iraqi officials.

  We spent a last glorious four days in Vienna with my daughter Rebecca, who lovingly calls our girl “Wism,” as in wicked stepmother. And then she headed more or less east, and I west. However, the only route to Baghdad from Austria proved to be a most circuitous one. At 8 p.m. she flew Czech Air to Prague; from there she caught a flight to Beirut that landed at 2 a.m.; four hours later she was on a flight to Amman and then, after collecting her hard-won visa, she caught the 9 p.m. flight into Baghdad.

  To while away the down-time of the cat-and-mouse game that is so much of her life these days, Brenda has taken up a new indoor sport: embroidery. Madame Dufarge incarnate, Brenda cross-stitches away, artfully recording the elusive sites of Weapons of Mass Destruction on pillowcases collected from the better hotels en route.

  The question has arisen as to why the good lady heads for the farthest, most Godforsaken parts of the globe on such a frequent basis. I have chosen to ignore the opinion most often voiced: that it has something to do with me, the five dogs, the two cats, and my large and overbearing family. A second explanation is more palatable. Those who are familiar with her own family have perhaps picked up on certain manifest patterns of obsessive-compulsive behavior. As noted previously, a gear gets thrown and this otherwise delightful, ofttimes wafty lass becomes steely-eyed, focused, intrepidly brave, and dogged. Nothing, not even me, five dogs, two cats, and my large and overbearing family can stand in her way. And then there is a third possibility, the one I like best. She was simply unable to get everything that was on her Christmas list when she was last there, and well, pashmina by any other name is just wool from Land’s End.

  Cheers,

  V

  DECEMBER 3, 2002

  It looks like the bribe to Mohsen and dozens of subsequent phone calls worked. A visa was waiting at the Iraqi embassy in Amman. Ahmed was at the airport in Baghdad to meet me. He says Sa’ad is again my minder but Amer can’t work for me as his longtime Japanese clients have arrived. He has a contract with them and there’s nothing I can do. I am desolate.

  We do the now-familiar dance through the airport. The “fees,” however, have increased, perhaps because people know that time is running out and they want to make as much money now as they can. And just when it looks like we have sailed through, there’s a hitch. I have to get a letter from the Information Ministry before customs will release my satellite phone. This requires a trip back to the airport.

  I race to the Information Ministry to get the necessary documents before officials pack up for the night, and then I head back to the airport. With hope flouting reality it was built after the ’91 Gulf War, but given the continued UN sanctions there aren’t many flights into Baghdad, and by the time I return the airport is deserted. The guards demand money before they will let me in. I wander around the sepulchral halls and finally track down the lone official who’s waited because of the promise of a meal, which the driver and I bought for him along the way. He hands over the sat phone, and I go back to the Information Ministry, where it is registered and unsealed. This time, though, I am not going to be able to work here. My “office space” out in the courtyard has been turned into a construction site. For reasons that defy understanding, the Information Ministry is expanding the building. These guys are living in never-never land. The new offices won’t be finished before there’s a war, when this entire building undoubtedly will be turned to ash. And if there isn’t a war, the number of journalists will drop off dramatically and there will be no one to rent the new offices.

  I decide to risk it and take the satellite phone to the Al-Rashid. When I check in, I ask for a room with a view over the swimming pool, the best direction for locking on to a satellite. For yet more money, reception is happy to oblige.

  DECEMBER 4, 2002

  The smarmy Uday al-Tae is still the managing director at the Information Ministry, but the simian Mohsen has been eclipsed by a new man who’s been put over him to run day-to-day operations. Qadm al-Tae (a distant relation to his boss, Uday) is definitely in a different class: organized and refreshingly straightforward. Nonetheless this means ingratiating myself with yet another official. The ten-day-visa rule still holds, and within seconds of my arrival it’s clear that reporters remain obsessed with the issue of visa extensions. Who gets them and how is a subject of endless speculation and jealousy. And there’s a notice announcing a hike in
the daily fees we have to pay for the pleasure of being in Iraq. They have doubled to at least $200 per person per day. Television companies pay far more.

  Sa’ad now has five journalists in tow, from each of whom he continues to demand and receive $100 a day. With the shortage of minders, let alone those who speak English, he can call the shots. A lot of reporters still have no one to work with and are more or less stuck in the Information Ministry with access only to official press conferences.

  The story this time round is going to be inspections. Saddam Hussein has agreed to UN resolution 1441 demanding the return of UN inspectors after a four-year break. So far, the Iraqi government has been surprisingly compliant, a strategy that could prove more vexing to the Bush administration than Saddam’s usual defiance. But the new UN resolution also stipulates inspections of presidential palaces as well as interviews with Iraqi scientists without Iraqi officials present, either inside the country or outside if need be. These are potential flashpoints, but analysts and diplomats I’ve spoken to wonder whether the United States has underestimated Iraq’s capacity to cooperate, since the regime’s very survival is at stake.

  At the Al-Rashid tonight, I hear a voice bellowing, “Bella!” across the lobby. It can only be one person, Lorenzo Cremonesi from Italy’s Corriere della Sera. His short blond hair stands straight up on end as usual. His eyes sparkle with devilish merriment. In an obscenely revealing pair of running shorts, he’s obviously just come back from a ferocious bout of physical exercise, his everyday way of dealing with tension. It’s great to see him even though he immediately yanks the cigarette out of my hand and, as ever, chastises me for smoking.