Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He hopes that what has happened here will soon happen throughout Iraq. That the Iraqis themselves will take control, without the supervision of ‘foreigners’ (for foreigners, read Americans). And that this would become a free and democratic country, like Western European countries – he mentions France, Spain and England – with a lay state, tolerant of all beliefs, including, of course, Islam, which is his religion. I ask him whether events in Iraq might be similar to Algeria in the early nineties when, in the first more or less free elections in Algeria’s independent history, it looked as if the fundamentalists would win power, through democratic processes, and would then have ended up abolishing democracy and imposing a theocracy. The Dean disagrees with my analysis, waving his arms with absolute conviction. ‘Here the fanatics will never win free elections,’ he assures me. ‘Here the great majority of us Muslims are civilised, open, democratically inclined people.’

  I hope with all my heart that this will be the case. But it is quite clear that there are a good number of fanatics on the loose, because the university teachers tell me that some of the thieves who took part in the looting and vandalism that destroyed this site and burned the libraries – I visit the Russian and German libraries where everything has been reduced to ashes, not a single book escaping the flames – and the offices in the Faculty, also daubed fundamentalist slogans on the wall, cursing this house of evil and the infidel.

  Who were these looters, who have created more wounds, bitterness and anger than the coalition bombings? I’m not exaggerating when I say that in the dozens of conversations and interviews that I’ve had over the past days, I have not heard a single Iraqi lamenting the fall of Saddam Hussein, who was clearly detested by the majority of the people that he enslaved. Indeed, most if not all seem to celebrate his fall from power. I have not even heard many complaints from the victims of the bombing. But what everyone is agreed on is their detestation of the dreadful looting that followed the fall of the dictator and has reduced Baghdad and, so it seems, a good number of other cities and towns in Iraq, to ruins, with gutted and burned houses and piles of rubble everywhere. And a very large number of citizens who were full of hope at the end of the dictatorship – the ones who toppled the statues of the dictator and who have defaced his image wherever they find it – have lost everything they had, their furniture, their memories, their housing, their clothes, the savings that they kept hidden in their houses out of fear that the banks would confiscate them. Everyone asks: ‘Why did the Americans not get involved?’ ‘Why didn’t they stop them?’ It’s a mystery that has yet to be resolved. There were hundreds, thousands of soldiers in the streets who from the outset could have dealt robustly with that maddened swarm of Ali Babas who, like a cloud of hungry locusts, laid waste to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities over several days, without any intervention from the Americans. Up to that time they had been greeted by many Iraqis as liberators but, after the looting, this friendly feeling turned into frustration and hostility.

  One of the explanations for the vandalism is the large number of common criminals let out of prison in Iraq by order of Saddam Hussein. How many were there? Between thirty and a hundred thousand. The figures never tally and sometimes reach fantastic extremes, as always happens in countries without freedom of information in which people are informed by hunches or hearsay. However, a great deal of this havoc was caused by a bunch of criminals who were allowed free rein in this country without law and order that Saddam Hussein wished to bequeath to posterity. It was also caused by the agents, torturers and bureaucrats of the regime, who were anxious to destroy all traces of their misdeeds. But it was also inevitable that circumstances turned many mild citizens into Ali Babas. Finding themselves free and uncensored, in a world without any checks or laws, some gave vent to the unbridled, savage thirst for violence that we all carry within us. The environment caused some to show their frustration and protest in the most ferocious way, or to take the revenge that they had so long dreamed of, to settle accounts with their neighbours, colleagues, relatives, litigants or enemies. Fanatics saw that the time had come to punish the pornographers and the degenerates; the envious saw it as an opportunity to take revenge on the people they had envied; in general, a people humiliated, maltreated, terrorised and alienated by thirty-five years of authoritarianism wallowed in a bath of purifying brutality and licentiousness, as in the great Dionysian festivities that began as a song to happiness and ended in human sacrifice and mass suicides. All this is comprehensible, after all. But what is not comprehensible is that the forces that occupied Iraq and had prepared for this war to perfection, right down to the technological minutiae – to judge from the speed of the victory and the mathematical precision of the bombing – had not anticipated this, and had no plan to combat it.

  I hear all this, in his florid Italian, from Archbishop Fernando Filoni, the apostolic nuncio of His Holiness, who has been in Baghdad for two years. He is small, astute, tough as nails, talkative and an expert on emergencies. In Sri Lanka and Tehran he had received excellent training for this hotbed of tensions that is Iraq. ‘The Holy Father was against the war because he knew what would happen,’ he tells me, with a sad expression on his face. ‘It is very easy to win, but then it is incredibly difficult to administer the peace.’ The nuncio’s residence is a simple house, obsessively clean and tidy, an unusual haven of peace in this city.

  The dictatorship literally destroyed a society that four decades earlier had reached a high level of culture, with hospitals and universities among the most modern in the Middle East, and world-ranking professionals. In the fifties, Baghdad’s culture and art were the envy of its neighbours. The Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein ended all that. There was a haemorrhaging of doctors, engineers, economists, researchers, teachers and intellectuals to the four corners of the world. (While I’m listening to him, I remember that on my way to Iraq, during my stopover in Amman, a diplomat who had spent many years in Jordan told me: ‘For this country, the tragedy in Iraq has been a blessing: the most important musicians, artists and intellectuals here are Iraqi immigrants.’) Censorship, repression, fear, corruption and isolation had increasingly impoverished the country culturally until it reached the low point that it is at today. For that reason there was so much hope among ordinary people at the time of the liberation. Whatever people say, the Americans were initially greeted in a friendly manner. But with the looting and the complete insecurity that followed, this initial sympathy turned into dislike and hostility. ‘You shouldn’t see this as love for Saddam Hussein, but rather as a hatred of chaos, of how precarious life has become.’

  Monsignor Filoni says that fear of robbery, assaults, kidnapping and rape has become a real psychosis. Many families have stopped taking their children to school; they hardly leave their houses and, since there is no police force, keep the weapons that the Americans have asked them to hand in to defend themselves against robbers. The nuncio does not seem very optimistic about the possibility of a modern democracy emerging in Iraq out of all this. There are many social tensions, a complete lack of political experience among the people, little evidence of democracy and too much anarchy for any democratic process to be implemented in a short space of time. In the long term perhaps. The very, very long term. His words repeat, almost literally, what I heard from my friend in Amman: ‘The best that one can hope for in Iraq, realistically, is a controlled and relative democracy, like Jordan. Here there have just been elections and not a single woman was elected. But, according to the law, there will be six women in Parliament since there is a quota for women. The Islamists have only obtained seventeen-and-a-half percent of the vote, a triumph for the regime of King Abdallah. But, if it hadn’t been for an intelligent ad hoc electoral law which prevents candidates getting on closed lists, the Islamist extremists would have gained a much higher percentage. Also, the tribal chiefs who decide the vote of the bulk of the electorate are more macho and intolerant than the Islamists themselves. For me, a system like this is the best that could happ
en in Iraq.’

  When I tell Monsignor Filoni that Iraqi friends have assured me that the case of Tarek Aziz, a Catholic who was the Foreign Minister and accomplice of Saddam Hussein, was not exceptional, for there were many members of the Catholic communities who sympathised with the dictatorship, he shakes his head. Catholics in Iraq, he tells me, approximately one million of them, five per cent of the population, were divided into different branches – the Chaldeans, who still use Aramaic, the language of Christ, in their liturgy; Asirians, Armenians and Latin – felt protected in the early years of the regime because the Ba’ath party proclaimed itself a secular party and put in place a system that recognised all beliefs. But, after the Gulf War, this secularism disappeared. Saddam Hussein used Islam to gain support in Muslim states, and declared himself the standard bearer of the faith against the infidel enemies of Allah. There was strict religious censorship, the regime encouraged the use of the hijab, or Islamic veil, the situation of women suffered a grave setback, and on the radio and television readings from the Koran and broadcasts by clerics and theologians became compulsory; as a result, the Catholic communities became nervous. There were also some isolated acts of religious violence that spread terror. The nuncio tells me about the murder of a seventy-one-year-old nun, Sister Cecilia Mouchi Hanna. In August 2003 she was knifed to death by three young men who, it seems, were released when Saddam Hussein decided to empty the prisons. ‘The Catholics, like every minority, are very interested in having a democratic system in Iraq that would guarantee freedom of religion. But this won’t be achieved without some kind of firm authority.’

  The first time Monsignor Filoni came to Iraq, there was not the freedom that there is today, but at least there was order and a degree of safety. At this time of the year, he remembers, in the torrid heat, people would take their mattresses onto the roof and sleep there, looking up at the stars. Have I seen the stars in the Baghdad sky? I confess that I have been so preoccupied with earthly matters that I have not done so. You really must do so straight away, he tells me; make use of these blackouts that leave the whole city in darkness. Up above, in that inky vault, the stars shine so brightly and so clearly that you have to think about God. Perhaps it was these starry nights back in ancient Mesopotamia that, at the dawn of life, caused men and women to start a dialogue with the divinity. ‘Legend has it that Abraham was born here, in Ur, did you know that? Perhaps here, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, not just writing but also faith was born.’

  25 June–6 July 2003

  5. White Beans

  Kais Olwei is a strong and handsome thirty-seven-year-old Iraqi, with a scar like a small snake on his forehead. He feels unwell every time he sees a plate of white beans on a table. This is because of what happened to him eighteen years ago, but he’ll remember it until he dies and perhaps even after that.

  He was nineteen then, and was arrested in one of those raids on students that Saddam Hussein’s security forces carried out ritually. They took him to the Headquarters of the Security Services (the Mukhabarat) in Baghdad, and the following morning, before they had even begun to interrogate him, they started torturing him. That was also routine. They hung him up by the arms, like a carcass of meat, and, soon after, while they questioned him, he received electric shocks through electrodes attached to his body. The chief of the three policemen who shared the narrow, dark cell with Kais administered the shocks by pressing a button. He received the shocks in short bursts, at regular intervals, firstly on the legs. Then the wires moved up his body until they reached the most sensitive parts: the anus, the penis and the testicles.

  What Kais Olewi remembers of that morning – the first of many such mornings – are not what were doubtless his screams of pain or that slight smell of scorched flesh coming from his own body, but rather the fact that his torturers often forgot about him and became involved in personal conversations, about their families or trivial matters, while Kais Olewi, trussed and suspended in mid-air, reduced to a living wound, wanted to lose consciousness once and for all, but could not manage to do so. At midday they brought the three policemen their lunch: a bowl of steaming white beans. Kais still has a very strong memory of smelling that delicious waft of cooking while he heard the three men discussing which of the cooks at the Headquarters of the Security Services prepared this dish the best. From time to time, while he was still chewing, the head of the group would remember what he was supposed to be doing and turned his attention to the hanging man. Then, as if to assuage his professional conscience, he would press that button and Kais Olewi felt the shock to his brain. Since then he has not been able to smell or taste white bean stew without feeling faint.

  Kais Olewi was condemned to life imprisonment, but was lucky since he only spent eight years in Abu Ghraib prison, from 1987 to 1995, before being released under an amnesty. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, he is one of the Iraq ex-political prisoners working as a volunteer in the organisation that I’m visiting: the Association of Free Prisoners. It is housed in an enormous run-down mansion in Khadimiya, on an embankment along the river Tigris where the people of Baghdad, in quieter times, would stroll in the evenings while the setting sun turned the sky red.

  What now turns this place red are the posters with photos of thousands of people who disappeared during the dictatorship. Some images – of prisoners with their faces eaten away by acid – are almost impossible to look at. They were all found in the files that the Mukhabarat kept of their victims, many of which were unfortunately lost in the fires. But the Association of Free Prisoners, which began to operate immediately after the fall of the dictatorship, have collected from police stations and other organisations involved in the repression all the documentation that had not been destroyed. There is a crowd of people in the corridors, rooms and stairs, where the volunteers, working on improvised desks or on their knees, are filling in forms, establishing lists of names, collating data and trying to attend to the innumerable people – many of whom are women – who have come here to ask for help in finding their parents, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, who one fateful day, x years ago, disappeared from their lives.

  There are other Human Rights organisations doing similar work in Iraq, but this association is the largest. It has offices in the eighteen provinces of the country, except Ramadi, and it receives some – albeit little – support from international bodies and from the CPA run by Paul Bremer. Its main function now is to help relatives locate the disappeared and provide them with documentation which will allow them to present petitions to, and seek reparation from, the Iraqi government (when it exists). The Association also has a group of volunteer lawyers who counsel the families of the disappeared who come to the building. I speak to one of them, Ammar Basil, who tells me about some of the horrifying cases that he has become involved in, like the shooting of a newborn baby, the son of a couple of doctors who were opposed to Saddam Hussein. They were subjected to the terrible ordeal of being made to watch the infanticide before they themselves were executed.

  The vice-president of the Association of Free Prisoners, Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, assures me that, however exaggerated the figure might seem, the number of people killed or disappeared since the Ba’ath Party took power in a coup in 1963, which led to the irresistible rise of Saddam Hussein, is between five million and six-and-a-half million. That is, about twenty per cent of the population of Iraq. ‘Not even Hitler had a record like that,’ he says. Since I’ve become used to hearing fantastic figures from different Iraqis, I don’t tell him that I find that figure improbable. But it doesn’t matter: exaggerations are more expressive than the objective facts that will never be established. They show the desperate reaction of people who were powerless in the face of the extraordinary horror of the regime, which no one will ever be able to document precisely, only through vague approximations.

  The repression affected all sectors, ethnic groups, social classes and religions, but it mainly affected Kurds and Shi’ites. Among those par
ticularly targeted were intellectuals – teachers, writers, artists – whom Saddam Hussein, a thoroughly ignorant man despite his feeble attempts at studying Law in Cairo, where he was exiled, particularly mistrusted. The vice-president of the Association tells me that, based on a study of some fifteen hundred cases, it became clear that ‘the regime had intended to do away with every cultured person in the country. Because the proportion of educated people, with degrees, among the murdered and disappeared is very high’. Villages, whole neighbourhoods, clans and families disappeared in extermination operations that frequently took place, with no apparent motive, at times when Saddam Hussein had complete control over a cowed population, in a country where terror held sway. It was, says Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, as if the despot had a sudden attack of homicidal paranoia, and decided on a quick massacre as a preventative measure, stirred by some hunch or macabre nightmare. That is the only way one can understand the extraordinary number of victims, the entire families that are turning up in the common graves that have been discovered in the past months. On other occasions, the collective killings had a precise objective: for example, to make the oil region of Kirkuk completely Arab, forcibly uprooting the Kurdish settlements and replacing them with Sunni communities, or punishing the Shia majority for their 1991 rebellion. All the Ba’ath Party buildings in the provinces were used as torture centres, since the offices of the Mukhabarat did not have enough room. The most frequent tortures inflicted on prisoners were electric shocks, pulling out their eyes and nails, hanging them until their bones were dislocated, burning them with acid, and daubing their bodies with alcohol-soaked cotton and turning them into human torches. When, as happened very infrequently, the families were informed of the death of a person, they received a death certificate that invariably attributed the death to ‘meningitis’.

  The Association has a real find, an eyewitness to one of those extraordinary massacres, which took place in Tuz, a town to the north of Baghdad, on the way to Kirkuk. He was a bus driver, and he and his bus were requisitioned by the police. He thus became a passive observer of the whole operation. As he drove around different villages across the region, he saw the police loading up his bus with entire families, parents along with grandparents and children. With his human cargo he was directed by Ba’ath Party members, who were in charge of the operation, to a piece of open ground on the outskirts of Tuz. There were already thousands of people there, being taken off lorries trucks and buses like his by policemen and party activists. As soon as they were unloaded, they were immediately put to work digging a long ditch, in the form of a trench. The witness says that he arrived there at four in the afternoon and that the activity went on all night. When the ditch was deep enough, the police and Ba’ath Party activists put on gas marks and gave him one as well. He was paralysed by terror.