The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “The young Iraqi women are dressing in jeans and T-shirts, and the soldiers asked me if they can ask out an Iraqi girl. I said, ‘If you do, probably her father or brother will kill you.’ ” He laughs very hard. “They said, ‘Oh, in Iraq there is a lot of killing, isn’t there?’ ”

  When I next speak to him a few weeks later, Karim has stopped laughing. He is worried now. He still hasn’t gotten any contracts and is living on money he had saved.

  “The Americans have so much money; they have all of Saddam’s two hundred palaces that were filled with money and gold. Where is that money? Where is the money from the oil we have sold? Why doesn’t the Iraqi Governing Council use that to rebuild the country? Give people jobs? Iraqis want to work,” he says.

  I cannot answer him. Paul Bremer (head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government set up by the US and UK following the “liberation” of Iraq) is living in Saddam’s lavish palace in Karradah-Miriam (a symbol not lost on Iraqis), near where my family lives, which eventually becomes known in Western newspapers as the Green Zone.

  “The palaces were all filled with gold and marble, ten times better than the palaces of Haroun al-Rasheed.” Karim was referring to the glory days of Baghdad over a thousand years ago.

  “When we couldn’t even get textbooks for our universities, how did they import all these luxurious things?” He pauses, then says angrily, “We are thirty years behind the world.”

  AN AMERICAN HELICOPTER FLYING OVER BAGHDAD

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Occupation Limbo

  When last we saw him, he was on a presidential platform, waving to the masses below, unsheathing a sword or firing a ceremonial rifle. Now we see him as a wild man, dirty and mangy as a stray dog. And we have to keep reminding ourselves, it is the same person. . . . Taken together—the bearded Saddam and his underground living grave—they are almost mythic, redolent of legends and fables that are hard-wired into the human mind. With this twist, the Saddam story has become a blend of Bible parable, folk tale, Greek and Shakespearean tragedy—and it is unexpectedly powerful.

  —Jonathan Freedland, “Blood Feud Ends in the Spider Hole,” Guardian, December 17, 2003

  When Saddam Hussein, hated by most Iraqis, is captured by US forces on December 13, 2003, many Iraqis do not react with the expected howl of sweet revenge. To see a figure so powerful who had tyrannized his people for so long, suddenly reduced to a bearded old man hiding in desperation in a hole the size and shape of his future grave, and then paraded on international television having his teeth examined like an animal, is distressing. They feel strangely depressed; not necessarily out of concern for him as a person, as he was feared and hated, but for what his capture represents. Even if it had been a dictatorship, corrupt and poor, the government was still Iraqi. Saddam’s humiliation symbolizes the humiliation of Iraq. Iraqis are no longer in control; the Americans are. It is a return to seventy years earlier when they were occupied by the British, before Iraqis had gained their true independence in 1958. Now they have lost it again. If someone as seemingly powerful and secure as Saddam could fall so far, no one was safe.

  In Dante’s Inferno, Limbo is the first circle of hell, a place where souls persist in desire without hope, living upon the brink of grief’s abysmal valley. In March 2004, a year after the invasion, Iraq is in a terrible limbo and is fast becoming a hellish place to live. But the American administration claims that now that Saddam has been captured, the violence would die down, not immediately maybe, but that all the “remnants” of Saddam’s regime would stop fighting now that their leader was in prison.

  When Karim finally searches for work behind the concrete ramparts of the Green Zone, he is shocked to see Americans driving around, eating happily in cafés, while his own family still struggles with lack of electricity, water and security. Huge American and British flags flank a tiny Iraqi one in the courtyard. Since then, he has tried desperately to get work, but without the right contacts in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), he has little chance. It is rumoured that many Western companies have signed contracts with the US military, promising not to hire Iraqis for “security reasons.”

  He can’t understand how the most powerful country in the world still cannot provide electricity, phone service, oil and most of all, security. “Freedom” has meant that he can express his opinion and contact us in exile freely. But he and his family haven’t tasted daily freedom, because without security, freedom is still meaningless. Karim’s dark sense of humour masks his deep disappointment. After hearing Paul Bremer’s optimistic weekly radio address that schools and hospitals were open and that life was improving, he laughed.

  “Mr. Bremer thinks that we are living in the best country in the entire world.”

  After twenty-five years of war and sanctions, Karim, like his fellow Iraqis, is exhausted. Unemployment is at 60 percent, especially if you are not “lucky” enough to be working with the occupation power. If you do risk looking for work, you could be blown up by those who are trying to disrupt the occupation. The world is still concerned with whether or not George W. Bush will be re-elected, but Iraqis are consumed by the anxiety of their daily lives. Before the war, under sanctions, women hardly went out because they were too busy surviving in harsh conditions. But they could dress as they pleased, and Karim’s wife and daughter were not afraid to go to school or the market. Now, women often won’t leave the house for days, preferring their men to bring home the groceries, for fear of kidnapping, bombings, criminals in the streets or random murder.

  As the car bombs and suicide attacks escalate, our family in Canada and England turn to my conversations with Karim for an understanding of what is going on inside Iraq. The Western media and the CPA don’t appear to know who is responsible, and there seem to be as many theories about who is carrying out attacks as there are attackers. The Americans are claiming that the culprits are ex-Baathists or “foreign fighters” (not acknowledging the irony that their own soldiers were foreign fighters too) or the helpfully vague term “insurgents.” At first Karim thought the attackers must be outsiders, but sometimes he believes that the Americans are provoking the instability, since it is mostly Iraqis who are dying in the attacks. He insists that Iraqis would not submit their own countrymen to such random violence. I ask him if he thinks there will be a civil war.

  “Who would benefit from such chaos?” he says.

  Certainly not Iraqis, most of whom are baffled by constant Western references to the Sunni, Shia, Christian and Kurdish divides as most families are a mixture, and there has never been a civil war in Iraq.

  Karim is scathing when the Iraqi Governing Council, which had been appointed by the CPA, unveils a new flag for Iraq. Karim thinks the CPA is very efficient at minting new money, creating new embassies, designating new holidays and now designing this new flag for a new country, but there is no security outside the Green Zone. The day before, he heard thirteen explosions in Baghdad, and saw the aftermath of one near his house, church and son’s school. These explosions went unreported in the international news, like so many of these incidents, because they were so frequent.

  Karim also tells me that more and more suicide bombers have been blowing themselves up in Iraq. The frequency is overwhelming. The first suicide bomb occurred two days after Baghdad fell: a soldier was killed near Firdous Square where the statue of Saddam had been pulled down. Karim was shocked.

  “There were no suicide bombers in Iraq under Saddam,” he says.

  He sounds very tired and depressed. I feel hopeless. I keep saying I wish I could do something and that no one should have to live like he was, but I knew that when we hung up, he had to risk his life walking out into the streets of Baghdad, while I was safe in Vancouver.

  “Please find us a way out of here, we’ll go anywhere, an island in the middle of nowhere, the situation is absolute anarchy,” he says.

  One of their neighbours said to him, “I w
ish the Americans would hurry up and put Saddam Hussein on trial, find him innocent and bring him back to sort out this chaos.”

  It is Iraqi humour, but it barely masks the despair and disillusionment the people feel. To even joke about wanting Saddam back is like wanting to go back to prison, because despite the loss of liberty, at least prison life is predictable. But my relatives can’t just leave Iraq because no other country is accepting Iraqis as immigrants. Wherever they go, they’ll be refugees. In fact, there is no functioning passport office in Iraq, so the most that an Iraqi can get is a one-page travel document, and it is unclear how many countries would accept it. At least in Baghdad, Karim has a house, car, relatives and friends and his office, even if he has no work. I look into the rules for immigrating to Canada, and discover that if you apply from outside the country it takes three to five years to be accepted.

  On March 8, 2004, a year after the invasion, Iraq’s Governing Council (or, as Iraqis joke, the “Puppet Council”) signs the Transitional Administrative Law that will govern Iraq when the occupation ends until the national elections in 2005. The US–appointed signatories are mostly exiles and so Iraqis distrust them, fearing their actions are not in the country’s best interests. Many Iraqis see the upcoming handover of “sovereignty” as the US changing only the face of occupation while underneath everything remains the same. The US wants to be seen by the world as invited guests of the Iraqis rather than occupiers. But they are barely bothering to cosmetically change the face of who is ruling Iraq. When the government is “handed over,” the palace housing the Coalition Provisional Authority will become the US embassy in Iraq staffed by three thousand people, most of them Americans. It is obvious to Iraqis who will still be pulling the strings.

  In this climate of growing distrust of the political environment, Karim has a new fear—kidnappings. Not of foreigners, the ones we read about in our press, but of Iraqi doctors, professors, intellectuals or anyone in the middle classes who might have money. He says no one knows who is really responsible, but various mafia-like groups kidnap civilians and then demand huge amounts of money for ransom. This has been going on since the beginning of the occupation, but is now becoming extremely common. The police are either powerless or are partners of the kidnappers. Many records were destroyed during the war, so it is hard to do background checks on the new Iraqi-police recruits. Frighteningly, there seems to be a systematic attempt to rob the country of its educated class, because prominent intellectuals are being assassinated. Iraqis also fear that the Americans don’t want the Iraqis to really take control of the country. Karim seems as confused as we are about what is going on.

  When I talk to my father about what Karim has been telling me, he is cynical. I feel like I need an interpreter to understand what is happening in Iraq, and to filter the news I’m hearing through the media and that I am hearing from Karim. “You see, the Coalition Provisional Authority is using all the same tactics that Saddam used to control the country. They rule from the same palaces, they torture in the same jails, like Abu Ghraib [Saddam’s notorious prison that was taken over by the US occupiers], they take people from their homes in the night and detain them without trial because they suspect them of being against them politically. They close newspapers that they don’t like. They use collective punishment, crushing whole towns that they suspect of harbouring people fighting them. People used to know that they couldn’t say anything against Saddam Hussein and his regime. Now they don’t know who they should keep quiet about, as they don’t know what all the forces fighting for power are.”

  Karim e-mails me from an internet café in June 2004 because his phone isn’t working again. Since I last heard from him, we have watched helplessly as the US carried out a siege of Fallujah, demolishing the city and killing at least eight hundred civilians, of which three hundred were women and children. This was retaliation for the murder of four contractors (the media’s new euphemism for mercenaries) after a bloody demonstration in which US forces shot into the crowd and killed innocent people. The images of the prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib have been splashed all over the world. After seeing one of a hooded man with wires coming out of his sleeves, which an Iraqi friend says has been nicknamed “The Statue of Liberty,” I can’t bear to look at the rest of them.

  I ask Karim how he is, and he writes back, “Still alive.”

  A few days earlier he went to the central bank on Rasheed Street in central Baghdad, and the next day a huge bomb exploded in the exact place where he had been standing. This was the second time he had cheated death in a week.

  “They’re trying to get me,” he jokes.

  Our media is talking about elections as an answer to Iraq’s problems. I ask him if he believes in the elections and if they will work.

  “First, we have to see whose names are on the ballot,” he says.

  This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since many campaigning for office are so terrified of being assassinated that they aren’t releasing their names or pictures. And then once again, the line is cut and the Internet isn’t working anymore.

  In his next message, Karim says that my great-aunt Lina’s phone is finally working and tells me I should call her. My heart beats wildly as the phone rings and rings. Finally, she answers.

  “Ha-llo.” It’s as if she knows it is going to be me. Immediately, she starts speaking in English, good English. I am shocked.

  “I can’t walk well because I have had my back operation,” she says.

  I realize that is why it took her so long to get to the phone. We chat. We don’t talk about the war. We don’t talk about the occupation. We don’t talk about the lack of electricity, money or freedom. We talk about my love life. She wants to know when I am getting married and is worried that my younger sister is getting married before me. I laugh it off, but she is persistent and I forget under the pressure that she herself never married. As I listen to her my skin prickles, and I suddenly know what she smells like. I can feel her enfolding me in her soft fleshy arms as she did when I was a child. I recognize the familiar rasp in her throat as she speaks English with a guttural accent. She is so close, and the memories of the times when I saw her in Europe flood back. I was eight when I tried to teach her to swim in the Mediterranean Sea in Greece and she repaid me with bottles of Pepsi and plates of chips at a taverna. She is real, she has lived through all of this, and she is talking to me. I realize I have missed her. I ask her if I should come and visit.

  “In six months . . . come in six months,” she says.

  Afterwards my father tells me that in Iraq, six months means never. It is a figure of speech, like saying, “Back in a second.”

  “I love you. I love you, Leilah,” she says.

  I hang up the phone and cry.

  The next day, Farah, who has finally returned back safely from Baghdad, comes over to see me, and when I open the door she says, “I have a gift for you.” I open the soft cloth and pull out a silver jug with an elongated, curvaceous spout and Arabic calligraphy etched onto the front. Farah’s mother told her that in Ottoman times the object would have been used at wedding ceremonies. It would have been filled with rose-petal water—symbolizing a sweet life—which is sprinkled on the hands of guests before the wedding ceremony.

  “I told the man selling antiques in the souq that I needed a present for an Iraqi girl who has never been to Baghdad, something to encourage her to come and visit.”

  It sits on my mantelpiece beside a silver plate that Jane, my mother’s sister, gave to me recently, one she brought back from Baghdad in the late 1960s when she was living in Kuwait. She wanted to hand it on to me, felt it belonged to me now. The silver still life whispers to me. Maybe in six months . . .

  A MASS IN BAGHDAD

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Christians

  Next morning, at 4:30 a.m. . . . my hostess and I were already on our way to Mass in the Syriac Church. We reached the Christian quarter across the early silenc
e of New Street, and found its dark alleys filled with quiet streams of people on their way to the Chaldean, Armenian, Latin, Syriac, or Jacobite churches, which are all hidden away unobtrusively among the labyrinth of houses. . . . Now, as we came from the half-light outside, we opened the heavy door on what looked like a bed of tulips brilliantly illuminated, so vivid and rustling and shimmering were the many-coloured silk izars of the women who filled the nave in the light of lamps and candles.

  —Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches, 1938

  A month later, on August 1, 2004, I hear on the news that a series of coordinated car bomb attacks has been unleashed on four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul at around six o’clock in the evening, when they are packed with worshippers. Sunday is a working day in Iraq, so Christians usually attend mass after work. Fourteen people are killed and at least sixty injured. According to news reports, the Syriac Catholic church, Our Lady of Salvation, was bombed from a Chevrolet driving by, and the blast blew out stained-glass windows, creating a carpet of coloured fragments outside. The insides of the churches were blackened with fire and smoke. Windows and doors were smashed and many of the churches suffered fundamental structural damage.

  I am afraid that Karim, Lina and the family are hurt. The next day, I hear from Amal that Karim and the family are safe; his wife is a Catholic but he is a Protestant and they had gone to his church that Sunday, a church that had not been targeted. Amal gently reminds me that Our Lady of Salvation contains the remains of my grandmother Victoria, as well as the remains of my great-grandmother Samira and my great-great-aunt Madeline. Did their graves survive intact? Amal doesn’t know, and she doesn’t show how she feels about this painful news. I contact Karim to find out what he knows.

  “I heard the explosions, as we weren’t that far away,” he writes to me. “We all ran out of our church. I saw all the ambulances, firemen and policemen swarming around the area. I knew many people from the Christian community that were in the churches; many had injuries from the attacks and even just from the shattered stained glass from the windows.” He says that all Iraqis are upset about these attacks, especially his Muslim friends who called immediately to express their condolences, saying, “We are all Iraqis, we are brothers. We are ashamed, embarrassed and sad about these atrocities.”