by Zainab Salbi
Amjad and I were on our long-delayed honeymoon in Spain on September 11, 2001, the day the World Trade Center in New York was attacked. Thousands of Afghan refugees streamed over the border into Pakistan in anticipation of U.S. retaliation against the Taliban for its role in supporting the terrorists. I was meeting with a group of Afghan women leaders of non-governmental organizations that were working with refugees when word came to us that the Taliban had been overthrown. The Taliban had been one of the most oppressive regimes for women in modern history, and I was thrilled for the Afghan women. I imagined them helping write a new constitution, free to work again, educate their daughters, and throw off the shroud-like burqas the Taliban had required them to wear.
“Isn’t this exciting?” I said. “It is all yours now that the Taliban are no longer ruling!”
Of course they were excited about the Taliban’s overthrow. But they also had reservations about what would replace it. “We are Muslims and that is the most important part of our identity,” one woman told me. “No one should confuse our hatred of Taliban with Islam.” The women I was meeting with that day said they wanted Islamic law, Sharia, to regulate their society and planned to continue to cover their hair, although not with burqas. I understood and respected their identity as Muslims, but it took me a moment to recognize my own disappointment. I had wanted them to reach out for secular laws that I thought would help free them. Instead, I was reminded that my own political burka, like that of the West, was as blinding in its way as the robes these women had been compelled to wear. My job was to help them achieve their own goals, not impose mine. Living in a culture in which women and men talk about intimate parts of their lives on television, I had to remind myself not to become desensitized to the struggle of Afghan women and all women who have lived under different forms of despotism their entire lives. For them, freedom isn’t the next step after tyranny, it is often a long and arduous personal journey.
Every trip I took to a refugee camp proved a humbling experience that deepened my own empathy for the women I met. Everywhere I went I saw men made public heroes for enduring torture while women were forgotten or even abandoned for surviving it, leading to a horrific silence on both a societal and personal level. Filled with rising anger and frustration over seeing the same patterns of oppression and violence repeat themselves around the world, I encouraged the women I met to speak out about the violence they had seen in their lives and in their societies. In private, on television, and at international conferences, I told women that if we didn’t take ownership of our voices, change would never come. We would never be able to pressure government and societal leaders to address the particular needs of women war victims, let alone halt new violence or prosecute the criminals responsible.
It never occurred to me that I was asking other women to do what I was unable to do myself. I had interviewed hundreds of women who had been raped, yet I had never told anyone except Amjad and my mother what had happened to me. I would never think of comparing my experience to the trauma of the women I met around the world; even in rape I was the lucky one. I encouraged women to speak out about the injustice in their lives, yet I was too afraid to say Saddam Hussein’s name even in my own home. As long as Saddam still ruled Iraq I knew I could never talk about Amo. My fear was so much a part of me it virtually circulated in my bloodstream. I still hung up the telephone twice no matter where I was, just to make sure no one was listening.
I still do.
For the longest time, I thought I was fighting my fear through my work, but I was only willing to talk about that injustice that was not related to me. I was willing to talk about Milǒsević but not Saddam, about injustice in Rwanda but not Iraq, about the plight of Afghan women but never Iraqi women. I might have gone on that way for years had the United States not claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent global threat. I had intensely mixed feelings as the world debated the U.S.-proposed invasion of Iraq. I desperately wanted Saddam out of power, but I knew that the Iraqi people, including my own family, would be the ones to suffer. In December 2002, when war seemed imminent, I decided I had to fly back to Iraq. I wanted to find out for myself what Iraqis and Iraqi women in particular were thinking about the possibility of the war. I also wanted to help get my little brother, Hassan, out of Iraq in case of an Iraqi draft in preparation of war.
Except for my mother’s funeral, when grief blinded me to almost everything else, I had not been back to Iraq since I had left to marry Fakhri thirteen years before. As I drove from the airport to my family’s house, I felt as if I were going back into history, both personally and as an Iraqi. Amo’s eyes looked down on me from posters and monuments on almost every street corner. The very streets my mother and I used to drive looked as if they had surrendered to him. What was forbidden before was allowed, and what was allowed, forbidden. Alcohol was banned, and prostitutes were executed in public, their heads dropped off at their parents’ doors. I heard people speaking Farsi on street corners; Iranians were now our “friendly enemy” and Americans were the enemies about to attack us.
When I walked up to my old house, I had the oddest sensation. I felt actual cold hanging over the front porch like invisible trellis of fear. Inside the house, almost nothing had changed. Hassan, a handsome but lonely college student, was living there alone, in a country where children typically remain with their families until marriage. The upholstery was almost threadbare. The tables were topped with old photographs and knickknacks in exactly the same spots my mother had once placed them. My father was living in another house with his new wife but visited Hassan every day. It was painful to see the two of them trying to hang onto some vestige of what our family used to be. My first night there, Hassan shyly asked if I would lie with him until he fell asleep as I used to when he was small. As I lay next to him, this all-grown-up boy fell asleep and I stayed awake. I felt haunted by the stories this house had witnessed. Nothing felt the same without my mother in it.
A confusion of feelings rushed painfully back when I saw my father. Though barely sixty, he seemed in ill health and looked little like the father I remembered cutting a fresh gardenia for me before I went to school in the morning. Amo had cast him out and blessedly left him alone after Mama betrayed the motherland for Jordan, and international restrictions on Iraqi aviation had made the former captain of an Iraqi Airlines 747 superfluous. He had opened a small business that provided a modest income and long since given up drinking. “These,” he told me, fingering his prayer beads, “give me more comfort than whiskey ever did.” Aunt Samer, the beautiful former activist I remembered dancing so elegantly, prayed day and night in a house that was barely standing. She had abandoned the world around her and retreated to her prayer rug and prayers beads. She was too afraid to say Saddam Hussein’s name, even to me.
Everyone was waiting for the fateful inevitability of yet one more war. My cousin Dawood met me with tears and grief. “My son was the first casuality of this war, Zainab,” he said. He had driven his family out of Iraq only to lose his son in an accident in Jordan. Dawood and his Kurdish wife had decided to come back to Baghdad to bury their son, and live or die near their families. To live or die together. I remembered those same words, that same debate, during the war with Iran. Why did that always seem to be our choice?
Economic sanctions had taken every last bit of energy or hope people once had. There was an eerie timidity in every sentence I heard. If Saddam’s name was mentioned, anyone in hearing distance would say, “The sire! The leader! The president Saddam Hussein! May God protect his life!” That last phrase I was accustomed to hearing only when it referred to historical religious figures like the prophet Mohammed or Jesus or Moses. It seemed obvious to me that Amo had simply entered a new phase and invoked traditional Iraqi notions of fate or kismet, shuffling responsibility for his people’s suffering off on to God.
I didn’t recognize the broken hearts of the Iraqi people. Through my friends and family, I was
able to escape government censorship and meet families from marginalized communities, where I was introduced as a social worker. Poverty had overtaken most people’s lives as they struggled under the burden of economic sanctions imposed on them in the name of setting them free. For the first time in my life, I met literate mothers with illiterate daughters. There was no money for books or bribes the teachers required because their salaries were so low they couldn’t survive otherwise. I asked a young woman about her dreams for the future: “Dreams for the future are things of the past. We no longer have them,” she answered. I noticed ten-year-old platform shoes on her feet; she had once dreamed of being a fashion model. “One more bomb does not make a difference,” said another woman. “Maybe it will finish us off and relieve us from this life.”
In one of the houses I visited, there were twenty-three women. They all wore black. Their husbands and sons had died in one of the previous wars. A grandmother had gone blind for lack of medicine, and the whole household lived off the labor of a single seventeen-year-old boy. There was no furniture because it had all been sold.
When I turned to go, a woman about my age spoke up.
“I remember you,” she said. “I remember your clothes. I remember your car. I remember you.”
I flinched. She remembered me? She told me we had gone to high school together, but I didn’t remember her. I lowered my eyes and felt embarrassed and helpless over the differences in our lives. The look on her face stayed with me long after I left. I knew that the only person she had seen standing in front of her was that privileged teenager she knew as a friend of Saddam.
On New Year’s Eve, 2003, I spent the evening with my brother and his friends as they passed forbidden champagne under the table. Before leaving with Hassan for Jordan, I helped my father take our family pictures down from the living room walls and gather up family albums for safekeeping in case of looting. Baba seemed curious about my work with refugees, and I told him how important those papers and photographs were to every refugee I had ever met. I wanted to ask him about the past, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Instead, as we sorted through the pictures, I tried just to talk to him.
“Are you afraid, Baba?” I asked.
He thought about that.
“I am fatigued, habibiti,” he said. “As long as you and your brothers are safe and happy, I want nothing more out of life.”
When I left after that trip, I pledged never again to return to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I decided that Baghdad was no longer my home. The concept of home had confused me for the longest time. Where was my home, anyway? In Iraq where I was born? In the United States where I now lived with my husband? In any of the countries I worked in and had also come to love? I reflected on the meaning of home for a long time on my flight back to Washington, D.C. I wasn’t sure I had a home. I didn’t feel as if I belonged in any one place. I was as much at home in the air, flying from one country to another for my work, as in any country I knew.
In March 2003, I watched on television as the United States went to war against Iraq once again. The war I saw on TV looked nothing like the wars I had witnessed. There was no sound of anti-aircraft missiles or bombs or bullets or shattering glass. There was nothing to convey what it felt like to have your whole house shake when a missile explodes nearby. To this day, when I hear a sudden noise I jump and sometimes tears come to my eyes. War is dirty and cruel and hurtful, but during the invasion there were no dead bodies or blue feet hanging out of caskets for Westerners to see on American television news. There were no cameras I remember that looked out from the point of view of women and men who had learned to fear, as I had, anyone in a uniform. There were no cries of mothers losing their children that didn’t transition into a familiar announcer’s voiceover. Instead, there were computer-generated graphics of missiles flying over nice clean maps of Baghdad with clear blue skies in the background.
I hate all wars because all I see of them is the impact they have on people’s lives. Still, I think the day I learned Saddam Hussein had been removed from power was the happiest day of my life. I was anxious to go back and help the Iraqi people as I had once told my mother I would. I wanted to help rebuild and set up an office in Baghdad to share with Iraqi women what I had learned from working with women in other countries. When I left for Iraq three weeks after war ended, I didn’t realize how scary and wonderful that would be. I returned just three weeks after the initial attack on Baghdad. There were no more than eight passengers, all of them from nongovernmental organizations, on that flight. When our small plane landed at the airport my father used to run, I felt deeply conflicting emotions at seeing American soldiers with their planes on our runways surrounded by burned-out Iraqi planes and tanks.
“Who’s with Women for Women International?” asked a captain processing the landing papers in the VIP lounge I had last seen when I waited to fly to America to be married to Fakhri.
“Me,” I said nervously. I had never stopped being afraid of men in military uniforms.
“Welcome to Iraq!” said a Capt. Chasteen, shaking my hand. “We need you and your organization here.”
I was speechless as he shook my hand. A soldier supporting my efforts? It turned out that he had seen me on The Oprah Winfrey Show and that he and his wife had been supporters of the organization for two years. He told me he felt that the United States needed to focus more on supporting organizations like ours rather than on military efforts in order to help win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people; I took our meeting as a sign I was on the right path. As I drove out of the vast empty airport toward the city, we passed the entry to the farmhouse. I looked away, toward the skyline of Baghdad with its charred palms and looted, still-smoking ruins. My emotions swung back and forth wildly. Tears flowed down my cheeks. My city was free; my city was in ruins. The Mukhabarat were gone; ten-year-old boys pointed Kalishnikovs at people on the street. The violence under Saddam, which had been controlled vertically by the government, had now spread horizontally out across the neighborhoods, enabling anyone with a gun or criminal intentions or revenge on their mind to rape, steal, and pillage.
Tears were streaming down everyone’s faces. My father hugged me harder than I had ever felt him hug me before. He told me that during the bombing he had thought he would never see his children again. He and other family members had built their own bunker and he had had a stroke as shrapnel fell on them. Five of the ten people in it had been injured, and it took them three days to reach a doctor.
Saddam Hussein was still in hiding somewhere, but for the first time in my life I saw a crack in the wall of fear he had created. I set about pounding at that wall as hard as I could, talking to women gathered at mosques and prisons who were looking for the disappeared, gathering their stories and doing whatever I could to avoid letting women’s voices be silenced once again. Every woman’s story was different, every one compelling. When I drove over to see Uncle Adel, I saw a handwritten message on the house of the Shia factory owner who had been deported to Iran years before. “This house is now restored to its original owners,” it said. I spent several hours listening to the woman who lived there, recording her tale of forced marches and imprisonment. When she and her family returned after twenty years in exile in Iran, they found stacks of documents and a table with electrical equipment in a bedroom. Their home had been used by secret police for torture. One victim had left a will that his torturers had never bothered to deliver to his family.
As I set about assessing how to establish our program in Baghdad, the pain from my childhood that I had successfully hidden began to surface. Lines blurred. I went to meetings with U.S. officials occupying Amo’s old palaces with their ghosts and familiar gold faucets. When my driver found out about my work, I learned that his fiancée had been raped by Uday. A bodyguard of one of Saddam’s brothers confessed to me he used to rape teenage girls. I met one woman who told me Uday had cut off the nipple on one of her friends’ breasts and another woman whose sister was killed by a brother of S
addam after she threatened to reveal he had raped her. A security guard talked to me about women being raped as they were being tortured, and a doctor friend of my mother’s revealed that she had managed to quietly treat women rape victims of “Iranian origin” who had been put in prison with their children instead of being deported. How many stories were there like his? How many women had been raped? Baghdad didn’t have rape camps like Bosnia or mass rapes like Rwanda and Congo. It was more insidious here and harder for me to work. I knew how to do my job in other countries and do it well. But I wasn’t prepared for what it meant to work in my own country, with my own people, in my own language, sharing with them a pain that was so much a part of who I am.
With Amo out of power, yet still unaccounted for, I wanted justice for Iraqi women. I wanted justice for the gypsy women he kept for his amusement after he sent their husbands away to war and for the village women I knew Saddam had raped on the pretense of helping them. At the end of the day, I wanted to know what had happened to just one woman: my own mother. What had she tried to tell me when she started gasping for breath?
I decided to visit my mother’s friends and talk to each one to find out the truth as she knew it. I prepared talking points in my head. You can confide in me the way you confided in my mother, I would say. Mama told me a lot already, but you know how ill she was, she couldn’t speak at the end. Tell me, what happened to her? I’m her daughter. I’m grown up now. I need to know what you were whispering about in our garden years ago. What happened with you? You can trust me, not only because I am the daughter of your friend but also because I work with women victims of war from around the world and over the years I have become a witness to horror stories of what women face in wartime.