Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  It was hard to tell who was who anymore. Men in plain clothes walked the streets with RPGs – rocket-propelled grenades. These weapons were wrapped in plastic, as though they were not going to be used any time soon. Black-clad members of the Fedayeen Saddam mingled with other military, police and security types at street corners and under bridges, but there was a sense of uncertainty about them that elicited in me a premonition that perhaps there was not going to be a serious battle for Baghdad.

  Two more journalists were dead. Thinking they were doing the right thing in not getting swept up by the urge to get to Baghdad as quickly as possible, Christian Liebig, of the German weekly magazine Focus, and Julio Anguita Parrado, of the Spanish daily El Mundo, decided to stay at a US field headquarters, south of the capital, rather than accompany the unit with which they were embedded on a push into the city. However, they died in an Iraqi missile strike that came from the rear of the base, which also killed two soldiers and injured 15 others of the US Army’s Third Infantry Division.

  It was going to be another sleepless night, so I was trying to grab an afternoon catnap when the phone rang. It was Joel Simon, the acting director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, who in his role as our professional guardian angel was emailing and sat-phoning around the Baghdad press pack to get as much information as he could about where people were and what strategies they had for emergencies. It was a subject we had debated at length, but Simon’s call forced me to confront again what we had always felt could be the most difficult phase of this assignment – our personal security in the power vacuum.

  Getting right out of Baghdad had ceased to be an option some time ago – there was fighting to the north and west. I had been issued with a visa to Iran just before the war started but, when I went to have it stamped in my passport in Baghdad, a security guard at the Iranian Embassy informed me that the last diplomat had fled to Tehran just 20 minutes before my arrival. If we were desperate, Jon Lee and I did have a pre-arranged safe house in the suburbs, which we had stocked with food and water; we were confident that Sabah would get us there safely. We were now absolutely dependent on Sabah – he liked that! – because Mohammed, who had been going back to see his family outside Baghdad every night, didn’t arrive for work this day. I had my first pang of anxiety about the younger man’s safety, because last night he had promised explicitly that he would be here today.

  I don’t know if it was based on sound reasoning or wishful thinking, but my security summation for Joel Simon was this: ‘One of the first things the Americans will do when they get into town will be to throw a security cordon around the Sheraton and Palestine hotels. We’re the only significant and exposed concentration of Westerners in the city and, if the regime wants to strike, we’re the obvious target. I also think that when the regime collapses it’ll be quick. Saddam is all that holds it together, so when the word goes out that he’s done for, collapse will be instant. If there is street fighting, our significance will be diminished as the armies go after each other, in which case it’ll be safer for us to hunker in the hotel than to attempt to find our way to the safe house through streets that have become the battlefield.’

  John F. Burns, however, was taking a much more practical approach to planning for the vacuum. He clearly had decided that time was nearly up for the regime – and he was determined to get his confiscated gear back before the staff of the Information Ministry melted away. As the minders had disappeared or become distracted, Burns was moving about more – coming over to the Palestine to use our computers and phone links, materialising at midnight or later and vanishing while I was asleep. Now emboldened by today’s noisy arrival of the US troops in the presidential compound, he went to the Palestine lobby and accosted Uday al-Tai, whom he had already caused to blanch with warnings that the DG might end up in Guantanamo Bay, or even before a US firing squad, should anything happen to Burns.

  Now The Most Dangerous Man in Baghdad was demanding the return of the equipment that had been stolen on the night the security squad barged into his room. He was holding to his theory that his NYT business card was as good as a Kevlar suit. Later he explained it this way to a TV interviewer: ‘I was able to send messages to officials I knew in the Iraqi government, saying to them that these facts were known to the New York Times and were known to the US government and that, if any harm came to me, these Information Ministry officials would be answerable for it and that I judged that the penalty they faced would be severe. And here I am.’

  Last Stop on the Orient Express

  John Martinkus

  John Martinkus was born in 1969 and grew up in Melbourne. He visited East Timor in late 1994 and began freelancing stories to papers in Australia and New Zealand. After several more visits he returned permanently to East Timor in mid-1998 and remained there until after independence in mid-2000, working for Associated Press, Australian Associated Press, Fairfax and The Bulletin as well as publishing A Dirty Little War (2001). That book was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Awards. Martinkus was also nominated for a Walkley Award for his AAP coverage of the violence in 1999. He made several trips to West Papua and Papua New Guinea in 2002, resulting in the publication of Quarterly Essay 7, Paradise Betrayed: West Papua’s Struggle for Independence (2002).Indonesia’s Secret War in Aceh was published in 2004. In 2004 Martinkus spent February and March working independently in Iraq under the American-led occupation gathering material for the book Travels in American Iraq (2004).

  *

  Baghdad’s main railway station, a well-preserved, British-built edifice, was virtually empty on the morning of my journey. The sole occupant of the domed booking hall was a Shiite woman covered in full-length black who was slowly mopping the marble floor in concentric circles. She told us that there was indeed a train to Basra and directed us to a small window where, miraculously, a ticket-seller was to be found. A first-class ticket to Basra cost little more than one American dollar for the twelve-hour trip.

  This had once been the final stop on the Orient Express. The station hadn’t been bombed, and there were still signs in English for the ‘international travellers waiting lounge’, as well as signs to Istanbul and one for ‘European travellers’. Although that had all ended a long time ago, it was still a quintessentially British station, with long platforms and small green guard boxes on the platforms. There was hardly anyone around and the train was due to leave in less than half an hour. It was not a good sign.

  The carriages were already on the platform and we climbed aboard. A cloud of dust from the ventilation filled the compartments as the train started moving, exactly on time. The windows in the corridor were full of bullet-holes and the cushions of the seats inside the firstclass compartments had been removed, leaving just the green vinyl on the hard wood beneath. Most of the fold-down bunks had also been removed, but some still hung on their hinges. Each compartment still had a small plastic intercom with five music options that had long since ceased to function. Salah was aghast. ‘This is worse than I thought,’ was all he said, but I could tell he was worried. No other passengers were in the carriage and we chose the best of the dilapidated compartments. More staff were on the platform organising the fourcarriage train’s departure than there were passengers. As the train moved slowly out of the station, everything inside was already coated in a fine brown dust.

  The train creaked slowly through the back streets of Baghdad, through scenery of junk-filled vacant lots and piles of burning rubbish tended by children. At a road crossing the cars ignored the slowly approaching train and continued to cross the rails until it was almost upon them. At one road a US Army Humvee prevented the traffic from moving forward. Towards the outskirts of the city destroyed anti-aircraft guns lay by the railway and, in one stretch, almost twenty destroyed Iraqi armoured vehicles mouldered in a grove of date palms where they had tried to hide from air attacks as the Coalition forces approached Baghdad almost exactly one year before.

  On the railway siding out
side Baghdad sat the remains of trains blasted apart and riddled with shell-fire in the war. Further along there were locomotives crushed from more recent impacts and passenger carriages gutted by fire and derailed, leaning off the sidings.

  When I had asked about the train a few days before, the off-duty guards at the station had assured me that the passenger trains were safe. The goods trains were another story. At least twice a month, they said, the train to Basra was attacked, as were about 80 per cent of the goods trains in other parts of the country. ‘The main aim for the resistance is to attack or steal the military cargo,’ said Ali Jabar Murad, one of the guards. He told me he had been attacked just last week. ‘They remove the railway tracks and force us to stop. Then they steal the goods. There are only two of us [guards]. They have RPGs. I only have an AK47 with sixty bullets. The goods are for the Americans. Why are we suffering for the goods for the Americans?’ He told me about a recent incident in which the guards had fired back. The attackers had simply waited until they ran out of ammunition and then come and broken their legs with rifle butts. Another guard, Jusin Alwan, said, ‘I only get 300,000 dinars a month. I am not going to lose my life for that.’ According to these two guards the goods stolen ranged from computers to weapons to uniforms. ‘In Nasiriya at the train station the guards have American uniforms. They stole a whole container full of uniforms from the train,’ said Ali. ‘If the Americans want the goods to reach Baghdad, they must guard them themselves,’ he continued. ‘There is no communication. If something happens, we can’t let them know.’ The guards were laughing. They didn’t really care whether the train was robbed or not. It wasn’t their problem – they just wanted to get paid. One of them said that he had a PhD in accountancy, but when he had applied for this job they had only asked if he had a primary school education. They told us the passenger train would be fine. There was nothing to rob.

  Basra is 550 kilometres south of Baghdad. The train ran through predominantly Shiite areas and only briefly through the so-called Sunni triangle where most of the attacks against Coalition forces were taking place at that time. From the train we could occasionally see convoys of semi-trailers escorted by US Humvees. Aside from that there was no sign of Coalition forces except for one lone patrol of two vehicles sighted in the desert past Samawa much later in the day. The Polish force had responsibility for Hilla along with small numbers of Filipinos, Rumanians and Lithuanians, but their base was on the other side of town near the ruins of old Babylon. The Spanish force had responsibility for the next region further south near Nasiriya before the British-run sector began near Amara. All the forces were on high security alert and never left their bases unless in sufficient numbers to deal with any potential threat. Although there were fewer attacks on Coalition forces south of Baghdad than in the Sunni areas, they still occurred. Bombings such as the car-bomb attack on the Polish base in Hilla on February 18th, 2004 that killed eighteen Iraqis and wounded sixty-four people including soldiers from Poland, Hungary, the Philippines and an American, were a constant threat.

  The trip was oddly peaceful. The train rolled along slowly through the day, past the cultivated areas around Hilla and down to Diwaniya, then through to the drier areas beyond where Saddam had drained the marshes after the first Gulf War to ensure the Shiite Marsh Arabs wouldn’t rise up again. It was almost relaxing, but I could see that every time the train stopped Salah would become alert and watch the corridor to see who got on. On the train there was no security. Four policeman were assigned to the train, but they, other passengers told us, had hidden their weapons and wore civilian clothes. When asked what would happen if there was an attack, the group of passengers we were speaking to erupted in laughter. They said the police would probably run away. Further south more passengers boarded the train. They were too poor to travel by car or lived in the areas we were passing through where no roads ran close to the rail line. Our only security lay in the fact that the slow passenger train was not a target of the resistance. Coalition forces wouldn’t even patrol the railway, let alone ride on the train.

  As we entered the area that had once been marshes but was now just a grey dusty plain with occasional irrigation canals dug into it that flowed with grey, silted-up water, we started up a conversation with Assad Nasser. It so happened that he was the chief inspector of the railways in the south. He had worked for the Iraqi railways for thirty-seven years and was returning to Basra after attending a meeting in Baghdad in which the main problem discussed was last month’s unpaid wages from the Coalition Provisional Authority. He was wearing the simple floor-length shirt that is popular in the south and complained about the appalling state of the railways that he had spent all his adult life working on. He sat down in our compartment with another man who was a ticket inspector who had also worked on the trains for many years. When we asked, they detailed fourteen major accidents involving loss of life on Iraqi railways since the previous May when the trains had started running again. It was a long discussion as they ran through all the relevant incidents and decided only to include serious accidents that had killed people in their total. But we had hours to kill as the train slowly rolled south and occasionally slowed to a near stop where the driver knew there was a fault in the line, and we would hear a massive metallic clunk as the wheels passed over it.

  Collisions were common, along with deliberate derailing and gunfire attacks. ‘Before there was control between the two stations. You would know the line was clear. Now no red light, no green light, no phones, no stationmaster,’ said Assad. He said most of the stations in the south had been bombed during the war and the others had been looted. He blamed the Coalition for starting the system again to move cargo from Basra to Baghdad before anything had been repaired. He said that the Coalition refused to guard the stations in the desert and no electricity or food was available out there. The remote stations in the south had been attacked so often that they had been forced to abandon them. He pointed to a looted station as we went past without stopping. There was washing drying on a line and children on the platform. A family had moved in and Assad said if they tried to move the stationmaster back into the station the family would shoot him. The last serious accident on the Basra line had been a head-on collision two weeks before. Both trains had been told the line was clear and the driver and engineer of each had died. The smashed trains had only been hauled off to the sidings outside of Baghdad a few days before where they joined the other wrecks we had passed earlier in the day.

  Further south the landscape of the marshes was slowly coming back to life with the gradual re-flooding of the area. Many of the inhabitants had gone as refugees to Iran throughout the ’90s to escape the repression of Saddam and the loss of their livelihoods as the marshes dried up. Since the end of the regime they had begun to return, and the train running through this area was one of their few sources of income. In January 2004 the last major attack on this line occurred with the derailing of a goods train. The Marsh Arabs simply removed the tracks, said Assad. When the train tipped over, killing the engineer and wounding the assistant, the teams of thieves got to work opening the shipping containers with welding equipment powered by portable generators and loading the goods onto waiting trucks. When the British forces finally arrived, they took the wounded engineer to hospital but did not interfere with the well-organised thieves. Assad went on to tell a story about his brief stint as a stationmaster at a desert station, where he had been forced at gunpoint by gangs of thieves to tell them which trains were carrying valuable goods.

  The train stopped at a desert station. It was not much to see, just a few low-roofed buildings and a small crowd of people coming out to meet the train. There were no signs of any vehicles or roads. It was getting towards dusk and as the light was good I decided to take some photos. I wanted to get a picture of the dilapidated train in the desert, thinking that it could perhaps form part of a deranged travel feature story. As soon as I jumped to the ground, people began to stare and it didn’t take too long before I was
surrounded by a group of aggressive children and young men yelling and trying to grab my camera. It became slightly threatening and I retreated onto the train. A crowd of young men followed me and stood at the door to our compartment. They were urging each other on and one came and sat down and took the bottle of water on the seat. Salah handled it well, explaining that I was not a spy and that I was not from the Coalition. The young men were intrigued and wanted my camera. Salah told me to put it away. They were just thieves, he said, and referred to them as ‘Indians’ in English under his breath. Eventually the train inspector came back and sat in the compartment. He told the boy who had taken the water to take his feet off the seat, which he did, and lots of shouting and laughter came from the corridor. The inspector told us there had been problems in this area; some of these boys had been employed as security for the train but there had been many robberies and they had been sacked. He started gently arguing with them and they eventually went away. The natural authority of Salah and the inspector had prevailed. They had wanted to steal my bag and my camera. ‘They have never seen a foreigner on the train before. The only foreigners ,they have seen around here have been soldiers. Most of those children have never been to school. They cannot read and write,’ said the inspector by way of explanation. Salah added that he had been explaining to them what a journalist does, but derisively said that these ‘Indians’ had no idea. As the train finally pulled out of the station and the young men ran out and jumped from the moving train, the inspector said that the only reason they stopped at that particular station was because the local people needed the train and had threatened to shoot the driver if the train didn’t stop regularly.

  The inspector spoke bitterly of the state of the trains. The carriages we were travelling in had been bought from the French in 1984. They were the height of luxury then and he had personally gone to France to receive training in their maintenance but things had gone downhill ever since. ‘There were no more spare parts in the embargo. We renovated and serviced them, but officially we should not be using these.’ He looked around the dusty wrecked interior of the ‘first-class’ compartment and said, ‘The passenger trains are not fit for people, they are not fit for human travel. Wars, occupation, embargoes, they ruined it.’ Once, he said, the trains had fifteen carriages and there were three or four passenger trains a day. ‘We used to have restaurants and bars on the train. Sometimes people would just get on to drink at the bar.’ In those days the service to Basra took seven hours, now it took twelve. The line had been bombed many times in the Iran–Iraq war, but they had always managed to keep the line open. As it got dark, the flickering lights in the train refused to stay on and we headed south into the marshes in almost total darkness. Outside the occasional shipping container on its side or a derailed flat car or oil tanker showed where ambushes had taken place. When the Coalition had restarted the train service in May 2003, Assad told me, journalists had been invited to cover the first train since the end of the war. He laughed as he recalled the closing shot of the subsequent television report, which had shown the train moving off with everybody waving happily. ‘After about two months the thieves started, the derailings, the attacks, the accidents. We should be running seven trains a day but we can’t, due to security. Now we just have one for passengers, one for oil and one for goods.’ He was sure no other journalists had caught the train since then. In fact, no foreigners at all. We were still talking when we began to pass the burning oil wells in the desert outside Basra which lit the whole area at night. He lived in Basra where he said 65 per cent of the people followed the Shiite cleric Moqutada al-Sadr. As the train pulled into the small station and we got up to leave, he said, ‘If he says fight the British and the US, we are ready.’