Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  In the next corridor was a row of even smaller cells, with barely room for one person, where torture by scorpion was carried out. ‘We called these the lonely cells,’ he said. ‘My 15-year-old cousin died here in the dirt and dust. Many died here. They would put you in alone with these big ugly creatures that get on your clothes so you can’t get them off and they sting.’

  Samoi never had to endure the scorpion rooms. For him, the hardest thing to deal with was the hunger. ‘We were fed old bread so hard it hurt our mouths, and sometimes soup with insects. When I left I weighed thirty kilos [four stone ten pounds]. I was like a skeleton.’

  When he was released, Samoi was so malnourished that he spent three months in hospital. Although he recovered, the mental scars remain, as they do for much of Iraqi society. ‘All that time in prison my wife had no idea if I was alive or dead and had to give birth to our son all alone and in hiding,’ said Samoi. ‘I hate Saddam for causing that anguish and for stealing the first eighteen months of my son Basil’s life from me. And we have never been able to have another baby.’

  The lack of information about Samoi’s fate was a typical tool of the regime to demonstrate what would happen to anyone who stepped out of line. Wives would sometimes even remarry, only for their husbands to reappear. Mothers cried every day for missing sons.

  But it was not just men who were taken prisoner. When Fala was arrested for ‘praying too much’, because of his regular attendance at the local Shi’ite mosque, his wife was seized too. ‘My wife was in a different block at the back and held for four months. They shaved their heads and made them run naked.’

  ‘I don’t know how he survived that,’ said Samoi. ‘At least I could reassure myself that my wife was safely outside.’

  ‘You don’t know how much your friendship helped me,’ replied Fala. ‘I am a simple man, a poor man of no education, whereas you are a man of books; you taught yourself English, you write your memories. In all this, when we were treated like animals, your friendship made me feel I was a person of value.’

  After thirty-five years of Ba’athist repression, old fears take a long while to die. The next day, Fala whispered that he had something to show me and we arranged to meet later on a bridge where nobody might ‘report back’ on him.

  ‘I’ve found my cousin, Abu Nathan,’ he said. He held out a photograph of a dead man, his body spattered with blood from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted after the 1991 uprising. ‘At least we know,’ he said. ‘The world should note all this and not forget, because none of this should be repeated.’

  By the time I got home from the war I had been away for two months, first in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then Kuwait and southern Iraq. Baghdad had fallen just in time for me to make it back the day before Paulo’s fortieth birthday and my mum agreed to look after Lourenço so we could go to Marrakesh for the weekend. We flew on Friday evening via Casablanca where we noticed the airport staff seemed tense, but didn’t think any more of it and arrived so late in Marrakesh that we went straight to bed. The next morning I was woken at dawn by my mobile ringing. It was my foreign editor telling me he knew I was on a weekend off and I’d already been away for months but there had been an al-Qaeda attack on a series of hotels and clubs in Casablanca and as I was in the country already would I mind just going there for the day.

  One of the most important qualities for a foreign correspondent is managing to be in the right place at the right time, but now I was a wife and mother I was starting to wish events wouldn’t keep following me around. Fortunately we were staying in a beautiful old riad and Paulo felt he could survive a day alone lounging in the courtyard by the turquoise pool, reading and sipping gin and tonics, while I drove to Casablanca at top speed to wander round shattered nightclubs and hotels and interview bloodied survivors. Not quite the romantic weekend I had pictured…

  * They did not exaggerate. Perhaps the most spectacular piece of news management was the ‘rescue’ of Private Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk captured when her company was ambushed after taking a wrong turning near Nasiriya and nine were killed. Lynch was said to have emptied her weapon before being caught and taken to the local hospital. This was stormed eight days later by US Special Forces firing guns, all filmed on night-vision cameras. The dramatic rescue made headlines and Hollywood bought up the rights. It later transpired that there had been no militia in the hospital and the whole rescue had been a staged operation. Nor had Lynch shot at the militia. She later accused the Pentagon of using her as a propaganda tool.

  The Last Summer in Baghdad

  Just thirty-two prize items still missing as treasures flood back to Iraq Museum

  Sunday Times, 15 June 2003

  THE RED TOYOTA spluttered to a halt in front of the Baghdad Museum and three men in their early twenties jumped out. As they struggled to lift a large object wrapped in a blanket out of the boot, the American guards on the gate raised their weapons.

  For a moment, a priceless 5,000-year-old vase thought lost in looting after the fall of Baghdad seemed about to meet its end. But one of the men peeled back the blanket to reveal carved alabaster pieces that were clearly something extraordinary.

  Three feet high and weighing 600 pounds, this was the Sacred Vase of Warka, regarded by experts as one of the most precious of all the treasures taken during looting that shocked the world in the chaos following the fall of Baghdad. Broken in antiquity and stuck together, it was once again in pieces.

  Having handed it over, the men jumped back into their car and drove off into the heat of the afternoon.

  ‘Every day people are bringing things back,’ said Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. Only an hour before the return of the Warka vase on Thursday, he had bemoaned its loss, calling it ‘one of the real masterpieces of the world’.

  The failure of American troops to stop the plundering of priceless antiquities from one of the world’s most important museums, while at the same time sending tanks to guard the Oil Ministry, was seen as one of the scandals of the war. Some 170,000 items were reported stolen from the museum and Iraqi scholars were filmed in tears while western archaeologists fell over each other to condemn it as ‘cultural genocide’. One Oxford academic compared it to the destruction of the great library of Alexandria in the fifth century.

  However, the recovery of the Warka vase means that the number of prized exhibits missing from the museum is in fact only thirty-two. About 3,000 minor artefacts are believed to have been taken from the storerooms – a fraction of the widely reported earlier estimates.

  ‘The museum is a classic example of how you can say anything bad about the Americans and people will believe it,’ said a spokesman for the US-led Iraq administration.

  Every Baghdadi has stories of how soldiers’ night-vision goggles are actually X-ray glasses to enable them to see through women’s clothes. Last week a Baghdad newspaper published an article about US troops raping Iraqi women. It was later forced to retract.

  A campaign for looters to return the museum’s treasures and promising an amnesty has resulted in the return of 1,500 items in the past two months.

  Last week alone, ten of the top exhibits were returned. One group of men brought back nine items from the Assyrian galleries. Among them was a statue of King Shalmaneser III – who ruled in the ninth century BC – on a pedestal inscribed with deeds and conquests from the ancient city of Nimrud. The items also included a large inscribed tablet from the sumptuous palace of King Ashurnasirpal II.

  A locked room in the museum, guarded by a sullen-faced woman in a black veil, acts as a repository for the returned items. Ivory pieces and figures that decorated thrones in Nimrud dating from the eighth century BC lie scattered on a table, along with beads, ancient silver bangles, swords and pieces of broken pots.

  ‘Everyone said the Iraqis are thieves, but they are bringing all this back and asking for nothing,’ said Dr Ahmad Kamil, deputy director of the museum. On one table is a list of the names of people requestin
g rewards for returning ancient bangles and vessels. ‘We still don’t really know what we’ve lost,’ he added. ‘It’s going to take a long time to check all the catalogues and items.’

  Founded in 1923 by Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and Arabist who was known as ‘the uncrowned queen of Iraq’, the museum is renowned for the world’s greatest collection of Mesopotamian art. Not only is Iraq the home of the Sumerian culture, which produced the world’s oldest literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it is also home to the Assyrian and Babylonian cultures, to Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, and to the hanging gardens of Babylon.

  It was the contrast between this ‘cradle of civilisation’ and American soldiers in full body armour and tanks apparently ignoring its pillage that so incensed public opinion.

  An emergency summit of international archaeologists held at the British Museum at the end of April denounced the coalition troops. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, described the looting as ‘the greatest catastrophe to afflict any major institution since the Second World War’.

  However, it is now clear that the original reports were highly exaggerated. Photographs of distraught museum officials among shards of ancient tablets and smashed glass in the entrance hall gave the impression of mass looting. In fact the main galleries had long before been emptied of their exhibits, which were moved to bank vaults following plans for their protection first drawn up during the Iran-Iraq War.

  Coalition troops last weekend entered a vault under the central bank where 179 boxes containing the Treasures of Nimrud – gold and ivory figurines from four royal tombs near Nineveh – had been hidden since before the first Gulf War.

  But MacGregor stuck to his comments. ‘I can’t think of another great museum that has had thirty to forty of its top pieces removed,’ he said.

  George, who was the source of the original number of items said to be missing, blamed shoddy reporting: ‘Someone asked me the volume of items in the museum and I said more than 170,000. It was immediately taken that more than 170,000 had been lost, which is not true.’

  He also pointed out: ‘I went to the headquarters of the US marines on Sunday, 13 April, after we had already had three days of looting and begged them for help, yet it was only the following Wednesday that they sent troops and tanks.’

  As the museum staff returned to work and began sweeping away the debris, many unanswered questions remained. Thieves seemed to know what to take and were able to break into three of the museum’s five locked storerooms. ‘The keys were in the director’s safe, which is an old-fashioned one – easy to break into,’ said George.

  There was suspicion, too, at the initial reluctance of museum officials to let experts from Unesco into certain rooms. Their explanation was that they had taken an oath on the Koran not to allow infidels into the vaults.

  The return of the Warka vase might help to resolve some of these questions, said MacGregor. ‘Who had it and how did they come to give it back?’ he asked. ‘Was it just an opportunist looter? Was it a professional thief?’

  Back in Iraq in late May 2003, six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, I experienced some looting of my own.

  Like many western journalists I was staying at the al-Hamra hotel in the Jadriyah district of eastern Baghdad. Its windows still had large crosses of masking tape that had been stuck up as rather ineffectual precautions against the US bombing raids. In those early post-Saddam days Baghdad had a gold-rush atmosphere, people talking of a property boom, and contractors and security consultants piling in, hoping for a slice of the reconstruction pie. The hotel lobby bustled with new arrivals as well as Iraqis hanging around wanting to pick up work as interpreters, and a large easel was pinned with notices announcing press briefings and offering shared rides back across the desert to Amman for $500 a time.

  My room was on the second floor of the back annexe and looked directly on to an apartment block just across the street. Often its residents would wave at me while I was making calls on the balcony where I had set up my satellite dish. One afternoon I came back from doing some interviews to find that the dish had disappeared. A strong hot wind was blowing from the desert so at first I thought it had fallen into the garden below. When I went down to look, a group of children gathered. They soon realised what I was searching for. ‘Ali Baba! Ali Baba!’ they shouted, pointing over at the apartments. One led me over and, sure enough, my satellite dish had been purloined by a family in a ground-floor flat. If I paid $200 I could have it back.

  I didn’t have much choice. Without the dish I could neither file copy, nor call my office or home. I went back to my room to fetch some dollars. On the way out of the hotel I met some young US soldiers whom I had got to know as they patrolled Jadriyah. A couple of times they had used my laptop and sat phone to send emails home. They were only 18 or 19 and it was disconcerting to realise I was old enough to be their mother. One of them had read me out a message from his father saying, ‘Son, I’m proud of you, you’re doing God’s work out there.’

  I told them about the fate of my dish and they offered to accompany me to retrieve it. This seemed a good idea as it might mean I had to pay less. But I was completely unprepared for what happened. When we got back to the courtyard of the apartment building, a crowd had gathered. The young soldiers panicked, pulled out their rifles and pointed them at the people, most of whom were women and children.

  ‘You people are all friggin’ thieves,’ shouted one of the soldiers, poking the butt of his rifle under a woman’s chin. ‘Give her back her satellite dish or we’ll friggin’ shoot you!’

  I was stunned. The Americans’ faces were twisted with hatred. Then I remembered once hearing them refer to people ‘speaking in Muslim language’. I thought about the checkpoints where my colleagues shouted at me to poke my blonde head out so the soldiers would know we were not Iraqis and not shoot. If this was how American soldiers dealt with ordinary Iraqis, they were going to create a lot of resentment.

  The man in charge of all this was L. Paul Bremer III, commonly referred to as ‘the Viceroy’. He had arrived in May to head the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA, the new name for the occupation administration. A short, smug man who wore a blue suit and cowboy boots even as the heat crept up towards 50°C, Bremer was a workaholic who liked to tell everyone he started his day at 4 a.m. and finished after midnight. He did not appear to know anything about Iraq. His young US advisers, who ran about importantly with clipboards, were almost all Republicans and talked of ‘the mission’ and ‘Free Iraq’. Their headquarters lay inside the high walls of Saddam’s old Republican Palace complex in the so-called Green Zone (the outside, where we lived, was referred to as the Red Zone). Each time I went to the CPA they were erecting more barriers, adding razor wire, rows of Hescos (steel-mesh baskets filled with ballast) and tanks. Nor did they seem to speak to real Iraqis. They were not allowed out without two vehicles and four armed guards. One of them confessed to me that they had just 17 Arabic-speakers for 6,000 staff. So cut off were they that after one press conference we were asked if any of us knew any educated Iraqi women who might be interested in being part of the new Iraq.

  To start with I dutifully went to the Green Zone every Friday for the weekly CPA briefing. These took place inside the vast convention centre across the road from the Al-Rashid hotel where I had stayed in 1994 and which had now been commandeered by the Americans. The briefings were such blatant propaganda they inevitably became known as the five o’clock follies. At my first one, I noted verbatim the following points made by Bremer.

  The regime of fear and oppression is gone.

  The Shia of Iraq have been able to honour their religious traditions for the first time in decades.

  Town councils and local politicians are starting to meet, and openly and freely select their leaders.

  Water quality is better in Basra than it has been for years.

  More Iraqis now have access to electricity than ever before.

  By the last three I
put exclamation marks (today of course it would be next to all five). All the Iraqis I met complained about the lack of water and power supply. There were enormous queues for petrol, and traffic was often at a Lagos-like standstill because of the American checkpoints. It seemed to be taking awfully long for repairs to begin on the damage caused by the bombing and everything was very chaotic. I remembered how at Foreign Office briefings before the war, I had asked about the plans for afterwards and had been palmed off. It had never occurred to me that there was no plan.

  When we asked Bremer about the fighting going on in Fallujah, not far from Baghdad, he would bristle and dismiss the insurgents as ‘those who refuse to embrace the new Iraq’. The military Sit Rep (situation report) would always refer to ‘foreign fighters’, part of the constant attempt to try to link Iraq to 9/11.

  One of the most amusing announcements was that of the arrival of a consignment of baseball caps for the Iraqi police. In charge of the police was Bernard Kerik who had sprung to network fame as New York police chief during 9/11. He stayed in Baghdad three months – just enough time, said cynics, for the extension to be built on his house back home. Anyway, it turned out there weren’t many police to command.

  On 16 May 2003, four days after flying into Baghdad, Bremer had announced CPA Order Number One. This decreed the deba’athification of Iraqi society to purge all former senior members of the Ba’ath Party and dissolve the entire army. He compared the measure to the Allies purging the Nazis after World War II. It would prove to be one of the US administration’s biggest mistakes.

  Ba’ath Party purge leaves Iraq without army or surgeons