Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack

  Now Heshmat’s bravado was gone. You could see defeat in every curve of his posture.

  “I don’t know how he’ll feel, being Parliament speaker, knowing he won by forgery. As an intellectual, he’s finished,” he half whined. “I’m planning to appeal and planning to go global to expose what’s happened.” But his voice was listless.

  He dropped his head.

  “This is such a stupid regime. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  A neighbor burst into his apartment. He had come angry; he wanted Heshmat to put the men out to fight in the streets.

  “I really disagree with you,” he told Heshmat, white beard dancing jerkily to his words. “The people are ready to die.”

  “So many people were arrested …” Heshmat trailed off.

  “So what? So what? Even if they arrest a thousand, so what? We were all willing to die for the ballot boxes yesterday. What they did was unbelievable.”

  But Heshmat was unmoved. His son, an art student, had been carted off to jail overnight, along with dozens of other young men. He didn’t have any push left.

  “I’m concerned about the people’s safety,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is a crazy regime. They walked all over the people’s will. They can do whatever they want.”

  This is called compromise in Egypt: giving the regime what it wants, and what it always knew it would get, one way or the other. Egypt is a study in endurance.

  Heshmat finally popped up in Cairo, but it was too late. He made some angry speeches. He said he’d been robbed. He wasn’t the only one: other Brotherhood candidates risked arrest to tell the world they’d been cheated in their precincts. Some judges came forward, too, and testified to the vote rigging.

  But their moment had already passed. Ancient, implacable Egypt was creaking forward, crushing the things that had to be crushed.

  Fiqi became head of the foreign affairs committee, just like everybody had predicted. He never made any excuses for what happened in Damanhour; he didn’t discuss it at all. He knew, I think, that it didn’t really matter.

  Even with all the dirty tricks, the Brotherhood still did better than anybody expected them to do. They wound up with a fifth of the Parliament. It was their strongest showing in history. The Bush administration saw that, too. They saw the Brotherhood, and Hamas, and Hezbollah all cashing in on elections. After that, we stopped hearing so much about democracy for Arabs. As it turned out, it didn’t look the way they had expected.

  I was asleep early one morning when I felt an earthquake roll through the house, as if Cairo were a spread of water and my bed a raft; it rippled and rolled beneath my body. I knew, even half asleep, that it could only be an earthquake. But when I asked around, the driver hadn’t noticed, or the supermarket clerk, or even Hossam. You would think an earthquake would be enough to break something, to shred an old idea, that the shifting of tectonic plates couldn’t help but express itself tangibly in our constructed world. You forget that most earthquakes simply aren’t very powerful. Not compared with all the concrete, bricks, pillars, braces, rocks—the architecture of structure, the foundations of inertia. Something has shifted below the earth, and maybe it will keep moving until it means something, but that day may only come when we are no longer here to see. The earthquake came to Egypt, rattled things about, and rolled off again. Nobody noticed. In the end, I found a wire story on the Internet—a marginal clump of paragraphs, flickering through half-life in cyberspace. An earthquake came to Egypt at dawn, the wire story said. No damage was reported.

  At least I knew I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

  FOURTEEN

  ALL THINGS LIGHT, AND ALL THINGS DARK

  I stared at the name, and from the sterile text of wire reports, the name stared back. Atwar Bahjat. I screwed my eyes into a long blink and opened them. The name was still there. The bodies of Atwar Bahjat and her cameraman and soundman were found early Thursday …

  Winter light struggled through the windows. Outside Iraq clenched tight as a muscle, the streets of Baghdad hollow and silent. I had been writing all night, overcooked coffee chewing my stomach. I was alone in a silent room in a drab hotel, staring at a computer.

  The day before, an enormous thing had happened. Sunni militants crept through the streets and set off bombs in the gold-domed shrine at Samarra, revered place of pilgrimage and worship devoted to the tenth and eleventh Shiite imams. Sunnis and Shiites had been murdering each other all day and all night, taking their revenge. Civil war had never felt so manifest. The translators and drivers who worked for the various news bureaus in our building had sorted themselves into separate rooms: Sunnis here, Shiites there. Just like that, all at once. Tight-jawed and tense, they clumped around television sets listening to their respective clerics, getting angrier by the hour. Everybody in the building was nervous.

  Staring at Atwar’s name, all I could think about was color: green and orange, blue and red. Instead of memory, that’s what came—the idea of bright color. I hadn’t seen Atwar in a long time, and it felt even longer. Time moved slower in Iraq, weighed down by life and death.

  When we met in the summer of 2004, the city rotted and sagged with hues: the wicked sheen of sunlight on new cars; wilting red flowers taped clumsily to car windows in blaring wedding processions; the soft, green haze of date palm groves. In the few seasons since, Iraq had blurred itself into dry-eyed black and white.

  Atwar had worked at Al-Jazeera that summer, covering the world’s biggest story for the world’s most controversial news organization, struggling to prove herself in the crucible of Iraq. Those were the days when homemade beheading videos were delivered to Al-Jazeera and broadcast to the world. U.S. officials openly loathed Al-Jazeera, complaining that the cameramen cropped up conveniently whenever a car bomb went off and accusing the reporters of alliances with insurgents. For their part, the journalists had little to model themselves after: the Arab world didn’t offer many examples of responsible journalism. The network made an interesting story. I asked to shadow a Baghdad correspondent, and they sent me to Atwar.

  “Atwar Bahjat!” The Iraqi men in my office had admired her full cheeks and carbonated eyes ever since Saddam’s days, when she’d dished up propaganda on Iraqi state television. “She’s a poet, you know,” Salar told me. It was true: she was a poet, a feminist, and a novelist. She was just twenty-eight that summer, and already emerging as one of the Arab world’s most respected war correspondents.

  We met in July, when trees sagged with heat and the landscape blurred into a shimmer by noon. The sun had teeth and a hard glare; every blade of grass glowed like a stalk of ice. An Egyptian diplomat had been freed by kidnappers that day, and Atwar would cover the story. By the time I reached the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad, she was inside. Dozens of sweating, jostling, cranky journalists, mostly Arabs looking for a scoop, pressed together in the framed gaze of Hosni Mubarak and the clammy embrace of broken air-conditioning.

  Adorned with lipstick, eye shadow, blue head scarf, and huge turquoise ring, Atwar barely grazed a seat before bobbing to her feet again. She laughed from her stomach, looked men in the eye, and dropped whispers in ears.

  The diplomat had been freed overnight. He stepped into the room and cameras snapped in a rain of shouted questions.

  Who paid for your release? How much?

  Do you think Arabs should leave Iraq?

  Will this kidnapping be the last?

  Was your family aware of what was going on?

  Did they threaten to kill you?

  A smug smile played on Atwar’s plump baby face.

  “Don’t you have a producer?” I asked.

  “I’m from Iraq,” she said coolly. “I don’t need a producer for this.”

  The press conference was over, and Atwar hadn’t asked a single question. I looked at her, wary. She winked and pulled me into a back room. While the other journalists elbowed for camera positions outside, she had arranged a private interview with the ambassador. She sat with him at leisu
re, and he answered all of her questions.

  Later that night, in the swampy darkness of the Al-Jazeera editing room, we talked about the corrosion of war reporting. I liked Atwar, I realized, and it surprised me a little. I had expected a musty, middle-aged man or a sallow-faced, veiled nationalist. But here was a woman my own age, tugged by ambition and emotion, trying to keep intact. Atwar had never taken a break, and the months were piling up on her. Now she had peeled herself out of her reporting persona and sat there pale and contemplative in the half dark.

  “There are a lot of complaints about Al-Jazeera’s reporting,” I said. “The Americans criticize you, and so do the Iraqis. How do you respond?”

  “I would like to say one thing.” Her voice was soft. “My generation has been in war ever since we were born. Before this war, we always felt left in the dark. The government would say one thing and we’d see something else. During that time, we got used to that kind of pressure. During this war, it is the same. The Iraqis say one thing, the Americans say something else. Since the war there is more freedom. It’s better since the war.”

  Atwar’s job hadn’t come easy. Her bosses didn’t want to send a woman into combat, but she pestered and pleaded, took on the political beat and covered it relentlessly to prove herself. In the end, her bosses relented.

  “She was very strong. People in Al-Jazeera always told her, ‘If you ever feel uncomfortable, come back,’” Ali Taleb, Atwar’s cousin and bodyguard, told me after she died. “But she never did.”

  Darkness had begun to nudge against her that summer of 2004. She had driven over a roadside bomb on her way to work one day. Her car was ruined, but she stepped out in one piece. She had been arrested and questioned by American soldiers. She had covered combat in the holy city of Najaf, reporting with bullets and mortar rounds flying overhead. A corner of her character had been dipped in blood—its tinge was on her, but she still seemed whole. Glimpses of death had given her a new reverence before God, she said, and had inspired her to adopt the Muslim head scarf.

  “When I go to hospitals and see children dying, I fight myself to be objective,” she admitted. “I’ve been affected mentally and psychologically, but if you’re not neutral around here, you can lose your job.”

  She couldn’t afford to cry at work, and so she pushed through the hours, drove home, and collapsed in tears.

  “I have seen death now.” But she said it lightly, by way of explanation. “I have been touched by it.”

  When we said good-bye, she looked at me with her warm eyes and apple-cheeked face and asked me to keep in touch. To call her if I needed anything in Iraq, any contacts, any help. And I said yes, I would call, but I never did. One story melts into another, an assignment becomes a plane ride, a new hotel room, a different country. I kept moving forward, and so did Atwar, and I guess neither of us had the luxury of time or retrospection.

  After she died, I sat with her sister, her aunts, her cousin, and her colleagues. They were the ones who told me the rest of her story: That Atwar had been the head of the family since her father died, and had resisted pressure to get married even though at thirty she was an old maid. She was too caught up in history, too busy building her own career, to start cooking dinner for a husband. She published a book tracing her adventures as a war reporter and had begun writing a second, examining the role of women in Iraq.

  “During the battle of Najaf, the correspondents wouldn’t go out in the streets. The Shia felt Al-Jazeera was against them,” recalled Amna Dhabi, her colleague. “But Atwar was very neutral. She’d say, ‘I’m for Iraq, not for a specific sect.’ She got in her car and went to Najaf and went live on TV.”

  The death threats pelted her for years. First she moved her widowed mother and younger sister to a new house in a safer neighborhood; a few months before she was killed, she took them to live in Amman. But it didn’t feel right. She couldn’t stay out of Iraq. She came home again.

  “She believed fate had decided for her to stay in Iraq,” Atwar’s twenty-five-year-old sister, Itha, told me. “She would always say, ‘It’s better to stay in one’s country.’”

  It was a deliberate choice. Atwar, unlike most of her stranded countrymen, had the talent and connections to get out of Iraq. But she wouldn’t go. She turned down jobs abroad, determined to tough out the violence. When Al-Jazeera was expelled by the Iraqi government, she went to work for the rival station, Al-Arabiya.

  All the while, the threats kept coming.

  This is not only the story of Atwar, but the story of Iraq. Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country; her murder reeked of the hopelessness of a lost cause. Here is one woman, one soul among some 100,000 Iraqis who have been sacrificed, fed to appease the nihilistic blood thirst of a slow-motion national collapse. She was no more than the doctors, children, professors, street sweepers, goat vendors, soccer players, and other Iraqis who were snuffed in this war. But she lived on television when television was the national security blanket—the only glimmer of the outside world still allowed to penetrate an Iraqi home; a flashing, talking companion; an addictive succor. She had kept company with the country all down the darkest days. Her death matters because all of the deaths mattered, but most of them were anonymous, and she lived as a symbol of mad hope for an impossible, alternative Iraq: a place of liberated men and women, and the free exchange of ideas; a society that had moved beyond its sectarian differences. She died because that hope was indeed insane, a bold and audacious rejection of visible evil.

  Life under Saddam meant existing in a very tight space, a land without horizon, discouraged from dreams. Then war comes and absolute change washes in on tides of killing. Iraqis, who had pined for everything in the world, were glutted with everything, all at once. Every imagined possibility, the ones that were hidden in the shadows, suddenly shimmered and breathed in the air. Saddam was gone, the country would reinvent itself, anything could happen. But … every possibility was chained to its own weight in danger and death. The claustrophobic closets of dictatorship gave way to the wild and wide-open and deadly plains of war and foreign invaders. The people found themselves stranded with no constraints except rusty imagination and the violence that stalked the land. There came to them all things light, and all things dark.

  So it was confusing, talking to Atwar. She kept saying it was better since the war—more freedoms. But under her words welled decay and downfall.

  “My country is collapsing, and it’s my job to watch this collapse,” she told me. “The Iraqi people are waiting for their dream, and now they find it’s only a nightmare. People find out that nothing has been done. Many people who hated Saddam Hussein now wish he’d come back. They’re feeling they were fooled.”

  Islamists gathered up power, and set about reestablishing the domination of men over women. They prowled the streets, threatening to kill women who bared their heads, encouraging men in the mosques to do the same. So that was one thing: Atwar was a woman on television at a time when rabid armies were trying to stuff women back into unseen rooms. Behind her elaborate and vague explanation of taking the hijab because she had seen death, I felt the big, unspoken truth of her fear, and believed she did not speak of this fear because she was too proud.

  Then there was the ancient and relentless question of sect, tearing apart the Muslim people ever since Muhammad’s earliest descendents tried to shape the religion and move it forward. Like so many lingering tensions, this had been squashed by Saddam and his endless armies of spies, policemen, and torturers. The Sunnis were in charge under Saddam, and the Shiites and Kurds kept quiet. And then Saddam was gone, power and oil and money were all up for grabs, and Iran came rushing into Baghdad and the south—and the sectarian war began.

  Atwar was a theological half-breed; she didn’t fit anywhere. Her mother was Shiite, her father Sunni. She told people she didn’t believe in sect. Her country kept on breaking down, and Atwar kept on refusing to acknowledge it. She wore a gold pendant in the shape of Iraq to indica
te her disdain for splitting people into categories: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd. That pendant was famous. Anonymous callers threatened to kill her for wearing it. She battled her editors about whether people in the stories should be identified as Sunni or Shiite. Atwar thought the sectarian identifications were immoral. The hatred was hot enough already, she told her bosses. She wanted to calm things down, not stoke the anger.

  There was no place in Iraq for a woman like that.

  At a time when Iraq was so blood-jaded and numb it seemed as if shock had abandoned the country for good, the bombing of the gold-domed shrine gripped the nation. Atwar must have been shocked, too, because she didn’t stop to ask permission. She rounded up the camera crew, piled into a van, and raced homeward. She thought she was safe in Samarra, surrounded by her own people. She called her younger sister and told her not to worry. “I’m among family,” she said. The crew found the roads into the city choked shut. Soldiers had surrounded and sealed the town, desperate to contain the violence. The entire country was clapped under curfew. Shiite gangs roved the streets, mad for vengeance, slaughtering Sunnis.

  In the farmlands outside town, Atwar’s crew set up a shot with the rooftops of Samarra in the distance. Curious villagers gathered around. As the light faded from the wintry sky, Atwar picked up the microphone. She arranged her haggard features into a television face and spoke straight into millions of Arab living rooms, to the far corners of Iraq, the other Muslim countries, and the wide world beyond. She must have known that civil war was at hand. Her words were defiant, and scared.

  “Whether you are Sunni or Shia, Arab or Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis,” she said. “[We are] united in fear for this nation.”

  When the live shot was over, Atwar called the Baghdad bureau. She talked with her colleague, Amna.

  “Iraq is swinging on your chest,” Amna teased Atwar. She meant the pendant.

  “Yes, Iraq is swinging between insurgents and these Iraqi politicians,” Bahjat said wryly. “It needs a warm chest to lie upon.”