Sisters in War
Page 7
“Okay, okay,” Sergeant Lautenschlager was saying in a besieged voice. “We will send your questions up the Civil Affairs chain of command. Come back next week and we will have another meeting and we will invite the police to hear your concerns.”
As the crowd was left to stew, Manal listened in to hear what the Iraqi women were saying.
“The ajnabi humiliate us in our own country,” they said, referring to the “foreigners.”
“How do they expect us to trust them when they don’t trust us?” another said. “We had to go through so much security to get to them.”
Sergeant Lautenschlager’s Iraqi translator was trying to placate the women. “Everyone gets searched this way to enter the convention center. I go through this too.”
But they stared disbelievingly at the translator.
“Why are you working for them?” one asked, accusatorily.
“They got rid of Saddam,” she reasoned. “They are going to help us.”
The women shook their heads. Many of them came from the poor Shia neighborhood of Sadr City, where Muqtada al-Sadr had begun delivering fiery Friday-night sermons accusing the Americans of spying for Israel, selling alcohol, and defiling women. In the absence of any real personal contact with the Americans, many Iraqis believed him.
“Tell the truth. Tell us the real reason why the Americans are here.”
MANAL STEPPED OUTSIDE the convention center into the blinding sun. She adjusted her headscarf and put on her knockoff designer sunglasses. Her loose flowing pants wafted dangerously close to the spiky barbed wire as she exited through the U.S. military checkpoint, toward her car. After the Americans occupied Saddam’s palace and the nearby convention center, they allowed Iraqis to enter both freely. But in the last month or so, there had been a few attacks against U.S. soldiers, and the response had been swift. The perimeter of the palace was surrounded with concertina wire and heavily armed guardsmen, and no Iraqis were allowed in or out without a U.S. escort. The convention center was established as the place for the Iraqi public to enter if they wanted to, say, actually speak with the people now running their country, but they had to endure pat downs and metal detectors to get there. The Americans were calling their few square miles of new headquarters in central Baghdad the “Green Zone,” because of all the lush parks, imported trees, and man-made lakes. It was the poshest section of the city, and it was now more off-limits to the Iraqi public than it had been under Saddam.
No, she shouldn’t have attended the meeting. She instinctively did not trust the military, which she saw as a bunch of trigger-happy, macho eighteen-year-olds, pumped up on violent video games. Although the war had begun with propaganda about “hearts and minds,” stories had spread from village to village about aggressive soldiers who kicked down doors and arrested men in the middle of the night. Presumably, they were looking for Saddam and those who supported him, but in doing so, often detained dozens of innocent men and left the crying families with no information about their fate. Manal had heard all detainees were being taken to Abu Ghraib prison, but even she couldn’t get any information. She had to stay separate from the military, she thought, as she was a humanitarian and an activist and she had to be wary not to allow herself to be used for propaganda.
Her aid friends back in San Francisco, understandably, would find this “liberation” appalling.
The very creation of the Green Zone flew in the face of every lesson the aid world had learned over the last thirty years: If you want to help the populace, keep things grassroots—small, close to the ground, using personal contact, and let the locals do it. Don’t seclude yourselves and run the country by remote control—don’t topple a dictator and then move into his palace. Don’t they realize the message this sends? Manal wondered. Of course, few in Manal’s world actually believed this was a liberation. It was a war to control Arab oil, clear and simple, that those now in the Bush administration had been pushing for years. Many Iraqis suspected the same. It was no surprise that the U.S. military’s lame efforts to do aid work were greeted skeptically by Iraqi women who had lost their husbands or had had their houses destroyed.
By late summer 2003, the Americans had established a governing body inside Saddam’s palace, calling itself the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The CPA held all legislative, judicial, and executive powers in Iraq. It was led by Ambassador J. Paul Bremer, a Yale graduate and a former ambassador to the Netherlands under President Reagan, who had more recently held various high-ranking counterterrorism posts in the government and the private sector. A loyal Republican and devout Catholic, Bremer was photogenic, clean-cut, and touted as Bush’s “man on the ground,” despite speaking no Arabic and having no experience of Iraq. Bremer’s staff was mostly Republican. They made clear that political loyalty was a requirement for participation in the new Iraq. To Manal, they had little interest in women’s issues, beyond media stunts. When the CPA planned a women’s conference on July 9, Manal was politely told “not to come” by conference organizers, who accused her of having ties to Code Pink, the radical San Francisco women’s group. “We saw your website says ‘war is harmful to women,’ ” the organizer told her, meaning she must be anti-Bush. Manal didn’t mind. The conference was held inside the U.S. headquarters, by invitation only. Few Iraqi women attended or even heard about it.
The cheery conference ended. The Washington, D.C., women flew home. The media moved on.
Four days later, on July 13, 2003, Bremer announced his selection for Iraq’s first new government, the Iraqi Governing Council. Despite high hopes by Women for a Free Iraq to get half the seats assigned to women, none of the council were members of Women for a Free Iraq. Only three of the twenty-five government members were women. Of the eighteen provinces that made up Iraq, there were no women serving as representatives. Furthermore, the committee selected to draft Iraq’s first post-Saddam constitution did not include a single woman.
If this is the best the Americans can do for women, we’re in trouble, Manal thought. The three Iraqi women appointed to the new government were Songdul Chapouk, an engineer and a Turkmen minority from Kirkuk; Dr. Raja Habib al-Khuzai, the director of a maternity hospital in the southern city of Diwaniya; and Aqila al-Hashimi, a former international diplomat under Saddam’s government. There were eighteen cabinet positions open, and only one went to a woman: Nesreen Berwari, a Kurd with a graduate degree from Harvard University, was named the minister of public works.
They all struck Manal as impressive women, but they were unknowns in Iraq, and seemed shocked by their new jobs. Dr. al-Khuzai said she was “delivering babies by candlelight” when the Americans contacted her, and openly admitted she “had no idea why she was picked.” Suspicions were aired that the more powerful women were pushed aside by even more powerful Iraqi male politicians, many of them tribal leaders, who had put pressure on the CPA. They wanted female fill-ins to rubber-stamp their decisions, and the Americans weren’t willing to stand up to them on women’s issues. The selection gave a public impression that women and different regions were represented, yet they would present no real challenges to the other members, and be kept out of the inner power circle.
Even more troubling than the lack of women was the choice of men: two wore the black turbans of Shia clerics, and two wore the flowing robes and headdresses of tribal sheiks. Some of Iraq’s most conservative, religious Shia parties were included in the council, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Islamic Dawa, both of which had ties to Iran—a country known for its oppression of women. Religion and politics had been kept separate in Iraq under Saddam and before his reign. What good would it serve women to remove Saddam and replace him with mullahs?
This was not a good start, Manal thought.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NOTHING WAS GOING as smoothly as planned, Heather worried.
By July, the fourth month of the occupation, Heather’s unit had moved from its temporary barracks at the airport and set up camp inside the Green
Zone in what she imagined were some of the fanciest barracks in all of military history: two grand residences alongside Saddam’s Republican Palace, formerly occupied by ministers. Other than the blown-out windows and scattered M16s, the living accommodations were nicer than most of the soldiers’ homes back in the States, with the exception that they were shared by more than a dozen soldiers. The military had divided the house up by rank, and Heather and Lieutenant Idong Essiet were the only two females in a house of nearly a dozen male officers.
These idyllic barracks were hardly representative of the situation at large, however—it was more like an oasis. In the last month, a couple of random attacks on soldiers had prompted the top brass to tighten security. The latest report showed thirty-seven soldiers killed in May and thirty killed in June. Though that was a low casualty count by military standards, given the 140,000 troops on the ground, no one wanted to let their guard down, even if probably half were accidents, illnesses, or maybe even suicides, Heather guessed. Given the amazing advances in communication—soldiers were watching CNN, surfing the Internet, and getting daily security briefings—the tale of just one dead soldier could chill the efforts of an entire unit. One story, in particular, had made the rounds: At Baghdad University, a young soldier had been accompanying some American education officials on a tour. He had walked off to buy a soda at an outdoor kiosk when an Iraqi walked up, shot him in the head, and ran away. This was the first story she’d heard of a soldier attacked not in battle, but while doing reconstruction work—exactly the kind of work that Heather and her unit thought was winning over hearts and minds. Naturally, this made many soldiers wary of all Iraqis. Since the warehouse mission in which the Iraqi militiamen had laughed with her and told her to “bring her tanks next time,” she had begun to let down her guard to chat with the locals, kick around a soccer ball, or buy ice cream on the way back to base; some soldiers even had tea with Iraqi families. Heather was careful not to stereotype all Iraqis as dangerous.
But perhaps she should be more careful now.
In response to that shooting, and other scattered incidents in recent months, such as roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades fired at Humvees, the army had tightened security rules. Now, any soldier who left the base had to be in a convoy of two Humvees, with three soldiers in each. And at least one of the Humvees had to have a Crew Served Weapon (CSW), which was the big circulating automatic weapon atop the vehicle. Heather’s entire unit had only two CSWs for one hundred troops, and only a couple of soldiers were trained to use them. This meant that the decision to heighten security, while perhaps logical in theory, meant logistical nightmares for the soldiers. With no electricity, operating schools, or running water in Baghdad, Heather’s Civil Affairs unit had more on its plate than it could handle. Now, the entire unit had to coordinate each day’s activities, sharing just two vehicles and dragging soldiers off their own important reconstruction missions to accompany others on theirs. It was the kind of poorly thought out bureaucratic decision that infuriated Heather—something much too small to be reported in the press, yet significant enough to doom the entire mission, in her opinion.
For example, negotiations with the sheik to return control of the warehouses had, frustratingly, stalled. She missed their last prearranged meeting when she couldn’t get a third Humvee. The phone network had yet to be restored. She had no idea if the sheik used email, and she couldn’t type in Arabic anyway. Setting up another meeting became impossible because she had no way to get in touch with him and her unit was quickly distracted by all the other things that needed doing. She had dutifully typed up her memo and sent it up the chain of command, but she never heard back.
Heather didn’t want to leave the growing list of problems to the sheik’s militias but her unit simply didn’t have the manpower or expertise to run every aspect of Iraqi society. She and others tried to scale down expectations, telling Iraqis, “These things take time,” or “We need your support to get the ministries up and running.” But the Iraqis would say, in broken English, “Ministry halas!” with a smack of their hands. The ministries had been burned down or looted. The problems were only getting worse, and instead of making even small progress the Americans seemed to be falling further and further behind, on all fronts.
After all, the sheik had approached them with an open mind, but the Americans had not delivered. She imagined him waiting around, getting angrier and angrier, and finally giving up on her. He would go back to his community, and to his leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, telling them that American promises couldn’t be trusted.
BEFORE HER FRUSTRATIONS began to snowball, Heather jumped off the couch.
“Morning, sir,” Heather murmured to Major Norcom as she crossed the marble floors to the palace kitchen, rummaged through a care package for some breakfast bars, and flopped onto the ornate patterned sofa, resting her dusty boots on the glass table.
“Sir?” she said, finishing her snack and approaching the major, who had a map and clipboard in his hand. “I’ve got to inspect some potential sites for the town halls in the morning. What else do we have going on? Can I get a private and Lieutenant Essiet to go along? Who’s free?”
Major Norcom looked through his thickly rimmed, square glasses at his list like a stern grandfather. The day’s agenda was set either by orders that came down the chain of command, or by requests from soldiers tasked to specific areas. Captain Sumner oversaw the zoo and the museum; Captain Edwards took care of the National Library and the World Food Program; Major Norcom worked on the preservation of religious sites and community sports. Heather did humanitarian issues, such as the food distribution program.
For months now, the military had been leading the effort to piece back together a country damaged by looting, sanctions, and Saddam’s negligence. While Heather expected her civil affairs unit to do reconstruction, it was hardly an appropriate role for combat soldiers. Where was the wave of experts from the State Department, USAID, and private contractors with plans to build up civil society? Wasn’t the job of rebuilding the country supposed to be done by Ambassador Bremer’s CPA? Heather was beginning to wonder what the CPA was up to. From brief observations, its members seemed even more clueless about reconstruction work than the soldiers.
Heather and Major Norcom looked over the map together and traced the convoy’s plans for the day to maximize their time and resources. They’d begin with assessing and clearing buildings to serve for Iraq’s new local advisory councils—that was a priority that came down the chain of command. With Saddam’s dictatorship obliterated, steps were being taken to replace it with a democracy. As Heather understood it, a temporary government of Iraqis had been appointed to work alongside the Americans in the CPA, and Iraq’s first national elections would be held the following year.
On a local level, each of Iraq’s eighteen provinces would have its own elected representatives, like U.S. congressmen. Neighborhoods in urban areas such as Baghdad would also have their own advisory councils, modeled after American town-hall-style local government. In order to create this kind of democracy, U.S. soldiers would eventually work with officials from the State and Defense departments, as well as private U.S. companies who had multimillion-dollar contracts. One such company, Research Triangle Institute (RTI), had a $187 million Pentagon contract to set up 180 local councils across Iraq. Together, they were to explain to the Iraqis the machinery of democracy, from its philosophical underpinnings to the nuances of campaigning and elections to the importance of civilian participation.
There was a lot of enthusiasm back in Washington, D.C., and the task of creating democracy had all sounded very romantic and wonderful to Heather when she first learned about it. However, confronted with the minutiae of its implementation, installing democracy by fiat was not so easy, she was learning. For example, both RTI and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) had a “woman component” to increase the number of females participating in the councils, but Heather never saw enough women involved. Once, when she asked, a
n Iraqi told her that women were comfortable taking positions of authority in government, but the problem was the presence of U.S. soldiers at the meetings. Husbands or family members forbade the women from being in the same room with military personnel, as soldiers in Iraq had a reputation for being uneducated and aggressive men. This kind of cultural barrier was something the planners in Washington had not even begun to consider.
This particular morning, Heather’s role in creating democracy boiled down to emptying squatters out of a few buildings in Baghdad that had been designated as advisory council headquarters. Securing real estate was a tiny task on the “building democracy” checklist, yet it was another change that had become harder to implement than Heather had ever imagined. No one had anticipated that, as soon as the invasion ended, thousands of rich Iraqi expats would return to the country, along with thousands of Western journalists, aid workers, and businessmen, all looking for houses to rent. Baghdad real estate prices had skyrocketed to beyond those of Washington, D.C. A furnished three-bedroom house, the sort of thing they were looking to convert into office space, could easily rent for a whopping eight thousand dollars a month—a result of market forces and savvy Iraqi landlords squeezing the foreigners.
There were hundreds of empty residences and offices belonging to Saddam’s government, however, and during the war, squatters had moved into many of the empty mansions. Heather didn’t know whether to call them squatters, war refugees, homeless people, or just real estate opportunists, but she was in charge of “clearing” them out so the buildings could be used by civic groups. Since the police had not yet returned to their posts, and the national army had been disbanded, this was another unexpected “building democracy” task that fell into the lap of the U.S. troops.
THE CONVOY ANTICIPATED taking an hour to get to its destination, which was less than ten miles away. The terrible Baghdad traffic was due to the absence of traffic police, traffic lights that couldn’t work without electricity, and the number of cars, which had quadrupled since the borders had opened. Deeming it unsafe to be stuck in traffic, military Humvees didn’t wait in the long lines—they drove against oncoming traffic or up onto the sidewalks. Still, convoys often got lost in the complicated Baghdad street system, which didn’t really use street names or house numbers. Heather didn’t understand how Iraqis got around. Back when city planners mapped out Baghdad—in the twelfth century—there was no use for grids, she guessed.