The Cairo Times” interpretation seemed the most convincing to me, so that one made the paper. Matter closed, you would think, and the afternoon after sending the article I took time off to attend the graduation projects of the film students at the expensive American University in Cairo.
I sat next to a man in his early twenties from the Haram slum district, “Hazem.” He was wearing his only presentable suit because this was his big chance. One of the students had an uncle who was high up in the Ministry of Information, and Hazem had arranged to ask the uncle a question. He would work the answer into a flattering article for a newspaper and then he’d go back to the uncle and ask him for a job. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the uncle, and Hazem had to bite his tongue in frustration. We chatted a while and I got onto the subject of Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Hazem nodded in relief, “Unbelievable, isn’t it? You see how our regime has to be on its toes all the time? You don’t want to know how many enemies Egypt has—the last thing I heard was that Israeli girls had spread AIDS in the Sinai desert.” I looked at Hazem and thought, Should I write only about what is happening in Egypt, or also about what people think is happening here? But, again, how could I—without access to reliable opinion polls—find out what the average Egyptian thought?
Chapter Four
Hamiha Haramiha
In retrospect, I wonder why it took me so long to realize that the concept of good journalism in the Arab world is a contradiction in terms. I missed it for years because, one, I had no idea how journalism worked; two, no one in the business talks about it; and three, which was the main reason, for a long time the word “dictatorship” meant something abstract to me.
Of course, I’d read about dictatorships. As a young student I’d come across sentences such as “Arab dictators hold on to power through a mixture of intimidation, co-option, and deception,” or “Within a dictatorship, lawlessness is such that society becomes chronically corrupt and structurally opaque, and public opinion ends up fundamentally out of joint.”
It hadn’t sunk in, not really, and that was the case for a long time. During the year I spent at Cairo University, I learned that people were sent to prison without trial; I saw the portraits of the president; and there was an armored tank with a machine gun in front of the campus. You get used to such things. I knew that, as a Westerner, the regime wouldn’t touch me—it would be bad publicity for investors and would deter tourists—so it never became more than an interesting question for me: Might my student friends, people I saw three times a week or more, be working as informants for one of the secret services? When I returned to Egypt as a correspondent, I knew that the worst the regime might do was to deport me—something that hadn’t happened there for years. I had a nice life, and so the true face of the system in which I was living and working remained hidden. The presidential portraits, tanks, and fixed elections notwithstanding, Arab and Western society seemed pretty much the same.
But less than a year later, I became much less certain of this.
For want of anything better, I still approached talking heads for their opinions about the news of the day: A conflict between Iraq and the U.S. (“More combative signs from Baghdad”); a setback or breakthrough in the peace process (“Israel’s neighbors cautiously optimistic”); the latest speech by the American president or secretary of state (“Looks like it was written in Jerusalem”).
Arabs enjoy conversation, and so after an interview, I’d chat away with a closed notebook. That’s when I heard things that made me think, Hello, everybody! A Syrian professor told me that he’d stopped discussing politics with his wife over the dinner table, and no longer switched off the television in irritation when the president came on. His son had reached the age where he repeated things—for example, in the school playground, where the children of secret agents were walking around. A Lebanese lawyer admitted that he only took on rich clients because, if you couldn’t pay off the judge, litigation was pointless. A businessman said that he’d been stopped by a policeman the day before; the street had been closed off because the president was going that way. “Before I could turn my car around,” the businessman said, “my four-year-old daughter had offered the policeman a thousand-lira note. She’s so used to getting everything with bribes.”
It’s a journalistic no-no to interview taxi drivers because of the fear that they only say what the customer wants to hear. But in many Arab countries, drivers have day jobs as civil servants, so the taxi provides a safe place in which to have conversations with ordinary people. Some drivers were cagey, others more open: One said that policemen could “buy” busy crossroads for a hefty sum in order to issue fines, which went into their own pockets. A large share of the profits would go to a boss who’d subtract a sum, and so on, making a pyramid of parasites. Some drivers worked for customs, in taxation, in education, or in prisons, and the same pyramids seemed to exist everywhere. “I can’t help it,” drivers would say. “My salary is too small to live on.”
My usual driver in Jordan told me that his brother had gone to Damascus in a brand-new Mercedes to spend a weekend with his family. The next morning, the car was gone. He reported the theft to the police, made the rest of his visits by taxi, but on the last day he saw his Mercedes with a new HUKUMA [government] number plate. The police station tracked the number plate, and an hour later a general turned up. “Was that your car?” he asked brusquely. “We found arms and drugs in it, enough to lock you up forever.” The brother nodded, excused himself, and left.
During a trip back to the Netherlands, a taxi driver who was originally from Egypt told me that a friendly-looking guy in a coffee house had accosted him during his last trip home: Wasn’t he bothered by the mess the country was in? Wasn’t it scandalous, all this waste and repression? Did the taxi driver live in Europe? That was a rich and civilized place—our idiot of a president could learn something there. The taxi driver was indeed bothered, terribly bothered, by the state of his homeland. He agreed, and aired a few further complaints, and then the friendly-looking man said, “Listen, you bastard, I’m with the secret police. I’ll let you off this time, but you’d better watch out. I know where to find you and your family.”
Or take the story of “Walid.” I met him after the pope’s visit to Syria. This had produced a predictable article about the Holy Father’s travel itinerary, embellished with great quotes from the president and the most senior bishop in Syria on religious tolerance and world peace. I padded it out with human interest quotes from ordinary Syrian Christians, and we were ready to go. The piece made the front page, and colleagues back home sent their congratulations.
Thanks, but it seemed I was learning much more about Syria from Walid. He’d been recommended to me by a tour leader I’d befriended. At first, he hadn’t wanted to talk because he’d had bad experiences with Western journalists. Walid was in his twenties, had a modern haircut and good clothes, and his father had lived in England for a while. We had a beer together in the hotel bar, and strolled on to a night-club. What was it like to be a pro-Western young man living in Syria? He looked at me as if I was asking him whether Syria would ever win the World Cup. “It’s really boring. Boring, boring, boring. Every day you see the same slogans; you hear the same incendiary rubbish about Israel, while everyone knows that we’ll never be able to do anything for the Palestinians. Everybody’s cynical. They’re selling degrees for three hundred dollars a subject at the university. Professors force students to have sex with them in exchange for good grades. Sons of important fathers pass all their subjects without taking the exams. You’ve worked damn hard and he hasn’t. You get a nice grade but he gets a great grade, because his dad’s put in a call to the professor. Wouldn’t that drive you mad?”
What did he feel when he saw a portrait of the president? “Nothing—disgust maybe. These people are destroying my country. They’re stealing oil money, demolishing monuments, polluting nature reserves, building up the coast. People who can skip the three-year draft and just write a letter.�
� Walid explained why he avoided Western journalists. He played in a band, and a year ago a reporter from the Los Angeles Times had interviewed him for an article. “We were over the moon,” Walid said with a self-deprecating smile. “It was going to be our breakthrough in America! After playing, we got plastered, and then we made jokes about Jurassic Park, which is what we call the regime. He quoted that, and not a word about our music. Yep, then the secret services called. I had to report to them every day for weeks. Always the same questions, and hours of waiting. Boring, boring, boring. Why was I making Western music? Why was I going to Internet cafés? As if that was deviant behavior! Those motherfuckers have no idea what the world’s like outside Syria. They’re boring us to death, literally.”
The waiter brought us more beers. Four moustachioed men in leather jackets came in and went to sit at the front table nearest to the dancing girls. Further up in the street, the most important “investigation facility” was located—it was obvious that the moustaches worked there. So that must be how you wind down after a hard day’s work putting electric cattle prods up people’s bottoms. How did the moustaches’ wives explain that to their children? Uncle Mohammed is a teacher, Uncle Yasser is an engineer, and Papa tortures enemies of the president. “Tell me something positive,” I said after yet another beer.
Walid’s response was to tell me about a neighbor who had had an enormous wall built around his garden. “The whole neighborhood went mad and called in their connections. A few days later, a colonel came along, but he was too late. The neighbor had painted a colossal portrait of the president on the wall and Yes-Yes-Yes President Assad For Ever! The colonel was powerless to do anything about it.”
I learned the most about dictatorships from Western expats. They were high up in the pecking order, the regimes couldn’t do much to them, and many of them liked a drink, which made talking easier. At one dinner party, a European Union consultant told me that he’d been going to help the Lebanese government with “transparency.” The idea was to list on the Internet all the documents that civilians might need to have whenever they had to seek approval for plans or projects. Civil servants had sabotaged the plan immediately, the consultant said. As long as citizens didn’t know exactly which documents to take with them, the civil servants could carry on making up new requirements and saying “Come back tomorrow” until the citizens reached for their wallets.
During an Arab summit meeting, I got to know Gerhard, a German manager of a five-star hotel. A few hours before the summit, a man from the security services had come in—did Gerhard want to sign for 150 Egyptian tricolors? “I thought I was supposed to hang them up somewhere,” the inebriated Gerhard recounted. “But suddenly there were three vans in front of the door, and I had to release 150 employees so they could go and cheer the president as he came down the street. I had a hotel full of guests for the summit, and not a single member of staff.”
More power to alcohol, I would often think to myself—and even more so when I bumped into Roland’s Dutch colleague from the Fayum oasis water company at a drinks party for the Dutch community in Cairo. He’d told me earlier that the ministries of irrigation and construction had sabotaged the project.
Now, after a refreshing number of half-pints of Saqqara beer, he continued. “The problem is the words. We say ‘ministry’ because the regime uses that word, but actually it’s something quite different. A ministry isn’t set up here to make irrigation more efficient and less corrupt; rather, it’s to buy the support of thousands of farmers with offers of land, water, and fertilizer. In exchange, these farmers keep other farmers in check, and they all go out and cheer on the streets when the president or a minister comes to visit. At the same time, a ministry like this keeps thousands and thousands of Egyptians in the cities in work. The ministries here would function better if they sent eight civil servants home, and had two of them work for the salary of ten. Those two would earn enough for their family’s keep. But then you’ve got eight people on the street. What are they going to do? That’s right, the system is corrupt. But it goes further than that—the system is corruption itself. You have ten people doing not very much for a much-too-low salary—so low that they can’t live on it, but too much for them to revolt. You keep them complicit and vulnerable that way, which means you’ve got them under control.”
This story put me on the right track: A dictatorship is a fundamentally different system, but this is hidden from view because the Western media and specialists write about dictatorships as if they were writing about democracies. Egypt’s dictator is called “President,” even though he inherited his job from his predecessor who, in turn, used force to gain power. This particular dictator leads the “National Democratic Party,” which is neither democratic nor a party. Egyptians often go to vote, but can you call them elections if you’re not allowed to set up a party, can’t run an open campaign, have no access to the state press, and have to vote under surveillance—which is still heavily defrauded afterwards?
Thanks to Saddam Hussein, it finally sunk in properly. In his country, I didn’t just see the dictatorship; I felt it. Compare it with sex: You can read all you want, but until you do it, you really haven’t got a clue what people keep going on about.
Iraq under Saddam was not only the most hardcore of all the Arab dictatorships; it was almost entirely isolated on the international stage, for since 1990 the country had endured the heaviest trade sanctions in history. Saddam didn’t care about his image—tourists and investors weren’t allowed in— and Western correspondents had no special status. The result was that Iraq was the only Arab country in which a Western journalist was treated just like the next man.
It began with the visa. I’d faxed and telephoned Baghdad for months on end, and I’d stockpiled frequent-flyer points with futile flights between Cairo and Amman. The one time I did finally get through to Baghdad, they said, “We sent off the approval ages ago, mate. Get yourself to Amman.” There I was told, “Tomorrow. Maybe.” Finally, other journalists helped me hire a dodgy Egyptian with connections who could sort me out with a visa for a thousand crisp Volkskrant dollars. “Now we’re there,” he told me two weeks later. “The approval had been in the system for weeks—it just took me a while to find out who you have to bribe.”
The visa was there. I just had to pay a bribe—another word that I’d never used in a sentence together with “I” before my time in the Middle East. Now I was getting a crash course: You put a bank note from the American Federal Reserve (in this case, one hundred dollars) into the envelope with your visa application. The functionary would nod that he’d seen the green note, and that’d be your receipt.
There was something intimate about bribery, but I’d soon had enough of it. “AIDS test,” the customs officer on the Jordan-Iraqi border said—Iraq needed to protect itself against Western illnesses. For fifty dollars, though, they could do without it. “Wait here until we’ve finished the paperwork,” another customs officer, sitting beneath a board reading SADDAM HUSSEIN, A WONDERFUL LEADER FOR A WONDERFUL PEOPLE, told us. My driver nodded; this was the moment to give the official his twenty-five dollars so that he’d stamp things now and not in one and a half hours. “Satellite telephone,” said another official, while he went through my baggage. This would be a permit that I could obtain from the Ministry of Information for a pile of cash. We handed out more cigarettes, fizzy drinks, and money. Each obstacle had its price, and the way in which the customs officers indicated that they wanted money was by announcing, “We need to drink tea.”
Finally, the road to Baghdad was open, and we tore through the desert for which the word “desolate” must have been invented. After five hours, the city of one thousand-and-one nights loomed into view. We drove past the Suq Al-Haramiya, “the thieves market,” where stolen loot from Kuwait was sold on, and under the victory arch that Saddam Hussein had originally wanted to grace with the skulls of dead Iranian soldiers rather than with their helmets. Past the Ministry of Defense, too; I’d done my re
search, so I knew that this was where the dictator Qasim had lain sleeping one day in 1963 when he was bombed by his own air force, arrested, and executed by his own soldiers. Reuters had sent a telegram offering forty thousand dollars for pictures of the corpse, but the coup organizers had turned them down.
We arrived at the Rashid hotel, and that’s where I really started to feel what it was like to be in a system where you have no rights. The telephone switchboard operator would only put through calls if you paid him; and unless I paid off the guard in charge of the safes, he’d nick my equipment, too. The porter threw an aggrieved glance at the dollar note just handed to him, and looked at my sweating face. “You have more?” he asked. He knew that I knew he had a key to the room, and that he could steal everything when I went out. That’s why they had safes, but I could not put my shoes, toothbrush, and water supplies in there. So I had to bribe the maids, the security, the cleaners, and anyone else who had access to my room.
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