Baghdad Without a Map

by Tony Horwitz

  So Yousri tested the alternatives: bogus applications, and bribes. He tried claiming medical cause, saying he had a back problem that could only be treated abroad. When this failed, he turned, inevitably, to fixers: shady men who promised that a visa could be “arranged,” for a price. This was the Egyptian way, I knew, and I lent him the money to go ahead.

  Soon after, Yousri began calling me from work and whispering over the phone line, “The man says my visa to Australia is coming any day.” Three months later, the visa was still coming, any day.

  After a time I began resisting Yousri's bleak vision of Egypt, both for his own sake and for mine. Unlike Sayed, whose cynicism was leavened by humor and by a genuine affection for Egypt, Yousri had an unremittingly grim outlook. I found it depressing to dwell on Cairo's faults, and I found it even more depressing that Yousri, who would probably remain there forever, found so little to sustain him.

  “You need a new job,” I told him one night.

  “I need a new country,” he replied.

  “How about asking for a raise?”

  “I did. They said in another year I might get ten percent more.” That would bring his wage to sixty-six cents an hour, up from sixty.

  Events conspired to alienate Yousri still further. One day his father woke up feeling sick, went back to bed, and died. Soon after, his mother took ill and went to a hospital. She lasted two weeks. “The doctors told us her organs were | enlarged,” Yousri said. “They said this was common for a woman in her fifties.” It was the sort of mysterious ailment that often carried away Egyptians, frequently before they reached middle age. One of Yousri's sisters had died at twenty-four from what he called a “poisoned pregnancy.” Most of Egypt's well-trained doctors had long ago fled to higher-paying jobs in the Gulf or the West, and hospitals in Cairo weren't much more sanitary than the streets outside.

  I tried to cheer Yousri up with a trip to the Roy Rogers restaurant at the Marriott Hotel. But the sight of young Egyptians like himself, clad in kerchiefs and cowboy hats, serving up french fries, only made him more depressed. The restaurant's manager had “Dr.” on the name tag pinned to his red-striped shirt. “You see,” Yousri said, “Egypt is full of people like me. Toolhuch education and too little to do.”

  We toured the lobby until just before midnight, when Yousri had to go to work. Then, at the door, two security guards pounced on Yousri, grasping his elbows and bombarding him with questions. Who are you? Where is your identification? What are you doing here at midnight with a foreigner? I explained that Yousri was a friend and the interrogation finally ended, but only after a warning to Yousri that he never return there in my company.

  Egypt, though much freer than most Arab countries, keeps close watch on its citizens. Egyptians are barred from hotel casinos. Soldiers stand guard on the Nile bridges each night, stopping cars and quizzing drivers. And Yousri was suspected of unspecified offenses simply because he was Egyptian and I was not.

  “It is a way to remind us that we are not free,” he said, hurrying into the night, humiliated. I didn't hear from him for weeks. Then the late-night phone calls resumed. “The man says my visa is coming,” he whispered over the hotel phone. “Any day.”

  7—BAGHDAD—In the Land Without Weather

  If man has not heeded my words which I have inscribed on my monument, may the Lord kindle disorder that cannot be put down and despair to be the ruin of him in bis habitation, may he allot unto him as bis destiny a reign of sighs, days of scarcity and years of famine, thick darkness and death in the twinkling of an eye.

  —The Code of Hammurabi, Article 250

  On a midsummer's night in Baghdad, soon after an Iraqi triumph in its eight-year war with Iran, Mohammed Abid stood outside his restaurant by the Tigris River, poking a net at the last fish circling in a tiled tub of water.

  “Tonight Iraq celebrates victory and eats a very great deal,” he said. “But in the morning, maybe we find that peace is like this fish, a slippery thing that swims round and round and sneaks away.”

  Snaring the river fish, Mohammed flopped it onto the sidewalk to see if it was of suitable size for my dinner. Then he picked up a rusted monkey wrench.

  “We must never forget,” he said, raising the tool in the air, “that Iraq has enemies everywhere.”

  “Persians.” Thuuunk.

  “Syrians.” Thwaaap.

  “Zionists.” Thluuub.

  He gutted the bludgeoned fish with a few deft strokes and propped it over a wooden fire. “No one,” he said, wiping blood on his apron, “makes love to Iraq.”

  No one loves to visit Iraq either—certainly not three times in one summer, as I did in 1988. Baghdad was for me the most depressing of Middle East cities, though it had once seemed the most romantic. The name conjured images of a fantasy Arabia, a land of harems and slave dens, of Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. It was the sort of place I imagined traveling to aboard a magic carpet.

  The actual journey resembled walking through the gate' of a maximum-security prison. Iraq Air officials in Cairo told me to report four hours preflight for security, and I needed every minute. Guards frisked passengersjrom toe to turban while X-raying their bags to the point of radioactivity. Then the soldiers lined us up on the burning tarmac to identify our luggage while they shook us down yet again before we boarded the aircraft.

  Every personal effect was regarded as a potential weapon. One passenger had a small bottle of cologne, and the guard uncorked the perfume and passed it beneath the man's nose, presumably to see if it was chloroform or some other substance that could be used to disable the crew. The guard asked for my camera, aimed it at me and clicked, checking, I guess, for a gun inside the lens. Then he plucked the penny-sized battery from the camera's light meter and pocketed it; the Duracell could somehow be used to detonate bombs.

  “You are lucky,” said the Egyptian in line behind me. “Last time I flew, you could not carry on anything, not a book, not a pen, not even a diaper for the baby. It was a very boring ride.”

  At the airport in Baghdad it was my typewriter that aroused suspicion. Iraq requires the licensing of typewriters so security forces can take an imprint of the keys to trace anti-government literature. Behind the customs desk rose a ziggurat of other forbidden imports: videotapes, audio cassettes, binoculars—any instrument for gathering or disseminating information. Even foreign blood evoked xenophobia. The first sign welcoming travelers at immigration stated that anyone who failed to report for an AIDS test would be imprisoned. There was a certain irony to the sign, as few Westerners visited the country. Iraq didn't issue tourist visas. Never had.

  The second sign—and the third and the fourth and the fifth—showed the jowly, mustachioed face of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Big Brother was watching from portraits on every wall surrounding the baggage claim. He was watching from a leviathan billboard outside the airport—Saddam International Airport. He was even watching from the dial of the wristwatch worn by an official sent to the airport, to watch me as well. “Saddam is like Superman,” the official said, showing how the watch hands ticked across the leader's cheeks and brow.

  The man pointed me to the back of a government sedan. As soon as I climbed in, windows eased up, locks clicked shut. We nosed onto a four-lane highway toward the city, past a huge sports stadium, past huge modern mosques, past huge billboards of Saddam, illuminated in the night.

  My escort worked for the Information Ministry, which, by definition, made him a poor source of information.

  “Is this near the presidential palace?” I asked as we passed a heavily guarded compound.

  “Not far,” he said.

  “And where is the Foreign Ministry?”

  “Also nearby.”

  Searching for neutral topics, I commented on the weather. Yes, he said, it is very hot. How hot he could not say. The weather in Baghdad was classified information, “for security.”

  We pulled up on the street in front of the hotel. Concrete pylons blocked the dr
iveway. Pylons blocked the entrance to every hotel and government building we'd passed: security against car bombers. As the locks clicked up, I asked my escort if I needed to check in at the ministry the following day.

  “It has been arranged,” he said.

  In the hotel room, 'Big Brother gazed out from the television screen as a chorus of voices sang in the background:

  “We will challenge them if they cross the border, oh Saddam.

  The victory is for you, oh Saddam.

  With our blood and with our soul

  We sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam.”

  In Iraq, paranoia comes with the territory. The arid Mesopo-tamian plain has been overrun repeatedly by foreign armies: Greeks, Assyrians, Persians, Mongols, Turks, and now Persians again. It was this last incursion that I'd come to report on. Or rather, it was the war's recent turn in Iraq's favor that had prompted Baghdad to grant my months-old request for a visa.

  Iraq never acknowledged that the war had ever/tilied the other way, though it had for five or so years. The morning's Baghdad Observer, a slim and Orwellian paper, devoted the upper half of its front page to a picture of the president, as it did every day, apropos of nothing. Alongside the picture, War Communique No. 3221 announced that Iraqi troops had “liberated 13 strategic mountain peaks at the northern sector” and inflicted “thousands of enemy casualties.” The enemy's original taking of the now-liberated peaks had never been reported. In eight years of war, no Iraqi defeats and no Iraqi casualties were ever reported.

  At the Ministry of Information, Mr. Mahn, director of protocol for the foreign press, sat behind his desk with a red flyswatter in one hand and my requested “program” in the other. The fat, flyswatting official reminded me at first of Sydney Greenstreet in the movie Casablanca. Except that Mr. Mahn looked even more like Saddam. It was an unspoken rule that officials not only draped their walls with Saddam portraits and wore a Saddam watch, but also mimicked the president's squarish haircut and thick, well-manicured mustache. Unfortunately for Mr. Mahn, Saddam had recently decided to lose weight, and officials across Baghdad were now on what was known as the “Saddam diet.” Officials' target weights were published, and those who failed to lose the proper weight lost their jobs instead. By my third visit to Iraq, Mr. Mahn had shed fifty pounds.

  I'd been warned of the difficulty of seeing Iraqi officials and had listed every person I could think of on my program, beginning with Saddam Hussein. Mr. Mahn took out a red pen and crossed out the president's name. “His Excellency, of course, is too busy to see you,” he said. Saddam's face was everywhere, but the man himself was elusive; he'd held one press conference for the Western press in ten years.

  “This is no,” Mr. Mahn said, crossing out the next official I'd requested.

  “This is also no.” He continued down the list, alternating strokes of the red pen with slaps of the red flyswatter.

  “This is no.” Thwap.

  “Never mind.

  “No.

  “Still no.” Thwap.

  “Never mind.”

  After five minutes, Mr. Mahn had squashed a dozen bugs and reduced my epic-length list to three or four requests. One of them was to “see current fighting on the southern battlefront.”

  “This maybe you can see,” Mr. Mahn said. “On video.” He stuffed the list in his breast pocket. “Now you can go back to the hotel and wait. We will see what we can do with your program.”

  Wandering back to the hotel, shielding my eyes against the blinding sun, I seemed to be touring a city-wide portrait gallery devoted to a single subject. The traditional Islamic ban on representation of the human form had been overcome in Baghdad, in a very big way. Saddam's face perched on the dashboards of taxis, on the walls of every shop and every office, on clock faces, on ashtrays, on calendars, on billboards at every major intersection—often four pictures to an intersection. Some of the portraits covered entire building fronts. And to ensure that your eye didn't ignore the pictures from sheer repetition, Saddam appeared in innumerable guises: in miltary fatigues festooned with medals, in bedouin garb atop a charging steed, in pilgrim's robes praying at Mecca, in a double-breasted suit and aviator sunglasses, looking cool and sophisticated. The idea seemed to be that Saddam was all things to all people: omniscient, all-powerful and inevitable. Like God.

  “There are thirty-two million Iraqis,” went a popular Western joke in Baghdad. “Sixteen million people and sixteen million pictures of Saddam.”

  Iraqis didn't tell that particular joke. Article 225 of Iraq's penal code stated rather baldly that anyone who criticized the president, his party or the government, “for the purpose of raising public opinion against authority,” would be put to death.

  Technically, Iraqis required government permission to chat with foreigners. Those who did so regularly were likely to be questioned by the regime's five security forces, which spied not only on the people but on each other. The first man I approached on the street, to ask the time, held up his arm as if warding off demons and scurried away. More often, pedestrians or shopkeepers responded to my approaches by stating politely that their English, or my Arabic, was not so good.

  “People just don't talk to you much, particularly about politics,” complained a United Nations worker named Thomas Kamps, who had worked in Iraq for three years. “They know that's the fast lane to the electrodes and the dungeon.”

  Expatriates in Baghdad made a grim hobby of collecting police-state horror stories. One diplomat's wife had spent much of her two years in Baghdad pushing infants in strollers. She said not a single Iraqi had stopped on the street to smile at her babies or utter so much as a “koochie-koochie-koo.” “They're scared even to be seen talking to infants,” she said.

  A Turkish diplomat attended the unveiling of a new wing at the arts center—Saddam Arts Center. Each time the opening speaker mentioned the president's name there was a twenty-second pause for the audience to applaud. “The speaker mentioned Saddam a lot, and his speech ended up taking an hour and forty-five minutes,” he said, yawning in his office the following day.

  A Japanese diplomat lost his way one night in the neighborhood of the massive presidential palace. Soldiers opened fire on his car, as they did at any vehicle motoring slowly by, or making a suspicious U-turn in the vicinity of Saddam's residence. “The policy is 'Shoot first and don't ask questions later,' ” explained the diplomat, who escaped unharmed. He said two Westerners had been killed at the same spot several years before.

  There were genies inside every telephone and telex. A United Nations worker from Ethiopia told of phoning a colleague in New York and switching, midsentence, from English to his native Amharic. A voice quickly cut in, instructing him to “please continue in a language we can understand.”

  The state forbade direct calls overseas and limited operator-assisted calls to three minutes. Western publications were often seized at the airport, as were short-wave radios. Censorship of the domestic media was total. And ordinary Iraqis were barred from traveling abroad, even to Mecca. Baghdad was airtight, hermetically sealed against the outside world.

  At a stall in the city's cramped bazaar, under cover of commerce, I struck up a conversation with a youth named Tariq, who sold Smurf T-shirts and Adidas sweatsuits. “Born in the USA” blared from a nearby boom box, drowning out the tap and clink from the centuries-old copper market, where men crafted giant urns, plates, ashtrays and wall hangings with Saddam's face adorning the center.

  “I not understand you Americans,” Tariq said genially. “You make good clothes and music. You have California girls. But you start this war on us to help Israel. Why you do this?”

  I tried to explain that most Westerners believed Iraq had started the war. Tariq looked at me blankly. Big Brother was watching from life-sized photos on two of the stall's three walls.

  Tariq's neighbor, who owned the boom box, wandered over and began jabbing his finger at me. “He says you can have your Bruce music, you can have it all back,” Tari
q translated. “Now that we win the war, we not need to beg America for anything anymore.”

  Back at the hotel, I tried to telex New York, to give an editor a contact number. The telex machine was mysteriously broken. Three hours later, I returned to the desk to find other telexes sent, but not mine. “Machine still broken,” the operator said. When I complained, a French manager appeared and took me into a back office. The telex operators, he said apologetically, all worked for security and were under strict orders to vet journalists' telexes with the Ministry of Information. It was the weekend and no censors were available.

  I used the hotel's Xerox machine. The staff made copies of my copies, “for security.” Hotel staff watched me carefully each time I went in and out. I tried to call New York. There were no open lines. In three visits to Iraq, there was never an open line. Apart from the stilted reports of the Baghdad Observer—and faint crackles of the BBC World Service—I received no news at all of the outside world.

  This isolation unsettled me much more than the distance I'd felt in a country such as Yemen, cut off from the world byli Third World phone system and by the genuine remoteness of the place. Here there were touch-tone phones, five-star hotels and bland modern buildings of steel and glass. But I might as well have been on Pluto. America could vanish in a mushroom cloud and I'd still be sitting there watching Saddam on television as a chorus sang, “The people love you, oh Saddam, and you love the people.”

  Not all people loved Saddam, of course, and I eventually located a few Iraqis brave enough to speak out. An office worker whom I will call Saleh chatted politely over tea until his colleagues filed out for lunch. Then he turned up a radio and leaned across his desk, speaking in an almost inaudible whisper.

  “My phone is tapped, this office is bugged, and for all I know my grandmother is wired for sound,” he said. “But sometimes a man must speak his mind. Saddam Hussein, he is the worst dictator ever in the history of man.”