Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  As I heard his words, I slowly began to realize that this man was on my side. For the first time ever, it seemed, a person in a position of real authority understood what we had been through and thought of us as human beings. I wanted to smile, but the smile would not come, pushed away instead by the tears that I felt welling up in my eyes. Tears of relief, and of sorrow too for my mother, who was not there to hear what was being said. Suddenly I became aware of the fact that many of the eyes in the courtroom were now on me, but it didn’t matter. And it didn’t stop me weeping.

  The judge then announced what was to be done with me: “In the circumstances, the sentence that I propose to pass is the maximum one that I can impose on a suspended basis. It is two years, and it will last for two years. I could, as part of my duties today, make a recommendation for deportation. I do not do so, for obvious reasons. I know my sentence will affect your citizenship application and, as I have said already, it is right that it should. I cannot, in view of the serious nature of this matter, mitigate my judgment any further, but, as I have indicated, I do believe that the interests of justice demand in these particular and unique circumstances that the sentence I impose be suspended.

  “Understand this: that if you commit any offense punishable by imprisonment within the next two years this sentence can, in whole or in part, be activated and you will then serve it. Do you understand that?”

  Through my tears I replied simply: “Yes.”

  The judge went on to say that he did not propose to make an order for me to repay the money to William Hill. That matter was for them to pursue in the civil courts. They never did.

  I stepped down from the dock, tears still in my eyes. I wasn’t pleased with what I had done—all I had ever wanted to do was work hard and make a life for myself and my family by honest means. That opportunity had been taken from me, and I had fully expected to pay the price for it.

  As it was, I felt humbled by the leniency that had been shown to me. Leniency that my past had shaped me not to expect.

  In the months that followed my trial, the judge’s warning rang in my ears: “If you commit any offense punishable by imprisonment within the next two years this sentence can, in whole or in part, be activated and you will then serve it.” I had no doubt that he meant what he said, and I knew I had to walk the line carefully if my mother and my brother were to benefit from my help. The need for caution didn’t dampen my enthusiasm to be reunited with them, however; if anything, it strengthened it.

  It took a long time to spirit my mother and brother out of Turkey; and in the months and years that followed the trial, they moved about constantly, always attempting to keep one step ahead of any suspicious officials who might try to pay unwanted attention to their bogus Iraqi documents. I knew that, having left Iraq, they were free from torture and brutality, but they couldn’t rest easy until they could claim asylum in a place of safety, for the threat of deportation was always hanging over them. To my exasperation, the route that my sister had taken became closed to me when the smuggler who had arranged it disappeared—I don’t know where—and so once more it was left to me to find a new way to enable my mother and brother to finish the final leg of their journey.

  My newfound trust in the British system inspired me to pursue their claim for asylum through the proper channels. I started liaising with members of Parliament (MPs), telling them our story and seeing if they could persuade the Home Office to grant us the right to family reunion; but despite the fact that the MPs had the ability to exercise their discretion to do so, they refused. As the months of red tape turned to years, I became increasingly frustrated as gradually it became more obvious that my mother and brother would never make it to England if they didn’t arrive at the border and claim asylum for themselves.

  By now I had saved some money, so reluctantly but with a sense of implacable determination, I launched myself back into the sinister yet sadly familiar scene of people-trafficking. I had long conversations with faceless individuals in far-flung corners of Europe; I negotiated routes and prices; I directed every instinct I had into deciding whom I could trust and whom I couldn’t. I had learned a lot about such things, after all.

  In the end, I parted with a great deal of money, handed over to a shadowy individual in another country to arrange everything that needed to be arranged. I wasn’t at all sure that I wouldn’t find myself in the same situation I had with the fake Spanish passports in Malaysia, but I couldn’t wait any longer. None of us could wait any longer. Families are meant to be together, and not one of us could rest easily until they were safely with me on British soil.

  Finally, after years of trying, we met with success. My mother—frail but determined—and my brother made the fraught, risky journey. The details of how they finally arrived here are another story, one that I cannot expand upon for a number of reasons; but eventually they were able, just as I had done several years previously, to speak the words I have no doubt they had been practicing ever since they left Al-Mansour: “I want to claim political asylum.”

  When I heard that they had made it, it was the happiest moment of my life.

  Some scenes become etched so firmly in your memory that you know you will never forget them until your dying day. In my head there are a number of such visions: the doctor in the south of Iraq pulling a bullet from my leg; the wild wolves in the Jordanian desert; the sight of my family, bedraggled and hopeless, being deported from the Malaysian holding cell. There were times when I thought these images would never be removed from my mind.

  Now, though, I have a new scene to remember, one that somehow puts all those others in their place. It is the memory of seeing my mother on British soil again for the first time. I will never forget it. When she made it over, she went immediately to the house of my sister, who had met and married an Iraqi man and was renting a flat in London, and I went straight there to see her. The difference in her appearance and her demeanor compared with how she looked when I first saw her at the airport in Kuala Lumpur was astonishing. The anxiety had lifted from her face; she would always bear the scars of so many years of oppression—we all would—but there was a softness around her eyes and an easiness to her smile that I did not recognize. I put my arms around her and held her tightly for fifteen minutes. We had so many things to say to each other, but sometimes words aren’t enough. It didn’t matter: our silence said it all. Finally she was here, along with my brother, and the happiness I felt at being reunited with them in the place I now called home was indescribable. Although there was always the nagging fear in the back of my mind that she could still be taken away from me if her asylum application was turned down, everything that I had learned had taught me to enjoy the moments of happiness that you have, because you never know how fleeting they might be.

  Of course, now that my mother was here there was a new responsibility upon me—the responsibility of making sure that this woman who had been beaten and humiliated was able to live a life, if not of luxury then at least of relative comfort. But that was a happy responsibility, because more than anything I was looking forward to being a family again, of reclaiming those years when that one simple thing that everyone in the West takes for granted was denied me. I wanted to be able to eat with them at the same table; to talk to them without the need for coded language and subterfuge; to share my happiness with my brother and sister; and to be comforted by my mother when times were bad. The night I knew that my mother and my brother were safely in the UK, I slept soundly and without interruption for the first time in years. A new chapter in my life was about to begin, and I felt almost like a new person. Sarmed had undergone everything that had happened; I needed to make sure that Lewis never forgot he was the beneficiary of that.

  Above all, I was looking forward to having my mum live with me. When I told my friends that, they looked at me in amused disbelief. “Are you mad?” they asked. “Why on earth would you want to live with your parents?”

  I simply smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “I jus
t want to know what it’s like,” I replied.

  But there was more to it than that. Since I had last lived in the bosom of my family, I had been abused and shot, imprisoned and hunted down. I had lived with the knowledge that my mother, brother, and sister were being tortured on my account. I had put my hard-won liberty at risk, as well as that of others. I had compromised my good name in the adopted country that I loved.

  Perhaps that makes me mad, or reckless. It’s not for me to judge. But what I know for certain is this: I would do it all again, because if there is one thing that is worth fighting for, it is the liberty of the ones you love.

  And because, ever since my uncle Saad had left me alone and frightened that night so many years ago in a small Bedouin village on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, all I had ever really wanted was to have the warmth and security of my family all around me. On that moonlit desert night, he spoke those words that were to shape my actions for so many years: the genuine man never forgets his family.

  I hope I have not let him down.

  I hope that, in that respect at least, it may be said that I am a genuine man.

  EPILOGUE

  One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my father’s lap watching Doctor Zhivago. Even as a child, I was transfixed by it: the awesome scenery, the grand themes, the beauty and the magnificence of it all.

  “Can I be like that?” I remember asking him. “Can I be an actor like Omar Sharif?”

  “Of course you can,” he replied indulgently. “Just so long as you don’t get up to the naughty things that some actors do.”

  Life, of course, has a habit of taking you in directions different from those that you had planned. In that respect, I suppose, my life was just the same as anyone else’s. In Iraq there was no possibility of training to be an actor. It was an impossible dream, and one soon forgotten.

  When I received my lenient sentence from the judge, however, I realized that the time had come to reevaluate my life. In the three years leading up to my trial, I had, in the midst of everything else, trained in the martial art of Thai boxing (also known as Muay Thai), been awarded an L.L.B. Honors law degree by studying part-time—ironically learning from the law while the state was practicing it on me. My conviction meant that I would never be able to practice law, so I started to cast around for other things to do with my new life. After all I had been through it seemed almost churlish to myself not to reawaken the dreams that I had once had. What is the point of freedom, after all, if you do not use it to the best of your ability?

  A friend of mine had taken a small part on a soap opera. When he told me about his part, it fanned the spark of interest that still remained deep inside me, and I determined to do the same thing. The second I arrived on set, it all seemed to click into place. I was fascinated by everything around me—the lights and the cameras and the clipboards, the hubbub, the sense of industry, and the artistic endeavor. Immediately I felt comfortable on the set, as though finally I had found the arena in which I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Rachel and I moved to London, and I enrolled at LAMDA—the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts—where I studied hard to learn my new craft. Once I received a LAMDA diploma in acting, I threw myself into building an acting career with the same determination that I had approached everything else in my life. Small parts led to bigger parts, and soon I was working enough to make a living from acting.

  On September 11, 2001, I watched the events in New York unfold with the same sense of horror and disbelief as everyone else. People asked me, as an Arab, how I felt about what had happened, but the truth was that my reaction was the same as almost everybody else’s: shock and deep sorrow for the human suffering that had been caused. But it is perhaps also true that I watched the events that followed from a more rounded perspective. When the allied armies marched on Baghdad with the intention of toppling Saddam Hussein, I watched the footage on television with mixed feelings. I remembered the last time the West invaded Iraq. I had been a child, living in Mosul with my father. The airwaves were full of anti-American propaganda: the American army was a murderous, invading army, we were told, and it was the duty of all loyal Iraqis to join up and fight against the Americans.

  I had phoned Saad in Baghdad when my father was out. “Is it true what they say about the American army?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “They are not like the Iranians. These people have a little bit more respect for Arab life.” During the Iran-Iraq war, if the Iranian air force was unable to approach their military targets, the pilots simply dropped their bombs randomly on small Iraqi villages. If they returned with their munitions, they probably would have been shot by their superiors. The Americans, Saad assured me, had better technology and more sophisticated weapons. They would never be so randomly brutal. But it was unsettling, to say the least, being led into a war with the strongest country in the world.

  When the U.S. bombs started falling in 1991, I was in the car with my father, driving through the narrow streets of Mosul to buy provisions from the market. Suddenly, from above, we heard the incessant drone of Stealth bombers. Nearby was a warehouse that stored flour, grain, and other provisions, and this was the pilots’ target. When the bombs hit, the impact was so great that it lifted our car into the air. As soon as we hit the ground again, we found ourselves hurtling toward a brick wall; my father spun the steering wheel as fast as he could and avoided a collision by a whisker. Had his reflexes not been so fast, we might have been rather less lucky that day. We jumped out of the car and took cover as best we could as bombs continued to rain down on the store.

  And so it went on.

  When the second Gulf War started, therefore, I had some idea of what people were going through in Baghdad. My uncle Saad and his family were still there; friends I had known from childhood were still there. I thanked God that my immediate family had made it to safety, but I nevertheless prayed nightly that Saad’s original faith in the accuracy of the Americans’ weapons would prove to be justified. The horror with which I watched the increasing civilian death count was excruciating: almost daily I expected to hear the news that Saad and his family were some of the most recent casualties of this war on their country that was not of their making. In the end, they endured the siege of Baghdad unharmed. Tens of thousands of others were less fortunate.

  When I saw on television the statue of Saddam being pulled down and smashed, it was a strange moment—almost as if my own past were being shattered before my eyes. Was I glad he was gone? Of course. Nobody who suffered from the brutality of his regime could feel otherwise. Thanks to that man, the country I loved had been raped, and the people I loved had been tortured. When I heard that Uday was dead, crushed by the building in which he was hiding, I remembered that time in 14th Ramadan Street when he filled my friend Hakim and me with such fear, and we hadn’t been exposed to even the lightest of his brutalities. It was a monstrous death but strangely and morbidly fitting for this monstrous person.

  But stories are rarely black and white, and what so many people failed to understand was that it was possible to celebrate Saddam’s removal from power and at the same time be suspicious of Western involvement in Iraq. I had read the history books. I knew that you didn’t have to go back so very far to find a time when Saddam and the Ba’ath party were being supported by American money and American arms. What we were seeing was just the inexorable march of politics, the arrival of George Bush Sr.’s “new world order,” and, as they had been throughout recent years, the Iraqi people were merely pawns in a bigger game.

  Now Saddam is dead, and I am glad he has gone to meet his maker. When I saw him being hanged, I felt a mixture of emotions: intrigue, excitement, irony, the curious feeling that I was reading the last page of an evil book. Saddam sold his soul to the Devil to get into power; when he tried to claim it back, the Devil got the better of him. But watching those scenes, I never once felt happy, or hopeful, for Iraq. How could I? My country seems to be the prostitute of the world, and every other gover
nment or group or society is standing in line to rape it.

  In 2006 I appeared in a major movie about the 9/11 attacks. United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, told the story of the hijacked airplane, heading in all likelihood for Washington, that was thought to have been crashed in Pennsylvania by the terrorists in order to prevent the passengers and crew from gaining control of it. My role as one of the terrorists was an emotional one, but one to which I hoped I could bring some degree of empathy and realism. It was an important film, and I felt proud to be a part of it. When the film premiered in New York, however, an event occurred that in a way encapsulated so much about my life. Although the U.S. government had allowed me into the country to act in the movie, I was refused a visa to attend the premiere. At first no reason was given; it later transpired that I was not deemed suitable to be in the the United States because of my conviction in England.

  When I learned this, I laughed—you often laugh when you want to cover up more complicated emotions. The U.S. government had allowed me into the country before; now they were refusing. Did the government or other entities have their own agenda, their own reasons for not wanting me there? I don’t know. All I do know is that the 2003 invasion of Baghdad had been initiated to bring about the liberation of the Iraqi people. I had done what I had done as a direct result of oppression by the very regime they had gone to war to change. Yet now, somehow, I was the enemy.