Faith, Shame, and Insurgency

Life in occupied Iraq

Steven Vincent from the March 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

"A lot of French journalists are shit," Wady, the sculptor, observed one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored tobacco. "They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way. They don't care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein." And it's not only the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S. military: "European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don't care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments." Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one afternoon weighed in. "Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good," he said. "They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans -- always how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better."

Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven, as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and throw rocks to create an "anti-American" demonstration. "These journalists come here with their minds already made up," he groused. "They're not interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint."

I asked Hasan, the poet, why, if the freeing of his country from Saddam Hussein was such a great event, so many people, both in Iraq and throughout the world, view it so negatively. "Think of Hamlet," he told me. "In the play, the young prince is haunted by his murdered father. At the same time, his mother, Gertrude, wants to forget the murder in order to get along with her life and encourages her son to do the same. But Hamlet can't forget; he won't forget. We see the same in the world: Hamlets who refuse to forget the crimes of Saddam, and Gertrudes who refuse to remember them."

In a small building north of the city center lie the final traces of many victims of those crimes. Their bodies are dust, their voices gone; now only documents exist to indicate their unpleasant fates. Imprisonment, exile, torture, rape, disfigurement, amputation, execution -- the list of the horrors experienced by Iraqis at the hands of the Ba'athist regime goes on. I stood in an upstairs room of this small building, home to the National Iraqi Association of Human Rights, surrounded by thousands of battered folders, many of which were taken from the Ba'athist headquarters in Baghdad, each folder an individual story of misery, loss, and death. "We have 17 more rooms like this in our offices across Iraq," said Asad Abady, deputy director of the human rights group.

As Saddam's role model Josef Stalin once noted, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions a statistic." For that reason I hesitate now to recite the horrendous acts of Saddam: the hundreds of thousands killed in his wars; the thousands buried, sometimes alive, in mass graves; the barbaric tortures involving acid baths and wood chippers, electricity, power tools, and ravenous dogs. For what do they mean? Amnesty International reports how Ba'athist guards sliced chunks of flesh from the bodies of women prisoners and then force-fed them to the captives. Abady told me of seeing buildings in northern Iraq filled with captive Kurdish women: A man could go to these buildings, fill out a form, and take a woman away for his own pleasure. The mind resists contemplating such deeds -- and this resistance is the first step to denial, and then forgetfulness.

I had gone to the association precisely to know, as best I could, the evil of Saddam Hussein. There I found more than files and statistics. In Abady's office, I met a woman whose husband and son were executed by the regime (which diligently charged her for the bullets) and buried in graves she was forbidden to visit. I met with people who were among the first on the scene when mass graves were uncovered near Babylon. They described the skeletons of men, women, and children killed so abruptly that the jugs they had brought to fetch water from a nearby river that day were still clutched in their hands. "Not since the days of the Mongols and Tartars has there been such brutality," Abady said.

Evidence of Saddam's brutality is everywhere in Iraq. In the Shabandar, I talked with a man I'll call Ahmed. Once a high-ranking Shi'a cleric, he was arrested by the Ba'ath Party in the late 1990s for supposedly conspiring with anti-government Shi'a groups in Europe. Imprisoned for three years, he was repeatedly tortured. Guards tied his wrists behind his back and hung him from the ceiling, sometimes for days at a time. They starved him, beat him with heavy black cables, electrocuted him with wires connected to a hand-powered generator. When he finally regained his freedom, Ahmed told me, the right side of his body had lost most of its feeling, while an untreated disease he contracted in prison had withered his right leg to the size of his arm. "When I went into prison, I was a Muslim," he told me. "When I left, I was an atheist."

But the heart of Saddam's malevolence wasn't only in the awful statistics (5,000 dead in the 1988 poison gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja) or stories of individual atrocities (the 1999 murder of Mohammad al-Sadr, in which Ba'athists drove nails into the Shi'a cleric's head after raping his sister in front of him). It was also found in the endless stories of routine harassment, imprisonment, and fear expressed by everyone I talked to in Iraq. "Just a conversation like we're having now," Rasim, the painter, related one afternoon as we walked down Mutanabi Street, "could lead to the police picking me up and questioning me for hours about what we talked of."

Saddam was always watching: Wady described being interviewed by a European film crew interested in his sculpture. "A 'minder' from the regime stood behind the interviewer, next to the camera, and if they asked a sensitive question, she opened her eyes to warn me not to answer incorrectly or else she would report me," he said. "Of course, if I'd hesitated, or looked defiant, she would report that, too." Saddam was always listening: An Iraqi man told me how his son one day blurted out "I hate Saddam Hussein" among a group of friends and was arrested within hours, forcing the man to pay more than 1 million dinars in ransom. Sometimes what you personally had done wasn't even the issue. An Iraqi cab driver told me he spent two weeks in prison because his uncle was a communist. "I had to cover my ears because of the screams of the women being raped," he said.

The climate of terror and uncertainty that Saddam spread throughout the nation lingers today. "I wake up every morning fearing that I've been dreaming and that Saddam is still in power," said Rand Matti Petros, the Internet café manager. "My generation is lost," Pasha, the painter, said sadly. "Maybe in 20 to 30 years Iraqi children will live normal, happy lives outside the shadow of Saddam." Exacerbating the pain of many Iraqis is a keen awareness of the world's record of apathy toward their plight. "Where were the U.N. and our 'fellow Arabs' when we were suffering?" Hasan asked. "Where were the peace activists and leftists? How can they all accept the crimes of a dictator for so many years, then rise up in protest when a war begins to remove that dictator?"

The Spirit of Impotence

Yet the more I investigated Saddam's regime, the more I began to realize that the dictator had bequeathed something perhaps even more corrosive to the Iraqi people than repression, trauma, and fear: shame. This is one of the most sensitive parts of the nation's psyche, one that may prove the most problematic. On some level, many, if not most, Iraqis are ashamed that Saddam Hussein brutalized them -- and even more ashamed that it took foreign troops to end his reign.

At a small social function one evening, I spoke to an Iraqi woman who expressed excitement over the fall of Saddam. Yet in almost the same breath, she declared, "I hate the Americans so much I fantasize about taking a gun and shooting a soldier." When asked how she expected Saddam to fall without the hated U.S. soldiers, she looked at me miserably. "I know," she said, "and you can't imagine how that humiliates me."

A waiter admonished me, as if I'd advised Rumsfeld and Bush: "You should have waited just a little longer. We would have risen up and overthrown him ourselves." When I asked why the Iraqi people hadn't toppled Saddam before, other Baghdadis claimed that the tyrant had support from "outside" forces -- most notably, the Jews. Speaking of Iraq's disastrous invasion of Iran in 1980, the piano player in my hotel confided, "You know, of course, that the Jews manipulated Saddam into attacking Khomeini in order to keep the Arabs down -- and Israel on top."

This sense of impotence and humiliation, exacerbated by every Humvee that rumbles down a Baghdad street and every Bradley Fighting Vehicle that ties up traffic, is the flip side to the pro-liberation sentiment I heard so often in Iraq. It helps explain the "thanks, America -- now go home" syndrome observers frequently note. It also colors U.S. plans to hand over civil and military affairs to Iraqi officials as quickly as possible -- giving them, the theory goes, a stake in their own future. But Iraqi attitudes may be more complicated than that.