April 25th 2008
The Lessons of the Iraq War
By Dana Visalli
I have just completed the second of two visits to the Kurdish area of Iraq this year. While there, I had the opportunity to observe economic and environmental conditions in northern Iraq and converse with Iraqi citizens, both Kurdish and Arab, about the impact of the on-going war and life in general.
The perception that dominates my senses is how worn both the land and the people are. Kurdistan happens to be one of the primary areas of the emergence of what we call civilization. The first archeological records for animal husbandry (goats, sheep and dogs) and agriculture (wheat and barley) appear in Kurdistan 11,000 years ago. The landscape, once covered with oak trees, is now almost completely deforested, except in the high mountains. Natural vegetation has largely been replaced by invasive, weedy species, some of which doubtless evolved insitu. The hills literally sag under the weight of the thousands of years of grazing, creased by innumerable ruminant feeding trails.
The people are sagging as well. I was impressed with what could be called the “conservation of motion” of the populace. The majority of people spend the day sitting—along sidewalks, on street corners, along roads, in their homes. This is due in part to a moribund economy—there is little work to be had—and it may also be due in part to an unhealthy diet (composed largely of meat and white bread) and depleted agricultural soils. It was commonplace for young people to tell me that there was no hope for a meaningful life for them in Kurdistan; most want to leave. One young man said that by 30 years of age Kurds lose all hope for a better life.
Like most civilized people, the Iraqis and Kurds are ecologically illiterate. The population of the country is growing rapidly, while all critical resources—water, food, energy, fertilizers—are depleting. Kurds love to go on picnics in the country, although they never venture more than 100 feet from the car. They will push accumulated plastic trash aside in a scenic picnic spot in order to spread a blanket and enjoy a meal, and then they add their refuse to the collection when they depart.
The niche of many women in Iraq is the role defined by conservative Islam, which is that of a slave class, subservient to the dominant male. In the smaller cities and towns women are rarely out on the streets, and when they are they are covered from head to toe with the all-concealing abaya, the full body cape. Women are typically quite overweight by about 30 years of age, and get little exercise, so that they walk with a stiff list from side to side that caused one western observer to compare them to penguins. So-called honor killings can still occur in Kurdistan—in which a girl or woman is killed by a relative for spending even platonic time with an unapproved male—as does genital mutilation of females.
Many human behaviors have their corollary in the larger world of nature. All living organisms are protective of their own specific DNA in its recombined form as offspring, or children. There are innumerable behavioral options for assuring genetic fidelity of offspring in the natural world. Among insects these behaviors run the gamut from species of moths in which the female never develop wings and scarcely emerges from her pupal cocoon, to praying mantises, in which the females kill and eat the males after mating. The Islamic methodology follows the pattern of the flightless moth, keeping the female helpless and homebound.
I read several field reports written by an environmental group conducting habitat surveys in Iraq, and found passages such as the following commonplace: “The water pollution is evident to both the eye and nose; there is a strong stench arising from decomposing garbage and/or sewage…..Fishing in the region is conducted both by electro-fishing and utilizing pesticide and other chemical toxins…. Dead fish were present during the survey, killed by toxic chemicals used in fishing…There are many villages in the area and the river is a major shipping channel, so there is pollution from oil and sewage...”
It is within this context of a time-weary and belief-burdened society that they recent wars in Iraq have taken place. These include the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war (fueled by 100 billion dollars of US weapons sales, to both sides in the conflict), the 1991 Gulf War, the US-imposed economic sanctions on and bombing of Iraq from1991-2003, and the current open-ended second Iraq War. These conflicts of course take a toll not only on people but on social infrastructure and on the earth as well. And so it is that in environmental field survey reports that I read there are passages such as “Site was visited in the summer of 2007, when the crew was shot at… The area was chemically bombed in the 1980s and there is evidence of destroyed homes in the valley….There are many mine fields in the area and there was heavy fighting here during the Iran-Iraq war….During the survey period the area faced occasional Iranian bombing…”
The young people growing up in Iraq today have known war for most of their lives. Ranj, who is 28, tells of working in Baghdad in the early days of the current war. One hot day while driving to work with the window down there was an explosion nearby, and he found himself showered with human blood and bits of fingers and other human tissue. He had to return home and wash up. On another occasion—he was working as a translator for the US military—he opened his front door to find a dead body laid neatly across the doorway. Fearing he might be implicated in the death he stuffed the body in his car and drove around for an hour with the putrifying corpse before he found a place to dump it. Taking the message left on his doorstep to heart, he fled to the north of the country.
Such experiences are commonplace for Iraqis. Mellich told me that she had a good friend killed in an explosion but that, “It’s OK.” I asked her why this was OK, and she responded that Iraqis have become used to death. “We used to say, when someone dies, ‘We will remember you forever.’ Now we say, they die in the morning, and we forget them in the afternoon.”
Ibrahiem powerfully characterized the current state of affairs in Iraq in this way: “My father was a rebel against the government, and so he was killed by Saddam Hussein. I hate that man so much. But when I see what is happening in Iraq today, I realize it was better under Saddam.”
Iraq was a broken society before the United States invaded in 2003. 13 years of sanctions had destroyed the economy of the country, while the US bombing of water treatment plants and electrical power stations in the Gulf War led to disease and an increasing death rate, especially among children. Such was the state of Iraq when the US attacked in March of 2003. The U.S. has to date spent $550 billion dollars on the current war, during which time an estimate one million Iraqis have been killed, and 4.5 million have been made into homeless war refugees. Clean drinking water and electricity have become vanishingly rare, malnutrition and unemployment are rampant, and sewage runs in the streets.
Taking in the larger sweep of history, it can be seen that the Iraqis have been destroying themselves by degrees for centuries through over-population and environmental degradation, and the U.S. has now shown up to finish the job. It is ironic that the debt the U.S. has incurred in the process of destroying Iraqi society, in combination with our own ecological illiteracy, now promises to cause a breakdown of this country as well.
What becomes clear from this litany of sorrow is that human society is insane. This is a disturbing realization, but it is a helpful clarification. If you see it, it is good to let in sink in for a minute: we are insane.
What to do? We have arisen from a dynamic and evolving universe. Really: initially there were only hydrogen atoms, and from that simple beginning all the beauty, complexity and confusion of the world has arisen. Human life is not about nothing, it is about something, we are a infinitesimally small molecular slice of the universe expressing itself in new and creative ways—that’s what the universe does, it experiments. Obviously something new is trying to emerge in the human species, something is struggling to be liberated from the biological imperatives of the genes.
Only individuals can participate in this process; the revolution will not be televised. Are you going to spend your life paying for the death of other people (war and the military--billionaire complex) and the destruction of the environment, or are you going to choose sanity? It’s completely up to you. Are you going to realize that your authentic primary relationship is one-to-one with the living earth, or are you going to continue to try to please the judge, the outside authority, your self-image, your father, the so-called government? Are you going to participate in the very simple, basic ecological reality that we live on a finite planet where all matter cycles (while energy flows through from the sun), and there is no such thing as waste? If you are you will want to compost the byproducts of your bodies metabolism—your excrement, your greatest gift to the biosphere, the real fruit of your life’s work. This is how to stop the war, this is how to help the exhausted land and people of the Cradle of Civilization. If you don’t want to participate in the revolution then stop pretending you do. If you do want to participate, then now is the hour and this is the moment.
“What I stand for is what I stand on.” Wendell Berry
Jan 28th 2008
Greetings;
I had an interesting experience here in Suleimaniya today I'd like to share.
I had become aware that there was some kind of on-going protest at a public park in town. I was able to go to this site with an interpreter. There is a big army-style tent set up in there, where a group of young people have been vigiling for 140 days now.
What about? About the fact that there is little or no opportunity for young people to create meaningful lives for themselves in Kurdistan. By 'meaningful' they are not asking for so much; basically just a decent education and some way to make a living as adults. They have 14 talking points that they are requesting the regional government to acknowledge; I got four of them written down:
1. Creating some kind of job potential for young people; building factories was mentioned, so they were only asking for the potential of even a factory job.
2. Decent medical care for young people, including sending critically ill people out of the country when necessary for advanced care, instead of letting them die.
3. Lowering the age limit for political candidates from 30 to 23.
4. Giving new families a grant of money so that they have a chance to acquire a roof over their heads.
The other side of the issue is the high level of nepotism and corruption in the Kurdish government. The best extreme example of this is the widespread suspicion that Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani has between $2-14 billion stashed in European banks. I have run into several of Vice-president Jalul Talabani's very large country estates in my travels outside Suleimaniya.
This group has been harassed by the KRG—Kurdistan Regional Government, and even threatened with violence and death. Their comment was, "We will not give up."
An interesting twist came when they asked me, "What advice do you have for us?"
I might challenge you in the same way, what might there be to say under such circumstances?
At first I could think of nothing. As the conversation continued, several things came to mind. Here's what I came up with—for better and for worse—this is just the ongoing challenge of how to respond to the world we find ourselves in.
I asked them if they had read any Gandhi. I thought of him because of 1) his ability to honor even his adversaries, and 2) his interest in creating simple and independent lifestyles that would not concentrate power in the hands and heads of a few people.
Along these same lines, I pointed out that factory jobs would mean they would still be dependent on the government; is there any way they could create an livelihood on their own? Not to be presumptuous here; these are poor people. But Gandhi was spinning wool and making his own clothes.
I also said that I didn't think there would be any way for people to regain their freedom without incorporating ecology into the movement. I didn't expect them to know what I meant, and indeed they asked what I meant by 'ecology.' But I am so impressed by how degraded the land is here, with the oak forests that once covered vast swathes now all gone. We talked about this a bit, and a useful avenue opened up when my interpreter Ihsen and I told them about the 'Green Kurdistan' movement—people planting trees throughout the region. They will be able to get in touch with the leaders of this movement in Suliemaniya.
That's what I could think of. What seems most interesting here is the challenge; how can we think about our world and how can we respond to it in ways that are meaningful to us?
I was also very cognizant, while sitting with them, of the news I saw yesterday that the US Congress has approved a $696 billion war budget for next year, and that the Iraq war is now expected to cost $2 trillion. How many meaningful jobs could those resources have supplied in the world, how many trees to plant, how many solar panels, how many simple homes for people?
Sincerely,
Dana
Jan 22nd 2008
Dear Friends;
Before I go to work writing up my summary story about my 4 weeks in Kurdish Iraq, which I can tell is going to have serious overtones, I thought it would behoove me to share a few of the more personal interactions I've had with our brothers and sisters here, half way around the globe.
A very interesting interaction for me occurred just today (Jan 22th). Our 'field survey crew' had to drive for 2 hours to the south of Suleimaniya, to a spot on the Diyala River, to gather various sorts of data. I wandered off with the bird guy, Korsh, but after about half an hour we got separated, and there I was along, standing on the banks of the Diyala River by myself. There were some plover-type birds across the river, and I had 'Birds of the Middle East' with me, so I knelt down to try to sort them out.
It wasn't long before I heard a clearing-the-throat kind of sound, and turned to see an elder Kurdish gent emerging from the brush. Waving seems to make everything OK around here; I waved, and he smiled and walked over to me. So there we were, I not knowing a word of Kurdish and he not a word of English. I showed him the bird book, and the binoculars, and pointed to the birds, and he smiled broadly and said something, I of course don't have a clue what. Kurds love Americans---there are several ironies here, one is that 30 miles further south in Arab Diyala Province the insurgency is still raging--- and I realized I could try to tell him in Arabic that I was an American. I said, 'Ana Amerikankee.' His smiled broadened, and then laughed and laughed. Ah, it's good to be an American.
Later, when I rejoined Korsh and told him the story, he said 'No, no, Amerikanitz......Americkankee means your are an American woman.' No wonder the old man got a belly laugh out of the exchange.
But, there is still the great charm of two people from opposite sides of the planet, genetically separated for 10,000 years, having a warm and entertaining exchange at the edge of a beautiful river. A picture of my new friend is attached below.
The other event to tell you about is slightly less sanguine, and hopefully the two pictures that really illustrate the event will come through, as they are certainly worth a thousand words. One of the members of Nature Iraq is a volitile Arab from Baghdad. He is friendly enough, but one day last week he got riled up and pulled out a box-cutter knife.
As it happens he wears an ear-muff over one eye, to hide and old injury from the US invasion, see photo one. When he pulled the knife, there was another set of ear muffs sitting on the table. Somebody thought to put the second pair over his other eye, and he immediately became docile, thinking night had fallen (see second pic of this event).
We are reporting this event to the US military, and encouraging them to stock up on earmuffs.
peace & love,
Dana
Wed 1-16-2008
The Wine-colored, Blood-stained, Red Badge of Courage
by Dana Visalli
Life here in Iraq is not so different than it is at home in the United States, except that the electricity keeps going off while I am slicing vegetables for dinner, which means I am then wielding a sharp knife in the pitch dark. Not only am I brandishing a sharp knife in the darkness, but the poorly made knife handle keeps falling off from the blade just about the time the lights go out, making dinner preparation a trying task indeed.
This is not an insurmountable problem, because about thirty seconds after the city electricity goes off the big diesel generator out on the street roars to life—in fact all the big diesel generators on the block roar to life, as there is one for every house in this well-to-do district of Suleimaniya. From the kitchen window I notice that the rest of the city stays dark much longer than does our block. One can only imagine how the millions of Iraqi IDPs—Internally Displaced Persons—from the on-going war are faring in their wind-battered tent camps without power.
The electricity failing is less of a problem than the fact that the water pipes in the house have frozen repeatedly. The issue here in this community house is that the toilets won't flush when the water doesn't flow, so the human effluenza quickly begins to back up in the toilet bowl. Fortunately I am working with a group of environmentalists, and we understand the importance of sustainable flushing. We resolved this conundrum by simply purchasing bottled water by the case, and use the handy pint-sized bottles of spring water to fill the toilet tank and flush the bowl, thereby maintaining the ecological equilibrium of the house. The war refugees in their camps don't have flush toilets, so they are not troubled by this breakdown in modern domestic infrastructure.
I confess, when the toilets failed, my own personal ecological orientation drove me out into the backyard in the freezing winds of the early morning's light, where I furtively jabbed a hole in the clay soil with butter knife in order to contribute a token amount of fertilizer to the humus-starved soil of the Cradle of Civilization. Contravening social mores by briefly rejoining the Great Cycle of Being was a frightening experience though, and I resolved to henceforth adhere to the Law of the Pack and shit in the toilet, which I had in any case been compelled to swear to back when I was a Cub Scout.
Flushing the toilets is, in the larger picture, less of a problem than doing the laundry, because the washing machine requires water and electricity at the same time, which is a rare conjunction of resources. Being a neophyte here I was unprepared for the potential pitfalls of employing the washer. Immediately after throwing all my clothes in and starting the cycle the electricity failed, and then that night the pipes froze. My dampened clothes sat in the washer for four days, while several species of mold attempted to digest any nutrients present on them before blind luck aligned water and power again. The multitudes of refugees from the war (estimated to total 4.5 million inside and outside Iraq, one of the great human migrations to nowhere in all of human history) are spared this misery as they have no running water nor machines to freeze.
It came as a shock to discover that it gets very cold in northern Iraq in the winter, so cold that even antifreeze congeals into ice, especially in the radiators of the generators. In apparent defiance of the laws of physics, this can occur at temperatures just below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, much warmer than it occurs in North America. The explanation for this anomaly appears to be that Iraq merchants have realized that the shortage of antifreeze in the country could be quickly and simply resolved by adding water to this chemical concoction, vastly increasing the quantity of antifreeze available to the general public. This concernth not the masses of refugees from America's war in Iraq, for they have neither radiators nor antifreeze to worry about.
All of these issues pale, however, when one considers the hazards of simply finding something to drink in Iraq. After ten days without even a drop of wine, I had decided to seek out one of the few Christian-run liquor stores in this non-alcoholic Muslim city. An Iraqi friend drove me to one such store, but as I got out of the car he admonished me to "make it quick" because "someone was shot to death just yesterday" for buying liquor in Suleimaniya. I did a rapid assessment of my mental resolve, and then in an uncharacteristically courageous act dashed into the store to make the purchase.
The United States government demonstrated its courage and resolve on the very same day, when it dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs in just 10 minutes—that would be about $10 million dollars worth of explosives dropped by a billion dollars worth of aircraft—on an impoverished farming village just south of Baghdad. We don't know how many were killed because "the United States does not do body counts," but we can rest assured that this courageous act will liberate another group of Iraqis from the drudgery of home life and swell the tide of refugees flowing outward into the larger world.
Impressions of Kurdistan
The landscape in Kurdistan is austere in the
extreme, due in part to the general aridity of the area, and in part to the
impact of 10,000 years of human civilization.
The land is nearly devoid of vegetation.
Granted it is winter here, but there is often no sign that anything green
grew on the hills in summer. Like
McPhee’s Basin and Range, the lack of vegetation creates a certain stark
beauty, because the jagged edges of the ancient sedimentary rock are laid bare
to see, dipping, striking and twisting, often turned upend at 90 degrees,
rising several thousand feet above the plain to form jagged mountain ridges.
Exactly what it is that the pervasive goats,
sheep and cows are surviving on is something of a mystery, but the wrinkled,
horizontal aging lines across of the “bovigenic” landscape are a testament to
their presence here for thousands of years.
How do the people survive? I
don’t know the answer to that; my guess is that the growing population is
supported by the global petroleum culture.
The primary foods are meat-kabobs and white-flour flat bread. I have seen only one or two postage-stamp
sized gardens. I have walked across
several agricultural fields which would one would have thought were a rocky
wastelands, except that the heavy clay soil had parallel furrows in it, disked
by a tractor in preparation for planting wheat in the spring. The soil dries rock-hard, due to the absence
of humus, although plastic bags blowing across the landscape take root in the
fields and impart a certain friability to the dirt. I'm sure people would be
shocked at the idea of rejoining the cycle of life by returning the flow of
nutrients coming from their bodies back into the soil.
The weather has been what I could call
“continental”---cold and windy. In fact
the temperature dropped to 22 degrees the night before last and the wind howled
until morning; in my pleasant, concrete bedroom the curtains danced to the
marauding wind, and the generator-driven electric heater worked overtime to
keep the room above 40 degrees. In the
morning the water pipes were frozen at both of the NatureIraq buildings, and
the diesel had jelled in the generators.
In an impressive turn of events, the antifreeze had also frozen in the
radiators. How could this be possible at
22 degrees?
Because this is the 3rd World, and the
antifreeze had been spiked with water before it was sold.
Frozen antifreeze and jelled diesel were the
problems of the well-to-do yesterday morning; one can only imagine how the
thousands of Iraqi refugees living in tents at the edge of town fared; they
certainly didn’t have any diesel to worry about (I hope to visit this camp
while here).
Out on the streets, fuel is sold in 5-gallon
jugs, and old tires are regularly set alight at the edge of the road as a sort
of cheery but smoky campfire.
Surely one of the most astonishing elements of
human existence is how far we have traveled from ecologically intelligent,
reality-based cultures.
Here in Kurdistan, as in much of the world, the
human population booms while the very foundation of life--the soil, water and
energy bases--shrink. The people eat
refined food laced with white sugar and fat.
How is it possible to be literally made of the earth, made over millions
of years of wind, sand and stars, and yet to be so alienated from the roots of
our existence?
The curious counterpoint is the
almost-predictable countenance of both the Kurds and the Arabs; they are just
the sweetest, friendliest, most animated people imaginable. I have been in the presence of 5 Americans
since my arrival here, and really none of them have the simple, child-like
spontaneous pleasure-in-living that one experiences with these local people,
beset with troubles though they be. This
is not a judgment, just an observation.
By-the-way, NatureIraq was started by an
Iraqi-American, Azzam Alwash, and his all-American wife Suzi. Azzam is currently here in Suleimaniya, he is
a bright, passionate, uninhibited man who is dedicated to restoring the
marshlands and as much of Iraqi nature as might be humanly possible. He is also a Republican who said he would
vote for McCain if he could, welcomed the US invasion and occupation of his
country, and is aware of the approach of the peaking of global oil production,
but doesn’t expect it to be a problem for our generation or the next, but
perhaps in “500 or a 1000 years.”
I’m telling you, god loves a paradox.
Be well,
Dana
Mission Accomplished
Many people have fled from the violence that
has ravaged south and central Iraq since the United States took control of
these areas in 2003. At least two
million Iraqis are refugees in Jordan and Syria, and another two million are
“internally displaced people,” refugees inside the country.
Most of these people have not only left their
homes, they have also lost their homes, because a process of ethnic cleansing
has rearranged Sunni and Shia families as if they were pieces on a chess
board. Shias now live in homes recently
occupied by Sunni, and visa versa.
Mere numbers can never communicate the reality
of a situation—four million Iraqi refugees since the invasion, one million
Iraqis estimated killed, two million wounded.
One can only imagine the impact on individual lives, the amount of
suffering, contained within those numbers.
On Friday I visited the Quala refugee camp in
Suleimaniya. The camp began as three
families from Baghdad squatting out on the edge of town, but now contains over
600 people living in tents supplied by the UNHCR—the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees. The camp is
located in a broad, open expanse of concrete building rubble, with a few
plastic water tanks scattered about where the inhabitants can come to fill
jugs. There is apparently no garbage
pickup, as there are ample quantities of plastic and other debris scattered
about.
My translator and I picked our way through the
rubble to a teahouse-tent, where we were able to meet with the mayor of the
camp, Halid. With hookas lining one
wall, we were clearly in a public space, but for most of the duration of our
conversation there were just the three of us, sitting cross-legged on the floor
around a kerosene heater.
Halid was happy when the Americans attacked his
country in 2003. He said we would like
to thank Bush personally for sending American troops. Some years before the invasion, when he was
required to report for military duty, he was three days late getting to the
army recruitment center. His sister, who
was pregnant, was having an operation, and he felt that he needed to remain at
home to help her. He was tried by Saddam
Hussein’s government for desertion and sentenced to death, later reduced to 15
years in prison. He was in Abu Ghraib
for 6 years, and was only released when Saddam emptied the prison just before
the U.S. offensive began. Halid was
tortured during his incarceration, and pointed out missing front teeth and an
angry scar on his head to prove the point.
Sectarian violence increased in Iraq in 2004
and 2005. Halid’s sister and brother
were slaughtered in Baghdad—that is the word the translator used.
Halid wept silently as he conveyed this. He is Sunni, married to a Shia woman. The Mehdi Army caught him in early 2006 and
was going to kill him—because he was a Sunni—but his wife begged for his
life. The Mehdi did let him go, but only
on the condition that he divorce his wife and leave Baghdad. It was then that Halid and his wife departed,
together, for Suliemaniya.
Life in the camp is difficult. Men go to town looking for work, but there is
none; women go to town to beg for food and money. The children are filthy It is cold in camp—temperatures in Sulemaniya
in January are 20-30 degrees at night, with strong winds. One can only imagine what it is like in
summer, when temperatures outside reach 120 degrees. The only electricity available in camp comes
from small generators, and heat from kerosene burners, with the gasoline and
kerosene increasingly expensive.
Food is distributed once a month by UNICEF.
I asked Walid if he would still like to thank
Bush, after all he has been through since the war started. He answered, with tears in his eyes, “Yes,
but why can’t he order peace? If he can
order war why can’t he order peace?
Tell Bush I cry over the situation in Iraq.”
messages from Iraq.(
Architects of War and Peace
The
leading Shia cleric in Baghdad, Sayyid Ali Mussawi Al Waadh, said in a recent
interview, "The Iraqi people have suffered enough." And so they have. The air in Baghdad smells and tastes like
burning tires. Much of landscape looks like it was set in place by a fleet of
dump trucks. Sewage oozes out of cracks
in the street while buildings crumble and electrical supply sputters and runs
dry. The 200 billion dollars spent by
the West to bomb and pummel Iraq during the two Gulf Wars hasn't improved the
lives of the Iraqi people one iota. Twelve
years of sanctions not only ensured that Saddam Hussein would not buy new and
improved weapons, but also that the garbage trucks wouldn't run, drinking water
wouldn't be chlorinated, the sick wouldn't get medicine and children wouldn't
get textbooks or even pencils (pencils were on the sanctions list until 1998
because the U.S. feared the graphite in them could be used for arms
manufacture). In this context it is all
the more remarkable, in the midst of this decay and disintegration, that
individuals and organizations are arising, Sphinx-like, to serve the needs of
the people and the land.
Alexander
Christof was sitting pretty in Germany in 1995,
an increasingly wealthy architect drawing plans for increasingly wealthy
clients. But he was increasingly
discontent with his life, gorged as it was on possessions, power and prestige
but devoid of the satisfaction of serving the real needs of the human
community. The emotional aridity of his
life finally compelled him to make changes.
He divested himself of his business, took stock of the skills he had to
could respond in some way to the abiding needs of the human family, and
together with his wife started Architects for People in Need, or APN. In 2001 APN came to Iraq, to try to offer to
the Iraq people the basic amenities of life that their own government and the
governments of the world had denied to them.
By the
time I visited Alexander in February of this year in Baghdad, APN had a staff
of over 50 highly skilled Iraqi professionals working on water purification in
rural areas, remedial education for older, unschooled children, and basic
health and emergency care in the countryside.
Alexander
points out that the most basic requirements of life were disrupted by the Gulf
Wars and the sanctions-water, sewage, food and health care. Water purification
plants were destroyed by allied bombing in the first Gulf War, and
reconstruction was made impossible because repair parts were on the sanctions
list, as was chlorine. In the largest
govenorate in Iraq, 28 out of 30 purification plants are out of service. People in rural areas along the Tigris and
Euphrates commonly drink out of the river, even though the water is polluted
and saline.
I asked
Alexander what motivated him to take on such a daunting task, working under
hazardous circumstances (one APN staff person has been killed in the post-war
violence sweeping Iraq) to attempt to alleviate some of the suffering of the
people of Iraq. He responded that seeing
the benefits of APNs work-completing a new classroom and seeing a youngster who
had previously been an illiterate shoeshine boy write his name on the board, or
building a rural water plant and seeing people get clean water out of their
taps for the first time-induced a feeling of joy that he had never experienced
when working for wealthy clientele. He thought a moment and then said, "I
never want to see another client as long as I live. Now we see the good results of our labors,
and it makes us happy."
Alexander
is convinced that the motive for invading Iraq was to create a permanent
military presence in the Gulf region.
"Those who control the flow of oil control the economy of the
world." Indeed, the New York Times
reported at the end of February that the U.S. is building four large military
bases in Iraq, suitable for long-term use. I asked Alex if he had any sense
that the U.S. was attempting to foster democracy in Iraq. His answer was, "No. This would be a delicate and long-term
proposition, and there is no evidence that any such process has been
initiated. Maybe it's too early; maybe
it's too late."
It may be
too late-or is it too early?-for us all unless more people learn to make the
kind of choices Alexander made for his life: to take risks, to question
authority, to take a stand for love, to become architects of peace rather than
accomplices to war. I would encourage
people to think ecologically, act lovingly, and ensure that the resources
flowing from their lives (including taxes) go only to life-affirming endeavors.
"This is what you should do,"
advised Walt Whitman 150 years ago. "Love the earth and the sun the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and
crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward people, take off your hat
to nothing known or unknown, or to anyone or number of people... reexamine all
you have been told at school or church, or in any book, dismiss what insults
your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
Attachment:
young child from village of Abu Siffa; her father was "detained" by
US forces on December 16th and has not been heard from since.
For more
information on Architects for People in Need see www.apn-ev.org
Seeking
Justice in Liberation Square
Our CPT
delegation recently joined the long-term Christian Peacemaker
Team in a
public demonstration in downtown Baghdad to draw attention to
the plight
of the thousands of Iraqis held in "detention" by the United
States
military. The total number of detainees
is not known because the military does not release such records, in fact, it
may not keep records of all those who are taken into custody. The country-wide estimates for the total
currently held vary from 10,000 to 150,000 Iraqis. Detainees
by
definition have not been charged with any crime, although some have
now been
in jail for over eight months.
From the
information we have seen, many detainees are innocent of any
transgression. For example, we spoke with one man at the
demonstration
who was
held for a month because his taxi driver had a gun in the car
when it
was stopped by U.S. soldiers. In a
farming village that we
visited
north of Baghdad, Abu Siffa, 8, men were arrested in December of
last year
based on what the government now says was "misinformation."
The men
remain in custody in spite of their acknowledged innocence.
To express
our concern for the detainees, we stood in "Liberation Square"
in
downtown Baghdad one afternoon for two hours, holding large posters of men who
have been held for several months or more.
We also held signs
that
conveyed our concern that basic human dignity be preserved during
the
occupation. They read, in both Arabic
and English, "The USA Must
Respect
Human Rights," and "Give Detainees Their Legal Rights."
We were
completely mobbed by Iraqis. 200 stood
around us at any one
time, and
at least 3000 stopped in the short time we were there. At
regular
intervals someone who spoke English would approach, either to
translate
the thoughts of others in the crowd or express their own
perceptions. I was compelled repeatedly to lay down my
sign so that I
could
transcribe their messages. Some of those
that I managed to capture
on paper
are given below, along with the name of the speaker, when
known. Often the commentaries were much longer than
I could transcribe;
I tried to
capture the most salient points. I have
not exercised any
selectivity
in what is represented here; everyone that spoke to me seemed to opposed the
U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Since the
time of the demonstration we have had the opportunity to talk
to several
influential members of Iraqi society: a former Iraqi
ambassador
to the U.N., and to the head Shia cleric in Baghdad. Included below are some
the insights that they shared about the challenges ahead for both the Iraqi
people and for the United States.
Comments
from Iraqis who stopped by at the demonstration:
Sa'di:
I am very
glad to see you here. Tell people in the
United States that we need to be a democratic country. We lost our voice under Saddam; you can help
us find our voice. But in the last 100
years the western countries have stolen everything from Iraq. Saddam treated us like animals, and now with
the occupation forces, we don't see any change.
Haji:
We hope
that in coming days we will see more rights for Iraqi citizens,
but for
now we have none. How do you expect us
to live with no
government
and no economy? As a retired
agricultural engineer the CPA
(Coalition
Provisional Authority) gives me a pension of 40,000 dinars a
month
(about $37 dollars). How do you expect
me to live on 40,000 dinars a month?
The USA
came here to occupy our country, not to give us freedom. Where
are the
human rights? There are none.
The USA is
like a million Saddams.
We need to
get results. There is maybe one month
left to get results.
The Iraqi
people are very angry with the United States.
Where are
the human rights? We have no human
rights. All people are
good, we
are the same as the Americans, we are good people. Why are you destroying Iraq? We are poor.
Why destroy our homes? Why bomb
our buildings and fields? Because you
came for oil.
I had
trouble with Saddam Hussein; he put me in jail.
People would ask
me,
"Why don't you leave, you are in danger here?" But this is my
country, I
did not want to leave my country. But
now it is over; I am
going to
leave.
Iraqis are
good people, but now we are very angry.
There is an American writer-do you know him?-Mark Twain. He said, "A small leak can sink a big
ship." Perhaps Iraq is the small
leak that will sink the United
States.
Why are
you telling us? (I was holding a sign
that said, in Arabic and
in English,
"The USA Must Respect Human Rights")
Go tell the Americans.
We like
all people even the Americans, but we want them to behave
properly.
Man in
blue shirt, yelling:
Saddam-Bush;
nothing has changed. Before, we had the
little boss, now
the big
boss, now he real boss is here. Saddam
and Bush are the same.
Mohammed:
Saddam was
a little Ali Baba; Bush is a big Ali Baba (Ali Baba is a
famous
thief in Arabic mythology).
Many
people, many homes were destroyed by the Americans in my town of
Salahadin,
many schools were destroyed. I have
friends who have been in Abu Garib prison, they were badly treated, left
outside in the cold with no blanket.
There are many girls at the prison, now some are pregnant;
the
American soldiers get drunk, they enter the girls, fike-fike, the
girls now
are pregnant.
Why do you
have pictures (of detainees) from so few villages? There are so many missing from so many
villages.
The
Americans shot my brother and his arm was broken. He has had five
operations
to try to repair the damage. Who do I
talk to about help
paying for
this? I have sold the furniture in my
home to try to pay the hospital bills.
My pension from the CPA is $20 a month.
Who can I talk to? Will you help
us?
I am old
and sick. My pension is only 3% of my
original income. I
cannot
afford to buy medicine. Who will help
me?
The only
freedom now in Iraq is for the fundamentalists, not for the
people. We
need equality between women and men, but now women are afraid to even go out of
their homes. It's a wonderful thing, the
collapse
of the regime, but the Americans carry guns everywhere and shoot everyone. There is no freedom now.
Samar, 16
years old
Why did
the United States come to Iraq? For oil.
*****
Immediately
after the demonstration we flagged down a cab and darted
through
Baghdad's torturous traffic to an appointment with Dr. Mussouyia, former Iraqi
ambassador to the United Nations. The
opportunity to interview this erudite and articulate man offered a counterpoint
to the generally poorly educated people we had encountered at Liberation
Square, although his message seemed to be basically the same. Some of his major
points, as
best as I was able to transcribe them, were:
"We
are in a very difficult situation-not only for us, but for the United
States. We have reached an impasse, in
that the Americans have put themselves into a situation that they do not know
how to get out of.
The United
States committed an international crime by invading Iraq.
Even if
Iraq had been in violation of UN Resolution 1441, which stated
that
XXXXXX, that resolution gave no automatic right of aggression
towards
one country by another. There was no
legal basis for this war.
So what we
have is the illegal use of force followed by an illegal
occupation. But George Bush did not understand what he
was getting his
country
into when he invaded Iraq; he does not know what to do next.
What is
needed is a way beyond the impasse that will allow the United
States to
withdraw while retaining its dignity.
"The
impact of recent U.S. policy toward Iraqi has been to fragment Iraqi
society. The impact of 12 years of
economic sanctions and then the bombing, burning and looting of all government
buildings except the oil ministry has been the impoverishment of an entire
nation of people and
the
dismantling of the state that held these people together.
"The
United States government may not like the Baath Party, but it should understand
that all of the intellectuals and well-educated in Iraq belonged to this
organization. If these people are not
allowed to
participate
in the rebuilding of Iraq, the natural result will be the
rise of
fundamentalism, and we will end up with a fundamentalist Islamic State.
"As
for the detainees, you know we are a small and interconnected
society. Everybody has a family member who has either
been killed in the war or has been detained in the U.S. prisons, or whose homes
have been ransacked. This only adds to
the anger rising in the Iraq people at the American occupation of their
country.
"It
is my choice not to work for the government, the so-called Iraqi
Governing
Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority. If I did so I would feel like a collaborator
with the occupier. We Iraqis do not see
any future for the occupation. The only
way out of this impasse, short of war, is for the United States to hand over
responsibility for
government
and security in Iraq to the United Nations, and then work with the
international community to hold free and fair elections that
represent
all people and all parties.
"You
are doing a magnificent job, really, you are doing the impossible in your work
here in Iraq. Thank you very much from
all the Iraqi people."