Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics by Mario Vargas Llosa
It is also true that the accumulated hatred of the governing clique encouraged many of their victims to destroy the houses of people in power and all the buildings associated with the regime. But, why the factories? A seasoned industrialist, Nagi Al Jaf, who has businesses in the Iraqi capital and in the Kurdish city of Suleymaniya, tells me that the large Farida beer factory in Baghdad, a mixed company in which he has shares, was stripped by the Ali Babas. ‘I can understand them stealing things that they can use or sell. But I can’t see why they destroyed all the machines and then, as if that were not enough, they burned them.’ How many industries in Baghdad were wrecked in this way? He is categorical. ‘All of them.’ I ask him not to exaggerate, to be objective. He takes a long look at the stars in the sky above Suleymaniya and repeats, ‘All of them. There is not a single industrial plant in Baghdad that has not been completely destroyed.’ What is the explanation then? Perhaps it is that a people cannot live in such abject terror and servility in the way the Iraqis were forced to live during the three decades of the dictatorship of the Ba’ath Party (a pro-Arab, nationalist, fascist and Stalinist party rolled into one, founded in 1942, in Damascus, by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq) and the twenty-four years of the presidency of Saddam Hussein, without reacting violently when they have an opportunity. So when, on 9 April, the Iraqis suddenly felt completely and absolutely free, there was an explosion of anarchy, dissolute behaviour and savagery which has destroyed Baghdad and left a bleeding wound in the hearts of every Baghdad citizen.
Since there is no public transport working, and there are no traffic police on street intersections, traffic in Baghdad is pandemonium. (Petrol is given away: it costs scarcely fifty cents to fill a tank). Drivers go wherever they please, so traffic accidents are very frequent and the jams are extraordinary. But at least in this area I noticed signs of the ‘spontaneous institutions’ that Hayek argues are more lasting and representative because they emerge naturally from civil society and are not imposed by the powers that be. When the jams become completely impossible, there are always volunteers armed with a stick and a whistle prepared to direct the traffic. And the drivers stuck in the jam obey their instructions, relieved that finally someone is giving them orders. This is also happening in neighbourhoods around the city: the local residents are forming groups to defend themselves against the thieves, or to take piles of rubbish to the end of the street and burn it. That is why when you walk around Baghdad, you have to pick your way through not only rubble, ruins, burned-out buildings and piles of vermin-ridden filth, but also the pestilential bonfires by which the inhabitants of Baghdad try to control the rubbish that threatens to swallow them up.
But perhaps the worst thing of all for the long-suffering inhabitants of the Iraqi capital is the lack of electricity and drinking water. There are continual power cuts which in some districts last for days on end. The neighbours are defenceless against the torrid temperatures that never drop below forty degrees in the shade and sometimes rise above fifty degrees. To be subjected to this burning heat, in total darkness and without running water, is torture. In the apartment of Spanish friends working for the Iberoamericana-Europa Foundation, that has brought five hundred tons of food and medicines and a drinking water plant to Iraq, where I was put up during my first week in Iraq, I experienced at first hand the hardships that the Iraqis had been suffering for three months. The light came on intermittently, but at times the cuts went on for so many hours that it was impossible to cook, wash or air the place and, to prevent us burning up in the oven temperatures of the bedrooms, my hosts took mattresses out into the garden, choosing the cockroaches over asphyxia. The demoralisation that all this produces is one of the obstacles that the Iraqis will have to overcome in order for their country, which is emerging from one of the most corrupt and brutal experiences of authoritarianism known to humanity, to leave behind that long night of despotism and violence that is their history and become a modern, prosperous and democratic nation.
Is this a possible, realistic idea, or an illusion, since we are talking about a society that lacks even the most minimal experience of freedom and that is also torn by many antagonisms and internal rivalries? Is it feasible to imagine Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, Shia and Sunni Muslims and the internal currents that divide them, Chaldea, Asirian, Latin and Armenian Christians, tribal clans, primitive country dwellers and vast urban communities to coexist in an open and plural, tolerant and flexible system, a lay state with a solid consensus that would allow the twenty-five million inhabitants of Mesopotamia, where writing was born and which is a fundamental reference point for all the great religions and modern cultures, the cradle of the first great collection of the historical laws – the Hammurabi Code – finally to lead a worthy and free life, or is it a fantasy as delirious at that of the mythical ancestors of these people, who wanted to build a tower that would reach the sky and ended up frustrated and lost in the frightful confusion of Babel?
I have come to Iraq to try to find out if these questions have a convincing answer. Twelve days is very little time, but it is better than nothing.
25 June–6 July 2003
2. Baghdad People
Captain Nawfal Khzal Aied Abdala Al Dolame is a tall, slim, serious, elegant and tough-looking man. He studied in the Al Almiraya Military Academy, in the outskirts of Baghdad, and after graduating spent several years in the Ministry of Defence. But when things got difficult for the regime, he was assigned to a combat battalion and was stationed in Basra, coming up against the UK coalition forces. Then his battalion retreated to Baghdad and, once there, as happened in many other divisions of the Iraqi army, his commanding officers decided that it was useless to put up resistance to the Americans, and sent their officers and men back home. It was there that he learned that the captain of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Ambassador Paul Bremer, had dismissed the almost half a million members of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, and that he was without a job. Since then, he has earned his living as a bodyguard, a profession which has become very popular, given the widespread anarchy in this country without a state, or services, or a police force, or any other authorities, that is prey to myriad Ali Babas.
Armed with a pistol (authorised by the CPA), and for the modest sum of one hundred dollars, he follows me everywhere like a shadow. As a bodyguard, he is charmingly useless. The only time his services were needed, in the Imam Ali mosque in the sacred – for the Shia – city of Najaf, when an enraged believer tried to attack my daughter Morgana who, with characteristic irresponsibility, was taking photos in the midst of the wailing masses, all that he managed to do was raise his hands to his face and deplore this demonstration of fanaticism and ignorance. It was other believers in the crowd that spared Morgana’s face from the blow that was aimed at her. But I like this captain with his interminable name: Nawfal Khazal Aied Abdala Al Dolame. Without a flicker on his severe face, he comes up with lines like: ‘I am a Muslim at night and a Christian during the day, so that I can have a cold beer’. I understand and approve of what he is saying: there is no sin that any normal personal would be unwilling to commit to placate to some degree this fifty-degrees-in-the-shade inferno that is the capital of Iraq.
The captain knows many stories about Uday, Saddam Hussein’s son, who adds weight to the tradition by which the sons of the great satraps usually outdo their fathers in terms of abuses and crimes. The stories that I hear on a daily basis about the scions of the Iraqi dictator remind me, like a recurrent nightmare, of those that I heard in the Dominican Republic, about the sons of General Trujillo. But I suspect that Uday even beat the record of Ramfis and Radhamés Trujillo, for example by having the Health Minister of the regime, Dr Raja, who, like Saddam Hussein, was from Tikrit, eaten by a pack of wild dogs. One story that the captain knows very well concerns a very pretty young woman, a close family friend, who earned her living as a teacher and whose name he does not disclose to me, out of respect. Uday saw her in the street when she was on the way to the school.
Despite not speaking Arabic, I understand everything that I hear around me thanks to my splendid translator, Dr Bassam Y. Rashid. He is a professor at the University of Baghdad and was for a time the director of the Spanish Department, that has more than eight hundred students. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Granada, with a critical edition of a treatise on astrology by Enrique de Villena, that took him seven years of erudite and happy study. That was where his son Ahmed was born, and his son still dreams of his childhood in Granada the way others dream of paradise. In the professor’s modest house, young Ahmed has turned his small room into a kind of shrine, with photos of the King and Queen of Spain and places in Spain – he knows the history and geography of Spain by heart and he repeats facts about the country like a mantra – the way other kids of his age would have plastered their walls with film stars or the latest rock group. Professor Bassam Y. Rashid was mysteriously summoned one day by Saddam Hussein to be his interpreter during a visit by Comandante Hugo Chávez, the demagogue who rules Venezuela, and I am sure that he must have lots of juicy anecdotes about that assignment. But I don’t ask him about it, because, knowing him, I know that he would maintain a strict professional silence and not open his mouth.
Professor Bassam is one of those decent people who are the moral backbone of a country, who might be frustrated and ruined by dictatorships, but who still manage to survive with their moral values intact all the vileness, fear, corruption and stupidity that tyrannies create, poisoning the very air that everyone breathes. In these twelve days that we have spent together, I have not heard him complain once about the infinite deprivations that he is forced to put up with, like almost all his compatriots: the complete lack of security, the uncertainty, the lack of light and water and the absence of any authorities, the terrifying mounting mounds of rubbish on all the roads and the pavements, the prevailing chaos, the economic shortages, the terrorist assaults that are multiplying daily, the attacks in the street. The only time I saw him sad was when he showed me the libraries and lecture halls of the University, where he has spent all his life, that had been ransacked and burned in the orgy of vandalism that gripped Baghdad following the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, and which literally destroyed, along with thousands of other institutions, homes and premises, the five universities in the Iraqi capital. But he is not defeatist. Freedom is always good, even though it comes at a high price, he says, and he has not lost hope that Iraq will one day be a free, modern, and democratic country, ‘like Spain’ (is the way he puts it). In his very modest house in the Al Magreb district, he and his wife greet me with the magnificence of the Arabian Nights, in the best tradition of Arab hospitality, though I fear that this means that they will go hungry later. If, by chance, circumstances take you one of these days to Baghdad, try to meet Dr Bassam Y. Rashid, because just talking to him for a few minutes will raise your spirits.
And, after that, take a stroll around the old centre of the city and go to the Clock Tower, on the banks of the Tigris. You won’t be able to enjoy the gardens of the old building that was the seat of government in the times of the monarchy, where King Faisal I was crowned in 1922. All that has been destroyed by the Ali Babas and has disappeared into thin air. And the looters, not content with carrying off the windows, the doors, the beams, the ironwork and floor tiles of the ancient building, chipped and broke and gutted and smashed everything that they could not manage to carry away, so that, in there, you feel as if you are stepping through the ruins left by some devastating earthquake. No, go there, because, as happened to me, you may well bump into the likeable and affable Jamal N. Hussein, a small and formal man from Baghdad, in his forties, who works in the Library of the National Museum and who savours the English language as if it were sugar. He is effusive and will be delighted to tell you his story. He used to live there, on the top floor of a block next to the government building. When the looting began, he was out, and he ran back here, to protect his apartment. When he got back, out of breath, he found that the Ali Babas had taken all his belongings – his books, his clothes and his music – and were setting fire to his apartment. From these gardens he could see the smoke enveloping everything that had not been stolen.
But what is really interesting is not this seemingly banal event that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iraqis, have also suffered, but rather that, at this point in the story, the delicate Jamal N. Hussein will raise his voice a shade and, gesturing energetically, will let you know that he was not so concerned that the Ali Babas had taken his things and burned his house, he could get over that. What really plunges him into despair and anguish, and keeps him awake at night, and brings him here every day to these destroyed gardens, is his Fiat. And then, with a wave of his child’s hand, Jamal N. Hussein will say to you: ‘Come sir, come and meet her.’ It was the apple of his eye, more important than a dog or a relative: it was like a lover or a personal deity. He cleaned it, took care of it and showed it to his friends with delight and admiration. And when you see the mortal remains of the Fiat, in a corner of that stripped garden, that heap of twisted and burned metal, bathing in the inclement heat of the Iraq summer, you will see Jamal N. Hussein’s greyish brown eyes mist over with sadness. You should leave at this point. Don’t be uncouth and try to console him with one of those stupid banalities that you hear at funerals. Tiptoe away and leave the unhappy man to his memories.
If you are very depressed at what you have just seen, less than two hundred yards from there, in among the ruined buildings and the pestilential rubbish, in a run-down street that crosses the narrow Al Mutanabbi Road, where every Friday there is a colourful second-hand book fair, you will find a crammed, timeless little café, with a surprising name: The Merchants’ Champion Café. Go there and I promise that it will cheer you up. Don’t be put off by the male throng, elbow your way into the café and sit down in any space you can find. Order a tea, a coffee or a hookah and start talking to the person next to you. If you are lucky, you’ll meet the lawyer, whose name I did not catch, with whom I shared a red-hot narrow bench, that burned my backside. He was a broad and jovial man, bathed in sweat, who chewed the mouthpiece of his hookah and blew out puffs of smoke smelling of tobacco mixed with apricot and apple, while he held forth. He told me that he was a lawyer, but that since, due to recent events, the country had no courts or judges or laws, and thus no clients, he found that, after a successful career in the courts, he had become a ‘nobody’, almost non-existent. ‘Just think, the country that gave the world the first written laws in history – the Hammurabi Code – is now a country without even shyster lawyers.’ His mocking smile flitted across the burning room, as if to say that, for someone like him, this did not matter a jot. For the time he was here, surrounded by poets, literary people and wastrels who are the locals at the Merchants’ Champion Café, and with a slow burning hookah, he was a happy man, without any problems.
‘Who do you think governs Baghdad?’ he asks suddenly, gesticulating in the air and posing like a diva to attract everyone’s attention. ‘The Americans?’ The lawyer pauses for a few seconds for effect before finally giving the eagerly awaited answer: ‘No, habibi. The real rulers of Baghdad are the Ali Babas, the cockroaches, the bugs, the fleas.’ A polite chuckle greeted his words. The other regulars must have heard his jokes many times over and did not find them very funny. I did. Cynical stoicism is like a breath of civilisation in these cases, an excellent way to fight despair.
25 June–6 July 2003
3. The Believers
Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim is sixty-three, and spent twenty-three
He has very pale skin and blue eyes, and his presence – with his long grey beard, his black turban and grey robes – has a studied dignity. He receives me in the city of Najaf, a sacred site for Shias, for it is where Emir Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, who was murdered in year 41 of the hegira and is considered to be the spiritual figure of the Shia, is buried. Imam Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim lives in spartan austerity, and the offices of his movement are also extremely simple. But the precautions that they take are very tight.
Clerics, bodyguards and assistants search us, take our shoes off and confiscate our cameras and tape recorders (which they return to us once they have checked that there are no arms or explosives hidden in them). There is not a single female presence in the house, and Morgana has to comply strictly with the dress code by wearing the Muslim veil so that she can come in with me and take photographs. When I tell Ayatollah Al Hakim that she is my daughter, he replies curtly, without looking at her: ‘I have six daughters.’ I do not commit the impertinence of asking him how many wives have borne these six children. (The Shia, apart from having four legitimate wives authorised by the Koran, can add a fifth – the so-called ‘pleasure marriage’ – if they are travelling without female company, so that they do not have to suffer the privations of abstinence. This fifth wedding can last solely for the duration of the journey).