A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal (40 page)

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Authors: Asne Seierstad,Ingrid Christophersen

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Editors; Journalists; Publishers, #History, #Military, #Iraq War (2003-2011), #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Journalism, #Social Science, #Customs & Traditions, #Sociology

BOOK: A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal
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- Suicide bombers, someone shouts. The mob crowds around the prey, the three men look up at them, scared stiff. They were discovered wearing explosives trying to negotiate a roadblock, the rumours spread. - And they were in possession of several grenades.
 
- They are Saddam’s men, says an onlooker. - They have come to kill, not to defend us.
 
The men are led into the hospital’s courtyard. A man pulls out a long sabre and follows them. Two others walk behind with pistols. - They are from Syria, they are terrorists.
 
Several curious spectators tag along but are brutally pushed away.
 
- We’ll lock them in the hospital and the Americans can take care of them, says a self-proclaimed security guard.
 
But there are hardly any Americans in al-Sadr. Chaos rules. The hospital has been taken over by a sheik - a holy man.
 
- I have erected four barriers around the hospital, says Sheik Said Ali al-Musawi. - This is the only hospital in town that has not been looted. Doctors have abandoned the other ones, the patients have been moved. Everything of value has disappeared; that is not going to happen here.
 
The sheik is both happy and uncertain about recent events. - I am glad that Saddam Hussein has gone. If he were standing in front of me now I would cut off his arms and legs. Then I’d watch him die slowly. Make sure he suffered an awful death. He deserves that after what he has done to us.
 
For nine years Said Ali al-Musawi was incarcerated in a four by four metre cell in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. - I was arrested in 1994, accused of leading a group which wanted to overthrow the president. They tortured me to make me confess. They tied my arms behind my back and hung me up, beat me with sticks and cables, gave me electric shocks. They threatened to kill my wife. My cell was painted red so the light would stab my eyes. I never saw the sun, never felt the fresh air, for nine years, he says bitterly. - The torture continued for years, because I had nothing to confess.
 
Said Ali al-Musawi was released from prison in October last year, when Saddam Hussein, with the elections in mind, set thousands of prisoners free.
 
- But I am not so fond of the Americans either. I am an Iraqi and every inch of me is patriotic. I cannot accept that foreigners rule our country. But they helped us to get rid of the dictator and for that they deserve a ‘thank you’. Under him life was worse than miserable.
 
Most of the doctors left the hospital in Saddam City when the ground war started. - There was no security here, lawlessness reigned, so they just went home, Chief Physician Mowaffak Gorjea says. But twenty-two out of one hundred and twenty remain. The best stayed.
 
The hospital has been without water and power for some days. Now water has returned, but the hospital is dependent on its three generators. - One is broken. If one more breaks down we have had it. All the equipment is several decades old. I don’t know how long it will last, says the doctor. - I know I could have saved many patients if the equipment had been better, he sighs.
 
In a room on the third floor lies Ali. Ali’s world has been reduced to four walls, a sheet, a dirty polyester blanket and a towel. He lies stretched out on the bed. Above him an iron hoop has been constructed over which a brown and white-patterned blanket has been spread. Ali’s body needs air, nothing must cover it. His aunt sits beside the twelve-year-old. She waves the flies away continuously; they must not settle on his scarred body.
 
His stomach and chest are covered in red, brown, yellow, black and white crusts. Every bit of skin, from his neck down to his hips, was burnt when the missile struck his house.
 
- His condition is critical, says the chief physician. - Thirty-five percent of the body has third degree burns, of what is left of his body, that is. If he had still had arms it would have been more than fifty percent. If he remains here I’m afraid he’ll die. Infections, infections
. . .
 
The missile hit Ali’s home ten days earlier, in the middle of the night. His mother, who was five months pregnant, his father and little brother were killed instantly. Ali’s blanket caught fire and his arms were so badly burnt that they had to be amputated. He was the only one to survive.
 
We stand some way off looking at him. We do not know what to say. Ali himself breaks the silence.
 
- I want my hands back.
 
The voice is weak and slightly grating. His lips quiver when he talks. The hospital has no painkillers. His thoughts might be worse than the wounds.
 
- They were all killed. Mummy, Daddy, my little brother, and all the friends in my street. Four houses were destroyed, he says. - I never want to go back, there’s nothing left.
 
Ali is quiet again. He is too tired to talk. He asks his aunt to fix a towel to the metal bars and place it round his neck. That way he won’t see his burnt body. The arm stumps disappear under the towel.
 
- Can I have my hands back? Ali asks yet again.
 
 
I want to go home; I can’t take it any more.
 
It is unbearable to look into Ali’s eyes. I have to turn away, I do not want him to see me cry.
 
Aliya remains there, talking quietly to him. In a tender voice she says something in Arabic.
 
I walk over to the window to pull myself together. The sky is grey with smoke from the fires.
 
 
I cannot leave yet. I have to find out more about life under Saddam. The worst atrocities took place here, in Saddam City. We stop at random, get out of the car, knock on a door and present ourselves. We want to know if anyone in the neighbourhood has relatives who disappeared under Saddam.
 
Yes, they have. The father disappeared one day. He left for work and never returned. The brother disappeared too, and two cousins.
 
We sit down on a threadbare mat.
 
It was in the spring of 1980. When the husband failed to show up at home his wife had gone to his place of work. There they had asked her to go to the police. She went, but the bureaucrat behind the counter had just shrugged his shoulders.
 
- I know nothing.
 
The second time she went he said there was no point asking more.
 
The third time he had hissed: - If you come again, your sons and brothers will disappear the same way.
 
She never returned.
 
We listen to her in the darkened room. A small window emits three rays of light; none of the lamps work. Several neighbours sit listening. I shiver. The room is chilly; the change from the burning sun on the street outside is considerable.
 
- Maybe he lives in a subterranean cellar, the wife says, her voice faltering. The daughters, little girls when their father disappeared, look doubtfully at us. The men stare into space.
 
More neighbours join us. They all have stories to tell. In the 1980s the Shia Muslims were subject to a wave of arrests: Saddam Hussein feared potential rebellion, and that the Shias supported the regime in Iran. His suppression was especially aimed at the illicit religious Dawa Party. Saddam worried about the might of the mullahs, and the mere act of belonging to a certain mosque or carrying out religious duties was enough to send anyone to the torture chamber.
 
I try to interview every person in the blacked-out room, but become confused. In time everyone talks over each other and about each other’s stories. They add details to their neighbours’ tales, and Aliya is only able to present a fraction of what is being said. While she translates the storyteller continues to talk. The family ties are also unclear. Who is a brother, a cousin, a son or a nephew? I lose the thread but get the essence. The incarnation of evil.
 
It appears that everyone in the little back street is present. They sit on the floor, stand along the wall, slouch in the doorway, listen from the hall.
 
- Can you help us find them? an old lady asks. Two of her sons disappeared en route to the mosque one day.
 
I look at her.
 
- I don’t think I can find them, but I can write about them. About the injustice you have suffered.
 
- But can you help us to find them? she asks again.
 
- I don’t think so. I’m sorry.
 
Disappointment shines from the eyes of the black-clad woman. She doesn’t say another word.
 
Some of the men have themselves experienced prison. Low-voiced, they talk about the torture they witnessed. Aliya translates mechanically. This is a reality she knew nothing about. Growing up in Baghdad’s middle class, in a safe and apolitical Sunni Muslim family, she was isolated from the Shias in Saddam City. I remember her fear of travelling here before the war.
 
The dust in the room hovers in the three shafts of light. On the walls are pictures of the missing husband and sons; beside them two pictures of the Shia Muslims’ holy men, Hussein and Ali. One picture catches my attention. The Virgin Mary with child.
 
- Ask why they have that picture, I say to Aliya.
 
Aliya asks.
 
- They say because it is beautiful.
 
- But it’s Jesus and Mary. That’s a Christian picture.
 
- I won’t translate that, Aliya says without looking at me. - It’s there because it’s pretty. Is that OK for you? Is there anything else? Can we go now?
 
On the way home we hardly speak. All our strength has been sucked out. The next day we continue the search.
 
 
Some did their calculations with dots, others with lines. The tiny cells are full of inscriptions - by the floor, along the door and up towards the roof. In these dark rooms, where no light ever penetrated, prisoners tried to survey their existence by scratching a dot or a line in the wall at the beginning of each day.
 
Sometimes there were six to a cell, others were alone in the miserly square metres. Some cells are painted red to prevent the eyes from ever getting any rest. In others the red has been painted over with white. Where prisoners have scraped away the white paint, the red colour has appeared, as if they wrote in blood.
 
‘Don’t despair, Allah will support you’, is written in the blood-red letters. ‘I give my heart to Saddam Hussein. May Allah protect me’. ‘To my beloved children Safar, Ali and Marwa, 19.7.1990’ is cut into one wall. In all directions, across the endless dots and lines, cockroaches scuttle, quick as lightning.
 
We are in one of the interrogation centres of the secret police - Mukhabarat. Political prisoners were incarcerated here, in al-Hakimiya in Baghdad’s Zuwiya district. Immediately before the bombing started the prisoners were moved, no one knows where to.
 
Desperate relatives now visit the prisons to seek information about their loved ones, or at least to look for signs on the walls. The day before, a group of relatives had tried to break open a large door with axes and iron bars. They thought it might lead to an underground prison.
 
- It is rumoured that there is a subterranean section here. Perhaps they were buried alive when the guards left, maybe they’re still breathing down there, says Mudaffar, who is looking for his brother. Adnan was arrested three years ago. Mudaffar pauses between blows to the door. - One day they came to the shop and took him. Said he was an enemy of society. We know nothing, only that they took him here.
 
Jabir is trying to find traces of his father. He was arrested in 1994, accused of conspiring against the regime. The young boy is one of the few who knows where his father is. The family were asked to come and fetch the body. The secret police told them he had died of a heart attack. They at least have a grave to visit. - But I want to see where he lived, Jabir says. - Every day, all these years, I have been thinking of how he suffered.
 
Jabir walks through the narrow passages with a torch. There are no windows, no ventilation. The cells stink of excrement, vomit, mould. Several of the cells appear to have been abandoned in haste, right after the prisoners were fed. In some cells two eggs remain on a plate, in others only the shell is left. There are neither blankets nor pillows, only a drain in the floor.

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