I return to Baghdad, with a heavy heart, without being able to get out of my mind the image of these women buried their whole lives — in Najaf and Kerbala, you see young girls buried beneath these robes — in these mobile prisons that deny them any comfort in these suffocating temperatures, which prevent them from developing their bodies and their minds freely, a symbol of their subordinate position, their lack of independence and freedom. This is the Middle Ages, severe and harsh. And if this prevails over the other social and political forces in Iraq, the idea that this country can become a modern, functional democracy in a short period of time, is illusory.
25 June–6 July 2003
4. Looters and Books
If the visit to Najaf and Kerbala was a journey back to medieval Iraq, the morning that I spend in the National University of Baghdad shows me the most modern and progressive aspect of Iraqi society. Young men and women mingle in the courtyards, in the corridors and in the lecture halls with complete naturalness, and many young women walk around without any headgear, showing their arms, although most of them cover their hair with the Islamic veil. The only thing that still brings to mind the Arabian Nights in Baghdad are the eyes of the Baghdad women. It is graduation day and there is a festive, boisterous atmosphere. Entire subject year groups are being photographed under the trees, with bunches of flowers and with their professors in the middle. Young men are dancing to lively music that is being broadcast through loudspeakers, singing at the top of their voices, cheered on by the women. Morgana moves among the dancers, in her element, and she is very well received. The atmosphere is friendly, happy and trusting. (But, the following day, in this cafeteria, a US soldier who was talking to a group of students was killed with a bullet in the head by an individual who ran off.)
I am in the Languages Faculty, which has close to five thousand students, eight hundred of them in the Department of Spanish. They have good teachers, and I interrupt a couple of classes and have a lively discussion with students of both sexes, who are very keen to hear about Spain. By contrast, they know little about Latin America. The building is in a ruinous state because of the looting, but no one seems to be bothered since all the students are in excellent humour.
The lecturers have just been paid their salary for April, a delay of two months. The recent upheavals have meant that salaries have seen some extraordinary readjustments. People who were formerly paid the equivalent of five dollars a month (they were always badly paid, but after the Gulf War and the international embargo salaries reached rock bottom) have now received 250 dollars. However, the Rector has already announced to them that this will be cut back next month to 165 dollars. Nobody knows the reasons for these arbitrary rises and falls, or how long this fickle system, which reflects the chaotic economy of the country, will last. The only thing that is clear is that Iraqi university teachers find it very difficult to live on what they earn, which is why so many of them go to teach in Libya, Jordan or the Gulf Emirates, where the salaries are high.
It is a pleasure to talk to the head of the Languages Faculty, the stout, curly-haired and exuberant Dr Dia Nafi Hassan, a specialist in Russian literature and language and an expert on Chekhov and Turgenev. His office is an oven, and is practically empty because everything in this university — in the five Baghdad universities — was looted and burned when the dictatorship fell on 9 April, so they do not have ventilators, desks, chairs, computers, filing cabinets or books. The walls are blackened, the windows and window-panes are broken, and there are no tiles on the floor of the corridors and stairs. Perhaps worst of all, they have no records of student enrolments, grades and files because they have all been burned. ‘Like all institutions, the University of Baghdad has returned to a virginal state,’ the Dean jokes. But this hurricane of barbarism which devastated the university, like the Huns of Tamerlane, ‘the sons of hell’, who devastated ancient Mesopotamia, indifferent to the civilisation that produced the artistic and intellectual marvels of Nineveh and Babylon, seems not to have made the slightest dent in the good humour and optimism of the colleagues and students of Dr Dia Nafi Hassan, who tells me excitedly that, as a forerunner of what would soon be happening throughout Iraq, the University of Baghdad had undertaken to implement a democratic system. There had been recent elections, and here, in the Faculty, he had been elected Dean with forty-two of the fifty-three votes cast. He is proud of the legitimacy of his mandate. His enthusiasm seems to be shared by the other members of staff present.
He hopes that what has happened here will soon happen throughout Iraq. That the Iraqis themselves will take control, without the supervision of ‘foreigners’ (for foreigners, read Americans). And that this would become a free and democratic country, like Western European countries — he mentions France, Spain and England — with a lay state, tolerant of all beliefs, including, of course, Islam, which is his religion. I ask him whether events in Iraq might be similar to Algeria in the early nineties when, in the first more or less free elections in Algeria’s independent history, it looked as if the fundamentalists would win power, through democratic processes, and would then have ended up abolishing democracy and imposing a theocracy. The Dean disagrees with my analysis, waving his arms with absolute conviction. ‘Here the fanatics will never win free elections,’ he assures me. ‘Here the great majority of us Muslims are civilised, open, democratically inclined people.’
I hope with all my heart that this will be the case. But it is quite clear that there are a good number of fanatics on the loose, because the university teachers tell me that some of the thieves who took part in the looting and vandalism that destroyed this site and burned the libraries — I visit the Russian and German libraries where everything has been reduced to ashes, not a single book escaping the flames — and the offices in the Faculty, also daubed fundamentalist slogans on the wall, cursing this house of evil and the infidel.
Who were these looters, who have created more wounds, bitterness and anger than the coalition bombings? I’m not exaggerating when I say that in the dozens of conversations and interviews that I’ve had over the past days, I have not heard a single Iraqi lamenting the fall of Saddam Hussein, who was clearly detested by the majority of the people that he enslaved. Indeed, most if not all seem to celebrate his fall from power. I have not even heard many complaints from the victims of the bombing. But what everyone is agreed on is their detestation of the dreadful looting that followed the fall of the dictator and has reduced Baghdad and, so it seems, a good number of other cities and towns in Iraq, to ruins, with gutted and burned houses and piles of rubble everywhere. And a very large number of citizens who were full of hope at the end of the dictatorship — the ones who toppled the statues of the dictator and who have defaced his image wherever they find it — have lost everything they had, their furniture, their memories, their housing, their clothes, the savings that they kept hidden in their houses out of fear that the banks would confiscate them. Everyone asks: ‘Why did the Americans not get involved?’ ‘Why didn’t they stop them?’ It’s a mystery that has yet to be resolved. There were hundreds, thousands of soldiers in the streets who from the outset could have dealt robustly with that maddened swarm of Ali Babas who, like a cloud of hungry locusts, laid waste to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities over several days, without any intervention from the Americans. Up to that time they had been greeted by many Iraqis as liberators but, after the looting, this friendly feeling turned into frustration and hostility.