One of the explanations for the vandalism is the large number of common criminals let out of prison in Iraq by order of Saddam Hussein. How many were there? Between thirty and a hundred thousand. The figures never tally and sometimes reach fantastic extremes, as always happens in countries without freedom of information in which people are informed by hunches or hearsay. However, a great deal of this havoc was caused by a bunch of criminals who were allowed free rein in this country without law and order that Saddam Hussein wished to bequeath to posterity. It was also caused by the agents, torturers and bureaucrats of the regime, who were anxious to destroy all traces of their misdeeds. But it was also inevitable that circumstances turned many mild citizens into Ali Babas. Finding themselves free and uncensored, in a world without any checks or laws, some gave vent to the unbridled, savage thirst for violence that we all carry within us. The environment caused some to show their frustration and protest in the most ferocious way, or to take the revenge that they had so long dreamed of, to settle accounts with their neighbours, colleagues, relatives, litigants or enemies. Fanatics saw that the time had come to punish the pornographers and the degenerates; the envious saw it as an opportunity to take revenge on the people they had envied; in general, a people humiliated, maltreated, terrorised and alienated by thirty-five years of authoritarianism wallowed in a bath of purifying brutality and licentiousness, as in the great Dionysian festivities that began as a song to happiness and ended in human sacrifice and mass suicides. All this is comprehensible, after all. But what is not comprehensible is that the forces that occupied Iraq and had prepared for this war to perfection, right down to the technological minutiae — to judge from the speed of the victory and the mathematical precision of the bombing — had not anticipated this, and had no plan to combat it.
I hear all this, in his florid Italian, from Archbishop Fernando Filoni, the apostolic nuncio of His Holiness, who has been in Baghdad for two years. He is small, astute, tough as nails, talkative and an expert on emergencies. In Sri Lanka and Tehran he had received excellent training for this hotbed of tensions that is Iraq. ‘The Holy Father was against the war because he knew what would happen,’ he tells me, with a sad expression on his face. ‘It is very easy to win, but then it is incredibly difficult to administer the peace.’ The nuncio’s residence is a simple house, obsessively clean and tidy, an unusual haven of peace in this city.
The dictatorship literally destroyed a society that four decades earlier had reached a high level of culture, with hospitals and universities among the most modern in the Middle East, and world-ranking professionals. In the fifties, Baghdad’s culture and art were the envy of its neighbours. The Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein ended all that. There was a haemorrhaging of doctors, engineers, economists, researchers, teachers and intellectuals to the four corners of the world. (While I’m listening to him, I remember that on my way to Iraq, during my stopover in Amman, a diplomat who had spent many years in Jordan told me: ‘For this country, the tragedy in Iraq has been a blessing: the most important musicians, artists and intellectuals here are Iraqi immigrants.’) Censorship, repression, fear, corruption and isolation had increasingly impoverished the country culturally until it reached the low point that it is at today. For that reason there was so much hope among ordinary people at the time of the liberation. Whatever people say, the Americans were initially greeted in a friendly manner. But with the looting and the complete insecurity that followed, this initial sympathy turned into dislike and hostility. ‘You shouldn’t see this as love for Saddam Hussein, but rather as a hatred of chaos, of how precarious life has become.’
Monsignor Filoni says that fear of robbery, assaults, kidnapping and rape has become a real psychosis. Many families have stopped taking their children to school; they hardly leave their houses and, since there is no police force, keep the weapons that the Americans have asked them to hand in to defend themselves against robbers. The nuncio does not seem very optimistic about the possibility of a modern democracy emerging in Iraq out of all this. There are many social tensions, a complete lack of political experience among the people, little evidence of democracy and too much anarchy for any democratic process to be implemented in a short space of time. In the long term perhaps. The very, very long term. His words repeat, almost literally, what I heard from my friend in Amman: ‘The best that one can hope for in Iraq, realistically, is a controlled and relative democracy, like Jordan. Here there have just been elections and not a single woman was elected. But, according to the law, there will be six women in Parliament since there is a quota for women. The Islamists have only obtained seventeen-and-a-half percent of the vote, a triumph for the regime of King Abdallah. But, if it hadn’t been for an intelligent ad hoc electoral law which prevents candidates getting on closed lists, the Islamist extremists would have gained a much higher percentage. Also, the tribal chiefs who decide the vote of the bulk of the electorate are more macho and intolerant than the Islamists themselves. For me, a system like this is the best that could happen in Iraq.’
When I tell Monsignor Filoni that Iraqi friends have assured me that the case of Tarek Aziz, a Catholic who was the Foreign Minister and accomplice of Saddam Hussein, was not exceptional, for there were many members of the Catholic communities who sympathised with the dictatorship, he shakes his head. Catholics in Iraq, he tells me, approximately one million of them, five per cent of the population, were divided into different branches — the Chaldeans, who still use Aramaic, the language of Christ, in their liturgy; Asirians, Armenians and Latin — felt protected in the early years of the regime because the Ba’ath party proclaimed itself a secular party and put in place a system that recognised all beliefs. But, after the Gulf War, this secularism disappeared. Saddam Hussein used Islam to gain support in Muslim states, and declared himself the standard bearer of the faith against the infidel enemies of Allah. There was strict religious censorship, the regime encouraged the use of the hijab, or Islamic veil, the situation of women suffered a grave setback, and on the radio and television readings from the Koran and broadcasts by clerics and theologians became compulsory; as a result, the Catholic communities became nervous. There were also some isolated acts of religious violence that spread terror. The nuncio tells me about the murder of a seventy-one-year-old nun, Sister Cecilia Mouchi Hanna. In August 2003 she was knifed to death by three young men who, it seems, were released when Saddam Hussein decided to empty the prisons. ‘The Catholics, like every minority, are very interested in having a democratic system in Iraq that would guarantee freedom of religion. But this won’t be achieved without some kind of firm authority.’
The first time Monsignor Filoni came to Iraq, there was not the freedom that there is today, but at least there was order and a degree of safety. At this time of the year, he remembers, in the torrid heat, people would take their mattresses onto the roof and sleep there, looking up at the stars. Have I seen the stars in the Baghdad sky? I confess that I have been so preoccupied with earthly matters that I have not done so. You really must do so straight away, he tells me; make use of these blackouts that leave the whole city in darkness. Up above, in that inky vault, the stars shine so brightly and so clearly that you have to think about God. Perhaps it was these starry nights back in ancient Mesopotamia that, at the dawn of life, caused men and women to start a dialogue with the divinity. ‘Legend has it that Abraham was born here, in Ur, did you know that? Perhaps here, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, not just writing but also faith was born.’