The Association has a real find, an eyewitness to one of those extraordinary massacres, which took place in Tuz, a town to the north of Baghdad, on the way to Kirkuk. He was a bus driver, and he and his bus were requisitioned by the police. He thus became a passive observer of the whole operation. As he drove around different villages across the region, he saw the police loading up his bus with entire families, parents along with grandparents and children. With his human cargo he was directed by Ba’ath Party members, who were in charge of the operation, to a piece of open ground on the outskirts of Tuz. There were already thousands of people there, being taken off lorries trucks and buses like his by policemen and party activists. As soon as they were unloaded, they were immediately put to work digging a long ditch, in the form of a trench. The witness says that he arrived there at four in the afternoon and that the activity went on all night. When the ditch was deep enough, the police and Ba’ath Party activists put on gas marks and gave him one as well. He was paralysed by terror.
Bludgeoning and firing at the terrified throng, they forced them into the excavated ditch and threw toxic gas cylinders on top of them. By dawn, it was all over. The driver was warned to keep his mouth shut and then sent off by the assassins. The ditch has now been found. It is one of many that are appearing across Iraq, often with four or five thousand corpses in each. ‘They were trenches rather than ditches,’ Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi specifies. And also that, in certain cases, the victims did not have the fortune to be gassed, because the Ba’athists preferred to bury them alive.
These ditches that are being excavated attract thousands of people, who come to see whether, among the remains that are being uncovered, that bear witness to the horror of the recent past in Iraq, they might discover their disappeared family members. One of these couples, who, since April, have been searching the country for the bones of their son who disappeared twelve years ago, are two old people. The woman is very ill, and her daughter tells me that the only thing keeping them alive is the hope of finding the remains of their loved one. Her name is Mrs Al Sarrat, and I visit her in a small, precarious house built on pillars, also in the Al Kadimia neighbourhood. ‘My life is thirty-five years of grief,’ she declares, without crying, her Spartan face chiselled out of despair. She is a woman of indeterminate age, swamped by a black abaya that only allows her face to be shown, flanked by her two very young daughters, who are also veiled and remain motionless throughout the entire interview, like tragic statues. The room is very modest and hot, crammed with pictures, and there is a majestic view of the Tigris through the windows.
‘We cannot breathe or pray because misfortunes kept befalling us, one after the other. He was one of the youngest boys in the family. He was a secondary-school student and signed a petition asking for money to bury a dead school friend. Someone sent that list, which was just a charitable gesture, to the security services. All the boys were arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, as conspirators. Some of them died in prison.’
Another of Mrs Al Sarrat’s brothers was a soldier. He was wounded three times in the eight-year war with Iran. ‘A hero, no?’ Well one day he was arrested, accused by someone of wanting to get out of the army, a crime that often meant a death sentence or otherwise a prison sentence and the added penalty of having an ear cut off. The family found out about this through rumours, since they never received any information in their frequent enquiries to official bodies. They never heard of him again.
Soon after this second misfortune, a third blow fell. Her father was arrested and disappeared into the night of the dictatorship. Three years later a stranger brought a note to the family. ‘Go to Abu Ghraib prison’, the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the worst tortures and political murders took place. There was her father, and she was able to visit him for several minutes every few months. He was released six years later, as mysteriously as he had been arrested. He was never told why he was detained.
Finally there was a younger brother who disappeared when the Shia uprising of 1991 was put down in an orgy of blood. He was a soldier during the war in Kuwait. The last time anyone saw him, he was still in the forces, in Najaf. He has not been heard of since then, and Mrs Al Sarrat’s parents are searching for him in their painful pilgrimage to the common graves scattered throughout Iraq.
When I leave, rather dazed by my morning’s immersion in suffering and barbarity, instead of saying goodbye to Mrs Al Sarrat with the usual right hand on the heart, I stretch out my hand. She looks at me, alarmed.
Just in case I hadn’t had enough barbarity, this evening, in the Hotel Rimini, where I have come to take refuge, betraying the hospitality of my friends in the Ibero-American-European Foundation for a few miserable hours of air conditioning which might finally help me to sleep a bit, I have a conversation with a woman who works for the United Nations which has sunk me into depression and will probably bring me nightmares tonight. She tells me about an investigation by America’s Watch, which has yet to be made public, but which she has read, into the rape and kidnapping of women in Baghdad since the anarchy began, on 9 April. This is a taboo subject because, in terms of traditional morality in Iraqi society, a raped woman is a disgrace that dishonours her entire family and, instead of receiving compassion and support, she is shunned and despised. She knows that her life has ended, that she will never be married and that in her own household she will be subject to exclusion and derision. To wash away this affront, it is often the case that her father or one of her brothers will kill her. The law has always been lenient towards these medieval ‘honour-cleansing killings’, and the perpetrators receive symbolic sentences of two or three months in gaol. Americas Watch has twenty-five testimonies from girls, young women and older women who were kidnapped and raped in Baghdad by criminals and who, for obvious reasons, do not want to report the abuse that they have suffered. Not only because right now there is no police force or functioning judiciary, but also, and above all, because even if these bodies were in place, the procedures and infinite humiliations that heroic women in the past suffered when they dared to report such crimes did not bring them justice. It just exposed them to the disdain and humiliation of public opinion, which increased the hostility of their families. For that reason, according to the Americas Watch report, the girls and women try desperately to hide what has happened to them; they are ashamed and sorry, as if it is they who were responsible for their misfortune.
Now I understand more clearly why, at the gates of the University of Baghdad that I visited yesterday, there were so many mothers waiting to take their daughters home, as if they were nursery-school children.
25 June–6 July 2003
6. Othello Back to Front
The dramatist, journalist, soldier, artilleryman, bon vivant and firm optimist Ahmad Hadi is tall, strong and engaging, and, with his exuberant anatomy, he seems very cooped up in the narrow rooms of the house where the newspaper Azzaman (The Times) has located its editorial offices. The paper was started up, in exile in London, by a famous opposition journalist, Saad Al Bazzaz, after he split with Saddam Hussein in 1991. The cause of the split was the despot’s eldest son, the ineffable Uday, who controlled the Press Union, along with innumerable other responsibilities (including the Olympic Committee, the Football Association, the newspaper Babel and many other activities). With the fall of the regime, the newspaper now brings out four editions: in London, in the Arab Emirates, in Basra and here in Baghdad. It started printing in the capital on 27 April and already has a circulation of sixty thousand. Azzaman is considered to be the widest read and perhaps most influential newspaper. It is produced by forty-five journalists, fifteen of them women, who fit with great difficulty in this small house where we can scarcely breathe, because the electricity cuts frequently shut down the ventilators, leaving us sweating and stifling. Despite this, there is a great energy in the air, one might even say joy, and the editorial staff — almost all young people — who are coming and going, or else toiling on the computers, are very friendly.