Bathed in sweat, the main editor of Azzaman is enthusiastic, and gives a cheerful account of his busy life. He had studied theatre, graduating from the Baghdad School of Dramatic Arts with a study and a stage adaptation of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire. He wanted to pursue a career as an actor and theatre director, but the regime decided otherwise and made him join the army, in the artillery division. He was kept in the army for eleven years, eight of which he spent in the mad war against Iran that Saddam Hussein instigated and which cost a million lives. Ahmad Hadi, who was by then an artillery captain, hung up his uniform and tried to return to his old love, the boards, when the Shia intifada against the dictatorship broke out, in which he became actively involved. Following the failure of the uprising, when the punishment killings were in full flow, he managed to escape across the border to Saudi Arabia. While he was in exile, as a reprisal for his rebellion, the regime burned down his two houses along with everything inside them. He tells me all this laughing out loud, as if the matter was funny or the victim of these misfortunes was his worst enemy.
Perhaps Ahmad Hadi is happy because, in his forties, he has finally managed to take up his theatrical vocation after so many frustrations. His work, Obey the Devil, which was performed four times in an open-air setting, amid the rubble in Baghdad, has been a monumental success and many Iraqis have told me about it, praising it to the skies. There were nine male actors and one female, who was also a dancer, and the actors appeared daubed with the ashes of the fires that every passer-by comes across in the streets of the city.
To hear the robust, sweating, gesticulating Ahmad Hadi explaining his work to me is, I am sure, almost as stimulating as seeing it myself. He describes it with great verve, lots of arm movements and loud guffaws, mopping the rivulets of sweat that soak his face and his shirt. The work is a recreation of Shakespeare’s Othello, a work which, Hadi assures me, could have been written with the Iraq tragedy in mind, since it fits so perfectly. There are also other coincidences, real premonitions by the Elizabethan bard. Othello, read backwards, from right to left, as is the case in Arabic, produces in that language a sound very similar to ‘Leota’, which means, ‘Obey him’. My translator, Professor Bassam Y. Rashid, who is a linguist, gets caught up in a philological discussion with him, and finally he admits that he’s right: it does mean ‘Obey him’. Ahmad Hadi added the word devil; although, he tells me, an infernal presence is implied in the idea that a society must ‘obey’ an irrational and destructive force. Life in the palace of the despot was indeed a world of jealousy, open hatred, rivalry, envy, crimes and betrayal. Iago’s betrayal, he assures me, is symbolic of the treachery of Saddam Hussein’s Head of General Staff, who, out of jealousy, handed over Baghdad to the American forces without letting the Iraqi soldiers fight. There is no doubt about it: his version of Othello represents what Iraq has lived through all these years, which is why the people of Baghdad identified so closely with the work.
This is the only time, in our conversation, that the optimistic Ahmad Hadi says something that could be construed as a veiled criticism of the coalition forces. In every other aspect, his view of the current situation in Iraq exudes confidence and appreciation. ‘I am optimistic for one very simple reason: nothing could be worse than Saddam Hussein. After that atrocious experience, things can only get better for us’.
He believes that once the CPA puts in place the Iraq Governing Committee which, he is sure, will be made up of significant figures from across the political spectrum, then the confidence of the people will grow, order will be imposed, services will be re-established and the uncertainty and insecurity everyone feels today will start to disappear. The main desire of the Iraqi people, he is convinced, is to live in peace, without hatred and violence, and to build a modern, tolerant, secular, pluralist democracy, on Western lines. This is what Azzaman promotes and exemplifies in its pages, where different opinions are freely expressed. Even among the most politicised religious sectors, be they Sunni or Shia, it is the moderates, not the extremists, who — now — prevail, and they are prepared to make an effort to coexist so that the nightmare of the Ba’ath Party does not recur.
The people will never forget these thirty-five years. Significant sites of memory are the common graves which continue to appear throughout all the provinces of Iraq, full of the bodies of disappeared, tortured and executed people. The figures he gives me, with emphatic certainty, are even greater than those I was given by the Association of Freed Prisoners. They make me dizzy. I know that they are more a fiction than a reality, but even after cutting them down drastically, the total remains horrifying. Every time I hear from Iraqis accounts of the horrors of Saddam Hussein, I am reminded of the Dominican Republic and what I heard there about General Trujillo’s exploits.
Ahmad Hadi states categorically that the figure of eight million victims of the Ba’ath tyranny is perfectly realistic, despite my look of incredulity. I tell him that it doesn’t matter if he is exaggerating. I didn’t come to Iraq to listen just to the truth but also to the fictions that the Iraqis believe, since the lies that a people invent very often express a very deep truth, and are as instructive a way of understanding a dictatorship as the objective truth. He insists that this mountain of eight million corpses is close to the historical truth. He adds that you can make calculations based on the numbers of bodies in common graves that have appeared since Apriclass="underline" there are at least three in every province in Iraq, and in just one of them, in Babilonia, there were some 115,000 bodies. I tell him that this is the largest figure I have heard of in any city since the butchery perpetrated by the Nazis in the Holocaust. He insists on giving me more horror statistics: in the city of Shanafia, which has scarcely twenty thousand inhabitants, they have already counted almost eighty-five thousand human remains, victims of the homicidal rage of the Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein. After a past in which so many extraordinary horrors were committed, how could one not feel hopeful about the future, despite the blackouts, the lack of water, the anarchy and the insecurity? Ahmad Hadi wants exemplary sanctions to be imposed on Saddam and his sons (Uday and Qusay died in a fire fight with American troops on 22 July, after this statement was made) and henchmen, but he does not want them to be taken to an international tribunal. They must be judged here, in an Iraqi court, with Iraqi judges. That would be an example that would inure Iraq for ever against dictatorships.
I ask him whether one can say that today there is complete freedom in his country to write and publish. ‘Absolute freedom, like never before in the history of Iraq.’ And even in the economic sphere, those with jobs must recognise that their situation has improved (for those without jobs, the majority of the people, it is another matter, of course). For example, under Saddam Hussein, journalists earned some ten thousand dinars a month (the equivalent of five dollars). Now they earn the equivalent of two hundred dollars. Isn’t that a big improvement? He tells me that, for example, with his first two-hundred-dollar pay cheque he rushed out to by a spare part for his fridge that had been broken for two years. His wife, who is a school teacher, spent her first salary after the liberation on a satellite dish, which means that she can now pick up television stations from around the world. And she is very happy!