When we left the meeting, Nagi Al Jaf, the businessman, takes me to a place that, he assures me, is ‘paradise’. He is not exaggerating. Suleymaniya is ringed by mountains, and we go up one of them on a very modern road, through pine forests, the gentle slopes lush with vegetation, until we reach the summit, which is wide and offers a splendid view of the whole region. Down below, dotted with gardens and parks and trees, are the white houses of the city, just as the lights are beginning to come on. It’s a large area, and at each end there are ochre-coloured rocks and wooded sections. At this altitude, the stifling heat disappears, cooled by a fresh breeze that smells of resin. All this side of the mountain is full of families or groups of friends, many of them young, who have installed themselves under the trees, cooking dinner on small braziers, while they talk, drink and sing. Along the road there are refreshment points, and a few isolated houses. And wherever you look everything is clean, beautiful and peaceful. I have to shake my head and tell myself that this is all superficial and misleading, that in fact I am in a country that only yesterday suffered the most atrocious injustice, and that a great number of these mild-mannered trippers who are settling down contentedly to observe the myriads of stars that are just beginning to appear — the most dazzling and the greatest number of stars that I have ever seen — will have many dead, tortured or wounded people to mourn, as a result of the savagery of the dictatorship or the fratricidal blindness of the Kurds themselves.
Everywhere that I visit the next morning, the market and the adjacent streets, and all the people I talk to, leave me with the same impression: that despite the tragedies of the past and the difficulties of the present, things here are heading in the right direction, and that the people are constructive and hopeful and have a firm resolve to put an end to the ignominious past.
But when I am about to leave, a casual conversation in the hotel over a cup of hot, steaming coffee with a young construction worker from Erbil, whose name I won’t mention, undermines my optimism: ‘Don’t go away with such a positive idea of what is happening here,’ he tells me in a low voice, after hearing how impressed I have been during my brief visit to Suleymaniya. ‘Don’t be naïve.’ It’s true that a lot of progress has been made, compared to the bloody past, but other problems remain. Iraqi Kurdistan is now divided between two parties which hate one another but have set up two monopoly governments. ‘Can there be democracies with single parties? Only a democracy that is very relative and very corrupt. If you want to do any kind of business, here or in Erbil, you have to pay steep commissions to the Democratic Party of Kurdistan or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and to the leaders themselves, many of whom have become very rich in recent years with these new powers. There are no real audit mechanisms of any sort that apply to the governments, either here or there.’ Is he right or is he exaggerating? Is his criticism objective or an expression of some resentment or personal failure? I have no way of knowing, of course. But I get onto the jeep that will take me back to Baghdad with a sour taste in my mouth.
25 June–6 July 2003
8. The Viceroy
At the first light of dawn, about half past five in the morning, Ambassador Paul Bremer leaves the non-air-conditioned trailer where he spends the night and runs his daily three miles through the gardens of the old palace — which is a really a fortress — of Saddam Hussein. He showers, and for the next fifteen hours is submerged in his office, at the heart of that giant construction full of crystal chandeliers, marble tiles and golden domes that the Iraqi dictator built as a monument to his megalomania. Indeed, so that there would be no doubt about his intentions, Saddam Hussein crowned the enormous complex with four giant copper heads depicting himself as Nebuchadnezzar.
Bremer is sixty-two, but he looks a lot younger. He graduated from Yale and Harvard, he was an ambassador in the Netherlands and in Norway and a roving ambassador for President Reagan. He’s an expert in crisis management and counter-terrorism, and had been working in the private sector for ten years when President Bush called him to offer him the most difficult job in the world: to shape the democratisation and reconstruction process in Iraq. He accepted because he has always believed in public service and because his father taught him that if one is lucky enough ‘to be born in the best country in the world’ (‘Well, we believe that it is the best country in the world,’ he qualifies), then one is morally obliged to do everything that the president asks. He also accepted because he is convinced that it is possible to turn post-Saddam Iraq into a functional democracy that will have an effect on surrounding countries and will lead to an essential transformation of the whole of the Middle East.
He speaks clearly and coherently and, at times, he departs from the banalities that are the stuff of any holder of a public office and says intelligent things. But, in his enthusiasm to describe Iraq’s promising future to me, he forgets the laws of hospitality and doesn’t offer even a glass of water to me or to my daughter Morgana. We are suffering from thirst and sunstroke because we had to go through a great deal before finally reaching this office (an hour late).
The interview was arranged for 11.15 and we arrived at the entrance at 10.30, alongside the great arch, amid the barbed wire and barriers of the guard post. We should have been met there by two officers of the Spanish Military Mission of the CPA. But Lieutenant Colonel Juan Delgado and Colonel Javier Sierra had parked their car in front of the arch, and we were waiting for them behind the arch. This mix-up placed my daughter and me in the hands of some soldiers who searched us, asked us for some incomprehensible passes and told us that they would never let us cross the barriers and get to Bremer’s distant office. For about an hour, we went back and forth to different palace doors, each several hundred yards apart, that we had to cover on foot in the burning sun. When an officer finally agreed to call the information office of Ambassador Bremer, he could not reach anyone because all the staff had gone to the airport to greet the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger who was coming out to spend the 4 July with the US troops in Baghdad.
In the hottest morning of my life, when we were already half an hour late for the interview, Morgana decided, boldly and inopportunely, to teach the US army a lesson in good manners and started to shout at the platoon sergeant that she would not put up with abuse, with people raising their voices, or with this complete lack of cooperation from uncouth army men, to the extent that I thought that, apart from not seeing Bremer, it was quite likely that my bones would soon be resting in one of the dungeons of the despot’s palace. At that moment, providentially, a lieutenant appeared in his slippers, who saw reason. He understood the whole thing and asked us to follow him. That is how we reached the antechamber of the ambassador. Fifteen minutes later a friendly colonel appeared, one of the proconsul’s deputies, who asked us if we were here for the interview that Ambassador Bremer was to give to a Nobel Prize winner. Had the splendid Miguel Moro Aguilar, the head of the Spanish Embassy who had arranged the interview for me, invented this credential so that Bremer could not say no? When I explained to the disappointed colonel that there was no Nobel Prize winner around, and that the interview was to be with a mere novelist from Peru, he muttered in a rather demoralised attempt at humour: ‘If you tell the ambassador about all this confusion, he’ll fire me.’