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The View from Missile Street, Iraq
By Kathy Kelly
Currently, many believe that the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be in Iraq won’t found, and there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s government and the al Qaeda network that would pass muster in a court of law, but Saddam Hussein is gone. And for that there should be, in general, liberation, jubilation and thanksgiving. This is a question that takes a lot of nuance. Certainly, there was a flaw in the Iraq Peace Team and in the Voices in the Wilderness campaign: The regime of Saddam Hussein was brutal and ruthless; it was a very efficient and effective police state. In 2002, I might have known two or three who were nervous because their own careers would be affected, but I didn’t know a soul that didn’t want the regime to go. But when we were in Iraq, we were not able to speak as we would certainly find it responsible to speak in the United States, because speaking out would have caused grave problems for people—so there was this inherent flaw. Had we waited to act perfectly, we would have been paralyzed and we might not have done anything. But the fact that Saddam Hussein certainly was a brutal and ruthless dictator does not mean that the only way to dislodge a brutal and ruthless dictatorship is to engage in the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history and couple that with bombardment that was like amassing the world’s largest firing squad and aiming it at helpless civilians. The idea that the only way to bring any kind of relief to the Iraqi people was to attack Iraq is a bit like saying, first we had to starve you so that we could stop bombing you and then we had to bomb you so that we could stop starving you. I would like to talk a little bit about some of the people that some of you might have seen in a fine film by Tom Jackson called Greetings from Missile Street, which took people into the Baghdad neighborhood where I and others had lived during the summer of 2002. One particularly attractive family, Karima and Majid, were living so simply in a hovel without even a roof overhead the area where they slept—we were spending more money on two days’ worth of bottled water for ourselves than they had for the whole month. Their most prized possession was one magazine they had read over and over. It had dog-eared corners and was yellowed, but to them this was a piece of literature. Their girls wanted desperately to go to school and Karima and Majid were erudite and educated, but they couldn’t get enough purchasing power to do more than put food on the table. I bring attention to them, because I want to say very passionately that if you really want to help another society move toward more democratic governing structures, strengthen the education: Don’t leave an entire family with only one magazine for over 10 years. Strengthen the social services: Don’t leave a family so desperate to have a buffer against disease and malnutrition that they don’t have time to think about questions of governance. And strengthen communication: Don’t leave people so beleaguered that they are nearly convinced that nobody out there will lift a finger to help them should they begin to undertake the terrible risks of internally dislodging a ruthless and inefficient police state. Pre-Traumatic
Stress Syndrome But the place where I learned the most about pre-traumatic stress disorder was in Karima and Majid’s neighborhood. One day, I went down there, bringing more oil paints for Majid, the husband of the family. The women poured out their story: The good news was that a bulldozer was parked on the street. People were excited because that bulldozer could mean the difference between children dying from water-borne disease. There was no curb and there was no pavement, and the sewage went into people’s homes. A bulldozer was a sign of hope. But the women in the neighborhood told me that they were suffering from a particular malady: Every time they’d hear a really loud explosion, it would cause them to faint and fall to the ground. Karima is a tiny woman; she makes me look hefty. She walked outside to go to the market as she would do on a normal morning. And the bulldozer operator did what he would normally do, he turned the key in the ignition – the noise, the deafening roaring noise, must have reminded Karima of the roar of an airplane coming to drop a bomb. She suddenly collapsed, her head hit the front claw of the bulldozer and she died instantly. This is emblematic to me of the pre-traumatic stress syndrome. People coming up to us telling us they didn’t feel they could continue. I had been hearing that for quite some time. Mothers like Um-Zaidr saying, “It is very very hard, when all you can do is to sit and to wait for your city to be bombed,” and she with 21 people in her household dependent on her. Some mothers in Baghdad connected to the Dominican maternity hospital did try to take matters into their own hands somewhat. They said they’d rather have a Caesarean section before the bombing began and take the risk of their babies being born prematurely rather than having their babies born under bombardment. During the first two days of Operation Shock and Awe, we thought maybe the U.S. was going to exercise some restraint. (It still hurts to say “shock and awe”—the word “awe” belongs in the province of that which we genuflect before, and I know that none of us would give our awe to dismembering, maiming, shedding blood, murdering). I had to laugh, when I received a phone call telling me that the hardware store in my Chicago neighborhood was out of duct tape, plywood and plastic because people were trying to reinforce their windows. At the family-owned Alfanar Hotel where we stayed (it’s seven floors), the staff in their white shirts and black ties where just beginning to saunter out with masking tape to reinforce the windows after the bombing had started. The markets remained full and people were out on the streets. 11 Earthquakes
a Day Wade Hudson, part of our Iraq Peace Team and from San Francisco, said that any one day of the bombing was like living through 11 San Francisco earthquakes. The next day you’d start all over again. The gut-wrenching explosions that were closest would sometimes make the building sway, the windows shudder, and the floors tremble. We began to realize that nowhere was really safe. You could be outdoors, indoors, in a marketplace, on a roadway, outside of the city, but the bombs were hitting all of those spots. The streets became deserted. People were inside their homes cowering. I had the most intense experience of the war from inside the Alfanar Hotel, where we were with grandparents and parents, toddlers and teenagers. The teenagers pulled out a board game—ironically Risk, a game of military dominance—and played it all the time. Cynthia Banis, a 79-year-old woman from Vernon, NY, stayed in the bomb shelter, just the basement of the hotel, where the elderly and the children went. Cynthia wouldn’t have minded if people settled in so she could get a good night’s sleep. One night in the middle of the bombing, she said to the teenagers, “You know you could always finish up the game tomorrow.” And little eight-year old Deema looked at her and said “Oh, Madame Cynthia, we might not be here tomorrow.” We would swing three-year-old Milada and one-and-a-half-year-old Zaneb around and help their parents rock them to sleep at night. We could easily tell that they were grinding their teeth morning, noon and night. Little Milada played one game over and over much to the distress of her mother. She would point her finger up in the air, shout out the Arabic word for airplane and then bring her fist down to hit herself and pretend that she had died. That is how a three-year-old copes with the proximity of tons and tons of explosives. When the electricity was out completely, the stairwells would be pitch black. Her mother was sometimes caught groping her way with a child in each arm, and one of us would come running with a flashlight. Well, Milada always wanted the flashlight. I tried to encourage shadow shows, but Milada wanted to take the flashlight and first aim it at her mother “at tat tat,” and then aim it at me “at tat tat.” Sure, kids always like to play war games, but believe me, for these children, there was a certain anxiety that accompanied their imagining that one of these bombs, one of these “at tat tats,” would be the end of them. I suppose I was a bit compulsive too. I kept thinking over and over again of teenagers that I knew that might be under those bombs. I was thinking of Iraqi teenagers, although we certainly didn’t want any soldiers to be harmed or killed. After a while you have to stop thinking about the victims, and I used to try to distract myself. I knew a lot of older kids who had been conscripted; kids from the neighborhood that didn’t want to be in anybody’s army. The Army Times said that 70 percent of the Iraqi troop had been degraded. A writer in the New York Review of Books took great exception to that phraseology. He said it would be far better to say that 70 percent of the troop unit had been pureed. Day after day, that is what the weapons of mass destruction covered with depleted uranium wreaked upon people in Iraq as the United States implemented the stated goal of terrorists everywhere: to frighten people into total submission. Occupation
I thought—take the kids away for a little while so she can have time to herself. I didn’t want the girls to be frightened. Finally, we take them outside for fresh air and sunshine. Then I realized that would be crazy. There’s barbed wire all around the hotel and what if they run into it? So I thought, I can hold one in each arm and take them out. I knew I would start talking to the soldiers nearby, and I wanted them to see the beauty of these children. Although it would have been good for the soldiers, it might not have been good for Um-Zaidr, who at that moment was weeping over the reality of that occupation. So then I thought, well, let’s go watch TV. Thank god I looked first, be cause the TV screen was showing corpses strewn through the streets of Baghdad. I took the kids down into the bomb shelter again. The day the Marines filled that intersection, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We knew that behind us and two doors down from us rocket-propelled grenades and other munitions were likely stored. We were definitely in a very precarious place should any Iraqis pull out those guns and fire them at the Marines and the Marines fire back. Looters were 10 minutes away; and we didn’t know if the looters might come and get us. As the Marine occupation rolled in we stopped worrying about the looters, but it was still a very tense moment. Nevertheless, we had big signs that said “Courage for Peace, Not for War” and very bluntly “War Equals Terror.” We wanted to bring that to the oncoming soldiers and to the Marines. Well, the hotel owner understandably said, “Please, you are like brothers and sisters we are all one family, but take the banners maybe one floor up.” So we stood on a balcony with those banners, and I’ll never forget when the first APCs started to park outside the hotel, and these young guys came out of the hatches. They looked excruciatingly young. I felt like Oz’s Good Witch Glenda when she says, “Okay, children, come out, come out, wherever you are.” One young man perched himself on his hatch and very deliberately took out an army-issued novel and started reading it. He was signifying, “I’m not going to be part of this, I’m going into my own world.” We were of course very curious about these fellows and they became very curious about us, no doubt wondering where our space ship was. One of them called up, “Well, who are you?” And we called back, “We’re a peace team.” “Well where are you from?” “Chicago, Boston, New York.” “Are you a Red Sox fan?” That kind of broke the ice, and I looked at Cynthia and said, “They look really thirsty and tired, don’t they?” We had a wall of six-packs of bottled water that we’d purchased as part of our emergency preparedness. Cynthia grabbed a six-pack of bottled water under each arm and with her pink fuschia hat from “Code Pink Women,” out she went. And I padded after her and thought, “Oh well, we do have these octagonal boxes of dates.” That’s what Iraqis have done for us, always given hospitality. It was a difficult moment you know. We had gotten the team together for consensus, and some were really troubled at the idea of this kind of interaction, but later we all agreed it was a right thing to do. So there we were mingling with the troops. I quickly wanted to find the one with the book and ask him what he was reading. “Heart of Darkness. It’s the 13th time I’ve read it.” A commanding officer came over. He said, “Don’t blame these young men for what happened, in the heat of battle I made some hasty decisions, and it is I who will have sleepless nights.” Another young man named Harris, an African-American holding his gun said, “I’m really glad I didn’t have to use this.” He said, “My daughter got a sixth finger, and I only joined the military because I wanted to get me some self-respect in this world, get her some care, couldn’t figure out how I could keep doing school and spend any time with my family and go to a job, so I joined. But I never wanted to kill anybody here, so I only brought up the prisoners in the rear. I didn’t use my gun but I felt real sad. I saw a car, it came toward the check point, and one of my guys here he got scared, he thought maybe it was a car bomb, and he told the car to stop, the car didn’t stop, so he shot. That left an orphan in the back seat and her mother and father were killed. I still think about that every day ’cause I know that he could have shot the tires.” Another young fellow came over late at night. He said, “We got to a town we didn’t know was they military or was they civilian ’cause we saw these fatigues on the ground, so we shot everybody, but I hope it never registers here.” And I thought of some Iraqi youngsters that I know who told me that very soon after they’d been conscripted, after the war had begun, the commander had told them there was a huge losing battle and a large section of Republican Guard people had been killed. The commander said put up your hands if any of you want to leave. Well, it might have been a setup, but these three wanted to go so badly they put up their hands, and they were free to go. So you bet they shed their fatigues as fast as they could find civilian clothing. I think also of the soldier who went to the perimeter of his camp (I read about this in the Washington Post): He was an expert sniper, and he shot out our the tires of every car he thought could reach the perimeter of the camp. It was an act of mercy to prevent an act of war. Because those cars might have been mistaken for car bombers, and he had already seen the trigger alert that people were on, shooting at approaching cars. At one point some of the U.S. soldiers asked to sit with us in vigil. We had unrolled a big tarp. It was an artwork made by a South Korean graphic artist, really quite stunning—the bottom third had weapons with flags scattered over it, the middle, a representation of agonizing people under bombardment and the top third, a map of the world. And as we sat on it, one young man came up and said, “Could you just tell me your side of the story?” Another came over and said, “You know I try to distribute antiwar literature as often as I can to everyone I know,” and a third just came up and held Kathy Green’s hand and said, “Would you pray with me?” Contact: Voices in the Wilderness, 315 N. Clark St., Box # 634, Chicago, IL 60640; (773)784-8065; info@vitw.org. www.vitw.org. Kathy Kelly is founder of Voices in the Wilderness. Since 1996, Voices has campaigned to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people. |
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’d
like to talk a little bit about what I saw in Iraq. Some truths about
this war might not have been so evident through the embedded media. I’d
like to talk about some changes I think are necessary and about militarism.