|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
AN APPEAL FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDAD |
Current rating: 0 |
by Andrew P. Jones
(No verified email address) |
08 Feb 2003
|
Rest under the stars of the martyrs, great tired beast.
and don't worry
They died so that you can sleep and not worry
so sleep great beast
while the rest of the world watches over you.
and may your dreams bring you
And the people of Iraq, Everlasting peace.
Salaam! |
AN APPEAL FOR JUSTICE FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDAD (part one)
Andrew P. Jones
This appeal for justice written by the only Black American in Baghdad is aimed at all Americans. Although I must admit the thought that Black Americans, the Red Indians, and the Spanish population are most likely to take it to heart.
Here in Baghdad, as one storyteller might have put it, the rosy fingered dawn caresses the gold minarets with her painted nails. With her comes the heat of day to the hottest capital in the world. Children arise this morning, sleepy after a night on their flat roofs where they slept with their parents, cousins, uncles and aunts under a fine blanket of desert dust and soothing Arabian night breezes.
It is a troubled place this city in the centre of the Middle East. Winter was a time of war. Spring saw an unjust peace. Shortages of food, water and electricity plagued the people like locusts. For a while civil war in the north and south blotted out relief from suffering, although none of the parties involved now seem to want more killing.
The quality of life in Iraq has taken a turn towards the dismal. True, a few of the rich get richer off the war, but many more went broke. An entire middle class has become an underclass and the poor have become a sub class, if such a class can be imagined.
Visiting hospitals in the south, I have seen case after case of infant malnutrition, the mothers themselves suffering, from the same. In many areas due to a mixture of stress, poor diet, bad sanitation and contaminated water, mothers find themselves unable to produce breast milk for their children. Instead they feed their children contaminated sugar water. The babies get gastroenteritis and become even more malnourished. Those who make it to hospitals soon enough get dedicated treatment. Those who do not just die.
A severely malnourished child looks like a tiny old person. The worst cases, and there are plenty, have wrinkles, baggy skin and distended bellies. They have to be cleaned constantly because as soon as they eat they defecate and the flies come around. Pediatric ward windows must be left open because more often than not there is no air conditioning.
Most hospitals are using small back up generators. Engineers make do by cannibalizing main generators for the spare parts they cannot import due to sanctions. Even so, the smaller generators cannot produce enough voltage to supply roomy wards with cool air. So mothers fan their children continuously and try to keep their own spirits up by kidding and joking around.
Playfulness tends to be a major part of most Iraqi households. I remember lots of kidding in my own household growing up in the projects of Richmond, Virginia. My mother used to play jokes on us and we played jokes on her and each other all the time. Later, as I entered white society and acquired white friends, I found them to be taken aback at the extent to which I joked about seemingly serious situations. They didn’t understand that I had learned to minimalize a problem first by laughing at it and later dealing with it seriously. Perhaps it is a coping mechanism, a kind of kill switch for sadness. If we cry hard enough, we laugh and if we laugh hard enough, we cry. Such is true all over the world.
It is early evening in Baghdad and I sit interviewing an Iraqi woman who tells me a story that begins with laughter but ends tragically The day was 19 January 1991. The time was approximately two o’clock in the afternoon in the Karada section of Baghdad. She says she was in her kitchen preparing to go to her sister’s house where the family was gathering for lunch. Big lunches are a tradition in Iraq.
All of a sudden she heard the roar of what seemed to be a low flying jet airplane. She looked up just as a cruise missile was passing right in front of the window. Laughing hysterically she ran into the living room ready to tell everyone about the slapstick sight she had just seen. Imagine, she says, standing in your kitchen in the middle of the afternoon and a cruise comes zooming by right in front of you. Unfortunately, there was no one in the living room. Everyone was outside already.
The missile had struck the home of her sister and brother-in-law, located a couple of streets away. They had been married thirty-three years. Both were killed instantly. Two of their daughters and the older daughter’s 18-month-old boy were also in the house. The three of them were dead.
Up in the north of Iraq, in the city of Mosul, children play in the now familiar post
War ruins: rows of houses destroyed by army projectiles. They use cardboard to slide down what used to be concrete roofs of homes. Laughing and playing in front of the camera, oblivious to the smell of raw sewage rivulets, they eagerly show me their bombed school. Some of the children weren’t so lucky as the ones now playing in the debris. I ask the names of dead children and their surviving peers shout out an honor roll. Sometimes they pause to remember. The adults say nothing.
A surgeon in the general hospital in Mosul tells me that during the war he decided to allow staff volunteers to video the immediate aftermath of the air strikes. He says he did so because of his belief that the hospital should have its own record of the bombing.
The videos include some shots taken in the hospital morgue. The shots show dead children and adults with no visible injuries, looking as though they died in their sleep
He says they died when their internal organs imploded. Often, he says, the force of a nearby explosion will simply push all air out of the body and cause it to collapse on itself suffocating the victim.
I write this appeal from the Diwan hotel here on Saadon street in central Baghdad. Before the war this was the city’s center of social and retail activity, sort of like Columbus circle in New York or the Latin Quarter in Paris. One block west are the world-famous fish restaurants situated along the Tigris River. Tourists used to frequent these establishments to eat the fish caught fresh from the Tigris river. Tourists used to frequent these establishments to eat the fish caught fresh from the Tigris river, now badly polluted due to sewage run-off.
Sewage treatment facilities, once the envy of other third world countries, were shut down when the power plants were struck during the war. Winter rains clogged drains and sewage backed in the streets. The only place to put it was in the river. Water sanitation experts estimate that it will take years for the great Tigris to recover.
Now most of the restaurants along the river are closed. The fish that is sold is too expensive for most Iraqi families and there are no tourists. Couples still stroll along the river. Men still sit outdoors, play dominoes, smoke and play pool. But the old atmosphere, so they say, is now gone.
It is difficult to imagine how quickly prices have skyrocketed here in Iraq. The average Iraqi family makes 150 dinars a month. A family of six people, two parents and four children, now have to spend at least 1000Iraqi dinars a month for food. It is a wonder how people eat. They eat little and work a lot, something for which Iraqis are famous
Nevertheless I have been a frequent dinner guest of Iraqis rich and poor. Even during brief visits they never fail to offer me tea or coffee. I have been treated to meals, the leftovers of which will be used for days, I am sure. I have never been asked to pay.
There lives in Iraq a strong tradition of hospitality that Iraqis lavish on foreigners and each other. The tradition is so strong that the majority of the Arabs here would probably rather die than suffer in the shame of being inhospitable hosts. Graciousness is in their blood but their blood may be shed for oil.
Caveat!
It is not my aim to base this appeal on a picture of a perfect or even heroic people. Indeed, the Iraqi people have the same foibles that any other people share and in some ways more so. There is racism here, sexism and what some might call arrogance among the educated classes. Yet what I have not found here, even in the most minute amount, is the blind hatred of the “enemy”, historically so prevalent in the United States during the times of war.
Throughout this entire Gulf crisis, there has yet to be reported one incident wherein an Iraqi citizen threatened, abused or insulted a visitor from any of the countries participating in the war against Iraq. All journalists and relief workers in Iraq have been treated with a collective courtesy and discipline that makes the more ignorant visitor suspicious. Not even the children call us names and children are generally the real barometers of the feelings of any household.
|
Comments
|
Re: AN APPEAL FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDAD |
by Joe Parnarauskis
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Feb 2003
Modified: 08:14:33 PM |
|
Thank you for an excellent article. Your experience is reminescent of prose by John Gerassi(news correspondent and author) and his documentary on North Vietnam ("North Vietnam: A Documentary"; 1968), now out of print but available via Lincoln Trail Libraries System. His travels/documentation as a member of the International War Crimes Tribunal,(set up in Paris by a score of world-renowned leaders of the arts,law and peace movement) brought to light the war crimes committed by U.S. government officials and their operatives during that "undeclared war". We, as Americans, failed to bring those government officials and their cohorts to justice for crimes perpetrated against the Vietnamese people during that conflict. Let us, as a national and interntional community, not make that mistake again in this "Bush" war against the people of Iraq. |
|
Pt. 2, AN APPEAL FOR JUSTICE FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDAD |
by Andrew P. Jones
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Feb 2003
|
Part two: AN APPEAL FOR JUSTICE FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDAD
For example, the surgeon I spoke to in Mosul told me that most children in Iraq now hate the Americans. To them America is Godzilla, a huge screaming flying lizard with flashing red eyes, breath hissing down from the skies spreading fire and destruction. They see Americans as lizard people whom they identify with the planes sent them into shelters night after night last winter, fearing for their lives. His son, having the idea that Americans are devils, was shocked when he heard his father receiving aid from American relief organizations. The boy urged him not to accept their gifts. Still I am absolutely certain that were I to encounter the boy in any situation, he would be courteous to a fault.
Many of us foreigners have traveled extensively throughout Iraq, either alone or in small groups, conspicuous where we have been by our accents,
, skin color, dress, and behavior. We have passed through numerous military checkpoints often in near or near sensitive areas. In every case, the soldiers have been to a man, nothing but professional, though often armed to the teeth. Indeed I feel safer here in Baghdad than I did in Boston where a visit to the wrong neighborhood could attract a racial slur or stray bullet.
Most Americans are not aware of the strong bonds between the Iraqi people and the Un ited States. The two countries have a history of cooperation going back well into the fifties when the Iraqis were coming back and forth to America as students and professionals.
One Iraqi engineer in Jordan tells me that when he was in the University of Denver in the fifties, there were over 3,000 Iraqi students attending school in the area. He says that because of their dark skin, many were mistaken for blacks or Chicanos and treated accordingly. Therefore, he and many others developed close ties with members of the black community with whom they had often shared eating and toilet facilities downtown. Indeed, in Iraq there is a sizable black population, although Iraqis insist that skin color is not a functional variable in their country.
Over a quarter of a million Iraqis now reside in the Detroit area alone in the United States, working in the auto industry as engineers, managers and technicians. Many others lived in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Tulsa and even Toledo. Almost every Iraqi I speak to here in Baghdad has a relative or friend in the United States.
Now many countries are refusing to issue visas to Iraqis. Consequently, the Iraqi passion for traveling, for sharing the riches of other cultures is once again being stifled by political circumstances. Whereas the Iraqi people have demonstrated their willingness not to hold travelers to Iraq accountable for the actions of foreign governments, that courtesy is not extended to them in return. The result is insult added to injury.
So it is another hot day in Baghdad. By noon the temperature will have reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The electricity may go off sometime in the afternoon at the Hotel Diwan, but it will come back eventually and stay on for the rest of the day. By tomorrow, prices will have risen slightly, excluding gasoline, currently the cheapest commodity in the country.
One year ago this time, I had just returned from a three month photo journalism tour of southern Africa. In that time I had spent 32 days inside South Africa traveling alone, talking to people in various cities and towns and in the townships.
Almost everyone I spoke to share the fear that South Africa had developed chemical and nuclear weapons as a result of technical assistance from Israel. It is already the strongest military force in all of Africa. No one inside or outside South Africa doubts that South Africa would use the full might of its military capabilities to quell any real threat from its black population. The fact that the United States has tolerated and even condoned the development of this militaristic creature is of utmost concern to all parties struggling for liberation in that country.
South Africa is guilty of everything Iraq has been accused of, including breeching the borders and threatening the sovereignty of a neighboring country. Its record of human rights abuses dwarfs that of any country on earth. The number of political prisoners languishing in its prisons is second only to the overall Black prison population in the United States. Three quarters of South Africa’s population cannot vote and are regarded as non-citizens solely on the basis of the color of their skin. So why hasn’t the United States moved against South Africa? Why haven’t the same kind of sanctions applied to Iraq been applied to South Africa? Why not deprive South African citizens of food and medicine in their country, and then bomb them and rebomb them until they either change their system or die trying. After all, is that not what we want the Iraqis to do?
One answer to the above set of questions is that it is inhuman to make war against a population when political remedies are available. Successive presidential administrations in the United States have stuck to a programme of constructive engagement aimed at inflicting minimal damage on the infrastructure of South Africa while enticing it towards slow but meaningful political change. So why not the same policy toward Iraq?
And why bomb Iraq again? Why rebomb a country that is at this very moment losing infants to typhoid, gastroenteritis and other diseases as a result of sanction imposed by thirty countries? Why rebomb a country that has already felt the
blasts of 109,000 tons of bombs? Why rebomb a country that withdrew from Kuwait, had its retreating army slaughtered from the air, and has accepted the most humiliating set of ceasefire restrictions ever imposed on one nation? Why rebomb one country when everything it is accused of is being perpetrated daily by at least two other countries, both of which are guilty of international infractions far larger than those committed by the country about to be rebombed?
I know that General Colin Powell opposed the initial buildup of offensive forces in the Arabian Gulf. Having read excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book, “The Commanders”,
I have learned that he questioned the president’s motives and at first argued against George Bush, a mean white man bent on punishing a people whom he probably thinks are “uppity”. As a black man I know what Colin must have felt, what any Black man feels when called to wield the whip against his brother. He must have felt revulsion. Yet he did what he felt he had to do and he will most likely do it again. For such the yoke we must carry for now.
But how many times can we be called upon to do the bidding of a people who have fallen prey to the idea of hate? How many times can we march off and slaughter decent human beings without thought of long term impact on the idea of God as love.
Previously we might have been accused of striking out in anger and in anger there is some measure of innocence. But now, before the eyes of the world, our actions can only be deemed deliberate, full of pretense and premeditated.
Therefore all deaths that are the direct or indirect result of military actions started or initiated by the United States on or after 25 July 1991, whether the dead be pilots or children, soldiers or civilians, their deaths must be considered murder in the plainest sense of the word.
So I close this appeal with an appeal for restraint, for mercy from the great nation of America, stumbling around now like a mad giant lost in the dust of its own desert storm.
BE STILL GREAT BEAST!
Listen to the voices of the humble people, those whom you robbed and enslaved,
Those who in turn gave you the idea of freedom and justice for all.
Hear the beat of our drums in the cold Dakotas as we flee the long knives. Feel our fear as we run to escape your hunting dogs, not sure of where we are running to, all too sure of the slavery we are running from Know now, that we ain’t gonna run no more.
Know mad and angry giant that we do not seek to hurt you that we simply seek to heal you because your power has made you sick. Just do not strike us. Do not kill us, your brothers.
Sit down blind giant. Have some tea. Enjoy the sweet aroma of Turkish coffee. You are safe here even though you have come to make war. All guests are welcome to the house of God.
Stop the screaming planes before they take off, and listen to the soft voices of children here. They call on you for mercy. Please feel the gentle hands of their fate. They will guide you.
Listen to the wailing wind and watch the date palms sway in the summer heat. Yes, it is too hot to fight. Why bother with war when the cool peace makes your angry sweat disappear?
Come hear crazed giant. I will comfort you. I was taught to love mine enemy. Yes, you have forgotten that lesson, but since you have taught me so much, it is the least I can do to teach this lesson to you in return. There will be no makeup test tomorrow.
The blood red sun sets daily over Baghdad. The cold fingers of dawn they fold themselves into the west to become the new twilight.
Rest under the stars of the martyrs, great tired beast.
And don’t worry
They died so you can sleep and not worry
So sleep great beast
While the rest of the world watches over you.
And may your dreams bring you
And the people of Iraq
Everlasting peace.
Salaam!
|
|
