AN APPEAL FOR JUSTICE FROM A BLACK MAN IN BAGHDA (Part one)D

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.