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Barbara Nimri Aziz

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From B. N. Aziz's new unpublished book on IRAQ ---(© Barbara Nimri Aziz)

Chapter 5 

FACING THE CHILDREN 

by B. N. Aziz

The students fell quiet when we entered the classroom. They waited with bright faces, each one flushed with anticipation of what I and my companion had to say to them. I found myself standing in front of a hushed room of 28 Iraqi teenagers. They were 15 year old girls in their third year of high school, and the sounds of the war still rang in their ears.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

No one had suggested an apology was necessary. Yet, I was overcome and I had uttered these words spontaneously. Despite a feeling that tears were coming, I forced myself to go on. “I was against this war; I believe Iraq was entrapped, then punished and humiliated,” I uttered, still not quite certain of my agenda. Still not knowing what I was going to say next, I stumbled on. “This terrible war against you is a demonstration of America’s new leadership in the world more than it is about what Iraq deserves. You were used to assert the dominance of the United States—a new world order.”

The girls remained silent, their faces alert despite what must have been a sense of confusion if not singular disappointment. They did not applaud me for what I perceived as a statement in solidarity with them.

A few moments before, a fellow journalist, Takashita, had also taken a moral position when he found himself in front of those same 28 pair of eyes. He did not apologize. Instead, he offered the class a general admonishment for Iraq’s lack of civil preparedness for the assault. “You leadership was ill prepared. You were not given evacuation procedures. Your food supplies were not secured. There were insufficient bomb shelters.” The gulf between Takashita and me on one side and the Iraqi youngsters on the other, was vast.

Reflecting on that 1991 visit to a girls’ middle school in Nassiriya city, I now wonder what we should have said. We had no real understanding of what these people had just experienced. Whatever our sentiments towards the children and whatever our criticisms of the way the war was conducted, in contrast to them, we were free to come and go, and free to speak our mind, free of sanctions, and not fearful of our own future. We were not really there to lecture Iraqis’ we were journalists in search news stories. If there was any impropriety in this meeting, it was the school’s invitation to us to address these young people.

The Gulf War battles—forty-two days of bombing, the Allied Forces ground assault and an internal rebellion put down by Iraqi forces-- were barely over. The war had been grossly one-sided and Iraq’s losses were overwhelming. The defeated population doubtless felt humiliation and some confusion about what might happen to them now. Neither did Takashita and I know what was in store for Iraq’s population now. 
 

Fresh from the battlefield

The Japanese correspondent and I had traveled together to Basra to witness the damage there, then drove north along the notorious “highway of death” to Nassiriya. Viewing the shells of burned tanks, and passing mile after mile of half buried trucks and jeeps, busses and pickups heaped in disarray on the roadside, we must have been stunned. I was unnerved not only by the sight of the carnage but by the silence as well. Perhaps because of that, when we finally reached the Nassiriya, I wanted to speak to some Iraqis. We decided to head for the municipal office to seek help arranging interviews. The streets, I remember, were almost bare of traffic; the whole town was brown with dust and there was a disturbing burning odor suspended in the atmosphere. One clerk said her sister taught English at a local school and she would inquire if the principal might receive us there. Meanwhile other office workers went to and fro. With no electricity, little work could be accomplished. One clerk told us food was scarce and that everyone was quickly losing weight. His wife had died and his two oldest girls, twins, had left school in order to take care of the family. Another employee volunteered that her husband was still a prisoner in Iran—she was still dealing with the last war.

We certainly had no insights to offer these people, no glimpse of the future. One wants to do more than sympathize with people at a time like this. One wants to offer promise, especially when facing young people. I had just gasped in awe at the once magnificent Nassiriya Bridge that had spanned the great Euphrates River now hanging in shreds in the green blue water, and I heard reports of how many died during the barrage of attacks on the structure.

Here and in Basra to the south, fertilizer plants and dozens of food warehouses-- filled before the war as an emergency food supply-- had been repeatedly hit by the allied bombers until their contents lay in ruin and waste. Water supplies had also been rendered useless. The catastrophe that was to devastate the health system was not yet apparent. But the malnutrition and contaminated water supplies were undeniable.

The Southern governate we were touring was close to the battle front and offered journalists graphic illustrations of the damage to feed to our offices-- “Yes, it had really hurt them; yes, your troops did a fine job.” Having heard in 1989 how Iraqis talked about their first war, I was keenly aware that the south had been through more agonies than the rest of the country.

But at that moment I was not reporting to Americans. I was facing Iraqi children. The defeat was so self-evident. What could I say, I thought, as I heard the English teacher, her voice pleasant and welcoming, introducing us to the class?

After my embarrassed remarks and Takashita’s reprove, she showed no annoyance but instead invited us to put questions to the girls. “Ask them anything,” she said brightly. This being an English language class, I could have talked to them about their favorite books simply conversed in colloquial English, which now I suspect they would have preferred. They probably wanted to forget war for a few moments. But for Takashita and me, the war was something new and it was paramount in our minds. Takashita began. “Tell me; have any of your lost a family member in the recent battles?” Four of the 28 put up their hands. In one cases it was a father, in the others, a brother.

It was a stupid question. (Did this confirm for us that the battles had actually been fought?) What had we expected? We did not pursue the question further and the girls did not volunteer any details. I don’t recall the other questions but they could not have been more insightful.

When the girls began to ask us questions, they did not admonish us of offer us more details of the battles they witnessed. They told us about Iraq’s modernity. One girl asked that Iraqis be recognized for their achievements in science, their interest in foreign languages. “We are proud of our schools and museums and hospitals and monuments of civilization,” she added. Her classmate asked me what my impressions of Iraq were since I had visited the country three times before the war. I replied that I was deeply impressed by what I had seen-- universities and research centers, art exhibitions, a highly educated middle class who lived as comfortably as Americans did. I had met many Iraqis here who were fluent in English and had traveled to the United States. I saw the care the government took to preserve the art and literature of the early civilizations which flourished here. “I feel,” I concluded, “that Iraqis share more with America in its living standard and its joy for living than any other Arab country I had visited.”

“Then why have you destroyed this?” retorted the girl in a quiet but firm voice. I did not try to answer her. I did not realize that she was referring not only to the immediate past, but to her future—because modernity includes the future, and that needs hope. I had just witnessed the results of the bombings but at that moment I did not imagine that the ‘war’ against Iraq had only just begun, that the bombing would be followed by years of a punishing, decimating economic, intellectual and social embargo. The sanctions was an ugly, poisonous disease that –its murderous capacity still unseen—was descending on Iraq; it would soon penetrate every house ripping its social and economic life apart, causing infinitely more damage than had been done to the four families whose men had perished in the battles.  
 

The children grow older 

I doubt if I could face those young people today, even though they are now 27 years old and might have a lot to tell me. Most will have begun studying Qur’an and wearing headscarves as a sign of their increased piety, in their search for hope. Some will have finished college. Some will have contracted cancer, or had children who perished in infancy, or died of one disease or another. Some will have migrated. And perhaps some will have turned to begging.

In subsequent visits in Baghdad I stopped at another girls school, Al Aquida. There too, the children were keen that I knew of Iraq’s achievements in the modern era. “They (the Americans) think we are barbarians, that we live like desert nomads, that we have nothing,” Rada charged. Her anger was evident and justified. Several students at Al-Aquida, one of the top ranked schools in the country, made a point of telling me about their holiday excursions to Paris, London and Los Angeles. When I visited the homes of two girls whose parents invited me, I found the walls of lined with private libraries and hung with their collections of contemporary art—work by Iraqi artists.

Other young Iraqis I faced no longer lived in Iraq. They were among the tens of thousands who left their homeland and reached Amman, Beirut, Ankara, London, Toronto and Los Angeles. They were mainly from the cities—Basra, Mosul and Baghdad—from the urban middle class. Without exception, every one was an unwilling immigrant.

Jordan was the first stop for most refugees. They were not seeking tourist or student visas at the American embassy as they may have in past years. They sought to escape the despair at home. “I’ll go anywhere,” said a despondent young man who had submitted his application at the consular offices of several embassies in Amman. “I don’t even care if it is America.”

“I do not want to leave Iraq,” he said sadly, his voice so low I could barely hear. “After the war I stayed in my country while my school friends left one by one. But there are no jobs…there’s no future for me in Iraq. Many of my classmates are already in Australia and maybe I will go there too.”

Two sisters whose father, a professor, had died from cancer just after the war, were in Amman awaiting their papers to Canada. They had already been accepted as immigrants but showed little interest in their new homeland. Asked if they were reading books about Canada during these idle months, they shrugged and replied “We have to leave Iraq. That’s all.”

I sought out Iraqi children lees eagerly as the years passed. I have no answers for them. They had more to say to me, however. With few exceptions, they were more critical than their parents and their teachers were of the American campaign to destroy their country. They felt cheated. They did not specify by whom. It could be the Iraqi leadership, their parents’ generation, the western powers, or all of us.

“We had the little things stolen from us.” The renowned, tireless Arab composer and activist Marcel Khalife said this of the occupation of his country, Lebanon. Khalife’s remark speaks to the Iraq experience where it was not only “little things” to work with and build from, or the collapsed infrastructure such as broken sewers, phones, incapacitated computers and faulty rickety copy machines. People could not buy their favorite perfume and magazines, or shop for smart shoes, or packaged soap, sanitary items or novels. Iraqis no longer planned picnics along the river; they did not go swimming at their parents’ clubs, or gather at an embassy library to enjoy a foreign film. It would be years before boys would again gather in the street with a football. Newlyweds could not move into their own apartment and many marriages were delayed. Iraqis stopped sending gifts and greeting cards to friends overseas. They abandoned rarely shopped except for food.

“Why? Why was America doing this?,” asked perplexed young people.

In the aftermath of the war, surprisingly, the young were not as tight-lipped as their parents. As such, it seemed to me, they would be excellent ambassadors abroad. Turing the world, speaking to the public, meeting other young people, they might make a convincing case against the sanctions. These young women and men were not associated in any way with the abuses of the regime and atrocities against opponents of the Baathists. They were infants during the previous war. If they could speak to the world with the same moral conviction and knowledge that I heard them utter, they might counter the demonization Iraq was subject to. Western media and schools and clubs might be more receptive to these youngsters that to the harangues of Saddam and the arguments of Tariq Aziz. But none of them were ever recruited.

Perhaps U.S. policy makers and diplomats realized the redeeming effect these young people could have. They did not issue visas for lectures tours and teach-ins abroad. Foreign doors were open only for immigrants ready to work hard and keep their mouths shut while they toiled towards their citizenship exam in the free world. Bright, proud Iraqis who might campaign on behalf of their country need not apply.

No more healthy children 

By 1995, Iraqi children finally entered the West’s consciousness. Now however, they were not the bright eyed and inquisitive highschoolers I had met just after the war. We did not hear them standing up and demanding, Why? Now, they were sitting on pavements by day offering to shine your shoes, or standing at traffic lights at night, their hand out, their voices whimpering. They were lying in hospital beds groaning or gazing up with empty, confused eyes.

By 1995 a trickle of foreign humanitarian delegations had begun to seek out Iraqi children, perhaps with the same compulsion that took me to Nassiriya Girls Middle School. We had to face the children in order to come to turns with what our governments had done to this nation.

It took years to break through the propaganda screen build by the U.S. but some independent minded people had finally heard enough reports about the spread of diseases, the malnutrition and the cancers that they insisted on witnessing conditions in Iraq for themselves.

Within five years of the imposition of Resolution 876, Iraq’s embargo related death toll was already approaching a million. The increase in diseases across the whole population was alarming, and the health crisis was growing at the same time that hospitals found themselves with no medicine, inadequate tools, broken machines and no bed sheets. Bed sheets and broken heart monitors did not interest the visitors however. Nor did auto accident or dog bite victims.

The truth-seeking visitors were drawn to the children. Lines of healthy foreigners arrived in pediatric wards. Some carried little pouches of useless sample drugs gathered from skeptical friends, while others clutched glass-eyed teddy bear toys they had collected. Many sobbed over the small, wasted bodies of little Iraqis. Men and women alike became inarticulate and stammered as they searched for a recipient of their useless gifts.

I sometimes found myself following a group of those solicitous pilgrims to a cancer wing or a contagious diseases ward and invariably the visitors were horrified, then embarrassed. Some wept openly. Others reached out smiling, trying to comfort the little soul, asking the doctor what her name was, how old she was--anything to suppress their discomfort. Some took photos, while others went into left hallway to sob in private while the rest of the group shifted uneasily, clearly wanting to end the ordeal.  

Dying ambassadors succeed

For most visitors, their tour to Iraq under sanctions was their only experience with the country, and their first encounter with the Middle East as well. They were always few in numbers. One by one, they joined long time political activists—Italian, British, Greek, Belgian and American teams such as Ponts-a-Baghdad, International Action Center under Ramsey Clark, Sara Flounders and Brian Becker, Voices in the Wilderness founded by Kathy Kelly, and (Belgian……………..) Particularly prior to 1998, not many international campaigners dared to make up their own minds about Iraq and undertake these risky ventures. They gained the confidence of enough Iraqi officials to proceed, few as they were.

Some of Iraq’s medical staff disapproved of the policy of showing the visitors their sick and dying. But they were overruled by those officials who understood that healthy, defiant children were less threatening than these pitiful boys and girls lying in broken hospital beds. In their dying weeks and months, unable to utter anything but cries of pain, they would become powerful ambassadors.  

Successive delegations of witnesses arrived to “observe the deadly sanctions” at work. The height of their tour was a glimpse at the occupants of children’s hospitals. They eschewed invitations to a regular hospital ward where they might encounter a man with kidney failure, or a heart attack victim (the cases have risen by 400% since the war), or a woman with bone cancer. They couldn’t be moved by an intestinal blockage (which can be fatal), or the sight of burn victims (these too had soared due to faulty electricity and makeshift kerosene stoves used after the war), or casualties from auto accidents (caused by faulty car brakes and stoplight outages or blowouts), or crippling eye diseases. They just wanted to see the children. , The foreigners were universally horrified by the sight of stricken young Iraqis and I could not argue with the impact these little souls had on those missions. The visitors’ tours were augmented, moreover, by meetings with health and industry ministers, engineers and medical experts. They departed not with ideological arguments but laden with convincing empirical evidence of massive suffering. Each witness carried away sheets of facts about the extent of the bombings, the reappearance of once eradicated diseases, summaries of studies linking war toxicity to rising cancer rates. Eventually U.N. agency reports validated the findings of these missions.

Those studies generated more intense interest abroad but by this time, Iraqi doctors had grown impatient. They began to object to the parades of these peeping foreigners, first because their work was interrupted and second because they saw no concomitant relief.

Members of Voices in the Wilderness and a British group encountered the growing resentment I faced from doctors when we appeared in their wards year after year. One year it was curiosity about cancer. The next year we sought out examples of birth deformities.

I stopped my regular tours of hospitals after a visit to Mosul Maternity Hospital in the north when I was first confronted at the entrance to a children’s ward by a woman doctor barring my passage. Her arms folded defiantly across her chest, she glared at me, perhaps hoping I would stop there at the doorway where she stood. She did not care if I was a medical expect, a journalist, or a sympathizer. “What have you brought with you to help us?” she asked petulantly. When my guide explained I was a journalist she shot back: “What good will it do to tell you anything?

“When will the sanctions be lifted?” she demanded. For her, that was the only issue worth discussing. Her voice was almost a whisper, seeping out through her rage.

But I was in for a more powerful confrontation as we proceeded down the hall. As the director led me away, the hospital engineer stepped in front of us. He was more polite than the doctor, but his message was more unsettling. In the boiler room and other parts of the basement, he pointed out the broken lift, the leaking pipes, bits of electrical fixtures and a roomful of useless air conditioners. In this inert pile of machinery, lay a demon waiting to take its toll. It was not only a matter of insufficient medicine. The entire health system of Iraq was falling into ruin; it would soon be completely unable to cope with tens of thousands of people yet to be stricken.

On my return to the United States, I began to speak out more angrily, channeling that woman’s rage with my own, but also voicing the nervous plea of that hospital engineer. I approached possible donors seeking funds to repair the decrepit facilities in two regional. With $10,000 we could make some really life-saving repairs, especially if we could act before the scorching heat of summer swept down on Iraq. Few audiences in the mid 1990s would sponsor a talk of this nature but those who did welcome me were strangely unmoved by the photos of soiled mattresses, broken elevators and air-conditioners. My host understood and counseled me: “No one would give money to repair beds or replace mattresses and light fixtures. Just tell us about the children, and ask us for money to buy medicines.”

END