Voices From Iraq
Canadian reports from sojourn in Iraq

March 2, 2003

I am taking a day off today. I am tired. This is my first break in two weeks. The last ten days I've been helping to co-ordinate an eight-person delegation. They left yesterday.

I think we are all a little tired, some more than others are. In my opinion, we' re stretched too thin. Too many irons in the fire, too many balls in the air, too few people to do what needs doing: a forty-day fast with daily two-hour public vigils; a letter-writing campaign; another delegation to organize; relationships with a village and detainee families and mosques and several communities to maintain; a door to answer; media contacts to schmooze and answer questions for; meetings with the Coalition Provisional Authority to arrange and follow-up on; detainee families to interview; writing to do. And this just off the top of my head. We're going to have a strategic planning meeting in a couple days to sort some of this out.

I have two handfuls of days left. On one hand, I am greedily anticipating my March 13 departure from Amman. The odds are looking good that I'll get home alive. On the other hand, the work here is a vital, compelling, full measure all pressed-down-shaken-together and flowing-over. I am just starting to feel like I have found my way into it.

Light

I have fallen in love with the light in Baghdad. How can I catch, hold, describe it in words, except to say there is just something about it. In the mornings, when I go onto the roof of our apartment building to hang my laundry or greet the day, the light rushes about me, kisses me everywhere. It is fine and simple and gracious, cheerful and embracing and flowing, a pouring swimming breathing medley of lemons and yellow roses and honey.

More than this I cannot say: you must come see for yourself.

Abu Ghraib

West of Baghdad, there is a prison called Abu Ghraib. It was the largest prison in the days of Saddam Hussein, and it is larger now in the days of Paul Bremer. It is a vast compound defined by blonde fortress walls and olive-green guard towers and miles of unfriendly razor-wire slinkies.

No one knows how many people are being held there. One human rights organization says 23,000. A man who came in the vain hope of visiting a relative says 150,000. Everyone agrees they must be counted in thousands.

We went there on the last day of February with a delegation. We got out of our hired van and within minutes were surrounded by Iraqis wanting to tell us their story. A man tells us about his brother who remains imprisoned after US soldiers raided their house four months ago. A family from Mosul tells us this is their fourth attempt to visit their loved one. It is a seven-hour drive for them. Another man tells us how he was released only fifteen days ago, how they kept him handcuffed and hooded, without food or shelter, for three days. "I felt like I was going to die," he says.

An imam [a Muslim cleric] is outraged by the detention of women. He says Iraqi women are being paraded nude, forced into sexual acts with each other, raped, becoming pregnant. His face is ashen as he tells how a female prisoner smuggled out a note begging for the prison to be bombed. "It is better for us to die," she is said to have written. I have heard this story before. As incredible as it sounds, it expresses the depth of Iraqi outrage with the practice of detaining women.

The next person we talk to is a woman whose sister is imprisoned. The detained sister is Nahida Jabar Abdullah. She is twenty-one years old. Then we meet another man whose step-mother is detained-53 year-old Jamila Aba Hamaidi. After hearing for months that women are being detained, this is the first time CPT has actually met their families. We make appointments to interview them.

It is time to go. We have been under siege for over an hour, people pressing in and around Will's video camera, Christie and my notebook. They listen attentively as each story is told and then jockey for Sattar (our translator's) attention to be the next one when the story is done.

We break from the families and walk towards our van. People follow us, hoping we'll listen to just one more story. I'm determined to escape into the van. There is one tiny woman who will not give up. Sattar tells me she just wants me to write down her son's name and sequence number. I stop, turn to her with my notebook, look into her brown eyes. Her face, a little brown diamond peeking out from the black folds of her abyia, is tired and worn. She has grown old before her time.

"My son's name is Ala Chaloub," she says."His number is 20487." She nods, smiles and goes her way. That is all she wanted.

More About Detainees

Much of our work involves security detainees- trying in different ways to pressure the occupation system, to expose what is happening, to make it a little more difficult for the US detention machine to continue grinding up Iraqi people.

We begin with the premise that the invasion of Iraq was an illegal and pre-emptive war waged under false pretexts. The occupation is a continuation of this war and therefore has no legal or moral legitimacy. If there were no occupation, there would be no security detainees.

Ambassador Richard Jones, second-in-command to Paul Bremer, told us they have "no policy," no process for determining guilt or innocence, the system is "overwhelmed" with the numbers of detainees, and they just don't have the resources to deal with "the problem."

Many people are being held without charge. Few receive family visits. All are being held arbitrarily and indefinitely without access to lawyers or to a transparent, accountable system of due legal process. They are being swept up in terrifying night-time house raids, put in "stress positions" (i.e.tortured) in open air compounds during interrogation, are subject to humiliation and abuse. Many are not even officially registered. Some people have been disappeared by US forces.

Clearly there are innocents being held. I interviewed a man from Kerbalah whose son is being held as a top Iraqi nuclear scientist. He has been imprisoned since July 19, 2003. His father showed me documents proving his son failed his fifth year of secondary school twice and never went to university.

And clearly there are "bad guys" being held who are responsible for violent attacks against US forces, the Iraqi police, the Iraqi Civilian Defence Corps and even Iraqi civilians. We have debated whether to demand the release of security detainees (given the illegitimacy of the occupation), or to demand justice for detainees (a legal system to determine guilt or innocence) given the terrifying lack of security in Iraq. Our thinking is that regardless of guilt or innocence, human rights must always be protected, that there must be transparency and accountability, and that Iraqis must themselves determine the fate of security detainees. Bombs, I am sick to death of bombs. I am sick of stories about them, the threat of them, the sound of them, and most of all, the ugly, ignorant, indiscriminate violence of them. Yesterday was a day of bombs. At 10:30 AM, there was an explosion near enough and powerful enough to shake our windows and for me to feel the sound in my chest. We ran up five flights of stairs to the roof and saw a plume of white smoke rising 500m to the south. We learned later that a landmine damaged an Al Jeezra media vehicle.

There were bombs in Kerbalah, killing scores of Shia pilgrims during their first celebration of the Ashura (a festival forbidden by Saddam) in 35 years. And there were bombs in Baghdad, at the Khadum Shrine, harvesting dozens of additional victims.

Jane, LeAnne, Matthew and Sheila were there. They saw it, video-taped it: a wall sprayed with blood; people collecting body parts and carrying victims away from the scene; rage, chaos, pandemonium; a US military convoy that blundered into the shrine precinct and barely escaped without being killed-or killing.

They returned home exhausted, sobbing, numb, bewildered. "We were helpless to do anything. All we could do was watch," Matthew said. They were stationed on a rooftop overlooking the shrine and surrounding plaza at the request of Sayyid Ali, the shrine's administrator and Baghdad's top Shia cleric.

The other day, I went with the delegation to see the Red Cross building that was bombed in October. It is actually quite near a ten-minute taxi ride in good traffic conditions.

It is a grim place. The site has been left basically as the bomb left it. Across the street from the Red Cross building, at the edge of a traffic circle, there is a crater filled with water. Inside the crater are twenty-foot long strips of white aluminum flashing that visitors use to measure the depth of the crater. It is perhaps fourteen feet deep. The crater is ringed with chunks of broken asphalt and rough mounds of displaced earth.

The Red Cross building, a modest three-story structure built in the 1950s, was split apart by the explosion. The first floor reception area is blasted open and a spider web network of cracks-you-can-see-through climb the building. Across the street there is a two-story apartment building. All of its windows are blown out and the exterior plaster is pitted from flying shrapnel and debris. A neighbour told us blood was sprayed onto the building-a distance of 30m from the car bomb. To the right and to the left of the crater there are telephone poles-industrial strength tripods of ten-inch steel tubing. The poles lean away from each other, as if some giant pushed them apart.

Another twenty feet from the epicenter of the bomb, there are three, four-foot high metal poles bending almost to the ground pointing in line with the force of the blast. The bomb-side of a nearby palm tree is scorched black.

In the traffic circle and right next to the car bomb there used to be a fifteen-foot square storage building. All that remains now is its oil-stained cement floor. Around the building there was a chain-link fence. It lies in gnarled heaps another 30 feet away. Rubble and twisted pieces of metal are scattered beyond that.

Someone said thirteen people were killed. This question begs an answer: who would do something like this, and why would they do it? But actually, really, honestly, I don't give a shit. Regardless of who builds or detonates them, all bombs do the same thing, leave the same effects, speak the same language.
Peace to you, and much love.

- James Loney