THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ: WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT?
Three books reviewed by Amir Taheri
by Amir Taheri
Asharq Al-Awsat
March 31, 2005

* Premier Retour a Bagdad

* Mufakkarat Baghdad ( Thoughts From Baghdad)

* An Iraqi In Paris

Did you notice the faces of the anchormen and women on Arab and Western satellite television channels on the day of the Iraqi general election on 30 January? If you did you will remember how glum most of them looked. There was this BBC lady anchor in Baghdad who looked as if she had received news of a great personal tragedy. And, what about that glum guru orchestrating the news-show on a notorious Arab television channel? Well, he looked as if someone had just pumped a bottle of cod liver oil down his throat.

Why were those people so unhappy?

The answer provided by Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannikakis in their extended reportage about liberated Iraq is simple: There are many people in the West and the Arab world who want Iraq to sink into tragedy so that they can prove that they were right in opposing the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

The two French star reporters had initially hoped that their reportage would be taken up by one of France's weekly newsmagazines. But they soon found out that the French media was not ready for a balanced view of liberated Iraq. President Jacques Chirac, with solid support from the French intellectual, media, and political establishment, had vigorously opposed the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Anyone stepping out of the line, for example by suggesting that the people of Iraq might well be happy at their liberation, risked being shut out of the French media. (One example: the deputy editor of the daily La Croix was fired after a visit to Iraq and writing an article showing that most Iraqis were happy at their liberation.)

Having traveled throughout Iraq and talked to scores of Iraqis, Rigoulot and Yannikakis had concluded that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis were happy that Saddam Hussein was under lock and key, and that the terrorists wreaking havoc in parts of Iraq represented little more than an outburst of nihilistic violence on the part of a small minority of ancien regime bitter-enders backed by foreign terrorists.

The Rigoulot-Yannikakis book, however, is not a polemical tract. In fact, the authors are careful to keep their political opinions to themselves. Their reportage is effective because it is an eyewitness account, an impartial photography of daily life in liberated Iraq. They chronicle all the difficulties of daily life under the long shadow of terrorist violence.

Luay Abdul Ilah's short travelogue, written in the form of a diary covering a three week visit to Iraq, is in a different register. But it, too, offers photography of life in liberated Iraq with sharp and brief flashbacks to put the whole thing into context.

Having fled Iraq into exile 26 years ago, Abdul Ilah returned home during the Ramadan of 2003 in the company of his friend Fadel Sultani, an Iraqi poet also in exile. The two decided to return to Iraq through the same route that had taken them into exile so many years ago. The concept of a traveling tandem is an ancient one in Mesopotamia, starting with Gilgamesh, accompanied by his friend Enkidu, setting out to slay Humbaba. Our modern duo, however, don't quite know what they are looking for in this journey, except may be a forlorn attempt at recovering some of what time and tyranny had stolen from them. The modern version of Humbaba is gone but is legacy lives on in the form of fear, violence, suspicion, and terror.

The first image the duo see of liberated Iraq is a dour faced American soldier examining their passports, and taking their pictures, at the Syrian frontier. Next, they see an American Humvee against a crimson horizon. Their first contact with their fellow Iraqis is not any happier as their car is stopped by Kalashnikov brandishing bandits who trap them in a hold up and rob them of their cash.

The journey becomes a roller-coaster of exuberance and despair. The diarist is struck by the extent of destruction that Iraq had suffered under the Ba'athist regime and because of the series of wars it had provoked. Things are not what they had once been, and the physical ruin of the land mirrors its moral and cultural destruction. In some cases, Abdul-Ilah abandons his sober, even minimalist, prose style, to lament the loss of an old village or town, for example Sidrat al-Hindyiah, near Babylon. In such cases one is forced to return to Imr ul-Qais shedding tears over the "atlal" with as much passion as lachrymose Arab hyperbole can muster.

Because Abdul-Ilah writes in short, almost telegraphic sentences, he is able to pack an incredible amount of information in this small book. At the same time he does not miss the small touches , such as the smell of earth after rain, the changing colours of the sunset, and, to be sure, the different sounds of different explosives that provide a kind of background music to the film of life in Baghdad, that bring his observations to life. After a while he also learns to recognize car bombs which have become a fact of daily life in the Iraqi capital.

The diarist must have had long days. For he managed to meet and talk to an incredible number of people, from close relatives such as his sister and nieces, to poets, writers, politicians, and the proverbial man-in-the-street. To introduce his many interlocutors, Abdul-Ilah provides mini-biographies which also offer glimpses into some of the tragic events that have marked Iraqi life since the coup d'etat of 1958. The brutal end of the monarchy, the various military power grabs, the mass expulsion of people accused of having " Persian" origins, the genocidal campaigns conducted against the Kurds , the repression of Shiites, the war against Iran, the attempt at annexing Kuwait, and the second Gulf war are some of the events that are briefly, but effectively, recalled by real people who lived through them. He chronicles their sentiments and views briefly and faithfully, thus providing the reader with a snapshot of Iraqi public opinion rarely available through the mainstream media.

Abdul-Ilah's diary is one of the most intelligent reportages that this reviewer has seen about liberated Iraq. Not only he offers us a picture of real life in Iraq as never seen by Western reporters, who are mostly cantoned in the "Green Zone", but he also sets out the terms in which the current political debate is shaping up in Iraq. He shows how Iraqis are diving across ethnic and sectarian life, to the point that they cannot even agree on which day marks the end of Ramadan. The main themes of the debate in liberated Iraq emerge to be centered on the relationship between the mosque and the state, the status of women, and power-sharing among the many components of the Iraqi mosaic.

Despite all the darkness, much of it a leftover from decades of despotism, that haunts this short book, Abdul-Ilah's diary ends on a note of hope.

Among the places whose destruction is narrated by Abdul-Ilah is Habbaniyah, once the largest Iraqi air base. We learn that the entire place was systematically looted after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with some buildings dismantled brick by brick.

Habbaniyah is also the birth place of Samuel Shimon, whose new book " An Iraqi In Paris" is a pleasure to read. Shimon's Christian Assyrian family was expelled from Habbaniyah, and had its home demolished by bulldozers, in 1968 when the neo-Ba'athists seized power in Baghdad. Also expelled from the town were other families who, because of their Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian and Assyrian origins, were regarded as potential fifth columns for the enemies of pan-Arabism.

The expulsion of the Shimons from Habbaniyah ended their life as a family. Samuel was sent to Ramadi along with another family expelled because of its " Persian" origin.

Having lost everything, Samuel then a boy of 12, withdrew into an alternative space in which to rebuild his life. That space was not physical but imaginal; it existed in his head, and heart, as a dream of going to Hollywood and joining the pantheon of stars and film directors that he had grown to admire.

But escaping from the clutches of the Ba'athist regime, possibly the most brutal ever in modern Arab history, was not easy. The minimum was that every male Iraqi had to perform his military service before obtaining a passport. Thus Shimon had to wait 11 more years before he was able to get out of Iraq and into Syria. But that was only the start of another ordeal which was to last for more than a decade, taking him to Lebanon, Jordan, Cyrus, Tunisia, France, and, eventually Britain where he has settled.

Samuel Simon is the very definition of the wrong man in the wrong place.

A Christian in a predominantly Muslim society, he could not even hide under the mask of pan-Arabism as others like Michel Aflaq, Jibran Majdalani, and Elias Faraj had done. The reason was that as an Assyrian, and heir to a civilisation that preceded the Arab one by at least 2000 years, he couldn't pretend to be a "true Arab". Shimon had another problem: he was a passionate monarchist at the time most Arab intellectuals were, or pretended to be, revolutionaries inspired by their mad version of the French and Russian Revolutions. Shimon saw Iraq as a kind of "paella", the Spanish rice dish which allows for the widest possible variety of ingredients. He also loved America at a time that anti-Americanism had been exported to the Middle East by the French leftist elites as well as Communist propagandists working for the Soviet Union. To make matters worse he had a "Jewish-sounding" name at a time that the Arab elites were obsessed with Israel.

But, perhaps, the biggest drawback that Shimon suffered from was that he was able to laugh at himself, and practically everything else under the sun, at a time that the Arab elites were choking with their earnestness. It is a miracle that Shimon, who came with a hair-breadth of being murdered by Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian groups, managed to stay alive long enough to escape to Europe.

Shimon's book is, in fact, two books in one.

The first part, An Iraqi In Paris, consists of a series of sketches depicting his picaresque experiences in the Middle East, North Africa and France. This is satire at its best, which means as a weapon in the hands of the powerless against the powerful. For most of that time Shimon was genuinely powerless. Caught in the maelstrom of events dictated only by fate, he had nowhere to go but down for the best part of a decade, which included years of homelessness existence on the streets and railways stations of the French capital.

An Iraqi In Paris is also a kind of Bildungsroman, narrating the slow maturing of this Peter Pan-like character, the little boy who refuses to grow up. What makes Shimon's satire effective is that he is never judgmental. He knows that human beings are flawed, and that perfection, possible only in art especially cinema, is a deadly quest in real life.

Along the way in this novella we meet numerous Arab " intellectuals", marginal characters who spend their lives drinking themselves into oblivion in various Parisian cafes and bars. These are people who have come out of the Arab world not knowing that the Arab world has not come out of them. Thus whenever they are angry at Shimon for whatever reason they shot insults at him as "the dirty Jew" or, when they are kinder, " the filthy Assyrian". He is even taken to task for not having been circumcised, a drawback that he corrects by submitting to the operation at the hands of a Tunisian barber for 10 dollars.

We see Shimon in a variety of odd situations. One morning he gets up to have breakfast in a " safe house" given to him in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, by a Palestinian revolutionary, to see Yasser Arafat, the PLO chief and his deputy Abu Jihad, engaged in a loud argument. How did they get there? Shimon has no time to ask as, almost naked except for his shorts, he is staring at the two Palestinian chiefs. Later he learns that Arafat and his associates are planning their escape as the Syrians close on Tripoli with the express intention of eliminating the entire PLO leadership. The fleeing PLO leaders empty their bank accounts and distribute the money among their supporters including a number of Arab journalists. Shimon who just happens to be there ends up with $5000, the largest sum of money he had ever seen in his life.

Review-04

While some of the characters in the novella are introduced with their own real names, many others are brought in under pseudonyms. Thus the Arab reader would have much fun in treating this text as a roman a clef, trying to find out who is who behind the false names. This reviewer managed to identify at least a dozen famous Arab writers, poets and political figures. See if you can do better.

Shimon' second novella, The Street By And The Cinema, is written in the style of magical realism. In it he relates his boyhood dream of making a film about his father, a deaf and dumb baker in Habbaniyah. Over the years Shimon dreams of casting Robert De Niro in the role of his father. It is a dream that helps Shimon absorb the pains inflicted on him because of the accidents of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Presented as homage to the great American film director John Ford, the titles of whose films punctuate the text like so many kabalistic clues, Shimon's novella goes beyond his autobiography to become the story of a whole generation of Arabs whose lives were shattered by the mad ideologies that dominated Arab politics from the 1950s onwards. If this narrative is not entirely dark and bitter the credit goes to a sense of humor and an incredible ability to create an inner space that have always marked the peoples of Mesopotamia. COPRYIGHT ARAB NEWS 2005