Mona Anis sets out in search of a dream and of a city like her native Cairo May 15 is a mournful date in the history of the Arabs, as it marks both the defeat of the combined armies of six Arab states in Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel as a result of this defeat. On 15 May this year I left Cairo on my way to Baghdad via Jordan. Despite the fact that leaving on this date was quite coincidental, the irony behind setting out to Baghdad on 15 May could not have gone unnoticed by anyone from a similar background: an Arab born roughly at the same time the State of Israel came into existence, whose formative years and education were inextricably linked with the dreams and rhetoric of national liberation and especially with the liberation of Palestine. Waiting at the Al-Karamah checkpoint on the Jordanian-Iraqi border, the name Al-Karamah, meaning dignity in Arabic, already rings a bell. Is this the place where Palestinian guerrillas and Jordanian troops forced the Israeli army to withdraw in defeat following its incursion into Jordanian territory in search of Palestinians fighters back in 1968? How could it be, when this is the entry point into Iraq, and not into the West Bank? Later, I learned that there were two Al-Karamah outposts, one on the Jordanian-Iraqi border and the other near the bridge separating the east bank of the River Jordan from the west. Again, the irony of the two entry points into Palestine and Iraq both being called Al-Karamah elicits a smile from me, albeit a contorted one. THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD: After a very thorough passport control by Jordanian passport officers, we move out of Jordan, and, passing two American soldiers who cast quick looks at our faces to make sure they resemble the photos in our passports, we enter a deserted Iraqi checkpoint where the words, "Welcome to Iraq: Head of the Arab Nation and Repository of Faith," are still inscribed on the entry gate. A few metres away, a statue of Saddam mounting a horse has been deformed in such a manner that it could pass as some surrealist work. For the first time I laugh from my heart as I try to figure out the head of Saddam from that of the horse. The five-hour drive to Baghdad is mostly one long stretch of desert. Our driver tells us that a lot of cleaning up has taken place since the end of the war, and had it not been for the existence of a few broken-down Iraqi tanks at the side of the road, and a couple of severely damaged bridges, one could never have imagined that a war had been raging here only a few weeks before. Only when I saw the palm trees from afar and realised that we were approaching Baghdad with its beautiful orchards did I really feel moved by a burst of tender love untainted by any other sentiment, whether ironic, cynical, tragic or otherwise. Just love, love for a city that instantaneously captured my imagination on my first visit, perhaps because it reminded me in so many ways of the Cairo that I had grown up in during the 1950s and 1960s. Baghdad had kept its hold on my imagination for 25 years, since the day in May 1978 when I found myself in the departure lounge of Baghdad Airport, replying in a terrified whisper to my Egyptian friend's farewell words of, "See you again in Baghdad", with "Not before those mad men in power have gone." And here I am back again, indulging in the sensations of a dream come true, a dream I shared passionately with many Iraqis of an Iraq free from Saddam and his fascist regime. However, the sensation of being moved beyond speech at the sight of Baghdad vanished completely upon entering the city, to be replaced by a deep sense of grief and anger at the extent of the damage that had befallen it and at the sight of American soldiers with armoured vehicles everywhere, inspecting cars and driving rows of presumably Iraqi "Ali Babas" forwards, the Iraqis' hands held above their heads in scenes reminiscent of images from a distant colonial past. Somehow, I had hoped against hope that what I had seen on the TV during the war, and I admit to seeing little -- I listen to the radio at times of war and great disasters to avoid seeing scenes of blood and death -- had been exaggerated. Suddenly, the realisation that Baghdad was not a liberated but an occupied city hit me, making me question the reason behind my burning wish to come to Baghdad. Perhaps I had needed to come all this way to measure the distance between dreams and reality. However, I told myself that now that I had come I had no other option but to swallow the bitter medicine to the very end. No sooner had we checked into the hotel, than I came out again wanting to discover what had happened to the centre of the city I loved. I inspected the infamous statue of Saddam in Al-Fardous Square, which had not existed the last time I was in Baghdad, but then Saddam had not yet been president. To my surprise, I was not moved by the absence of the statue, but I was disturbed by a banner hanging underneath some plaster work in its place announcing that a group called Al-Najeen, that is, those who were saved, were in the process of erecting a monument there. One might have hoped that either they would leave the place empty, or restore the beautiful monument to the unknown soldier that had originally been there. Walking down Al-Saadoun Street to Sahat Al-Tahrir, the condition of that once famous street was heartbreaking, with almost every shop smashed, burnt and looted. When I could take the sight no more, I thought of walking along Abul-Nawwas Street on the banks of the Tigris River: at least one could look at the river and pretend not to see anything else. Talking to the few people who were sitting near the river guarding their property, I found that they were quite friendly and very open in discussing their feelings, predominantly a combination of relief that a battle for Baghdad had not taken place, since this would have led to the city's being razed to the ground, and apprehension at what the future now held for them. Of the five people I chatted to on the banks of the Tigris, four were quite happy at the defeat of Saddam, saying that he was a cowardly man who wanted the people to die while he was in hiding. However, the youngest, a teenager, who had been following the conversation silently, followed me as I was leaving, saying in a defiant tone, "but I like Saddam." I made my way back to the hotel, as I had been warned by the friendly Kurdish man at the reception to be sure to come in before dark. IRAQ FOR THE IRAQIS: Everywhere one goes one hears a variation on the slogan of "Iraq was for the Arabs, now it must be for the Iraqis." "Where were the Arabs when we suffered at the hands of Saddam?" "Where are your actors, singers and writers who used to glorify the dictator?" At certain places, like the Mohamed Sakran Cemetery, 30 Km east of Baghdad, for example, where people were frantically exhuming the bodies of loved ones, it would have been indecent to argue. I did not go there to argue, but was there in search of information about an Egyptian whose body had been exhumed the previous day. I had obtained information on the subject from an Iraqi woman who had been standing in front of the Palestine Hotel in search of somebody to listen to her story. She had accused me of being, like all Arabs, insensitive to the pains of the Iraqis, and she also asked where the Arabs who had supported the dictator were now, in order that they could bear witness to his crimes. It was the tears in my eyes while she was telling her story that produced feelings of empathy between us, and at that point she told me about the Egyptian whose body had been exhumed at the Mohamed Sakran Cemetery, where she had been looking for her brother who had disappeared in 1980. The Egyptian had had his passport hidden in his socks, she told me, and all those standing at the edge of the grave had immediately recognised the green passport, which must now be in the possession of the cemetery guard. I found the passport, and I also found the names of three other Egyptians, one executed in 2003, at that cemetery, testimony to a bond of suffering that belies all the superficial anti-Arab sentiments being at the moment rife in Iraq. One hopes that after the Iraqis have put their dead, butchered at the hands of the criminal former regime, to rest, they will also find time to look for the mass graves of the retreating soldiers who were left to burn alive on the Mutla Ridge during the 1991 Gulf War, for these soldiers were also Iraqis, and they number in the tens of thousands. As chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff at the time of the Gulf War, Colin Powell was asked to give an estimate of the number of dead Iraqi soldiers. He gave a figure of 250,000. A later request for information to the Pentagon, made under the US Freedom of Information Act, produced a figure of 100,000 killed and 300,000 wounded. To them, we must now add those who died in this latest war. DE-BAATHIFICATION: On Friday, 16 May 2003, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremmer III, issued an order regarding the de-Baathification of Iraqi society. The order, like many other announcements, was posted, in both English and Arabic, on the outside wall of the Palestine Hotel, a bustling gathering point for Iraqis who want either to make their voices heard to the outside world, or to enquire about what the future holds for them. This later aspect greatly disturbed me, as I frequently encountered people trying to get to the Palestine Hotel to ask about concerns that nobody seemed able to answer. For example, I once encountered a young man asking if there had been something posted on the walls regarding what judicial system was going to be implemented in Iraq. When I expressed my astonishment at his expecting to find an answer to such a question at the Palestine Hotel, he said his family wanted to sue a former high- ranking Baath Party official, but upon going to court he had been advised by the judge to go and check at the Palestine Hotel on the provisions of the new legal system. I could not help remembering what we used to learn from history books in school about how Napoleon's generals in Egypt had posted their orders on the walls of Cairo for the information of the inhabitants. That was during the French campaign in Egypt in 1798, which had introduced the first modern printing press to the Arab world. The de-Baathification order did appear in the Iraqi newspapers, but not until 20 May when the first issue of the Coalition newspaper, Al-Sabah, hit the newsstands. Before that, people had no way of knowing what this order entailed except by going to the Palestine Hotel, and indeed every time I passed I stopped to check if there were people reading the orders, and, without fail, there would be a few seemingly worried men slowly reading and not keen to talk to me no matter how hard I tried. A few days into my visit, only the English copy of the order remained, the Arabic having disappeared. Perhaps it was no longer needed, since it had now appeared in the papers, or perhaps Palestine Hotel staff had themselves taken it down to get rid of the worried men I wanted to talk to who were blocking the building's entrance. What alarmed me about the de- Baathification order was not the first part concerning "eliminating the Party's structure and removing its leadership from positions of authority and responsibility in Iraqi society" and "banning from future employment in the public sector" the four top cadres in the organisational hierarchy of the Baath Party, some 30,000 in number, according to Intifad Qanbar of the Iraqi National Congress, but many more according to other sources who can only speculate from their own experience. What worried me was the second part of the order, which sounded like a recipe for disaster. Any senior civil servant, university professor or doctor must now be scrutinised for possible former links with the Baath, the order stipulates. Those proven to be Baath Party members will be removed from their employment, "including the more junior ranks of member and active member," and this in a country where complete sections of the civil service and of the liberal professions had had to fill out Baath Party membership forms before getting appointed. A news item in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Zaman on 20 May revealed that an open letter had been addressed to Paul Bremmer by a group of veteran Baathists, warning him about the consequences of the purge he was leading and challenging him to be able to purge the 15 million Iraqis who had either been members of the Baath Party under the previous regime, or had been close to it. The authors of this open letter considered that the order was a violation of human rights, and they called on Bremmer to study the history of the Baath Party, which had been hijacked by Saddam and his family who had committed crimes against the leadership of the party in 1979. If the figure of 15 million members is a gross exaggeration, everyone I talked to nevertheless conceded that there were at least six to eight million Iraqis with some connection to the Baath. How can you purge society from their influence without holding a witch-hunt that would consume the whole country? On the day I left Baghdad, the Iraqi army was disbanded, making 400,000 people redundant, and on the same day the whole staff of the Ministry of Information was made redundant. There is an urgent need for a truth and reconciliation commission to be set up in Iraq, along similar lines to those adopted in South Africa. Without something similar, Iraq will plunge into a civil war the scale of which will be beyond anything witnessed before in the Arab world. Will Iraqi political forces be able to rise to this challenge? One can only hope so. OF ENEMIES AND BROTHERS: I began my journey to Baghdad on 15 May, and framing my visit at its end was 25 May, Jordan's Independence Day, marking the creation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan in 1946. Having left Baghdad on the day the Iraqi army was disbanded, I did not know what to make of the sight of the Jordanian army celebrating Independence Day in Amman. On the radio of the taxi taking me to where I had arranged to meet a Palestinian friend for lunch before taking off again for Cairo in the evening, I listened to part of King Abdullah's Independence Day speech. In it, he spoke about the meaning of independence and the necessity of comprehensive development, activating civil society and enhancing political pluralism and economic liberalism. And he warned people against clinging to obsolete notions that have been proven erroneous by time. Over lunch, I shared some of the difficult questions, macabre stories and dark thoughts I had cultivated in Baghdad with my friend. In response to my saying that after what I had seen in Iraq it might not be long before other Arab countries were re-colonised, he reminded me that the borders between one Arab country and another had been drawn up in the 1920s following the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. "Now that the grandsons of Sykes and Picot are redrawing the map in accordance with new imperial interests, what business is it of ours," my friend asked sarcastically. As for my worrying about the seemingly anti-Arab sentiments the Iraqis were now venting, he consoled me by saying that this was natural and would soon recede. After all, "in the face of a crushing defeat one curses those closest to you for not offering help, rather than blaming the enemy you were unable to defeat. We, the Palestinians, have done this time and time again, and you Egyptians have also done it. Now it is the Iraqis' turn," he said. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps all this is the result of a rich and multi-layered national history trying to find its own level, torn between the urge to exorcise the demons of yet another bloody chapter in its history and the pull of strong Arab national sentiments in the heartland of Arabism. A happy balance at this difficult moment cannot easily be struck, and it would be cruel, in this period of self-discovery and against a background of unspeakable suffering, to proffer either judgment or criticism.
