http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1013793,00.html
Twenty-two years ago Mazzin al-Khazragi fled Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein
and military service. He has been living in Cardiff ever since. With the
end of the regime it became safe to go back. James Meek went with him
The Guardian (London) Thursday August 7, 2003
by James Meek
At 7am on November 26 1980, Assad al-Shabibi, managing director of the
South Iraqi Liquid Gas Company, left his home in Palestine Street,
Baghdad, to fetch bread for breakfast. He was trying to lose weight, and
he liked the exercise. Sometimes he went by bicycle, but the bike had a
puncture that day. His son Zaid offered to go instead. Assad said no, he'd
get the bread, and set off.
It was a special day in the Shabibi household. Zaineb, youngest daughter
of Assad and his English wife, Delia-May, was about to go for her first
class at Baghdad University, where she would study French literature. She
remembers the conversation between Zaid and her father; she remembers that
her father was wearing beige slacks and a checked shirt. But she was
thinking about her first day at university. She wanted to be a good
student, and wanted to be early. She didn't wait for her father to come
back with the bread; why should she?
Assad did not come back. Zaineb's sister Jinan broke the news to her at
university a few hours later. The family went to the local police station.
The police asked for 20 photographs to help with their search. They
appeared to be investigating, but the family did not know whether they
were really looking for him, or whether they knew that he had been
arrested. The police could not say, and the family could not ask.
It was a dark, bloody time. Saddam Hussein had become president in 1979;
people were disappearing in their thousands. The dictator had launched a
war against Iran, and thousands of young conscripts were dying in the
trenches. A few months after her father's disappearance, like many with
the chance to do so, one of Zaineb's childhood friends, a ginger-haired
boy of her age called Mazzin Khazragi, also half-British, fled to England
to avoid conscription. Mazzin - Maz - had always liked her, though Zaineb
had never thought of him as anything more than a friend.
The hollowness of loss, fear and unknowing settled over the big house on
Palestine Street. The family could not flee. Margaret Thatcher's new
British government had changed the law to make it impossible for Zaineb or
her siblings to claim British citizenship, and their mother's British
nationality was no defence against the whims of the tyrant's agents.
With great courage, Zaineb tried to find out where her father was being
held. She wrote petitions to the government on national holidays such as
Saddam's birthday, and got no answer. She even visited the dreaded Abu
Ghraib prison. They let her in, but would not answer her questions about
her father.
In 1987, a fellow student, who was going out with a security-service
officer, told Zaineb that if she wrote another petition, her boyfriend
would follow it up. Sure enough, the family was granted an interview at
the headquarters of the security police. To avoid exposing other family
members to risk, Zaineb insisted on going alone. In a filthy, cobwebbed
room an officer told her that, yes, her father had been arrested on the
street that day in 1980. He told her that three years later, he had been
executed. The officer carried on talking but Zaineb could not hear him any
more. She got up, sobbing, and ran out of the building.
In the ministry of oil, Assad's employer, the personnel department agreed
to show Zaineb her father's file. The last page was a note from the
security service advising the department that Assad had been executed and
that they should terminate his employment. Assad's bosses and colleagues
had known of his fate for years; they had told the family nothing.
Finally, one day, the family was given Assad's death certificate. A doctor
had certified that their father had died from hanging. To this day, the
family does not know what their father was charged with, or what happened
to his body. Not long afterwards, Saddam relaxed the rules on travel and
Zaineb and her mother left for the UK. While Zaineb was still in Baghdad
she had received a proposal of marriage from Maz in Britain. She had been
surprised. But they grew close and, in 1990, exiled from the country they
loved, unsure whether they would ever return, they got married.
In another century, 22 years after Assad disappeared, two men sit
stupefied by weariness in a kebab joint in Amman, Jordan. It is 4am. They
have just come in on an overnight flight from London with their suitcases
stuffed full of gifts and their moneybelts and shoes stuffed with dollars.
They are Iraqi exiles from Cardiff, and they are going home for the first
time since the fall of the regime. One of the pair is Maz. His intention
is not simply to visit. He is determined to bring his family - Zaineb and
their two young children - to settle in Iraq for good, to make a new life
in the old country.
Maz, a 41-year-old electrician and erstwhile Cardiff cafe co-proprietor,
has bright, eager brown eyes, even in his tiredness, and a fuzz of shaved
ginger hair. He speaks flawless Baghdad Arabic and flawless English with a
tinge of his mother's native Wolverhampton. Even with the excitement of
the return, over the next few days a portion of his mind will be reserved
for worrying about whether Wolves will make it past the playoffs to a
place in the Premiership.
It is May, not much more than a month since US tanks rolled into the
centre of the Iraqi capital. I ask Maz, as I will ask him several times,
why he wants to go back to chaotic, still-burning Baghdad so soon, when he
has been settled in Britain for two decades.
"In Arabic they haven't got a word for acquaintance; everybody is either a
friend, or not," he says. "If they meet you once, next time they see you
they shake your hands. Relationships in Iraq are stronger. Socially, it's
a very nice place to be. I want to bring my children up there, but it's
not just them, it's me. Iraq is a challenge. It's history being made. It's
a love affair. Although I've been in Britain for 22 years there's a
feeling I'm not quite in tune with it."
Had he experienced racism in the UK? "I've only once had people saying
derogatory things to me, on September 12 2001. Someone came into the cafe
and said to me: 'You fucking Muslims should be ashamed of yourselves.'"
Twenty-four hours later we are hurtling in the darkness through the
rockfields of eastern Jordan towards the Iraqi border. The clock in the
car is set to Baghdad time. Salam, the other Cardiff Iraqi returning home,
says a prayer.
The driver, an Iraqi who makes the Baghdad-Amman run regularly, fills us
in on the news. One of the parties that has sprung up in Iraq since the
fall of Saddam is called the Islamic Communist Party.
"That sounds about right for me," says Maz. Perhaps the ideal party for
Maz would be the Islamic Communist Liberal Free Enterprise party. He was
born in Moscow, where his father had a brief scholarship in the 1960s, and
the family was suffused with the socialist ideals that transformed the
Islamic world in the 20th century. Maz's outlook sounds, to conventional
western liberal wisdom, confused, but when he explains it, it has sense: a
former communist still with leftwing leanings, now a pious Muslim, a
believer in western-style democracy, a strong Iraqi patriot who supports
the invasion.
"I think many people over the years feel their culture has been
contaminated by the Coca-Cola culture," he says. "There's a feeling that
nationalism came and went and failed, that communism came and went and
failed. Now they've turned to the one thing that's untainted. They turn to
Islam because it has all the answers. I was a communist. I have also
changed."
We reach the border at dawn. A long queue of vehicles waits for permission
to cross. There are many returnees. Salam is intently watching a
middle-aged European man with the demeanour of an exceptionally erudite
tourist.
"Isn't that Robert Fisk?" he murmurs. It is. Salam and Maz go over to
debate news coverage of the war with him. Like all the Iraqi exiles, they
know the names and often the faces of all the western correspondents who
cover the region. Watching the war on television was a mixture of elation
and horror. "We knew Iraqis were going to get killed," says Maz. "What if
Iraq was damaged, and Saddam stayed? But I was convinced that this time it
wasn't going to happen. I was asked by somebody to go on an anti-war
demonstration and I refused. I said that if the placards said 'No to war,
down with Saddam' I would go, but I never saw anything on those placards
against Saddam.
"How would the demonstrators feel if the same cameras that filmed people
suffering during the war had been filming the Iraqi army and secret police
killing and torturing civilians for 35 years? There were no cameras there.
They were silent victims."
The Jordanians stamp us through and we drive into Iraq, to be greeted by a
large picture of Saddam in a lounge suit, with his face missing; derelict
offices where the regime's officials and bribetakers in mufti used to
swarm; and an NCO from the US 3rd Cavalry.
The US troops don't bother to search the car. After a cursory passport
check they wave us through. Maz stretches out his hand towards the US
sergeant. Wary but polite, the NCO shakes it and smiles. Behind us the
cars start honking. In the front seat, in dark glasses, Salam looks like
John Belushi. "It's very strange, you know, to come back home and find the
Americans occupying your country," he says.
On the far side of the border, we are mobbed by men selling petrol. Since
the war, in this country floating on oil, there has been a severe petrol
shortage. Clear of the border, the driver floors the accelerator. Thanks
to carjackings, 90mph is the standard speed on the 300-mile, six-lane
highway through Iraq's western desert to Baghdad.
As we approach Baghdad, two US Blackhawk helicopters fly along the pylons
by the roadside. We pass the long, low mass of Abu Ghraith prison. Maz
says the family thinks Zaineb's father was probably held there before he
was hanged.
There is no grand entrance to Baghdad; it creeps up around you. The roads
are busy, many shops are open, and the detritus of battle has been
cleared. Traffic is often gridlocked none the less. Baghdadis seem to be
spending half their time queuing for petrol and the other half stuck in
jams caused by the queues.
It is mid-afternoon. There is a lot of weeping. Maz breaks down at Salam's
house at the cries of Salam's family. Salam's father, wheelchair-bound,
has not seen his son for 23 years and cannot speak a few words without
sobbing.
Maz and I are to stay at the home of his aunt Sabihah, in a rougher part
of town. Maz made three short visits to Iraq before the war but it is
still an emotional moment when the metal gate of the tiny courtyard
judders open and his cousin Fatin reaches out to embrace him.
Baghdad is a city in which the citizens have lost all the broader frames
of reference; of truth, of reality, of the significance of memory, of law.
All they have left is the narrower reference points of family, the Koran
and survival. The future and, indeed, the past are unpredictable places.
The reemergence of independent newspapers and the hungry dash for newly
permitted satellite TV only adds to the simmering stew of legend,
testimony and twisted polemic which makes up Iraqis' perception of what is
going on. Few people can express the totality of Saddam's crimes, but
everyone tells the story, apocryphal or true, of the executed boy whose
body was recently excavated from a mass grave, his dead hand still
clutching the marbles he was holding when he was shot.
On good days in Baghdad, electricity is two hours on, four hours off; on
bad days two hours and six. The big old ceiling fans in Aunt Sabibah's
three-storey house don't work, and it's stifling. In the street outside,
household waste runs into an open ditch. It is a stinking mess of shit and
torn pieces of plastic and scraps of paper. Goats patrol it. Cousin Fatin,
who lives across the road, says that one of the American soldiers fell
into the ditch. Everyone laughs. The patter of automatic weapons is a
constant background noise in the city, like car horns and birdsong and the
cries of street traders.
One evening, soon after our arrival, we try to satisfy Maz's curiosity to
meet some of the American troops. He's also hopeful he might be able to
help his unemployed cousin Sa'adi find work. At a compound that the US
military has taken over Maz walks under the guns of the troops, confident
that we are British civilians and have some special protection from
American jumpiness. I don't think we do, and stop him and Sa'adi as they
are about to cross the path of a US soldier in a watchtower who is
pointing an automatic pistol at something we can't see in the distance.
The moment passes, and the slightly embarrassed soldier, hearing us
talking in English, explains that he was trying to get some kids to stop
throwing stones.
We find the Americans' front door, a narrow gate in a high wall, ringed
with razor wire, guarded by a trio of bored soldiers. One of them is
reading an old copy of Sports Illustrated. They don't have a job for
Sa'adi. They only need English-speakers, and they have one there at the
gate, Bari, who says he learned his English from watching American movies.
Maz, who hasn't yet decided how he's going to make a living in the new
Iraq, asks his advice.
"The next few years are going to be rough," says Bari. "We need about five
years to be safe.
"If you want my advice? Restaurants. Something new. From outside. You
know, we don't have a McDonald's."
Maz is a supporter of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, the group
of exiled Iraqis that worked closely with the pro-war lobby in Washington
and still has the ear of senior Americans. Critics accuse it of being a
creature of the Pentagon and of being obsessed with de-Ba'athification,
even if that means sacking skilled technocrats. It is that last point
which Maz likes about the INC. Tens of thousands of senior Ba'athists were
responsible for murder and torture of innocents, and the betrayals and
denunciations that led to Abu Ghraith prison; why should they not be
punished?
Ahmad Chalabi - "AC" to the exiles - is not in town, but Maz is granted an
audience with his nephew Faisal at an old Ba'athist haunt, the Iraqi
Hunting Club. At the gate, a skinny young exile in shades, who works for
the INC, tells us: "Once I've finished here I'm selling everything and
moving back to Tennessee to get my American citizenship. For 700 years the
rulers of this country have done nothing but kill the people who live
here."
"But Ahmad Chalabi..." Maz begins to say.
"I don't believe anything anybody says any more."
"Very promising," mutters Maz as we strike out across a parched lawn,
overlooked by the concrete shell of a vast, half-finished mosque, one of
the dictators last folies de grandeur.
In a conference room inside the rambling clubhouse, Faisal asks Maz why
he's coming back. "I'm naturally optimistic," says Maz. "I'm also
emotional. So I look at it like I'm coming back to my first love. Iraq. On
the practical side, I need to have far more information. Generally
speaking, most people, 70%, are pessimistic..."
Faisal lays out the INC's priorities: to help the US and Britain purge
30-50,000 Ba'athists from public life - "We need, basically, to sterilise
all layers of society from the Ba'athist point of view" - to introduce
some form of government, and to make Iraq safe for business. "The problem
with Arab society is that there are family bonds, tribal bonds. All this
goes against free-market practices."
Maz is encouraged, but Ahmad Chalabi's nephew seems bored, impatient and
frustrated. He seldom makes eye contact; the only time he comes alive is
when he tells Maz that perhaps he should open up a restaurant.
"Sometimes I lie awake and dream about Lebanese food," he says, his eyes
aglow.
I ask Maz if he is going to become an activist for the INC in Baghdad. He
isn't. "You're involved enough in politics just being here," he says.
One day we drive to Karbala, an hour south of Baghdad, where Imam Hussein,
the martyr whose death gave the Shia their culture of contrition and
humility in the face of their own mortality, is buried.
On the road from Jordan I'd asked Maz to recall what it was about Iraq
that he loved as a child, but he had trouble remembering anything
specific. Now, as we pass a village with a minaret rising above date
palms, he points it out as typically Iraqi, and suddenly the memories of
his childhood in the town of Samarra flood out.
The family moved when he was eight and left when he was 10. It was, he
says, the happiest time of his life:"We had a massive garden and about 50
animals, birds and turtles and a dog given to me by a guy from Newcastle.
Me and my friends used to run up the minarets. It was really scary; we
were sitting at the top with our legs over the side. There was a place
nearby that went back to the [8th to 16th century] Abbasid period. We used
to get these long, long, long salamanders there. We'd grab them and see
which one would go further. This guy there had 20 donkeys. He died, and no
one looked after them, so they had to fend for themselves. They ran wild
and we used to go riding on them. I don't know what it's like now. I'd
love to bring my kid to that place."
We arrive at the cemetery outside Karbala where Maz's father, Rassool, is
buried. It is considered a good thing by Shias to have a burial plot in
one of the holy cities, Karbala or Najaf. The taxi goes down a long
driveway, lined by tombstone masons who follow us with their eyes as we
pass, and enters an immense field of dust, built up with low brick
enclosures and squat, cuboid stone graves.
Rassool was arrested shortly after Maz left Iraq in 1981. He was an
engineer who had worked his way to a senior position in Iraq's electrical
industry. The family thinks neighbours denounced him after overhearing him
make a hostile remark about Saddam's regime when he witnessed a deserter
being shot dead near their home. Rassool was arrested in his pyjamas,
taken to the Mukhabarat headquarters, spat on, beaten and held for several
months. He was released after an officer recognised him as the man who
once gave him a job, and managed to join his family in Britain a few
months later. He was an unhappy exile; he could not find work, and died in
Cardiff, in 1989.
Was it partly for his father that Maz was returning? "I don't think he
would be one of the main reasons but I do think if he could speak to me he
would be happy at me settling back in Iraq. He had the fears of any Muslim
father about his children settling in the west. I'll be able to visit his
grave more often.
"When you lose a parent it's a powerful reminder of your mortality. It
tells you not to take life too seriously and not to be afraid of taking
decisions that might be wrong. I know it's never going to be perfect in
Iraq. Far from it."
It takes time to find Rassool's grave; the tombs have thickened around the
Khazragi plot. When Maz and cousin Sa'adi find it they bow their heads,
open their hands and pray. A jobbing preacher bicycles over and begins to
recite from the Koran. Although there are no trees nearby and the land is
parched, somewhere close by a dove coos.
"I brought my son here last time," says Maz. "My father never saw his
grandchildren. My son looked slightly confused at the beginning but he
comprehends, of course, who is in the grave."
Did Maz think his father could see him now? "I don't know. Some say the
dead know what you're doing, some say you're dead and you're gone, some
say you're dead and gone but come back at the day of resurrection."
Maz was shrewd enough to anticipate the fall of Saddam and to buy land
through proxies before the war. He bought four acres in his father's home
town, Hindiyah, near Karbala, in 2000, and a second plot in Baghdad, where
he plans to build his house. Another of Maz's cousins, Selma, shows us
this second plot. Selma lives in a district called Baya. Locals have
nicknamed a street there Massacre Street because so many people were
killed when US forces attacked Iraqi irregular troops who had taken cover
in civilian houses. One family lost nine people.
One of the sons, Mothana, was conscripted for the war, even though the
family paid $600 to the government to exempt him from the call-up. His
infantry unit was posted to Tikrit, then ordered to move to Taji, closer
to Baghdad. They never had a chance. The Americans knocked out about a
dozen of their tanks on the road. For days, in the palm groves of Taji,
Mothana and his comrades were hunted from the air, without food or water,
and being lied to by their officers. Then he slipped away from the army
and walked home.
Mothana and his brothers show Maz the land, an unmarked square of hard,
uneven, baked earth about 10 metres from a paved street.
"I bought this seven months ago and now it's doubled in price," says Maz,
his shaven head beginning to redden in the sun. "It's probably going to
double again when everything is back to normal. I thought there was
actually some simple tarmac here but there isn't. But it's not a big
deal."
We pass a local boy's school. Most of the windows are broken. The schools
have reopened for two hours a day, sort of. There is a demented babble of
boys coming from the building, like a flock of giant starlings. We peek
over the wall and see that the boys are reenacting the Palestinian
intifada. The air is full of missiles. Maz asks a boy if there are any
teachers.
"Yes," says the boy.
"Where are they?"
"I don't know."
Outside a little shop nearby, a teenager lies sweating on the ground, his
leg bound up with an enormous bandage. He was injured, he says, when a
friend of his picked up an explosive device from a US cluster bomb. The
friend was more seriously hurt. From the detailed description he gives of
the device, it turns out it was not from an aircraft bomb but from
artillery - either a shell or the payload of a rocket. This type of
cluster munition is notorious for not detonating on impact, and the US
says it doesn't keep records of when they were used, or where.
Zaineb's brother Zaid has just reopened his ice-cream parlour, Milky Way,
near the al-Hamra Hotel. We go there one day and get treated to strawberry
ice cream and a working fan. The cafe has a generator. Zaid's young
daughter Aya has an ice cream too while her father and uncle Maz argue
over whether things are going to get better or worse. Maz will not be
daunted. Zaid is more pessimistic.
"There's no sense of common ownership in Iraq," says Zaid, trying to
account for the looting and disorder that still leaves central Baghdad
half-shut, even during the day. "Everything belonged to Saddam. When
Saddam went, the lid came off.
"The euphoria of getting rid of him has been soured by what's happened
since. I told Maz not to come back now, to wait for six months, a year,
see the situation, but he insists. I know he will do it because my sister
told me he'll come back now. If he wants to do something he will do it."
Next day is Aya's 10th birthday and there is a party at her house, the
house from which her grandfather set out to get bread 23 years earlier and
never came back. There are two cakes with candles and happy birthday sung
in English and Arabic. After the children have gone to bed, the adults sit
out on the lawn until the small hours of the morning, Maz trying to
convince a pilot who loathes the US presence that it is for the best.
It is a happy household, where Zaid and his wife Dina try to shield their
two daughters from the bad and complicated world. Sometimes the anxiety
and the sadness show on Zaid's face. The British authorities have never
given him permission to visit Zaineb, or their British mother, while
Saddam was alive or since. Their mother died in 2000. "I lost my father,"
says Zaid. "I don't know where his grave is. Now my mother is dead and I
can't visit her grave."
In the morning Zaid gives us a lift. First he has to drop his daughters
off at school. It's not far away and we park on the corner and Aya and the
other girl, May, get out and go off to the gate. Dozens of cars, mostly
dented, rusted, bald-tyred, come rattling up to the kerb and let out girls
in white blouses and dark-blue dresses. Saddam was evil, the Americans are
incomprehensible, no one can tell what's going on a few miles away, the
future is a mystery, and through the chaos and horror imposed by others in
the name of order, families have to chart their course. You have to make
the school run, if you can.
Postscript
Maz returned to Cardiff last month, after a bus journey from Baghdad to
Amman lasting 23 hours. Since we parted, he has had a narrow escape. While
he was standing on a roof a bullet, fired by somebody shooting into the
air for kicks, passed close over his head. On Palestine Street, a mother
went into her house for a moment, leaving her young daughter playing in
the street. When the mother came back out, the girl was dead, killed by
another stray bullet of unknown origin.
"Everywhere you go, there are weapons," Maz says. "I went into houses in
my dad's home town that had machine guns."
He is frustrated by the lack of change. An ad hoc American-funded project
to fix the sewer outside Aunt Sabibah's house seems to have petered out
after local contractors pocketed the money. The electricity shows little
sign of improvement. A few days before Maz left, the power was off
completely for 48 hours. On the second day, even the water gave out.
He says the Americans are "screwing things up". They don't rely enough on
the knowledge of friendly emigre Iraqis like Maz to work round local
sensibilities. He sometimes despairs of the Iraqis; both the militant
resisters, a group he believes is made up of disaffected Sunni Ba'athists
cocky because the Americans have not slaughtered them, and the ranks of
the ordinary disgruntled, who he says are not "politically mature".
"The change came from the outside," he says. "Because it came from the
outside, the Iraqis didn't win their freedom; it was given to them, and
they don't know how to handle it."
He is still optimistic. He met enough people with will and hope for change
to believe it could happen. America, he thinks, won't settle for the kind
of stability in Iraq which it tolerates in other friendly states around
the world - corrupt, repressive, exploitative stability. They want Iraq to
be a good example.
Zeinab is worried about going home. Maz says she is pessimistic. Zeinab
says she is realistic. Certainly the schools are going to be a problem. "I
went to inquire about the International School," says Maz. "But it burned
down, so they're going to have to find a new location."
He is still determined to return with his family for good. "The land is
there," he says. "They're going to start building in about three or four
weeks. They're going to put in the foundations."
======================
*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the
original source. ***