Iraqi women join Americans in peace

By Shirley Wentworth
Car bombs and the dangers of the Green Zone.

Eman Ahmad Khamas combs the Internet for stories in U.S. newspapers and all the stories she finds related to Iraq are about car bombs and the Green Zone. In Baghdad, she says, there’s been scores of reporters prowling around with cameras and notebooks out “looking for the next story” but the next story is always about car bombs and the Green Zone.
But the poets are writing about the boot. Living under the boot. The familiar image of occupation.

Khamas doesn’t find stories about living under the boot the reality of life for Iraqi people living among the ruins in bombed-out cities, coping with the lack of necessities such as water and electricity, the destruction of basic infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and bridges. Even blatant destruction takes a back seat to the constant worry and insecurity. The constant worry of being thrown into prison and tortured or whisked off the street and raped by guys wearing boots and carrying guns. Fear of the death squads.

“You can be creative,” she says. “You can cope with the daily problems — the lack of water (etc.), but you cannot cope with the constant fear of death.”

A pervasive fear that makes it almost as hard to stay inside one’s home or shelter as it is to venture out to merely walk half a block away.

“A major issue American people do not know is the bombing of cities. President Bush said that as of May 1, 2003, military operations ceased. This never happened. The bombing, the shooting and the fighting is going on up until this moment we are sitting here talking,” she says, ticking off a long list of cities that have been bombed in the last two years. “It’s not even a battle. It’s American troops armed with the most developed weapons in the world and it’s just people they bomb.”

Khamas, a journalist herself as well as a translator and activist, is touring the U.S. as part of the Women Say No to War campaign. I’ve caught up with her on her Portland leg of the journey, where she joined in the third anniversary march for peace.

The misconceptions in the U.S. press are numerous, she tells me.

Abu Ghraib, for instance. When the photos were first published in the U.S., there was much howling that these photos would inflame and enrage the Muslim world and put U.S. soldiers and contractors (mercenaries) in danger, and much criticism was heaped on the media.

Guess what? Here’s a no-brainer. The Muslim world was already outraged. Americans, as usual, were the last to know.

Khamas says she and other journalists wrote many stories chronicling the torture and sexual abuse taking place at Abu Ghraib, the demonstrations asking for an end to it all, but no one was listening. Only after the photos got exposed outside the Arab world did conditions get better, though she says there are still thousands of detainees who have been held for months and years without reason and thousands of Iraqis who are still missing. She certainly doesn’t buy the “inflaming the Muslim world” myth.

“The outrage was already there —maybe not here (in the West) because people didn’t know, but we knew,” she says. “No one listened to us. No, the truth has to be known. It is difficult and it is hard — it sometimes injures your feelings, but this is the reality of the occupation.

“There are much worse photos —someday they are going to be exposed.”

That’s also a no-brainer. Torture photos were floating around long before the Abu Ghraib photos hit the U.S. media. There are photos of U.S. soldiers gang-raping Iraqi women that can be found on the Web. There’s also the infamous “nowthatsfuckedup.com,” a pornographic Web site where men sent in photos (pay to view) with captions like “ass fucking my wife on the stairs” — a Website that expanded its business by giving soldiers free access to the site in exchange for grisly war photos. One such example is a photo of an isolated human organ lying on the road with a glib caption that reads “Name this body part,” or a photo of an Iraqi man’s head surrounded by viscera and entrails with the caption “What every Iraqi should look like.” That is not to say these photos should not be seen — but it is one thing for authorities to control access, another thing not to view them because of “delicate” sensibilities or inability to face the facts. It’s another thing altogether for these photos to show up in a pornographic venue. That should speak volumes not only about the soldier mentality but about the relationship between war, pornography, voyeurism and desensitization in general.

It should also speak volumes that the U.S. government could decide to sequester the Abu Ghraib photos from the American public for so long.

Khamas says that at the beginning of the invasion, some Iraqis thought “Now we are free, now we can have a democracy, now we can build a country without tyranny.” However, as soon as the looting and burning and rampant destruction started, they realized almost immediately that what was happening was not freedom or democracy but occupation. The ministry of oil building was the only building that had any protection.

Khamas, herself, though, doesn’t think the war is only about oil. She vividly remembers watching a broadcast a week before the invasion in which Dan Rather interviewed Saddam, who asked why the U.S. was preparing to invade, also telling the news broadcaster that if the U.S. wanted oil, their companies could come in and invest. She also doesn’t think it’s a rightwing versus leftwing sort of thing. Although she’s a lifelong resident of Iraq, when she sees images of violence on TV, she has to look twice to see if it involves Palestinians or Iraqis. The same level of brutalization is happening in both places and she notes that Sharon is no worse than Barak nor is Barak worse than Sharon. After 15 years of war, sanctions and bombings she can say ditto for the Bushes and the Clintons — they’re interchangeable.

“These are not persons — these are institutions — it’s the American policy,” she says.

That’s where things get confusing for Iraqis. On one hand, they realize there is a difference between the American people and their rulers. Even so, after the reelection of George Bush, there was a feeling of “you can’t sell us” the notion that the American people were not complicit in allowing the destruction to continue.

Eman, too, admits bewilderment. It makes no sense that a country would spend billions and billions of dollars to kill so many people — and even more, the political cost — since the rest of the world recognizes the arrogance and the unwarranted aggression displayed through the U.S. act of destroying Iraq.

After touring the U.S. with speaking engagements for the last several weeks, she too sees the disparity between the people and their government.

“Coming here, I realize they are not really the same, which is a pity because you are supposed to be a democracy.

“There is a huge gap between the government and what the people say they want — where is the democracy?”

Yes indeed. Where is the democracy? Do the liberty-loving Americans need the Iraqis to ask where their sacred democracy is hiding? It’s losing ground in the U.S. and it’s nowhere to be found in Iraq. When it’s gone, Americans, as usual, will be the last to know.

On the day Khamas was scheduled to speak in Portland, freerepublic.org breathlessly alerted its readers with a posting: “Medea Benjamin’s multiple Marxist Organizations make it somewhat difficult to find out what they’re up to, with their “Iraqi Women” tour. I just found this itinerary listed on Global Exchange’s website. Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, Global Exchange, Women Say No To War, et. al., have been peddling this tour as being voices of real Iraqi women. Not true, and I will add more about this in comments to follow on this thread. But since some of these events are tonight, I wanted to post this announcement quickly, in case some of you all wanted to attend and/or protest these events.”

Referring to the tour as the “Lying Roadshow,” some readers mobilized, exchanging postings such as “Even if these fools do come to NH they’ll never come up here in the woods where I live.” “I don’t think they will show up in my area, I live in a Marine Corps town!” “These persons are enemy agents engaged in illegal anti-war propaganda and should be cited, arrested and held for war crimes against this nation. If found guilty, they must be executed for their war crimes!”

Whew! It’s too bad none of these deep thinkers talked to these women. They might have verified for themselves that not only are these speakers real Iraqi women, but they also came to tell the American people they are not getting the straight story from the media.

In a report from David Swanson, who attended the Washington D.C. event where the Iraqi women converged before fanning out across the country on their various engagements, he wrote on Yubanet.com that the stories told that night were not like anything heard in the U.S. media — and the media was not there to record those stories either.

This from civil engineer Faiza Al-Araji: “We see Mr. Bush on television lying that Iraqis are happy for their freedom. Oh! my God! Who will come to tell you the truth? We are come to tell you the truth. And what have we done? This is what we are always asking: What have we done?

“They are provoking Iraqis against each other to make civil war to make justification to stay forever in Iraq. We are not stupid.”

Yes indeed. Who will tell you the truth? And who will listen?

These Iraqi women say the portrayal of Iraq in the U.S. media as a country full of religious maniacs on the verge of civil conflagration is fiction. They see Saddam’s dictatorship as a CIA creation. They realize the U.S. prompted Saddam to invade Iran, the precursor to Kuwait. Then bombs, sanctions, Shock and Awe, and more bombs, and occupation. They know the rules of conquest and colonialism have changed and they see themselves as pawns in the game to take over the Middle East and ultimately the rest of Asia.

Khamas told me that politicians or journalists who depict the Iraq situation as a Shia-Shiite conflict have no credibility. It’s political militias fighting for power using religion as a façade.

“There are many secular people in Iraq,” she points out. “There are many Sunnis who do not care, many Shiites who do not care, many Muslims who do not care, many Kurds who do not care (about religious differences).

The lies, they say, extend further.

They know very well they lived under a dictatorship. They didn’t need Americans to tell them that. They say Iraqi women did go to university — contrary to the lie put out by the U.S. State Department that said they could not — and were the best-educated women in the Middle East, with both free child care and free transportation —amenities unknown in the U.S. All that is gone and contrary to the Bush claims to help women‚s rights, they now must hunker down at home to avoid rape, a now widespread pheonomenon Khamas says was unknown until the arrival of the Americans.

In occupied Iraq — as in any occupation throughout history — it is the civilians who live in terror. The soldiers wielding the guns and bombs may be the dumb instruments of terror, and supporting such terror through blind or willful ignorance makes us partners in terrorism.

Despite the daily terror Iraqis live in, Khamas, amazingly, has not lost her graciousness.

“I always ask the American people to look for truth. I have a confidence deep inside that the American people are wonderful people, she says.“I think they are misled. I think if they look for the reality of the truth, they’ll find it. (When they do) I think they will react accordingly — I see they are doing that now.

Shirley Wentworth is a freelance writer based in the West.