[Peace-discuss] note from Baghdad

[Ricky Baldwin]

[Hi folks - This is a note I just received from my
friend in Baghdad.  I've posted some of her articles
before, but she waxes poetic in this note and gives a
feel for life in Baghdad these days.  Thought others
would be interested. -RB]

Happy anniversary. 

“ATTENTION, ATTENTION, ATTENTION… THIS IS A MILITARY
AREA… THIS AREA IS CLOSED, BY ORDER OF THE COALITION
FORCES… IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THIS AREA…IF WE SEE
ANYONE WITH A WEAPON, HE WILL BE SHOT IMMEDIATELY.”

That was my wake-up call this morning: a US Army
Humvee, prowling the streets outside our hotel,
blasting the curfew warning in Arabic at psyops-level
volume. 

The Humvee was patrolling Firdous Square, the little
public square where the US pulled down Saddam’s statue
exactly one year ago today. You’ve probably seen
endless TV coverage of Firdous Square—whenever Jane
Arraf or Ben Wedemann is standing in a front of a
beautiful, blue-domed mosque and talking live, that’s
where they’re standing. Usually, they’re in front of
one of the two big hotels off the square, the Sheraton
or the Palestine, the locked-down fortresses where all
the big-bucks media stay. (We’re in a smaller,
cheaper, and less secure place nearby.) 

But Firdous Square isn’t just where they pulled down
Saddam’s statue. It’s also where  a sculptor named
Basim Hamed put up his statue, just weeks after
saddam’s fell, of a nuclear family standing in front
of the rising sun. Modernistic, almost abstract, it
was a perfect symbol of the country’s rebirth: it
avoided the kitchy, neo-fascist socialist realism that
saddam loved so much, but it celebrated regular Iraqis
in a deeply humanistic way. Even the very curve of the
sun, as it arced into the sky, seemed to speak of a
soaring, unfettered future. 

Though Basim put up the statue without any help from
the CPA, they immediately adopted it and used it as a
symbol of how the US was helping iraqis. The military
even wrote a story about it in my favorite propaganda
newspaper, Baghdad Now, which boasted the irresistible
tag line “All the News You Need to Know.” They
confused Basim Hamed the sculptor with a different
Basim, printed quotes they’d obviously made up
themselves, and made up a story about him getting
kicked out of the state-run art school for refusing to
make a statue of saddam (he actually just dropped out,
sick of the pervasive baath mentality).   

For me, Basim’s statue came to symbolize everything I
love in Baghdad and Baghdadis: resilience, DIY spirit,
and an anachronistic passion for abstract modern art.
Basim is part of a group called al-Najeen— in arabic,
the survivors, because they survived saddam hussein.
When I first came here in October I was convinced that
they were going to be the future of Iraq. [...] Every
time I passed Basim’s
statue, I used to think: Well, there’s one good thing,
anyway. 

Lately, though, Basim’s statue has been festooned with
pictures of Moqtada Sadr and Mustafa Yacoubi. There
were also a couple of banners from shiite political
parties. Every time I passed it in recent days, I
would think about how that must annoy Basim. The
Najeen boys don’t have much use for organized
religion, and they’re not much on political parties
either. But midafternoon today, a US soldier struck a
blow for freedom: walking into the abandoned square,
he clambered up on the historic pedestal and tore down
the pictures and the banners. 

I had just returned from Sadr City, where I'd been
swallowed into an angry river of hundreds of men
streaming out of a mosque and chanting “Forgive us
Ali, forgive us Ali, Moqtada is the wali”—Sadr is the
wali, inheritor of the Shiite martyr Ali. Basically,
they were screaming that they love him so much they’re
willing to blaspheme their own religion for him.
Taking down the pictures in firdous square seemed
pointless, to say the least. 

By this time, the psyops Humvee had stopped mentioning
weapons and was flatly announcing that “IF WE SEE
ANYONE ENTERING THIS AREA, HE WILL BE INSTANTLY SHOT.”
Then, in case that seemed unlikely to win hearts and
minds, the hidden voice of America would add: “IF YOU
ARE ANGRY TODAY, YOU SHOULD BE ANGRY AT THE MEHDI
ARMY, BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE THE BEST INTERESTS OF
THE IRAQI PEOPLE AT HEART.”

Twelve hours hours later, at four in the morning, this
bastard is still circling our hotel, still blaring out
his warnings--doing his best to prove that here in
firdous square, at least, America’s in control.  

annia



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