A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal (5 page)

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Authors: Asne Seierstad,Ingrid Christophersen

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Editors; Journalists; Publishers, #History, #Military, #Iraq War (2003-2011), #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Journalism, #Social Science, #Customs & Traditions, #Sociology

BOOK: A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal
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I sit in front of the TV all evening, mesmerised. It is Saddam Hussein all the way, be it news, religious or entertainment programmes. Music videos are played, one after another, between shots of the military council. There is one man and one message - Saddam!
 
The stars of the music videos appear only briefly on screen. Saddam plays the main role, in a variety of get-ups: uniform, lounge suit, white shirt and braces, feathered green Tyrolean hat, black beret, turban, Bedouin dress, Palestinian scarf, lambskin hat, or Argentinian tango hat; more often than not waving a rifle around.
 
Labourers also feature frequently in the videos, hammering and welding - the country is being built and defended for all to see. Other videos show historical ruins, camels in the desert, mighty waterfalls and beaches, followed by fighter planes, aircraft carriers and marching soldiers.
 
Up-to-date pictures of anti-war demonstrations from all over the world are also given prominent coverage on Iraqi TV. They even find a European wandering around with a portrait of Saddam.
 
Suddenly weapons inspectors appear on the screen and a Viennese waltz wafts from the TV set. The inspectors are standing outside a tall gate. They are being hassled by an Iraqi whose threatening finger is beating time to the music. Bumbling inspectors stumble around. Some are listening; some look down on the ground, others up in the air. The TV viewer cannot hear what is being said, but one thing is for sure: the Iraqi is giving the intruders a dressing down. With their rucksacks and blue berets, they remind one of a school outing where no one knows where they are or what they are supposed to look at. We never see them actually inspecting anything, we only see them being given instructions. The pictures are repeated time and again. Iraqi TV has quite simply constructed a ludicrous music video of and with the weapons inspectors - to waltz time - and they are walking out of step. Only the threatening finger keeps time - quick, quick, slow.
 
I have read that from time to time Saddam Hussein communicates his private thoughts to the populace. - I never have problems falling asleep. I fall asleep the moment I put my head on the pillow and I never use sleeping pills, he once said in a rare personal TV interview. At other times he relays a few comforting words and tells the viewers not to worry.
 
- If I am not always smiling, do not worry. The smile is there. It is there because I have chosen the right way. I smile because Americans and Zionists will have to be sacrificed. They should have chosen a small country to fight against, not mighty Iraq.
 
Now Saddam sits behind a desk. He talks to the camera. Is he giving us some useful sleeping advice?
 
- Good night. Sleep well. I am watching over you!
 
In slow motion he rides off the screen on a white horse - into the sunset.
 
 
The next day Hans Blix holds a press conference. It will be the last before he sets off for New York with his final report to the UN Security Council. I arrive at Hotel al-Kanal on the outskirts of Baghdad in plenty of time. I am without my minder for the first time; they are denied entry. This is UN territory. I gleefully leave Takhlef by the entrance and trot into the conference hall. Blix and his men arrive one hour late. The good-natured Swede gives a sober account of the latest developments from the weapons inspections, what the Iraqi government has accepted, what the obstacles are. He thinks the Iraqis are yielding, that they might agree to more UN demands. - But we need more time, he says.
 
When he has finished several hands fly up in the air. Quick-on-the-draw journalists vie with each other to ask questions. They all speak at once. - Mister Blix, Mister Blix! The answers are as noncommittal as the introduction. I wonder what he is really saying. What it implies. Does it mean war, does it mean peace, or does it merely mean a postponement of war?
 
- Last question, Blix says, surveying the sea of raised hands. - But it has to be in Swedish.
 
There are no Swedes present. The hall is silent. Surely I am able to affect something in Blix’s mother tongue. But I can think of nothing, my head is empty, so empty. - So there are no Swedes around, Blix concludes. Chairs scrape the floor, the party breaks up.
 
- Honourable Mr Blix, a question from Dagens Nyheter in Stockholm. What did you
really
mean by all that?
 
That’s what I should have asked. At least that’s what I wanted an answer to.
 
 
- You have so much energy, Takhlef complains. I don’t understand why you need to talk to so many people.
 
Aha, I’m winning, I think. He can’t keep up.
 
We are at Baghdad’s Stock Exchange. Takhlef thought a ten-minute interview with the boss would suffice, but I want to talk to the employees. I might have to interview ten brokers before I find one who has anything interesting to say. The ones who are prepared to share their thoughts with me are few and far between. I must go on, go on, until I have assembled a picture.
 
- But this is so interesting, I exaggerate excitedly. - It is important to report that quotations are hitting the ceiling, while the rest of the world thinks the country is going to the dogs.
 
- The last three months stocks and shares have risen by nearly fifty percent. Iraqi investors have nothing but contempt for the threat of war, the Stock Exchange chairman says. They are buying factories, banks, hotels.
 
I assume the appearance of a naïve and friendly journalist, energetic and enthusiastic.
 
- The majority speak English here, Takhlef volunteers suddenly. You’ll manage on your own.
 
- Yippee, I think, while my minder goes and sits on a chair at the end of the room. He appears to be lost in thought, and is looking up at the boards on the wall.
 
The Stock Exchange is the size of a gymnasium, divided in two by a solid barrier. On one side, where the boards are, the brokers work; behind the barrier are the buyers and sellers. The closed Iraqi market operates according to its own rules. Only Iraqis can trade and only with Iraqi dinars.
 
Experts call the country’s economy chaotic. The chaos consists of some liberalisation at the micro level and immoveable bureaucracy and planned economy at the macro level. The economy is heavily scarred by sanctions and hyper-inflation. Twenty years ago one dinar was worth three dollars; today two thousand dinars buy only one dollar. There are plenty of loopholes in Saddam’s socialism. Smuggling, corruption and money laundering is widespread.
 
I stop next to a well-dressed man with a moustache. He speaks fluent English.
 
- Rising, says Telal Brahim contentedly. - Five percent in one week. They didn’t get us after all!
 
Telal hasn’t bought into any old company. He has invested in one of Iraq’s chemical factories, which recently had the dubious honour of receiving an unannounced UN weapons inspection.
 
- Provocative, but quite fun really. I own shares in the firm so I should know whether it produces anything illegal or not. We make plastics - boxes, bags and bottles. PVC products - run of the mill plastic. A factory producing chemical weapons wouldn’t be quoted on the stock market, Telal fumes, while all the time keeping an eye on the figures on the board. The quotations are altered with a felt pen and a sponge. The brokers run to and fro between the clients and the board. The swiftest is the most successful. Electronics have yet to reach the Baghdad Stock Exchange.
 
- A bull market. Quite unexpected! Muhammed Ali exclaims. - Most people thought shares would fall as a result of the threat of war, but the opposite is happening.
 
The Iraqis quite clearly
want
to believe in their economy. Anyone who gambles now might stand to gain many times over later. - Unless the war is long and bloody, Muhammed predicts. He lived in London for fourteen years, where he got a PhD in economics. - London is my second home, he says while all the time boasting about Iraqi stamina. - A quarter of a million soldiers threaten our borders. Instead of fleeing the country, people are investing in the stock market. It’s impressive, isn’t it? Let the Americans come. They just want our goodies, he says in his polished British accent.
 
Someone who was led astray by the threat of war stands gloomily in the corner watching the hive of activity. Yasser is a retired policeman who put his savings into a cycle factory. Certain that war would devalue his shares he sold them off some months ago. - When I sold, the shares were worth eleven dinar. Now they are up to eighteen, he says dejectedly. - I come three times a week to check. When they have fallen to fifteen I’ll buy them back. Of course I’ll end up with fewer than I had. Oh well, we can only hope they’ll drop.
 
Beside him is an elderly lady in a white head-scarf and thick glasses. She owns one million shares in Baghdad Bank and signals continuously to the brokers. While the living standard of the man in the street has been drastically reduced during the last decade, Suham has grown richer. - I have more money now than when sanctions first began. But I don’t take it seriously, this is just my hobby, she smiles apologetically. She is a doctor and owner of a clinic specialising in gynaecology.
 
- Most people are worse off, she admits. - They come to me with the most terrible afflictions; many of them cannot afford the treatment. This country is seeing a lot of horror.
 
- Goodbye Doktora, one of the brokers calls as the Stock Exchange is about to close.
 
- See you, says Suham, before disappearing out through the door and back into real life - to patients who cannot pay for her services. She is one of the winners; a dinar millionaire - on the board at least.
 
 
The press centre lies on the first floor of the Ministry of Information, an eight-storey monstrosity. Minister Muhammed Said al-Sahhaf sits at the top, the man who later, much later, is nicknamed
Comical Ali.
Now he’s just ‘the man at the top’, ‘the minister’ and not at all comical. He’s someone we never see, but who ultimately decides our destiny - how long we can stay, what we can see, where we can travel. On the ground floor is INA, the Iraqi News Agency. All Saddam’s decrees and laws are broadcast from here - via television and the three major newspapers, which are confusingly similar, despite their different names and possibly different archive photos of the president on the front pages. News never originates here. It is written in the Presidential palace and phoned in to INA, where a number of secretaries and so-called journalists take dictation and pass it on to the newspapers.
 
Every morning a cheek by jowl stream of people rounds the corner and hastens in the door of the Ministry of Information. They are men in suits and women in high heels. Some with flowing locks, others with hair hidden under shawls and bodies under loose folds. Everyone appears to be heading for something important. Like worker ants they carry heavy bags and briefcases into and along the anthill’s corridors, offices, nooks and crannies. At lunch time the building teems with people on their way out. They stop and talk by the entrance before ascending once again. In the evening they stream out once more, not quite as determined, but just as fast.
 
The Ministry of Information is divided into storeys according to a strict hierarchical pattern. The eighth floor commands the seventh, the seventh commands the sixth, and so on, right down to the second floor and the conference rooms where al-Sahhaf and his colleagues conduct their everlasting briefings. Anybody unlucky enough to find himself in the press centre when a conference is announced is squashed into the large hall. Kadim, Mohsen and engineer Walid, whose job it is to oversee our satellite telephones, wield invisible whips and herd us like cattle into the room. If they spot you it is too late to plead other engagements. Worst of all is when the Agricultural Minister, Trade Minister, Health Minister or any one of the others who do not speak English top the bill. They go on in Arabic, for an hour and a half, followed by questions from journalists from Arab-speaking countries. There is no translation. You can bring your interpreter with you, but having done that once you won’t do it again.
 
The Agricultural Minister does not talk about agriculture but the strength of the Iraqi army. The Health Minister never mentions hospitals, but goes on about how wonderful Saddam Hussein is, and the Trade Minister has nothing to say about sanctions and their effect on the economy, but how the Americans will suffer should they attack Iraq. Regardless of content, the speeches all originate from the same floor - the eighth.
 
The ground floor - the lowest and most pitiful - is ours. Here the gruff Uday al-Taiy rules. Not as awe-inspiring as his namesake, Saddam’s son, but scary enough. While the president’s monster of a son is corpulent and limps as the result of an assassination attempt seven years ago, our Uday is light of foot, thin and sinewy. His brows are always knit, his shoulders heavy, his nails manicured and his suits immaculate. A cold wind blows in his wake. Even though he never deigns to greet me, I stand to attention and lower my eyes. I am always scared stiff that he will catch me doing something; that I have misbehaved, said something unforgivable.

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