Via Dolorosa Kerbala

Via Dolorosa

We are driving to Kerbala again, this time to observe and be guests at the
celebration of the birthday of the Imam Mehdi, or the disappearing cleric
of the Shi’a tradition.

Now we are passing the Bagdad Hotel, the thick, tall concrete barriers
looming ominous over the street, hard to ignore as you zip by. Anne says,
the concrete is a bad idea, it will only serve as a target for
dispossessed Iraqis. [Two days later, she is proved right]. Our team
used to live in the hotel next door.

Evidence of Iraq’s wars are visible in the people on the street as we pass
them by…those who walk on stumps, without prosthesis. Those who sit on
the ground, the posture of disgrace in this country, with no legs at all.
This is the legacy left behind by landmines, and now by cluster bombing.

In Kerbala earlier we met the human rights organization who took it upon
themselves to clear all the landmines and cluster bombs laid in the city
by US forces this summer in advance of the next major pilgrimage. One
man, a former soldier in the Iraqi army who instructed the other local
volunteers in the process, removed over 5,000 of the explosives by
himself. Then he was killed when trying to disable a cluster bomblet in a
schoolyard. I know I’ve mentioned him before. I think of him often.

Now the US occupying power has announced two new policies: all press must
clear their stories about US soldiers or military actions through the CPA
before releasing them or risk being ejected from the country. We met
another European crew who reported on human rights abuses and were
censored in this way. They are the main channel in their country and well
respected. The second is that if anyone fires on US forces from a grove
or field, that agricultural area will be razed, even if the perpetrator of
the attack is not the owner of the field. Yes, you are right. It is just
like the policy of the Israeli military. Already we have been asked to
see one field that used to support 80 people’s existence. It comes in the
same week as the razing of Gaza. I heard my friend Laura on the BBC radio
explaining the damage there, and the UN estimating 1,500 Palestinians are
now homeless. I believe them. I have walked that neighborhood, I knew
those houses. Rachel and Tom bled on that sand.

Last week I took the testimony of a 16-year-old boy who was tortured while
being held in US custody for ten days. I have to prepare this report and
send it soon on our team’s mailing list. As I wrote down his words, in
the back of my mind I kept thinking, How can we do this? What are we
thinking? It is just like Israel. The names of the players are all that
has changed. My question now is, who was the teacher and who was the
pupil? Who is the father and who is the son? Everything I have reported
on about Israeli human rights abuses in Palestine has been duplicated ten
times over in Iraq by US soldiers. I am beginning to hear that US
newspapers are developing some courage and beginning to report on these
events. The next question is, how do we stop our neighbors and sons from
carrying on with these crimes? It is not just Iraqis who will suffer from
their behavior. Eventually all soldiers return home.

I am watching in Aadhumiya as workers lovingly rebuild the dome of their
mosque destroyed by shelling in the war. They are lining up the turquoise
tiles, and replacing the wood and stained-glass windows of this
Turkish-style holy place. Across the street is the largest Sunni shrine
in Baghdad. It too was rocketed, after the war was over, by US forces.
Its minaret clock tower barely stands, and is held up now by scaffolding.
All the glass in the ornate windows was blown out. The top corner of the
main gate was knocked off by the rocket after it passed through the tower.
It is grotesque. Like in Viet Nam, when young men with fighter planes
picked the largest temples to destroy, ignorant of the culture and history
they were wiping out, so now even a too-short cycle of history repeats
itself.

I am learning lessons in coping with outrage. I have more lessons to
learn in coping with guilt for my nation. Others on the team are newer
and their emotions flow freely.

Why, I ask, were 10,000 spare troops sitting in the yard of the Ministry
of Oil after Baghdad fell to our control? Why did we fail to protect
Iraq’s cultural institutions from looting when every war with this level
of damage, at least in this century, has been immediately followed by
looting? That of Iraq’s culture which we did not destroy ourselves we
allowed to be pillaged by others while we sat by in our brand new,
state-of-the-art tanks and ate sandwiches made with white bread. After
all, those who are our soldiers now were the children we set in front of
our television sets with a bowl of popcorn to watch the war that took
place then.

Perhaps I seem a little redundant in driving this point home: This is our
next Viet Nam, and it will come back to haunt us. The most useful class
of my college education for this fall was the course on Viet Nam. A young
kid in a helicopter rockets a thousand-year-old temple. And kills the
people. And comes home and the invincibility finally wears off. And the
nightmares set in, both for himself and his family. How much of our
homeless population and our mentally-ill population now are none other
than returned Viet Nam veterans?

There are rumblings here, both among the soldiers and among Iraqis in the
street. I hear them both, and don’t always know what to think. These two
groups have more in common, it seems, than one would think. The rumble on
both sides is that suicide rates among soldiers are at an all-time high.
That 600 soldiers have been declared no longer physically or
psychologically fit for duty and sent back to the US and dispersed among
hospitals around the country. That deaths of “green-card” soldiers are
not being reported to the media and the bodies are being disposed of
quietly here.

I am glad Camp Cropper at the airport has been closed down. I saw a
reprint of an AP article citing increasing pressure to close the camp due
to human rights abuses taking place there. As I read, I learned the
person in charge of that camp is an officer at the CPA whom I meet with
weekly. He seemed like such a nice man. When I talk with the soldiers,
they all seem like such nice people. They are fathers and brothers and
sisters and wives, and then they all share this very dark side. What
shall we do? What will they be like when they come back?

I see here that tempers soar with the temperatures. Soldiers in the
streets tell us, “We’re not trained for this.” Our translator gave one
guard a few Arabic phrases such as, “Please move over here. Stand right
there. Wait one minute.” He was grateful, and wrote them down. There
was no translator with him, and he was responsible for controlling a crowd
of several hundred people. We have seen what happens to soldiers when
they work in these conditions. They begin screaming, cursing, shoving,
and finally shooting because they simply can’t communicate. I wouldn’t
want to be a soldier here. Not just for moral reasons but for their own
well-being. They don’t know when they’re going home. “If we only had a
date to live for, we could go on, it would be bearable,” one told us while
we waited in line at an office a few weeks ago. I wonder how he’s doing
now.

I heard on the radio some US commentator saying with all the money Bush is
requesting for the Occupation, “We are in an economic crisis here at home.
Americans don’t want to pay for new Iraqi post offices, and the Iraqis
don’t want foreign corporations building them for their own private gain.”
Then I heard a member of the resistance here say, “We are only sabotaging
the oil lines that lead out of Iraq, pumping our wealth away from our
country where it is needed most now.”

We are sitting in traffic again. It has taken an hour to crawl halfway
across town. There are Iraqi traffic cops back on the streets. “Seeing
traffic police makes you feel your wait is a little less in vain,” says
Anne.

A sobbing man came to our apartment last week looking for help. His
brother had been detained by the US. “My brother doesn’t do anything,” he
cried. “In fact, all he does is drink.” We were able to help the brother
and negotiate with the military, and he was released within 48 hours—which
is rare—and the overjoyed brothers invited our team to his farm for a
dinner in gratitude. As we drove there, we passed the ancient Persian
city of Ctesiphon, and saw the curiously-shaped arch and fortress which
still stand there. We also saw the sun set in brilliant red over the date
palms and the Tigris. It was a date and citrus farm, dairy, and fish
hatchery. Irrigation streams ran through the farm. The man was quite
wealthy but lived alone except for his servants, and the house was quite
simple. Children would have loved this place. As it was, we were most
excited by the puppies. That night, we ate the samech bil’ tannour, fish
roasted in a traditional Arab oven which looks like a large clay vessel
surrounded by bricks, and it was the softest, best fish I had ever tasted.
This was after being stuffed with fruit and nuts all evening. We barely
made a dent in the platters on the table in front of us.
Across the river from the man’s house, two barges lay rusted in the water.
They were gasoline carriers, he explained, but they were rocketed during
the war and burned there.

It was a Thursday night when we were there, the night for weddings in
Iraq. Car after car after bus filled with wedding-goers passed by the
front gates with a drum and trumpet band in each bus. Here again, the
festive collided with the realities of war.

I see the central bus station and train station here in the center of
town. I hear that rail lines have been resumed to Turkey and Syria. I
hope I can travel the whole of the Middle East someday by rail. As long
as there’s air conditioning in the cars, that is. In our car right now,
there’s not.

Eventually we unravel our traffic knot and make our way to Kerbala. Soon
we move from our side of the four-lane highway over to make a two-lane
road, because so many pilgrims are walking, bare-footed, on the asphalt in
the late Iraqi summer sun, to reach Kerbala by nightfall. To help them on
their way, the farmers and villagers along the road set up tents with tea,
bean stew and rice, and plenty of water. As with the pilgrimage to Kadhum
last month, groups of young men pack together bearing the brightly-colored
flags of their tribe and chant and dance their way southward.

Inside the city pilgrims packed every street in ways you or I have not
experienced, even in Jerusalem for Good Friday. For the evening, we
joined our friend Sayyid Ali in his family’s hostel and I held a two
year-old on my lap most of the evening until the men began dancing in the
hall below and I filmed our male teammates taking part. The birth of Imam
Mehdi—the Cleric who Disappeared, rather than be martyred along with all
other forefathers of Shi’a, and who will return with Prophet Jesus on the
Judgement Day according to their tradition, is celebrated much like
Christmas. This included ornate creche scenes with angel dolls in Arab
clothes hovering over the baby Imam in a manger, and brightly colored
candles in tree-like arrangements, and lots of sweets, with which everyone
filled our hands and pockets. We were then led up to an unfinished
building so we could observe the millions of pilgrims processing between
the shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, martyred in the same battle.
From above, the movement of the pilgrims seemed choreographed and
peaceful. From below, it was a peaceable chaos! Yet the millions of
pilgrims still could sleep on their mats in the streets, men and women,
including small babies, gathered by tribe and village together to camp on
the pavement, thousands more still walking by within an inch of their
heads as they dozed. The last of the pilgrims had arrived in the city and
were well fed—physically and spiritually—and rested for their efforts.
The evening was a joyous moment before the troubles—noted only by the
single file men in black chanting their praises for a man named Muqtadar
Sadr—would erupt in the streets of Kerbala and the people there would fill
the streets again only for funerals and sorrow.