On Iraq, Sweet!

[Annie]

Italics, mine.

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/02/the_first_time_.html

February 06, 2005
'The first time I have felt like a complete human being'

Last Sunday Iraqis were voting in their first genuine election. This Sunday, one week on, seems like a good time to think back on that fine day. On BBC Radio 4 this morning, Fi Glover spoke to Hugh Sykes who had just been present at a ceremony to mark the opening of ten new sewage pumping stations in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

FG: Now, last week, Hugh, you described very vividly the scene that had greeted you on your arrival at a polling station. It's an image that was incredibly hard to eradicate from one's memory, even just hearing it through the radio, but a week on I wonder what remains in your mind?

HS: I tell you, not only a week on but that very evening I thought I was going to have nightmares and not a very good night, but I woke up in the middle of the night with a vivid image, not of those awful scenes, but of other much happier scenes. Whenever we drove through the vehicle-empty streets of Baghdad there were hundreds - literally - of children playing football in the streets, using cardboard boxes as goalposts, and all week people have been proudly showing their inky voting fingers, to show 'I have voted', and making this public statement. One man said to me: 'Welcome to the new Iraq.' And all this immense, infectious emotion is summed up to me in fact by a woman whose voice I was unable to play you last week because of a power cut - a sixty year old woman, Umm Ali [unsure of spelling - NG], talking to me on her way in to vote. [HS says to her...] 'How important is today? You look very happy, madam. You look very pleased.' [She replies in Arabic and he translates...] She prays for the safety of Iraq from north to south, and east to west. 'Today is the first time I have felt like a complete human being,' she tells me.

FG: Hugh, what is the talk there regarding the ending of the occupation?

HS: There's some talk. People don't like being occupied; it's pretty straightforward. They do regard it as an occupation, but some regard it as a benign occupation. Others are critical of the occupation, and the time that it's taken to reach this point. Maybe, they wonder, there would have been less violence if sovereignty and elections had happened sooner. But now is now, a lot of people keep telling me, and there's a lot of realism. For example, I asked Alaa [spelling?] a market trader... I asked him... about ending the occupation. 'No way,' he replied.

Alaa: If any kind of foreign forces leave Iraq, there will be no Iraq. We need American and British and any foreign experience to control the country again, because 35 years of Saddam's dictatory, we lost the rules, we lost how to control a country by a parliament. There was one man ruling the whole thing. I haven't been in any kind of elections since was I born.

HS: How old are you?

Alaa: 35 years. [He laughs.]

HS: Alaa - and an Iraqi army colonel who I met, Samir Al Tamimi, agrees absolutely with that. He was very candid with me about the extensive training and equipment that the Iraqi security forces still need before the Iraqi army in particular can work on their own.

SAT: We are new. New army; new country.
.....
HS: [on the subject of intimidation] Here's Sergeant Imad. He's been ostracized by his mother for joining the Iraqi army, and his brothers have threatened to kill him.

Imad: My younger brothers and my sisters and my mother and my brothers, no one talking to me. I won't give up the army unless I'm killed.

HS: And you're wearing a hat with 'No fear' written on it.

Imad: Yes, 'No fear'. And I'm not scared of anybody. Yes.

HS: Imad. There's a moving, anonymous tribute appeared on a notice-board I was looking at yesterday evening, a tribute to the Governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidri, who was assassinated just a month ago. It reads: 'This country is overflowing with Iraqis willing to sacrifice their immediate security for the greater freedom of all Iraqis.'

There are people in the West - and of the left - who express their solidarity not with these brave Iraqis fighting for democracy in their country, but with those who are trying to kill them. There are others - also loosely of the left - who position themselves most adroitly between those who have released that country from a decades-long tyranny and those battling to plunge it back into another. One day this history will also be written.

Posted by Norm