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WAITING FOR THE AMERICANS AGAIN
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By Margaret Wente
The Globe and Mail (Canada) - March 8, 2003
Zainab Al-Suwaij was nearly 20 before she had a taste of freedom. "It was in March," she remembers. "We heard President Bush on the radio saying that, if the people of Iraq want to change their government, they have to rise up."
The year was 1991, and the Americans had just chased Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait. Zainab was a student. She lived with her grandparents near Karbala, a medium-sized city southwest of Baghdad. All her life, she had known only war and repression, concealment and silence. She grew up in a world where speaking your mind could mean death.
The uprising was a giddy, joyous time. It swept up Iraqis from all walks of life, and they took to the streets. People told Zainab to go home because she was a girl, but she refused. "This is my fight, too," she told them.
When it all started, she says, "we were just a few people. We didn't have any weapons. We were facing bullets with sticks and knives from the kitchen. The streets were full of soldiers." Then the soldiers began to desert. "They started running away and joining the crowd. They started knocking at doors asking people to give them civilian clothes."
Zainab wasn't scared. The scent of freedom was too wonderful. She was surprised to see a neighbour in the street, someone she had never spoken with because "I was afraid of him and he was afraid of me." For the first time she could remember, people spoke openly to each other. "It was like a wedding celebration. Some people were being shot, some were killed, but we were dancing in the street. We were shouting, 'Down with Saddam!' It was the first time I'd seen Iraqis that happy."
Her grandmother was sick with worry, but Zainab reassured her. "'Remember what President Bush said? If we rise up against Saddam, the Americans will help us.' "
The day after the dancing, they opened up the jails. Zainab went to see for herself. She saw where people had been tortured. She remembers the stink, the bloodstains. She saw people who had lost their minds, and instruments she describes as "human meat grinders."
At the peak of the uprising, the rebels controlled as many as 14 out of 18 provinces. But the Americans never came. Instead, they signed a ceasefire with the Iraqi military. The uprising was quickly crushed. At least 30,000 people were killed, including many of Zainab's friends and neighbours, and she went into hiding.
After the rebellion, she remembers, nobody was allowed to collect the bodies in the street. They were left for the dogs to eat.
Nobody knows better than Zainab how America betrayed Iraq. But, today, she believes only America can save it. "The Iraqi people need the help of the U.S. and its allies to remove Saddam. War is terrible. I lived through wars for most of my life in Iraq. But Saddam has been waging war against his own people for 30 years, and this war has to end."
Zainab lives in Massachusetts now, one of the four million Iraqis - 17 per cent of the population - who have been driven into exile. They include artists and poets, engineers, lawyers, teachers. And although you'd never know it from the peace protests or the debates at the United Nations, most of them agree with Zainab. So do the Kurds in northern Iraq. Come liberate our country, they are begging. Make it quick, and do it fast. Help us build a democracy, then go away.
They don't have much time for Resolution 1441, or weapons inspections (which they regard as a farce), or the endless machinations inside the UN. And what they dread most is the prospect of more "containment," which they are sure will only prolong the misery.
Ihsan al-Aasm is a soft-spoken geology professor at the University of Windsor. He escaped to Canada in 1980; his wife's family is still in Iraq. Like many exiles, he believes the voices of the Iraqi people have not been heard. "I feel the peace demonstrators don't know what's going on inside Iraq, and they are helping the regime to stay in power. It's very difficult to say, 'Go ahead and invade my country.' But change is essential. And if there is a light at the end of the tunnel . . ."
In the West, the writers and artists and many of the clergy and public intellectuals are intractably anti-war. Their views are not shared by their Iraqi counterparts, perhaps because they know how dissident writers have been killed by having the pages of forbidden books stuffed down their throats. Last month, a group of Iraqi intellectuals in exile turned out at London's huge peace demonstration. They tried to speak with Glenda Jackson, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other celebrities, but they were ignored. Political commentator Amir Taheri wrote a searing column about their observations.
"Are these people ignorant, or are they blinded by hatred of the United States?" wondered poet Awad Nasser.
"Are the marchers only against a war that would liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war Saddam has been waging against our people for a generation?" asked Fadel Sultani, president of the National Association of Iraqi writers.
Abdel-Majid Khoi, son of a prominent religious leader, had this to say: "The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive and tortured by a gang of thugs. The proper moral position is to fly to help that man liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. But what we witness in the West is the opposite: support for the torturers and total contempt for the victim."
After a few months in hiding, Zainab Al-Suwaij escaped and made her way to the United States. Today, at 31, she is executive director of the American Islamic Congress, a non-political group formed after 9/11 to promote tolerance and understanding of the Muslim faith. Like many exiles, she can still recite George Bush's radio speech word for word. "If America again fails to remove Saddam Hussein from power," she says firmly, "the long-term suffering of my people will only continue."
Last month, her eloquent account of the brief 1991 rebellion was published in The New Republic, and now she's expanding it into a book. She dreams of being able to update the ending, where she wrote: "We are waiting for the Americans once again."
mwente@globeandmail.ca
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