Baghdad Journal
Day 10
Tomorrow we leave Baghdad, as Marc says, at "oh-dark-thirty".
I'll be glad to be back in the other world. My daughters were
doing their university exams while I was here and I missed the
chance to be as close in touch as we usually are, and let's face
it, talking to your wife and kids on a satellite cell phone when
everyone sounds like Donald Duck with his head in a tin bucket
does not lend itself to endearments.
Abbas Mehdi Abbas is searching for information about his father.
|
But I'm sorry to be leaving Baghdad. Our translator Ahmed Abdullah
Faddam has become a good friend. He just left with tears in his
eyes. (and ours too). These people are a tough lot though. What
they've been through remains beyond my comprehension, even today.
What lies ahead for them also remains beyond my comprehension.
We met a lot of very unhappy people here. Angry people. What may
not have come across as well as I might have liked is the humor
the people here have. On our last drive through the city today,
we saw some signs of hope; shopkeepers hosing down the sidewalks
in front of their shops, washing the sand and the smoke stains
and the dust off the windows. They're leaving the tape on the
glass though. There are still lots of big bangs in Baghdad and
plate glass is one very expensive commodity. Marc and Ahmed and
I laughed out loud at one point on our drive through the city.
It was a big billboard that had once been a part of the whole
"Love me, love my thugs" advertising campaign for Saddam
Hussein. Someone had climbed to the roof of the building it was
on, and used a knife to a very creative effect. I'll get Marc
to include the picture here.
Aside from the humor though, there are so many stories that have
yet to be told.
A Baghdad billboard gets a new look. |
I want to tell you about one man you didn't hear on the radio.
He was an Iraqi man who saw our truck and my microphone earlier
today and came over with a tattered manila folder. His name is
Abbas Mehdi Abbas.
"What's this?" I asked.
"It's my father." Abbas said.
I asked him to explain.
Turns out Abbas had been one of the first people into the secret
police headquarters after the scampering retreat of Saddam Hussein.
He knew what he was looking for and he found it. Back in 1981,
in the early years of Iraq's war with Iran, someone in the Mukhabarat
(the secret police) decided that Abbas's father and his grandfather
and his two uncles were allied with an Iranian movement. They
were all picked up. No one knew why. Abbas was ten at the time.
Ten.
The file he held, explained in cold bureaucratic Arabic script
that the four men had been arrested and "questioned"
and executed.
So after 24 years, here's a grown man standing in front of me,
with a manila folder that explains for the first time, what happened
to them all. Here's his picture
You be the journalist. What do you ask? What do you say? I stumbled
some lame question out.
He looked at me with the folder in his hand…the name of
his father and his grandfather and his two uncles, written on
the cover.
"I feel so much sorrow to see this file and to read it.
And I am so sorry for all the years that we have served as a citizens
of a country that was led by such criminals."
"The people" Abbas said, "were ruled by force,
not by love"
Let it stand as a coda to these days in Baghdad. Let someone,
somewhere, hear a grown man's call for a government with compassion.
For me? Tomorrow it's a long drive to Amman Jordan, a shave,
a shower, and then a trip back to my family. For Abbas…there's
a handful of pieces of paper that finally explain what happened,
to his family.
FIELD REPORTS
