Digital Extras

11.4.2001

She returns home to find a starvation of the soul

BY RANDALL RICHARD
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Rana Abdul-Aziz had been waiting for this moment half her life, and by the time Royal Jordanian Flight 6870 slipped gently into a rain cloud 10,000 feet above Baghdad her lips were trembling.

In four minutes, the 19-year-old Tufts University sophomore would be home.

Slowly, through wisps of thinning clouds and tears she had been unable to shed since the summer of 1990, the sprawling terminal at Saddam International Airport began taking shape below.

Rana still winces with embarrassment as she recounts how 11 years ago -- with the giddy impatience of a 9-year-old heading off to Disney World for the first time -- she was at this same airport, mercilessly nagging her parents to board a plane for America.

No sooner had she blown her final bouquet of kisses to her grandparents -- to her Jiddo (grandfather) Amin and her B ibi (grandmother) Faooza -- than Rana's thoughts had turned, far too quickly, she now frets, to the treasures awaiting her in Orlando, Fla.

The itinerary her father had laid out for their Disney trip was supposed to find her back in Bibi Faooza's arms within a month -- a tolerable separation, she convinced herself at the time, but just barely.

For Rana, who had grown so close and had come to rely so much on her grandparents, the idea of leaving her Jiddo and Bibi -- even for the Magic Kingdom -- was intimidating.

With her father working in distant oil fields and her mother devoting so much time to her own job, it was left to Rana's grandparents to comfort her whenever the unrelenting brutality of the Iran-Iraq war got too close to her middle-class home in the Iraqi capital.

Like other Iraqi children of her generation, the eight-year war, which ended in 1988, was all Rana had known.

At times, the war seemed far away, as distant as her father -- intruding only briefly in the patriotic songs she was expected to sing each day in the classroom.

On weekends, in the grim faces at the country club, it crept closer, with new daggers of dread piercing into her playtime each time the banter of the grownups turned to whispers about all the new body bags returning to Baghdad.

There were a few times the war came as close as her bedroom window -- in the moonlit silhouettes and deafening, window-rattling palpitations of helicopter gunships, or in a heart-stopping concussion whenever a bomb rocked the neighborhood.

"When you're surrounded by death," says Rana, "you lose your innocence. I didn't sleep in my own bed for eight years -- until the war stopped. And no one ever walked around the house without holding someone's hand."

Whenever her father was due home from the oil fields, she'd wait for him outside the door to Jiddo Amin's house -- and if he was five minutes late, she'd begin crying.

"That's what would happen during the war. People would go away and you would never see them again," she says now.

Rana grapples for the words to explain the meaning of her return to Baghdad and why, even after half a lifetime, her sense of loss only grew stronger every day she was in America.

It was Jiddo and Bibi who dried her tears when she was a child, she says, and it was only with them she felt truly safe.

"In America, you do fire drills. There we had bomb drills," she says. "And because of all the chaos, my family was everything to me -- my grandparents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles. A cousin, for me, has a very, very different meaning. We were always together. We were one."

And so it was the war, Rana says, as well as Iraqi tradition, that forged her unbreakable bond with her family in Baghdad -- a bond that, in turn, shaped her grief and her persistent discontent in America.

Eleven years ago, on July 30, 1990, the day her American Odyssey began, Rana was as certain as every other Iraqi child her age that nothing -- not even Mickey Mouse and all his friends -- could keep her from her grandparents for very long.

But three days later, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent tanks rolling into Kuwait, and Rana, her younger sister, Donia, and both their parents, were stranded in America.

For the next 11 years, Rana was haunted by a lack of closure -- by a sense that in her eagerness to get to Disney World she had somehow abandoned the people she loved and needed most.

The guilt, she admits, is irrational, but real nonetheless -- the guilt a child feels for all the words unspoken and embraces shunned before a loved one's unexpected death.

Rana's new life in America was something she neither planned on, nor wanted -- and when the international community declared Iraq a pariah state, cutting off all contact and banning all travel, she felt isolated and adrift.

Her father, whose work in the oil fields was for a U.S. engineering firm, suddenly found himself with no job and a set of return tickets for a flight that no longer existed.

When her father's firm offered him a new position in Framingham, Mass., and helped the family through the process of getting permanent residency status, Rana feared she might never see her grandparents again.

Not a day went by over the next 11 years that she didn't dream of returning to Baghdad.

At first, they were the dreams of a triumphant return -- dreams of a child impatient to share her adventures in America.

There would be so many cousins jammed into Jiddo Amin's house that they'd be spilling into the backyard and sprawled out under the shade of the ancient nabaga -- her grandfather's venerable "tree of knowledge" -- as she regaled them with her tales from the Magic Kingdom.

Her most detailed accounts, as always, would be saved for her cousin Mohammed, her "leader and confidant." For as long as she can remember they were inseparable.

At sunset, as the heat gave way to a scented whisper of a breeze, they'd be outside Jiddo's library; on a four-foot-wide silver swing that hung from the fattest branch of the nabaga.

They'd pump so hard, she says, that they'd crash into the wall outside Jiddo's study, just for the thrill of seeing him dash apoplectically to his window to bark his usual admonitions.

It was on that swing, says Rana, that they'd design the rocket ships that would blast them off to the most beautiful and bizarrely inhabited planets in deep space.

After Jiddo's sunset admonitions, they'd return to earth -- Mohammed as the Grandiezer (a popular Iraqi folk hero) and Rana, his loyal companion -- always with the same wonderful secret.

It was the secret, says Rana, of lasting peace.

Just as children in America played at wars they never knew, Rana and Mohammed tried to imagine a day without the fear of death.

But even fear of Iraq's new war was preferable to separation. As her weeks in America wore on, Rana continued to pester her parents with the refrain of children everywhere -- "how much longer." Only in this case, Rana's "when will we get there" was always about Baghdad.

As the weeks turned to months, and finally into years, Rana's parents became increasingly troubled by Rana's obsession.

She was living in a fantasy world, her parents complained, longing for a Baghdad that no longer existed. Nothing, they warned her, would be the same.

But they were wrong, she told herself. They just wanted her to forget, to move on, to focus all her energies on making a new and better life for herself in America.

She was a bright girl, they told her, but a romantic -- too much of a romantic for her own good -- and it was a terrible waste to wallow in a past that could never be reclaimed.

Already she had abandoned her engineering studies for a liberal arts degree at Tufts. And why? Because she wouldn't settle down -- couldn't settle down -- until she put aside her obsession about going home.

In some ways, Rana admitted to herself, what they were saying might be true. But even if Baghdad had changed, her family, she was convinced, would surely be the same.

Unlike her sister, a premed student at Harvard University who never looked back, Rana saw everything in America as a prelude to her return.

Even now, as an American citizen -- proud of much of what that entails and what she has worked so hard to become -- there was never much doubt in her mind that she needed to find a way to make a difference in the lives of the children of Iraq.

Like the days of her childhood, when she would return with Mohammed with a gift from a far off planet, she knew she eventually had to go home, and it could not be empty-handed.

The question, for the past 11 years, was when -- and how.

It was at a campus lecture shortly before Christmas of last year that Rana first heard of Conscience International, a network of mostly American activists opposed to U.S. sanctions against Iraq, and of its plans to go to Baghdad earlier this year.

The risks, Rana knew, were great.

As an American citizen the price of going home, even for just 10 days, and carrying in medicine and school supplies was potentially high -- up to 12 years in prison, a $1-million fine and a $250,000 administrative civil penalty. To the U.S. State Department, it made no difference that Rana's motivation was personal rather than political.

Travel to Iraq -- even if only to embrace her beloved grandparents -- is a felony.

Americans had risked going to jail before by defying the travel ban on Iraq, but always on the overland route from Aman, Jordan.

This trip would be different, would attract far more attention, and with it, far greater risk.

For most of the 21 other men and women who would make up the first antisanctions delegation to fly to Iraq, international attention was precisely what they wanted.

By flouting the law, they hoped, in the tradition of civil disobedience, to call attention to the toll that 10 years of economic sanctions had taken on Iraq's 23 million people.

But not only were they proposing to fly to Baghdad, they also planned to carry a token supply of medical equipment with them -- yet another violation of U.S. law.

From the perspective of U.S. policy makers, Rana's intentions, despite her opposition to the sanctions, might have been less sinister, but they were no less illegal.

Still, despite her parents' objections, she insisted on going, arguing that it might be years -- perhaps even another decade -- before she got a second chance.

Finally, her parents relented, mostly in the hope that the visit would cure her obsession about returning to Iraq and allow her to get on with completing her education.

Rana was happy to settle for even a skeptical endorsement.

For 11 years, she had been calling Baghdad at least once a week, frantic to find out how her grandparents and all her aunts, uncles and cousins were doing.

Despite their constant assurances that things were fine, Rana was never quite convinced.

She knew of the devastation the sanctions were causing to the country's economy, the toll it was taking on the population, especially the children who were dying from diseases that had not been seen in Iraq for generations.

How could it be that they were managing to get by? Clearly, she figured, they had to be hiding things from her so she wouldn't worry.

Now she would find out for sure.

It had taken 11 years, but to Jiddo and Bibi's delight -- and her parents dismay -- Rana was coming home.

Even as Royal Jordanian 6870 was making its final approach, Rana could see that much had, indeed, changed, as her parents had warned -- and not for the better.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Saddam International Airport was packed with travelers. Planes choked the taxiways and a chorus line of jumbo jets from more than a dozen nations waited impatiently in the wings.

On the day Rana returned earlier this year, there was only a single toy-like sedan scooting toward empty parking lots in front of a vacant terminal. The once busy superhighway leading from Baghdad to the airport was a deserted ribbon of gray stretching as far as Rana could see into a bleak, overcast horizon.

Inside the terminal -- where, 11 years ago, every ticket counter, waiting lounge, customs shed, restaurant and baggage-claim area was tattooed with portraits of America's longest-reigning nemesis -- neither tourist nor airline official could escape Saddam Hussein's airbrushed gaze.

There was Saddam the Dignified, looking presidential in a tailored business suit; Saddam the Defiant in army green; Saddam the Wise, floating piously above quotes extolling the virtues of Iraq's martyred heroes and urging pedestrians to exercise patience and restraint at busy downtown intersections.

Saddam Hussein and his many faces were still there while a sneering mosaic of former U.S. President George Bush -- the man who chased Hussein's army out of Kuwait at the close of another millennium -- served as a foot wipe at Baghdad's Al-Rashid Hotel.

But the years, and Bush's two successors -- including his eldest son -- have been no kinder to Iraq. Signs of decay were everywhere. But so too were signs that the economic noose that has been strangling Iraq for more than a decade is looser now than it was even just a few months ago.

To Rana, who had vivid childhood memories from which to gauge the impact of the sanctions, much of what she would see over the next 10 days was heartbreaking.

But to a first-time visitor -- a visitor bracing for what many within the United Nations now admit is a humanitarian catastrophe largely of the United Nation's own making -- one of the biggest surprises is Iraq's seeming normality.

Once away from the eerie desolation of its airport and the barren stretch of superhighway leading to it, the city quickly becomes deceptively ordinary.

In Baghdad's center, where vendors roast succulent chickens and blend exotic concoctions from colorful mountains of fresh fruit, signs of scarcity have been slowly evaporating over the past several months.

Even in the suburbs, where dozens of merchants at the end of the bus line maintained stalls brimming with spices and produce, the outdoor cafes are alive late into the night with men playing dominoes, sipping tea and puffing sweet, fruit-scented tobacco from elaborate, serpentine hookahs .

Except for its wide boulevards and a few massive but faded monuments to its former wealth and grandeur, Baghdad, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for just about any other big city in the Arab world.

But first glances, a new visitor to Baghdad quickily learns, like a stranger's smile or a frightened merchant's angry diatribe, can be deceiving.

In Baghdad, you discover, things are rarely as bad as you thought, and never as good as they look.

As in most dictatorships that have incurred America's wrath, truth here for American visitors -- including those firmly opposed to the U.S.-led sanctions regime -- is often elusive and is glimpsed, if it all, only fleetingly and out of the corner of one's eye.

On more than one occasion during Rana's homecoming, several of the more adventurous Americans who were traveling with her decided to shun some of the government organized tours and events to explore the city on their own.

If there is truth to be found, they reasoned, it is likely to be as far as they could get from the watchful eyes of their Iraqi "minders."

What they inevitably found was that much in Iraq is not what it seems -- and that a talent for deciphering body language is as useful as Arabic when it comes to communicating with everyone from shopkeepers and physicians to concert-goers and used-car salesmen.

But it is a lesson learned at a price.

The trick is to limit conversations with Iraqis -- especially in public -- to nonthreatening subjects and to always take your cues from the people willing to talk to you.

In a country where talk -- even seemingly innocent talk -- is sometimes dangerous, attempts at even simple communication can have bizarre consequences.

A brief encounter with a shopkeeper early one night in a Baghdad suburb is a case in point.

The man's shop is a liquor store -- a curiosity in a nation where drinking alcohol in public is illegal and where drinking alcohol anywhere, and at any time, is a grave sin according to Islamic law.

When asked about his store, the shopkeeper's first response was simply to smile and invite his three visitors off the street and into his store for a cup of tea.

Unfortunately, his unexpected visitors didn't take the hint.

Instead, after begging off from what would have been a fourth cup of tea in two blocks, his visitors continued chatting with him in front of a curious gathering crowd.

In a minute or two, after spotting a man glaring at him from behind a peanut vendor's kiosk, the shopkeeper's sanguine persona turned to rage.

In a voice loud enough for the man behind the kiosk -- and for everyone else in the neighborhood to hear -- the shopkeeper erupted in a scathing denunciation of his American visitors and their inquisitiveness.

The incident should have come as no surprise.

During a stopover in Aman, Jordan, before crossing into U.S.-patrolled Iraqi airspace, organizers of the trip tried to alert members of the delegation to the risks that Iraqis face if government agents even suspect them of speaking critically of the regime.

Discretion, they insisted, needed to be observed at all times.

The other major piece of advice for the delegates was to avoid jumping to conclusions.

Don't be misled, they warned, by the amount and variety of items that were on sale throughout the city.

A better way to gauge the impact of the sanctions, they suggested, was to see how often any of those items actually were bought.

For many Iraqis, the painful truth is that much of what is available in the shops is simply cruel window dressing on their poverty. Often the items are family treasures and heirlooms offered for sale on consignment for desperately needed cash.

Still, for some of the delegates -- many of whom had visited or worked in desperately poor Third World countries -- it was difficult to reconcile what they had long been told about the suffering of the Iraqi people with what they were seeing on the street.

According to U.N. health officials and Iraq's Ministry of Health, there has been a tenfold increase since the end of the Gulf war -- from about 7,000 each year to more than 73,000 -- in the number of deaths of children under 5 from respiratory diseases, diarrhea and malnutrition.

During that same period, says the U.N., low birth weight has soared from about 1 in 20 births to about 1 in 4; cases of marasmus, which causes children to waste away, have increased more than fiftyfold; and by 1998, nearly 2 million Iraqis out of a population of 23 million were suffering from severe and prolonged malnutrition.

Diseases such as cholera and typhoid, rarely seen in Iraq prior to the destruction of its water and sewage systems in the Gulf war, also have returned, according to the World Health Organization; as have a variety of other diseases -- including whooping cough, measles, mumps and polio -- for which vaccines are no longer available.

But for visitors to Iraq it is usually in the country's underfinanced, understaffed and underequipped public hospitals that the victims of these diseases are visible.

On the street -- with the exception of some of the poorer areas of Baghdad, such as Saddam City -- there are few signs of disease or malnutrition.

In central Baghdad, where Rana's family lived a life of middle-class comfort, even at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, the changes wrought by the sanctions are far more subtle, but in some ways even more disturbing.

As terrible as that grinding war of attrition was, Iraq's oil riches enabled Saddam Hussein to buy enough guns and butter to keep those who weren't killed or maimed at the front relatively healthy and prosperous.

Even as his regime was buying high-tech weaponry from an American government happy to use Iraq as a counterbalance to Iranian influence in the region, there was enough money left over to repair the nation's infrastructure and provide a cradle-to-grave health-care system that was the envy of the Arab world.

But eight years of war with Iran and six weeks of war with America -- weeks that included the most concentrated and blistering bombing campaign of the century -- would have meant only a temporary setback for Iraq's economy if the international community had not added economic sanctions to its arsenal of weapons.

What rockets and bombs had failed to accomplish soon came to pass. Iraq's status as a regional economic power vanished almost overnight.

Except for Saddam Hussein's highly placed cronies, who are still able to live off whatever black market oil can be smuggled out of the country, every segment of Iraqi society has been impoverished by the sanctions.

With no market for its oil there is no money to rebuild Iraq's war-torn infrastructure and without an infrastructure to maintain there are no jobs for engineers such as those in Rana's family.

No one is immune. But the group that had the most to lose -- and the furthest to fall -- was Iraq's well-established middle class.

When it became apparent that the sanctions would not be lifted anytime soon, many of those in the professional class who could leave did. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, had to settle for whatever menial jobs they could find.

University professors became taxicab drivers. Engineers hawked goods if they could get their hands on them -- usually to people like themselves who were also selling the family's best carpets, watches and china for Iraqi dinars that were sinking in value by the hour.

Before the start of sanctions, each Iraqi dinar was worth about $3. A teacher's salary of 300 dinars a month got you $900 at the official exchange rate. Today, that same salary of 300 dinars is worth about 15 cents.

Public services and health care deterioriated so rapidly that Iraqis -- especially in the southernmost part of the country, began suffering from diseases and illnesses unique to the poorest of Third World countries.

The war was over, but the tragedy, for most Iraqis, was just beginning.

For 10 years now, doctors and dentists throughout the nation have lacked even the most basic drugs and equipment, engineers have no computers, professors are without textbooks, water-treatment personnel have no chlorine, farmers no fertilizers, ranchers no vaccines, teachers no chalk and students no desks.

Although it is generally conceded that the situation for much of the population remains desperate, despite some improvement since the U.N. agreed in 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil for food, there is bitter disagreement about who is responsible.

What government spin doctors in both countries have argued about for years is whether the blame lies with the U.N. and its sanctions, or with Saddam Hussein and his failure to do more to alleviate his country's suffering.

The argument out of Washington is that Saddam Hussein, since 1996, at least, has had it in his power to pump more oil under the United Nations's oil-for-food program, and that he could easily get the sanctions lifted altogether by adhering to U.N. demands that he cooperate with its weapons inspectors, which were withdrawn from the country in 1998.

What Washington, and the U.N., say they want, is for Iraq to prove that it is no longer a threat to its neighbors.

The argument out of Baghdad is that the weapons-inspection program was a sham, that the United Nations has no intention of lifting the sanctions, no matter how much sovereignty Iraq surrenders, and that the country is in the absurd position, in terms of whether it poses a threat to its Arab neighbors, of having to prove a negative.

Rana knows both arguments and is incensed by the finger pointing.

Whether Saddam Hussein is a monster or not, as far as she is concerned, is not the issue.

If he is a monster, she says, he is clearly one who was empowered by the United States to counter the growing regional influence of Iran's brand of religious fundamentalism, and it is America's oil interests -- not whether one Arab dictator is causing trouble for another -- that inevitably determines American Middle East policy.

Even before stepping off the plane at Saddam International Airport, Rana knew, from news accounts, of the economic devastation she would confront during the group's 10-day visit.

What Rana only suspected, however, and finally came to fully appreciate is how much the sanctions are ravaging the mind and the spirit, as well as the body.

She knew, from her weekly telephone calls over the years, of the brain drain. Many family friends had left since the start of the sanctions, not simply for a better life elsewhere, but because the sanctions had made it impossible for them to practice their professions.

Rana's uncles and aunts, all well educated and highly trained professionals, mostly engineers, either have no jobs to go to, or get by as merchants in a country with precious little merchandise.

But even worse, Rana saw, is what was happening to the children who were her age when she went to America.

The cousins she left behind, and the ones who came along since, still go through the motions. They struggle to get into the best schools, they study hard and they excel in their exams.

But they also confided to her during her stay that they know it is all a waste of time.

The skills they are working so hard to master in school, they said, are outdated and the jobs they are training for no longer exist.

One cousin, who is Rana's age, originally planned to follow in the family's footsteps to become an engineer. But space in understaffed engineering schools is scarce and goes mostly to students from families that are politically connected. Rana's family is not one of them. (Neither was her family secure enough to open its homes to strangers from America, even for Rana's friends on the trip.)

Rana's cousin, unable to get into the engineering school, enrolled in a computer-engineering program -- at a university that has no computers.

With a shrug of resignation, she showed Rana her syllabus.

Not only are there no jobs awaiting her when she graduates, she told Rana, but her training is so archaic she wouldn't have a prayer of getting a job even if she left Iraq.

Rana, after pouring over the syllabus, did not have the heart to tell her she was right.

And now, more than ever, Rana is determined to return to Baghdad to teach -- to somehow, as she had dreamed long ago, make a difference for the children of her country. The children of Iraq, she says, like children everywhere, deserve to live up to their potential.

"People in America think that if you're from Iraq you live atop an oil field -- that you're barbaric and uneducated," she says.

"But there's a saying in the Arab world: Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Baghdad reads."

Yet now, says Rana, even books are denied Iraq's population.

"They're isolated," she says of her family. "They can still get BBC [radio], but in terms of print media very little is available."

Her family, she says, asked for nothing when they learned she was coming -- but she crammed her suitcases with books and magazines, the things she knew they would treasure most.

"Imagine waking up one morning and finding everything has been taken away from you. After all these years, I've adapted to life in the States; so if someone took away from me what is mine -- if they took away my rights, my freedom, my liberty -- I don't think I could be so strong."

Saddest of all, says Rana, is that her cousins "are part of Iraq's lost generation. They will never be the engineers or the doctors they dreamed of being. They are a generation without a future."

Rana Abdul-Aziz was prepared, as she stepped onto Iraqi soil for the first time in 11 years, to accept, as her parents' had warned, that nothing would be the same.

But her visit, distressing in many ways, confirmed her fondest memories of Jiddo and Bibi, of Mohammed and all her other cousins, and reaffirmed her belief that it is with them, and in Baghdad, that she belongs.

The poverty and deprivation she expected to see after a decade of economic isolation are there, but for her family, at least, not as bad as she feared.

What she found, however, is a deprivation even more insidious -- one that robs her loved ones of hope for the future -- a starvation, not of the body, but of the soul.

Rana tried hard while with her family to maintain her composure.

In 10 days of visits and all-night pajama parties, she managed to stay upbeat as the family basked in reminiscences and in the promise that, after graduation, she would be with them again.

But one night, on the swing in Jiddo's backyard, she could not contain her heartbreak.

She was with Mohammed, still her leader and confidant, and she wanted from him the same reassurance he had always managed to provide when they were children.

Half a lifetime ago -- with his encouragement -- she sat on this same swing as they dreamed of saving the children of their country.

But this time was different.

This time, instead of reassurance that anything is possible, he kissed her, took her by the hand and walked away from the swing.

He had not been back to the nabaga -- to the tree of knowledge -- since she had left for Disney World 11 years ago, he confided.

And he would not, he vowed, be back again.

" 'This will be the last time,' " Mohammed told her, " 'because in this land there are no longer dreams to dream.' "

Back to: Iraq: A Decade of War Printer-Friendly Version Read/Post to our Bulletin Board on this topic