It is a darkening Saturday evening in Baghdad. The shops are closing and the roads are blocked with traffic. At the side of one congested dual carriageway in the north-east of the city a group of friends have gathered at a small, whitewashed theatre.
On the stage the red brocade curtains are drawn open and a small orchestra of about 60 men and women sits on plastic white chairs in a semi-circle around their conductor. Once they were the Iraq Symphony Orchestra. Now, their numbers fallen and their professional status a distant memory, they are a group of amateurs who meet to rehearse three times a week.
The government minder sitting next to me explains that the orchestra symbolises his people’s brave resistance to years of unfair UN sanctions. He is right, of course. But now that seems a commonplace: so much of ordinary Iraqi life today is lived in resistance to a decade of sanctions which have impoverished the large middle class, crippled the health and education systems and only strengthened the hand of the dictator Saddam Hussein.
As the music stops, my minder falls silent and we look up to watch Emad Jusuf Jamil step to the front of the stage. He looks anxious as the orchestra starts to play again, this time an Agnus Dei by Bizet. As Jamil sings he grows in confidence and lets free a strikingly beautiful tenor voice. The sound is transfixing.
Everyone in the theatre knows as clearly as I do that a war is probably coming. But they know better than I what that means. In the Gulf war of 1991 it meant Iraqi soldiers and civilians died, the electricity was cut off and sewage spilled into the streets after water treatment plants were destroyed in bombing raids. Everyone in Baghdad has stories of relatives injured or killed, houses damaged, jobs lost.
But somehow the cloud of inevitability that hangs over the country has not brought paralysis. I keep asking Iraqis to explain why. It seems so obvious to them that they struggle to put it into words. ”We are still living and we are still doing the same things, although admittedly not as before,” says the tenor, Jamil, 37. ”We have to live. It is the law of life. God forbid if something bad happens to us.”
Jamil comes from a musical family. His father and grandfather both sang and his sister spent 18 months studying singing in Belgium. It is Jamil’s greatest regret that he could never afford lessons himself. Instead he sings in the St Raphael church choir in Baghdad. At home, while his mother watches over his small coffee bean shop, he practises by singing along to classical records in his room upstairs.
The orchestra’s first violinist, Zaid Osmat (36) describes why he and his friends continue to rehearse. He talks about the deeply physical need he has to pick up his violin each day and play. Before the Gulf war Osmat, like most musicians in the orchestra, was a professional. After 1990 the state no longer paid musicians and so he went back to his studies and became an academic, a mathematician at Baghdad University. ”I gave up coming to the orchestra but I was getting bad marks in my maths studies. I was going crazy, I shouldn’t have quit the music. As soon as I started to play again my marks improved.”
Every Iraqi, he says, has their own way to avoid being consumed by the terrifying threat of war. ”There is something in this country, some magic. It is like a desert. When it rains beautiful flowers appear for a day and the next day they are not there.”
Powerless
The threat of conflict for these people is not new. Before Britain and the US bombed Iraq in 1991 the country had spent most of the previous decade at war with Iran. Like the Afghans, the most recent military target of America’s war on terror, the Iraqis have seen so much conflict they appear strangely inured to war. Ordinary people in Afghanistan and Iraq share a startling sense of powerlessness.
Of course, the Iraqi regime itself fosters that. It is desperate to remind people they have an obligation to put up a brave resistance. Perhaps this is a vain attempt to obscure the fact that it is President Saddam, who has been personally responsible for plunging Iraq into every conflict it has faced in the past 20 years.
Driving through Baghdad I continually come across odd examples of official obstinacy, an insistence on ignoring the threats of war from Washington. The al-Jamorihya bridge (the Bridge of the Republic), one of the crucial road links across the grey Tigris river, is being repainted. It was hit three times in bombing raids in 1991, and would probably be hit again in a new war. Workmen are also reconstructing a larger and grander sandstone building to serve as the headquarters of President Saddam’s Baath party. The original building was hit in the Gulf war and again in 1998, during Operation Desert Fox.
President Saddam wants his people to be martyrs. At the entrance to the Triumph Leader Museum, which houses thousands of state gifts given to the dictator (among them a pair of riding spurs from Ronald Reagan) hangs a plaque with a revealing Saddam adage written in 1986:
”The clock chimes away over time to keep record of men and women, some leaving behind the mark of great and lofty souls while others leave naught but the remains of worm-eaten bones. As for martyrs, they are alive in heaven, ever immortal in presence of God. No time therefore is greater in value than the time put on record by the martyrs’ stand and no heritage is worthier or more sublime than theirs.”
Bunkers
Two days later I see the first hint of the regime’s military preparations. Several hundred miles north of Baghdad, on the road between the town of Mosul and the frontier with the Kurdish autonomous region, dozens of deep bunkers have been dug into the rolling green fields. Tanks and large-calibre field guns are being set into position, pointing north towards the Kurds who President Saddam fears may lead a US-backed revolt against Baghdad.
On the outskirts of Mosul, by the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, teenage boys are being taught to march in step, led by a soldier with a rifle on his shoulder. The boys are probably from one of several civilian militia groups established by the regime to assert control.
Few others seem interested in the small display of militarism. A handful climb a long flight of steps that lead up into a recently refurbished shrine dedicated to the Prophet Jonah, known as Nebi Yunis.
Today Iraqis regard the shrine as a source of luck. Inside is a large wooden coffin with a metallic grate on each side. Iraqis queue to attach padlocks to the metal grilles and throw the keys inside by the coffin, out of reach. When the keys are cast away, a wish is made.
Aziza Hassan, who is dressed in an all-covering black cape, has come to give thanks. ”My daughter wanted a husband so we came here and we made a wish. Now she has found someone and so we came to say thank you,” she says. Her daughter Danyu (20) smiles shyly.
I ask if they have made a wish that war will not come to Iraq. She sounds fatalistic. ”If God decides it then we will die. Until then our lives must continue. Once we were worried but now we have become used to war.”
She describes how hard the sanctions have made their lives and how much they want them lifted. She does not believe the west wants a war between Christianity and Islam but she is suspicious of American intentions in Iraq. ”No one is looking for our liberation. They are bombing us every day. But there is no difference between you and us as people. Everyone loves their own country and their land and I hope they will understand this.” – Guardian Unlimited Â