People Like Us (9 page)

Finally, the road to Baghdad was open, and we tore through the desert for which the word “desolate” must have been invented. After five hours, the city of one thousand-and-one nights loomed into view. We drove past the
Suq Al-Haramiya,
“the thieves market,” where stolen loot from Kuwait was sold on, and under the victory arch that Saddam Hussein had originally wanted to grace with the skulls of dead Iranian soldiers rather than with their helmets. Past the Ministry of Defense, too; I’d done my research, so I knew that this was where the dictator Qasim had lain sleeping one day in 1963 when he was bombed by his own air force, arrested, and executed by his own soldiers. Reuters had sent a telegram offering forty thousand dollars for pictures of the corpse, but the coup organizers had turned them down.

We arrived at the Rashid hotel, and that’s where I really started to feel what it was like to be in a system where you have no rights. The telephone switchboard operator would only put through calls if you paid him; and unless I paid off the guard in charge of the safes, he’d nick my equipment, too. The porter threw an aggrieved glance at the dollar note just handed to him, and looked at my sweating face. “You have more?” he asked. He knew that I knew he had a key to the room, and that he could steal everything when I went out. That’s why they had safes, but I could not put my shoes, toothbrush, and water supplies in there. So I had to bribe the maids, the security, the cleaners, and anyone else who had access to my room.

The next morning, I made my compulsory visit to the Ministry of Information, and made the acquaintance of Mazjdi of the secret police. Every foreign journalist gets one of these agents. We call them “minders”—that way, it doesn’t sound so bad. A little while later, there I was with my notebook, sitting down with the female director of the Saddam Hussein Cultural Center. I’d started by having a row with Mazjdi because I really didn’t want to go to the Cultural Center, and after that I’d politely inspected five hundred portraits by twenty different artists, all of the same man. Now the three of us were sitting drinking tea, and I asked the director why the artists had only painted Saddam Hussein. She was a pale woman in her mid-forties who spoke broken English. “Are you crazy?” she cried. “How can you doubt our love for our leader, Mister President Saddam Hussein? There’s a worldwide conspiracy against Iraq! What more fitting a subject for an artist’s inspiration than our leader, may Allah protect him?”

Mazjdi beckoned me. He really wanted to move on to the Amariya shelter, where an American bomb had killed 403 Iraqis during the first Gulf War. “All Western journalists go to Amariya. It’s an important story, or don’t you want to tell the Dutch people about the war crimes the Americans are guilty of?”

In the car we’d already argued because I wanted to go to a primary school instead; there’s no better window on the soul than children’s drawings. But permission for such a visit remained impossible to get, and no one could explain why.

It went on like this for thirteen days, and by that time I was truly down and out. I’d always left other Arab countries with regret because there seemed so much more to do. I left Iraq a day early, despite all the hassles I’d gone through to get
the visa. What a nightmare those thirteen days were, seeing people duck out of even the most innocent questions with comments like, “Iraq is blessed with such a strong leader as Mister President Saddam Hussein, may Allah preserve him.” Or, “I’m certain that our leader has a solution for this.” Or, “I’m not interested in politics.” I spent all day sitting in the car with a secret agent who had God-knows-what on his conscience, but with whom I had to dine out every evening—on the
Volkskrant
expense account, naturally.

“Amazing that they have Dutch beer here, Mazjdi.”

“Thanks to Saddam Hussein, we have everything.”

 

 

I
n the hotel, I felt like a walking cash machine. Every evening, I had to take into account the fact that my drinking water could be stolen, and my clothes and my notes. The phone in my room was bugged, everything on the television was about Saddam, and apparently there were hidden cameras behind the full-length mirrors in my room. “A real man drops his trousers,” my colleagues had sworn to me when we’d met in the whisky bar in Amman for a few courage-building drinks before my departure.

I ordered a taxi for the next morning because in the evenings the route to the border was controlled by bandits who shared their booty with the police. I packed my bags and, late that evening, walked over to the nearby Ministry of Information for the fleecing that would end my stay: One hundred dollars per day spent in Iraq, another hundred for having a satellite telephone, and fifty dollars a day for Mazjdi. They even gave me a stamped receipt because Western accountants are so strict ... As I took my leave, the director said, “You’ve now checked out.”

“Ordinary Arabs have an expression for this,” the Jordanian driver told me once we’d left Iraq.
“Hamiha haramiha-he
who protects you, robs you.”

 

 

I
was shattered after that trip. Once I’d recovered in Cairo, I realized that it wasn’t normal fear that had made such an impression on me. I’d had to deal with that fear in Libya and Syria, too—and, if I asked enough questions, in any Arab dictatorship. What had had such an effect on me in Iraq was my own vulnerability, the humiliating powerlessness I’d experienced at the embassy in Amman, at the border, in the Rashid hotel, and at the greedy Ministry of Information. I had been permanently watched, and had suffered from the constant realization that I would have no rights if I was robbed. I could have disappeared without a trace, and no one would have blinked.

This was dictatorship in its naked form, and I had to physically experience it in order to understand how fundamentally different such a system is from democracy. If someone breaks the law in the Netherlands and harms me, I know I can go to the police about it. If they don’t do anything, I can apply pressure higher up or go to the civil commissioner. I can get a lawyer, go to the press, or go to an MP or the European Court. There are many different authorities I can turn to in the exercise of my civil rights, and these different bodies monitor and correct each other. This makes the abuse of power and corruption more difficult, and at least you have the illusion of legal certainty—the basis of democracy. When I see a police officer in the Netherlands, I relax because that man or woman is there for me. When an Arab sees a police officer, he starts running.
Hamiha haramiha.

Of course, not everyone in Iraq is corrupt or terrified; just like in Western democracies, things don’t always work to the system’s dictates. Every Arab country has its own variant, and Arabs don’t spend the whole day being robbed, accused, or grassed on. But if something does happen to you, there are no universal procedures for enforcing your rights. This makes you vulnerable, and that’s why my minder Mazjdi got into a panic when I wanted to deviate from the program. It would have made him susceptible to blackmail—“Where did you disappear to all that time with that Western spy?” And Mazjdi, in turn, was probably blackmailing his subordinates.

S
ome time after that trip to Iraq, I briefly returned to the Netherlands for what we called “the correspondent days,” a biennial event during which correspondents returned home for a week. That’s where the penny finally dropped. The meeting began pleasantly, because correspondents are pleasant people, and I relaxed even more when I discovered that many people shared my uneasiness about the news agencies. Our men and women in our London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington bureaus all felt that the wrong topics were dominating the news, and that we were following the news agencies too slavishly.

This was balm to my soul, but were we talking about the same frustrations? That evening, at the drinks session, a colleague stationed in a Western country asked me what kind of people the Arabs were. I’d worked out a standard answer for that one: I adopted my specialist’s voice, and said that the Arab world was extremely varied and that Egypt was the only country I knew well. I rarely spoke to women, so
my impressions only related to half of the people; and even then, if I’d gotten to know around one person each day, in three years that amounted to around one thousand people. Out of 260 million Arabs, that was 0.0004 percent of the population.

Yeah, yeah, she reacted—now say what you really think. And then it hit me: I didn’t know what Arabs were like, not because I wasn’t trying, but because I
couldn’t
know.

“You work in a democracy,” I said to my colleague, “and in that kind of system you’ve got all kinds of instruments you can use to double-check your impressions of the 0.0001 percent of the people you talk to. There’s a context. People in your country dare to talk to you. They dare to talk to each other, and there’s freedom of the press. There are opinion polls, TV and radio ratings, election results. In other words, in your situation, the news agencies can illuminate a much greater part of society, and you can investigate things for yourself. The articles you write might be drowned out by the news agencies, and that’s what you’re fed up with. But in a dictatorship the problem is of a different kind. There’s no way I can come up with my own stuff. Where you are, opposition parties, NGOs, action groups, or journalists can call the leader to task, and he has to defend himself. Where I am, the leader sends in a gang of thugs. Knowledge is power: Dictators try to gain total power, which means doing everything to prevent their subjects getting hold of any information. The more opaque the society, the easier it is to corrupt and abuse power, and the harder it is for an opposition to form.

“The fact that you’re not afraid to listen to me telling you this, and I’m not afraid to say it, is the difference between dictatorship and democracy. Imagine if we knew that half of us here at this table—although we don’t know who they are—
have got to be working for the secret services. And what if all our bosses were party members, and reported our thoughts to the secret services? Don’t you think we’d all shut up?”

 

 

W
hen I went to Cairo as a correspondent, journalistic practice seemed a set of tools you could unpack and use all over the world. But dictatorships and democracies weren’t two cars of different makes. If a democracy is a car, a dictatorship is a cow or a horse. The man who turns up with a screwdriver or a soldering iron is powerless.

My third year as a correspondent went by, and the world seemed stranger every day. Syria banned the Disney hit
The Lion King
because the president was called Assad, which means lion in Arabic. In Saudi Arabia,
The Pink Panther
was called
The Pink Hyena
because panther is
fahd
, and that was the king’s name. President Mubarak was voted “Man of the Year” by all the Egyptian daily, weekly, and monthly papers. In the days before the Iraqi “referendum,” people didn’t get a dialing tone when they picked up the phone, but a recorded message with “Yes! Yes! Yes! Saddam.”

No wonder people told each other jokes in abundance: “Congratulations, Mr. President!” the advisor says. “99.98 percent voted for you at the referendum. That means that only
0.02 percent were against you. What more do you want?” The leader growls, “Their names.”

Burglars break into the safe at the central bank. There’s a big panic until the governor comes out and says in relief, “False alarm. Nothing important was stolen—only the results of the 2015 election.”

 

 

T
he most surreal thing was my own job. Student riots broke out in Iran, and I had to cover them from Cairo because Tehran kept its gates closed. How many readers and listeners would know that I couldn’t even place a direct phone call to Iran from Egypt, and that Cairo was about the least-suitable place on earth from where to follow these disturbances? Not many, I hoped, and it really couldn’t come out that I knew precisely six words of Persian.

Syria was closed off at that time, too; despite my barrage of faxes (“Your country deserves to be described from the inside, not by my colleague in Tel Aviv”), I never got a personal visa. Other journalists had the same problem, and the Cairo Foreign Press Association organized a very brief and tightly run group trip to Damascus. Part of this was a collective interview with the Syrian minister of economic affairs, for which our opening question was: “Each year, two hundred thousand young Syrians flood into the work market. How is Syria going to help them find a job?” The minister smiled sympathetically and said, “Thanks to the wise leadership of our president, we don’t have any unemployment. At the most, just a few lazy people.” It went on like this for half an hour; then, as I was leaving the ministry at the end, a pretty young woman grabbed hold of me. Did I belong to the group of Western journalists who’d been invited by the Ministry of Information
to come and look into the impressive progress of Syria under the leadership of President Hafez Al-Assad? She’d seen us on the news. Could I pass on this petition to the minister and have it signed? Her brother would pick it up later that evening from my hotel because, of course, a nice girl like her couldn’t come to me. Was this an appeal for a pardon for a group of political prisoners? A complaint against human rights crimes? A plea for democracy? Our entire group would be thrown out of the country and my name put at the top of the blackest of black lists if I handed a petition like that in. But then I took another look. It was an appeal for a job in television. “I want to be a presenter,” she smiled charmingly.