(Updated: Originally published October 29, 2006)
The first post of the day a redemption of sorts for Sabrina Tavernise.
Heart-wenching!
Please click on the link to see the picture and caption.
"Iraqis See the Little Things Fade Away in War's Gloom" by SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Oct. 28 — The things the women missed were almost too small to notice at first.
Simple numbers and dates began to elude their memories. They were hugging their children less. Past pleasures, eating and listening to music, began to feel flat. They were shouting at their husbands like army commanders.
Small as they seemed, these scraps of life were the effects of the war as discussed by four Iraqi women on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in a women’s center in Baghdad.
Their stories began with a familiar theme: the shrinking lives of middle-class families in the capital. Social clubs have emptied out. Weddings have been sparsely attended. But as the circle has become smaller, and as they focus intensely on just staying alive, they said, even the basics are being stripped away.
“All the elements of society have been dismantled,” said Fawsia Abdul al-Attiya, a sociologist and a professor at Baghdad University. “You are afraid because you are a woman, a man, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Kurd.
“All these things start to change society.”
In a room in the Amal Women’s Network that was strewn with remnants of a morning meeting — a half-eaten piece of cake, an orange peel, some crumpled tissues — the women talked about the changes forced on their lives by that fear.
One of the women, a senior employee in an Iraqi ministry that is now run by religious Shiites, recalled recently walking through the gate of her office building with several colleagues, two wearing form-fitting dresses with bare heads and a third in a hijab, when security guards pulled the third woman aside.
“They told her to tell her friends to be more cautious,” she said, leaning out of her high-backed chair. She asked that her name not be used because it would be recognized. She has received two threats on her life.
Her own office was a measure of just how far relations between Iraqis have unraveled. She has worked with her colleagues for 21 years, but in the past year, strange new alliances and rivalries have emerged. In business trips abroad, lists of those permitted to go were compiled along sectarian lines. Shiites chose Shiites. Sunnis chose Sunnis.
Basma al-Khateeb, a 47-year-old mother of three, shook her head sadly at the familiar tale. “We never dreamed it would be like this,” she said.
Ms. Khateeb, who runs a program for youths at the center, said she missed the very simple pleasures that gave life its texture.
“Walking. Riding a bicycle down the street. We gave up so many things we used to do,” she said. “Now we call them accessories.”
Private lives have been dented and squeezed into uncomfortable positions. Houda, a 40-year-old layout designer for a magazine in Baghdad who would not give her last name, said the violence had cast her and her husband in the roles of emergency room doctors, shouting orders and performing urgent tasks. Little time remains for intimacy. The last time she remembers feeling happy together was a year ago.
“Something has changed,” she said. “There is a kind of dryness between us now.”
One conversation that comes up daily is about leaving Iraq, but there are no answers.
It is a daily struggle not to shout at her two teenage girls, one that she usually loses. She has stopped hugging and kissing them, a strange byproduct of extreme stress, she said. Recently, her 15-year-old called to say she missed her, though they had not been apart.
“I feel surrounded by threats,” she said. “When I go to work. When they go to school.”
As the violence tears the fabric of society, breaking communities and long-established social networks, even peoples’ thinking is muted. Plans for the future are too painful, too breakable, many Baghdad residents say, and so their thoughts stay fixed on the immediate.
“The events are too big to comprehend, and the mind stops thinking,” Ms. Attiya said. The result, she said, is a distracted population with vastly diminished ambitions.
With jobs too difficult or too dangerous to find in many cases, young people in particular have put aside their dreams. In such an environment, the allure of populist leaders and militias offering protection, a sense of purpose and belonging has become compelling.
For the women — secular, middle class, employed and part of an increasingly slender slice of Iraq’s population — the effects have been on a more personal scale.
Many reported a new difficulty with memory, particularly of numbers and dates.
For Houda, it happened in front of a television set. She sat down to turn on her favorite Egyptian television show a few days ago, and for several minutes she could not remember the channel.
“It was a blankness,” she said. “My brain is loaded. It is not active like before.”
The feeling is particularly intense for those who have lost a close relative, especially a child. Haifa Hassan, an English teacher whose 12-year-old son was kidnapped while he walked home from school this summer and then brutally killed, has a face like a mask. She finds it hard to smile, and when she does, it is more a grimace.
She has trouble sleeping at night. She tries to nap, but when her husband enters the bedroom, her eyes are often open, staring ahead.
“My son dies every day,” she said, recalling his small body and neck with rope marks. She left Iraq with her husband and remaining son this month.
Life has become so hard that many Iraqis find it too painful to partake of the world outside. Houda said she can no longer stomach movies, bright things that show varnished, perfect lives. She has not watched a movie all the way through in more than a year.
Life was also hard under Saddam Hussein, the women pointed out. Plans were equally impossible to build. But the basic fabric of life, visiting family, attending weddings and funerals, was for the most part intact. Now Iraqis are letting go even of those parts.
The ministry employee sat at the table looking agitated. She attended the funeral for the mother of a good friend this month. The family was Christian, large and respected in the community, and before the war, such a funeral would draw hundreds. Instead, 10 people came to the church service, and only one, the dead woman’s son-in-law, risked following the casket out to the cemetery. Even her daughter stayed home.
Those who escape to Jordan or Syria or the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq describe stumbling around for days, extremely disoriented.
One of the women recalled that when she saw her children in a mall in Jordan, she was overcome by a feeling of indescribable relief. The lights were bright. Her children were safe, and drinking fruit shakes. But they were also melancholy, tinged with the memory of what had been lost.
Hana Edwar, the director of the women’s center, said she brought a group of young people to a scenic lakeside resort in Iraqi Kurdistan in September. When a group gathered there for prayer, one young man joked that he did not need to pray because he was already in heaven.
“Really, you feel how much we miss these things,” Ms. Edwar said. “How much we miss them.”
A year ago, there was still so much hope, she said, “but now the light is so weak.”
A stanza by her favorite poet, Muhammad al-Jawahiri, runs constantly in her mind.
“Oh open-handed Tigris!” it says. “Our ambitions have fallen so low that even the simplest among them is not promised.”
And that is the Dream of Freedom and Democracy bestowed upon the Iraqis by the Murderous and Bloody Desecrater!!!
You know who I'm talking about! And that was ONE YEAR AGO!!!!
Think it's better now, do you?
