Nostalgia for the past
It is over a decade now that the Americans overthrew the Ba’athist government of President Saddam Hussain in 2003 in an experiment to restructure Iraq according to the Western democratic ideals, and if successful, to replicate it as a model to transform the entire Middle East. The experiment failed. How did this failure affect the lives of the Iraqis was brought to our knowledge through various sources such as journalists, political analysts, etc. They presented the ‘factual reality’ of Iraq but side by side exists the ‘fictional reality’ as is experienced, understood and explained by popular poets and writers. One such popular Iraqi female novelist is Maysalun Hadi. How did she conceive and represent the life in pre and post- Saddam Iraq in her seven novels has been the focus of research of Ronen Zeidel, who is a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies at the Tel Aviv University.
It seems as if the Iraqi society had been most adversely affected by the wars first waged by Saddam to flex his muscle and later on by the Americans to dethrone him. Like all wars, these also caused immense death and destruction, consuming both the young and the old whereas those who survived the war- fronts looked much older than their time of absence from home. The American occupation preceded by strict economic sanctions from 1990 onwards degraded the lives of the middle classes and caused widespread destitution among the poor. Much more significant than the economic impoverishment were the psychological stress and moral degradation as these extinguished the desire to live.
Not all could bear this traumatic experience so a large number fled Iraq to wherever they could severe the strong familial bonds. Many emigrants could not adapt in the greener pastures particularly in the West owing to language barrier, liberal traditions and cultural shock. They suffered from identity crisis and as a consequence some of them discovered the appeal of mosque as “the only safe place in the jungle.’’ One of Hadi’s characters, Yasir, criticizes the Western hypocrisy by arguing that ‘’Muslims in the US have built mosques that are spacious and beautiful whereas the Americans discourage the Iraqis from doing the same in Iraq.’’ Life in exile was like a limbo which Hadi depicts with dots in her works signifying the insignificance of that life and when some of the emigres who returned found it impossible to restart from where they had left to the extent that a pianist stopped playing piano because he thought “Iraq is not fit for music.’’
Through the “rediscovery of mosque” by her characters, Hadi points to the rising religiosity in post-Saddam Iraq which is presented as the implied outcome of the exposure to the Western culture because one of the female characters admits that in the 1970s she used to wear skirts and not the traditional head covering which she adorns, now. Through other characters she highlights how the rising religiosity has exacerbated sectarian divisions in Iraq and blames the shias for ‘collaborating’ with the Americans by first stating as to who “brought the elephant in” and later questions as to why “did [shias] open the gates of the city in their ignorance and stupidity.” Through a character, she shows how the shia- led Iraqi political authorities in the post- Saddam era repressed and persecuted the “peace- loving Iraqi patriots.” Overall, she supports civil and passive resistance against both the Americans and their shia ‘collaborators’ but adopts a controversial stance when one of the characters who is arrested by the American forces for keeping glorifying videos of jehadis resorts to suicide bombing against the US forces making another character to comment that though suicide attack was unjustified but so were the searches and detentions by the occupying forces.
Though Hadi hopes to have a democratic and pluralist Iraq with no place for the ‘collaborators’ in future; the prevalent unending misery has generated a nostalgia for the past in which the Ba’athist rule of the 1970s is remembered as “the best period we have lived in so far” because the post-Ba’ath period has “no name or quality”. There is a continuous yearning in her characters for the ‘good old days’ of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Umm Kulthum and pan- Arabism because in those times instead of fighting sectarian battles among themselves, the Arabs railed against the US and Israel. In her ‘fictional reality’, Hadi equates the American invasion of Baghdad with the destruction caused by Hulagu Khan in 1258 AD but quite conveniently condones Saddam for starting the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that preceded the Gulf War of 1991/92, victimization of the shia majority as well as the chemical bombing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.
Even to this day, the Kurds resent Saddam’s policy of ‘Arabisation’ under which the Iraqi state encouraged thousands of ethnic Arabs to settle in the Kurdish areas. Hadi’s writings are totally silent over Saddam’s repression to every kind of opposition against his rule particularly the shia uprising of 1977 in Najaf after which he executed Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Sadr, the founder of the Islamic Call Party (Dawa). It was the result of such brutal Ba’athist oppression that compelled two more shia leaders, Iyad Alawi a former Ba’athist to form Iraqi National Accord (INA) to instigate the overthrow of Saddam from within the Ba’ath Party and Ahmed Chalabi to set up the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to forge closer ties with the US that enabled the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. These ties definitely benefited the shias because after ‘de- Ba’athification’ under which the 400,000 strong Iraqi army was disbanded; the Americans tried to fill the void by forming alliances with shia militias such as the Sadrist Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigade and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SICRI), whose ‘ethnic cleansing’ of their former sunni ‘oppressors’ created opportunities for al- Qaeda. In the ensuing four-corner fight, several cleavages ripped apart the fabric of the Iraqi society. At the sectarian front, there was a visible schism between the shias and the sunnis while at the ethnic level, there was an Arab-Kurdish rupture.
As the Americans began to remodel Iraq on the Western ideals, the society began to polarise between the secularists and the Islamists. The secularists led by Barzani and Talabani supported the US policy of democratization and secularization whereas the Islamists opposed this agenda. Whether the Islamists succeed or not in their opposition, one thing is quite clear: the US invasion was without any well-thought out plan as to how the transformation of Iraq would be brought about.
Under the American occupation, Iraq has been a perfect example of misgovernment and corruption. A few examples will illustrate the malaise. A former trade minister Abdul– Falah al–Sudani was accused of importing expired tea worth US $ 50 million. The Iraqi Members of Parliament (MPs) used their legislative powers to convert US $ 60000 provided for the purchase of armoured cars into a cash grant for themselves. The Kurdish leaders Barzani amassed a fortune of US $ 2 billion while Talabani pocketed about US $ 400 million. The same Talabani unofficially siphoned off more than US $ 250 million per month on the oil exported to Iran in 2010. A USAID report alleged that most of the hiring and promotions in the civil service were not done on merit but on political connections. Thus, Iraq became a haven for the plunderers. According to the reports of Transparency International, Iraq earned the dubious distinction of being ranked the third most corrupt country in the world in 2006, 2007 and 2008; fifth in 2009; fourth in 2010; and eighth in 2011 and 2012. Can anybody save Iraq from its ‘saviours’?
