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Local Iraqi-American Provides an Unimbedded View of the “New Iraq”
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by Frieda Gardner, W A M M
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“Salaam” is not just a greeting and a wish for the peace and safety of the one you speak to. “Salaam” is a goal, for the heart as well as one’s home.
—Sami Rasouli
Sami Rasouli, human rights worker, poet, math teacher, and former owner of the Minneapolis restaurant Sinbad’s, is an Iraqi American who chose to return to Iraq when America’s war began to rain down on the country. Iraq is the place of his birth, where he has many friends and relatives. He comes back periodically to the Twin Cities, with news of the war, its effects on the lives of Iraqi civilians, and with unique insight. Rasouli is not embedded; he travels around Iraq unprotected by either the Iraqi or American government. He also travels as a member of one of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, trying to break down boundaries of religious and cultural differences that have been reinforced by American occupation. “Salaam,” he notes, is not just a greeting and a wish for the peace and safety of the one you speak to. “Salaam” is a goal, for the heart as well as one’s home.
The news and insights Rasouli brought to the WAMM-sponsored event in mid-February were not sunny. He explored a number of negative consequences of the three-year-old war. First, the disasters: torture, unjust detention, kidnapping, forced evacuation from one’s home, town, or city, destruction of one’s home (as in the 30,000 houses wiped out in Fallujah), and, routinely ignored by the American press, the deaths of Iraqi citizens, 120,000 as of last summer. Then there is the daily, unremitting danger and instability of everyday life: physical insecurity for most people (from explosions, gunfire, mines, interrogation); rationing of food (which began under US-devised sanctions before the war began), of electricity, of water; high unemployment; and restricted medical care.
America’s exalted plans for oil-sustained reconstruction of Iraq remain unfulfilled. Looting, war-inspired corruption, a lack of resources, and the vagaries of privatization schemes are all part of what the Western media dubs the “New Iraq.” What George Bush sees as the “seeds of democracy,” Sami Rasouli experiences as the destabilization of the entire Middle East, with Iran emerging stronger and more assertive, and traditional religious differences deliberately inflamed by the so-called “democratic” processes we have “liberated” Iraq into practicing.
But Rasouli didn’t come back to America just to recount the war’s bad news. He came with wisdom, practical savvy, humor, historical reminders, and art. On projectors at the front of St. Joan’s sanctuary were photographs startling for being ordinary. We saw not the dead, the grieving, or enraged, but Iraqi people sitting at dinner, relaxing amongst friends, serious or smiling, but untagged by religious or political markers. Featured art was modern, both abstract and representational, some traditional, featuring the Arabic script I can’t read but admire for its elegance. These images are tokens, gifts of a humanity routinely effaced by occupation journalism.
Rasouli's stories go beyond the news bite. In one, three American Humvees bring immediate fear to a small village he is visiting with relatives. Luckily, he’s able to make friendly contact with one of the soldiers, another Minnesotan. For this contact he’s thanked by villagers, who fear the arbitrary detention that often comes from a surprise American visit. (Rasouli notes that as soon as the Humvees pull up, shopkeepers quietly begin to take their wares off the outside shelves and move them into their stores.)
Sami tells about Palestinian Iraqis, people who were forced out of their homeland and had found precarious haven in Iraq. They have been subject to threats, interrogation or torture, house arrest or jail by the American-sponsored government, and they often choose to leave Iraq if they can. Once, Rasouli, as part of a Muslim Peacemaker Team, was accompanying a group of Palestinian Iraqis to the Iraqi-Syrian border, which it wanted to cross. There was trouble on both sides of the border, and the UN contact did not seem able to help. The males of the group were forced to sleep outside in the night-cold desert, and the women and children slept in the truck that brought them all. Who should come to the rescue but Hamas, those demons of the Western press, bringing food, water, blankets, and promise of safe passage to Syria.
Did you know that the word “Baath,” in America associated only with the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, means “resurrection” or “renaissance” and has been used to designate many secular, pan-Arabic political groups in the Middle East? Under the American occupation, the designation “Baath” has been used to settle scores and grudges, and to drive formerly secular groups into the religious-political groups now so lethally at odds. At one point, Rasouli wryly noted that American policy advice could rationally be taken as “You Iraqis should kill each other!” Against this half-hidden message he posited his own, noting that many religions and various legal systems have coexisted in the Middle East for many centuries. “We know how we have lived together.”
Sami Rasouli's humane and rich eyewitness report was delivered before the Al-Askariya Shiite mosque in Samarra was blown up, before the consequent violence in Iraq spiked to new heights, and before his friend Tom Fox, a Christian Peacemaker, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed. But no further news can undermine Rasouli's insight that abstractions like peace and democracy must be grounded in concrete knowledge of places and persons, and that we cannot mouth compassion while acting with contempt and violence.
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© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete April 2006 Index - click here
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