THE UN-DEMONS
Foreign journalists
are treated sympathetically in Iraq as John Simpson reports
Baghdad TO WALK into the lobby of the InterCon- tinental Hotel in Amman after coming out of Iraq is like heading into the main street of some frontier town on the edge of unknown and dangerous territory. The word goes round that you've arrived. People come out to shake your hand. For a splendid moment or two, you are some- body. This pleasant feeling was spoiled for me recently by a producer for a Western television organisation. 'What was it like?' she asked, in a flattering kind of way. Honesty compelled me to explain that it had now become easier to work in Bagh- dad than in Amman. 'But it's not like that at all,' she answered crossly, 'it's really dangerous, and there are people watching you all the time.' I was still explaining as she walked away.
People do not like to find their precon- ceptions challenged. As it happens, Bagh- dad offers greater scope to foreign journal- ists now than in the days when Britain, France and the United States regarded Iraq as a useful counterweight to Iran and Syria in the region. For the time being, the foreign press and television perform a valuable function for Saddam Hussein's regime; though it wasn't until several of us received an invitation to dine with a senior government figure that I understood prop- erly what the function was.
The tables were set in the open air. A single star hung under the leaning crescent moon, forming the Arabic letter 'b'. A fountain splashed in the background. Darkness hid the ugly modern buildings, the projects that remained unfinished, the mess and absurdity which made it just another third world city. By night, its dreary efforts at urban redevelopment hidden, Baghdad can almost seem like the city in which Haroun Al-Rasheed once wandered in disguise, seeking information and diversion.
We ate in silence at first. I was trying to avoid talking to the Iraqi on my right, who had lived and worked in London in the Seventies. Like many of his educated countrymen, he professed a powerful anglophilia. It was distinctly cloying. `Where in good old England do you come from?' The Suffolk coast, I told him, hoping he had never been north-east of Brentford. `Ah, yes, Suffolk,' he replied, finding the consonants hard to manage. `Wonderful: Brighton, The Old Ship Hotel, Eastbourne.' That led him to throw out names at random. 'And how is Orping- ton? And Edinburgh? How about Newcas- tle?' When last heard of, I said, they were all reasonably well.
He looked up in the direction of the crescent moon in a melancholy way. It became harder not to like him. 'When this difficult episode is over, I should like to see Edgware Road again. And High St Kens- ington.' He pronounced the abbreviation as though it stood for 'saint' rather than `street'. Perhaps he detected a certain something in my reply, because he went quiet after that, and left me with the feeling that I had somehow damaged his memories.
The host at our pleasant open-air dinner party was talking now: a different and more impressive figure altogether, super- bly dressed in white, trailing a string of worry-beads in some expensive semi- precious stone from a languid hand and speaking English as well as any of his `We've seen Dickens's house, now we want to see Peter Ackroyd's house.' guests. He was witty, sharp-minded and subtle. `Ah, John,' he greeted me the morning after an article of mine had appeared in the review section of a London newspaper, it seems you have been tra- ducing our fine city of Baghdad in the British press.' Someone had faxed him a copy.
Now he was expounding the views of the government of which he was a member: harsh views, with a toughness which would have come naturally to an Enver Pasha or a Bismarck: the views of an older brand of power-politics, which the rest of the world seemed until recently to be moving away from. He made them sound rational and capable of success.
A famous American journalist, haggard of face and hard of understanding, sat on my left. It was his habit to explain to you what you had just been explaining to him. He jabbed a stubby finger in the direction of the worry-beads as they clicked away. `What you're trying to tell me is that Iraq isn't planning to back off in all this.' A faint hint of pain passed across the fine features of our host at such a statement of the obvious. 'It is true', he replied, 'that Kuwait is a part of Iraq which will never again be alienated from its motherland.'
`Why', I asked, hoping to find out something we didn't know rather than something we did, 'is the government here so willing to have foreign journalists in Baghdad now, when it used to do its best to keep them out?' Because your presence here and the reporting you do means that Baghdad ceases to be an abstraction in the minds of people in the West. It becomes for you a real place, with real people. If the Americans bomb us, everyone knows that ordinary people like themselves will be killed. In a way, you are a form of national defence for us.' What you're saying . . began the famous American journalist. But our host's attention and the clicking beads were turned in another direction.
It's a sophisticated aim: the un- demonising of Iraq. It cannot altogether succeed, since Saddam Hussein's regime demonises itself anew at regular intervals. Within days of our agreeable little dinner party the Iraqi government threatened to hang anyone who sheltered people who have taken refuge in Western embassies in Baghdad. The thought that those plump, brown and determinedly jolly men and women who camp out in the British Embassy compound and splash around like seals in the swimming pool might be rounded up and driven off is intolerable. Merely to suggest such a thing shows what kind of system Saddam Hussein runs.
And yet for those of us who spend our time here in Baghdad the propaganda is inevitably beginning to work. It has indeed become a real city, full of real people; and when an American commentator spoke publicly of turning it into an empty car-lot by aerial bombardment it seemed little different from Saddam's men talking of hanging the people in the embassy. I thought of the commentator a few days later, as I sat in a Baghdad tea-house looking through the open window at the brown waters of the Tigris below. The room was cooled by slow overhead fans. There was the sound of loud laughter, and of ivory dominoes being slammed victor- iously down on wooden tables. A waiter with a gotch eye and a badly scarred face came over with a tray of sweet lemon- flavoured tea. Rough faces, dark and unshaven, grinned wolfishly at us from around the room. A cripple called us `Lord' and took our shoes away to be polished.
Our driver had brought us here: an upright, brown little man with a military bearing. When asked to pick us up from our hotel at eight, he is invariably there at seven-thirty. Recently, with some embar- rassment, he asked us for the afternoon off. It turned out that his wife had given birth to their fifth son the day before, and this was his first chance to see him. Now he was showing us the complexities of the Turkish forms of backgammon; Adi, Mahbous, Gulbaha, Chesh-besh, and another whose name I never caught. He threw the dice with a tremendous flourish and proceeded to make a series of moves which none of us could possibly under- stand, let alone emulate. After that we played dominoes, and he made a point of letting me see what he had in his hand. He liked me, in particular, because I had just been unpleasant to our official minder. Out of the game, I sat back and surveyed the scene. Fat-bellied men in grubby white gowns knocked back tea or slammed down their pieces on the table. Mohammed and Haroun Al-Rasheed looked down at us from the walls. The cripple bashed away at our shoes under a tree in the courtyard outside, joking with a small group of friends. This was douceur de vie as the poorer levels of society in Iraq know it. It has nothing to do with the savageries of Saddam Hussein; but that won't necessari- ly protect it if someone does decide to turn Baghdad into a parking-lot. These are sentiments the Iraqi government wants to elicit from any foreign journalist. Yet what they really amount to is an appreciation of how pleasant Iraq could be if only Saddam were removed from power.
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