Return to Baghdad
Article from 2003 by the late Ammar Al Shahbander.
After a near-lifetime of anticipation, I found myself driving into the Iraqi heartland to fulfil a long-coveted dream: a return to my birthplace, Baghdad.
The journey felt like sleepwalking. Images swirled through my head with the speed of light. Dark images of torture, fear, war, and devastation intermingled with hopeful images of newly-liberated, celebrating Iraqi men and women.
I drove into a surreal Baghdad in its first chaotic days of liberation.
The streets vibrated with spontaneous demonstrations. People chanted "Death to Saddam" as crowds hailed coalition troops as heroes. Widows and orphans, who were barred from publicly mourning during Saddam's regime, were in the streets wailing for loved ones killed as long as 20 years ago.
In a misplaced sense of freedom, people drove like madmen, breaking every traffic law, and hundreds of people looted gleefully.
On the surface, it was as I had imagined it would be. But over the several months I spent in Baghdad, I slowly came to realise that at a deeper level, it was an Iraq I never knew, and could not have imagined.
After many years campaigning for the cause of Iraqi freedom, I and many of my compatriots in exile thought we knew Iraqi society. We had constructed a picture of a society divided simply into two generations.
First, an older, reactionary generation indoctrinated in the ideology of the Baath party and pathologically antidemocratic. They would resist the values of liberty and equality.
But we also thought there would be a smart, energetic younger generation full of visions of a better, more productive future.
The reality was far more complex, and will be far more difficult to transform.
Few of us in the diaspora realised that a deep, slow moving process had altered Iraq to its core. We had not seen that the Baath regime had worked for more than three decades to destroy the traditional structures, values and customs of Iraqi society. In the summer of 2003, we found that all the crucial elements of society had been organised so as to service and maintain the position of those in power. The fall of the regime did little to extricate them from their privileged positions.
The result, after 30 years, is a class-based society deeply fragmented along regional, ethnic and sectarian lines. A privileged few are well educated, have substantial financial assets and well-paid public- and private-sector jobs. The deprived and long-persecuted majority is poorly educated, with little more than the will to survive.
Like many of my fellow exiles, I returned in the hope of helping build a new Iraq. But we realise today that we are up against an entrenched elite largely untouched by the war. Saddam's regime may be gone along with his most brutal enforcers, but loyalists largely retain the most powerful and privileged positions in society.
Now, as I leave Iraq to return home to London, images of destruction and injustice jam my mind once again.
And I wonder when, and how, Iraq will be liberated.
Ammar Al Shahbander, 1973-2015.
This is a slightly abridged version of an article published as Saddam Legacy Lives On in 2003. It was read out by IWPR's Susanne Fischer at a memorial in London on October 13, 2015.
