- You need to iron your shirt, the auctioneer calls. People laugh. In a town with limited recreational facilities, this is entertainment. But in spite of the jokes falling hard and fast, the iron remains unsold.
- Five thousand dinar, the auctioneer calls. - I’m starting at five thousand. A shamefully low price, it’s worth a lot more. Any offers? Iraqi steel. Hard, immaculate.
No hands are raised, in spite of the price of around £1. For the moment, irons are an irrelevance. People buy drills and spades to dig wells in backyards, industrial tape to seal windows, sandbags to cover walls, warm blankets for bomb shelters, lanterns and lamps.
Some neighbours have come to see if they can find a second-hand generator. - It might come in useful if the electricity plants are bombed. We’ll take turns using it so the whole street can benefit.
The two strapping men are the neighbourhood’s representatives. But there are no generators for sale this evening. On the other hand, there is a dinner set in a pale blue pattern, over one hundred pieces, one with yellow roses and gold edges in delicate porcelain, some mirrors, scales, a radio, a TV, pots and pans in all shapes and sizes, stoves, stools, beds.
A woman runs her finger thoughtfully round the gold-edged flower service. Then she pulls her coat tighter around herself and walks on. Some children roar with laughter. They have found a pink swing to play on.
Duraid and his daughter Sera are sitting on a plush green sofa. They are waiting for it to be called up and hope someone will come and have a look. - We decided we didn’t need it any longer. Anyhow, it has always been too big, and was in the way too, Duraid explains. He is employed as an engineer at a state-run factory.
The descending spiral began in 1980 when Saddam Hussein decided to attack Iran. The war lasted eight years and the costs were enormous both in the loss of human life and for the economy. The disastrous invasion of Kuwait followed two years after the peace treaty with Iran. UN sanctions seriously hobbled Iraq’s economy. Following twelve years of sanctions and embargos the middle classes’ purchasing power plummeted. Lawyers, engineers, doctors and teachers fought to make a living by taking on extra jobs, driving taxis in the evenings, or selling up old belongings. Auction houses sprang up like mushrooms. They jostled for place along the banks of the Tigris and in the course of a few years Baghdad’s six large auction rooms increased to sixty.
- Everyone’s waiting, no one is buying, one auctioneer sighs. - I have been calling out the same things week after week. When the stuff has been here five weeks people have to come and take it back.
Duraid and his daughter’s sofa is called up. Total silence. The auctioneer tries in vain to entice people.
- Normally it would have been snapped up, Duraid sighs, having sold many belongings over the years. - But people don’t want to replace their furniture now. Who wants to buy something that can be shattered to bits in a week or so, or that they might have to leave behind?
Nine-year-old Sera sits sulkily beside her father. She turns away when I speak to her.
- Be polite to the lady, Sera, her father says.
Sera shakes her head, folds her arms over her chest and looks demonstratively the other way. She mutters something into the ground.
- She is frightened of you, she thinks you are an American, the father explains.
- I am not from America, I say, and smile my warmest smile. But Sera is not susceptible to flattery.
- You look like one and you don’t have to tell lies.
The father strokes Sera’s head and explains that she dreads bombs and war. She has heard on TV that the bombs will soon start falling and that American soldiers will break into people’s houses.
- She has changed recently, the father says. - She cries a lot and cannot sleep at night.
Suddenly Sera looks me in the eye.
- Why do you want to kill us?
- Most people don’t want to kill anyone. Including the Americans. But some politicians want war, I try.
Sera looks at me sceptically.
- Come on, Daddy, let’s go.
Sera grabs her father’s hand without condescending to look at me.
- Are you prepared?
It is Janine. She has made all sorts of preparations; rented rooms in three different hotels, so that she has a bed irrespective of where she is when the bombs start to fall. The rooms are equipped with water bottles, tinned food, blankets, batteries, a generator and a bottle of whisky.
She instructs me to keep a ready packed bag by my bed, in case I have to leave quickly. The gasmask must be ready, the bulletproof jacket, a torch and some good shoes.
- You must buy water, Åsne, she says. Why haven’t you bought water? And you should book beds in several hotels, like me.
Making preparations has always been my weak point. I have however learnt to provide the absolute essentials: two of every cable for the satellite phone and computer, two of all chargers, batteries and torches. The remainder can all be got hold of.
I hadn’t thought I would need gasmasks or safety equipment when I travelled to Baghdad at the beginning of January. Back then I had no plans to stay until the war started. Now that war is drawing near I am one of the few without safety gear. But unexpected help is close at hand. The Norwegian Embassy left twenty or so gasmasks, safety clothing, bulletproof vests and helmets when they closed down and went home. The kit was given to the Church Aid, the sole Norwegian aid agency still in Baghdad. I leave their offices with tens of kilos of kit which I throw into the cupboard. At last I can tell Janine that I am ‘well prepared’.
- But do you know how to use the mask? she asks.
- No
- Didn’t you learnt that on the survival course?
- Eh?
- You have been on a survival course?
I am probably the only journalist in Baghdad who has not attended a survival course. There they learnt how to don a gasmask and slip on safety clothing in a flash, how to measure the air’s gas content, how to fall down during a possible attack, how to evaluate dangerous situations. Most editors would not send their journalists into crisis zones without such a course, but no one has sent me; I sent myself. Janine thinks I am playing with life and death, as though staying in Baghdad during the war is not playing with life and death, survival course or not.
Peter, The Times’ photographer, who has been through every conceivable survival course, intends to teach Janine, Melinda of Newsweek and me to put on the gasmasks quicker. I include Tor from the Norwegian Church Aid who has been generous enough to supply both Aliya and Amir with masks from the Embassy. The Norwegian human shields are also given masks by the obliging aid worker.
Janine is loath to hold the session at her hotel, the al-Rashid, as people say there are cameras in all the rooms. If we were seen trotting around in gasmasks and survival suits we might be accused of plotting something. We go to al-Hamra, one of the other hotels in which Janine has rented a room.
We are taught how to drink wearing the mask, talk through the opening, change the filter, go to the loo. The suits are tight and uncomfortable.
If deadly gases are used, what are the chances of me being close to the mask and would I get it on in time? What about everyone else in Baghdad, the ones without masks? How long might it take for a Baath Party member with a gun to shoot me and confiscate my mask if a chemical attack occurred? I will probably never use it.
Days pass without my hoarding water bottles in my room. To book rooms in three hotels seems like a waste of money. I am happy in my little al-Fanar, at twenty dollars a night. There is an abundance of food in the markets and I see no necessity to hoard.
- I’ll do it later on, I say to Janine.
- When the bombs start falling you’ll have other things to do than to buy water. And then the bottles will cost a fortune.
After all it doesn’t matter that I am not prepared, because on the last day of February it is all over.
- I can do nothing more for you, says Kadim.
- But
. . .
- You must leave.
- But . . .
- Come back another time.
- The war is about to start, I would never get back in time, I object.
- What war? There won’t be a war.
For the first time he does not help me. He wants rid of me. His desk is flooded with paper.
- You promised you would always help me, I try.
- But I cannot protect you any more. You have overstayed your welcome; the immigration authorities have issued your marching orders.
Kadim pauses for a moment. - OK, fill in a new application, go to Amman and apply for another visa, and I’ll help you. You’ll be back in a week or two.
I complete the form but I know it’s pointless. Kadim just wants me out of his way.
- Maybe Uday can help me, I ask Kadim.
- He can do nothing for you.
I have done my best to keep away from Uday, thinking out of sight out of mind. But I know he is in charge of who can stay and who has to leave. He recently called Janine and Melinda in to his office and asked if they were prepared, whether they had covered wars before, whether their survival gear was in order, whether they were frightened. I was not found worthy of a private audience with Uday. That same evening I enter the lion’s den.
- Who do you think you are? Uday roars, when I express my wish to stay.
Life is looking gloomy as I leave for the airport in the morning. The question is - how to get back?
At the airport my state of mind is so low that even the most zealous attempts to extract bribes fail. Iraqi border guards will always find that papers are missing and consequently demand enormous sums. From me they do not get a dinar.
Two white overalls advance towards me. - Aids test, they say.
Everyone coming to Iraq must be tested for Aids. The tests are a joke; the blood vials are left unmarked on the shelves. Just another way of inconveniencing foreigners. The test costs a few dollars but the penalty for not having taken it is hundreds of dollars.
- I don’t have Aids, I say gruffly.
- This is the rule.
- I . . . do . . . not . . . have . . . Aids.
I muster all the authority I can possibly come up with at seven o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t care less about the two overalls. Actually I would like them to keep me back. That way I will miss the plane to Amman. They mumble something in Arabic, look at me, while I grunt back at them. Then they wave me on. A tiny triumph in all the misery. So that’s how to escape bribes - by not giving a damn.
Someone asks me to come in to his office. This time it’s the satellite telephone. I know, however, that my papers are in order. He asks me to sit and I crash down like a petulant teenager. I know people leave these airport offices masses of dollars poorer for fear of not being blacklisted.
- You’ll have to pay, he says after a long period of silence.
- Eh?
- To take this telephone out with you.
- I have a right to take it out. Here are my papers.
- But you are missing—
- Are you insinuating that my papers are not in order? That the Ministry of Information has made a mistake? Let me phone and ask. May I borrow your phone?
The man sits there, gaping.
- Just a wee bakhshish, he begs. Bakhshish is the Arabic for a gift or tip. I give him five dollars and get up, ready to leave.
Half an hour later I am on the over-crowded morning flight to Amman.
I drive through Amman in a daze and check in at the best hotel in town - it is large and luxurious but depressing. I long for the grotty al-Fanar, shrill Mino and Said with his endless interior ideas. Once inside the room I even miss the tiny flies that accompanied Said’s palm tree.
All is light and shining in Amman’s Intercontinental. The beds have soft white duvets and pillows. A velvety dressing gown hangs in the cupboard, slippers are ready for use. Everything smells clean and pleasant, not a single cockroach in sight. There is a TV with numerous channels, room service, Jacuzzi, massage, fitness room, swimming pool, mini-bar. I am in the wrong place.
I ponder how to return to Baghdad. I can forget about the normal channels. The hotel is jammed with journalists waiting for a visa. Some of them have been waiting for months. Instant visas, however, accompanied by a pat on the back from the Iraqi embassy, are granted to the human shields. Once in Baghdad I am sure to escape the chains at the oil refinery.
After just an hour in Amman I show up at the shields’ enrolment office, on the fourth floor of a shady hotel near the bus station. My hair is dishevelled and my clothes are worn out. It is all important to look like a genuine shield.
I am met by a Jordanian who leads me to Shane. He sits wrapped in a woolly Afghan shawl. I feel like asking whether he had also acted as a human shield for the Taliban but resist the urge. Shane is coughing and pouring hot tea down his throat. His eyes are red-rimmed and his skin pale. Suddenly a wet sneeze erupts. Shane points to a chair and I try hard to look as miserable as him to impart the impression that I am one of them. That is not difficult after the frustrated, sleepless night.
I invent a story that I lay awake because of the Iraqi children who will soon be bombed by the Americans. As a precaution, and in case they see all the Iraqi stamps in my passport, I say I have been in Iraq as a volunteer with a team of Norwegian child psychologists. As I have already written about them I can adopt their story without difficulty.
Shane says I can go on the next bus.
- It will be departing in a few days; we just have to fill it up. We are expecting a few more shields. It might be the last bus to Baghdad before the war. But you’ll have to see the boss first, she must give you the OK. That shouldn’t be a problem, Shane says encouragingly, before another coughing fit overtakes him.
The boss is a gruff British woman. She informs me about all that might happen in Baghdad. The danger of chemical attacks, the danger of being taken hostage, the danger of being chained to military installations. She also tells me that most of the shields are now on their way out. That I know already.
- The party is over, Lydia says. - The mood has changed. None of the shields live in hotels any longer, but spend all their time, night and day, at the installations they are protecting.
I answer that I am prepared to take the risk. Lydia accepts me as a human shield, takes my passport, and asks me to sign a document saying that I am informed of the dangers of going to Baghdad and that I am acting on my own responsibility.
- What is your room number? she asks. The majority of the shields live in the hotel while waiting for departure. They share rooms at fifty pence a night.
- I’m staying with friends, I stutter. Genuine shields do not stay at the Intercontinental.
She asks me to return the next day, but the next day there is no news, nor the day after. An increasing number of shields return from Baghdad. I am nervous that some of the Norwegians might walk through the door and spot me. But something else nearly gives me away. Because I am depressed and my energy levels are low I indulge myself in the luxury of an hotel driver. I normally ask him to wait some way off during my daily trips to the shield office. One day the driver gets nervous because I have stayed so long in the shady hotel and he comes to look for me. One of the employees knocks on Lydia’s door while I am there.
- Your driver is here, he says.
I bundle the uniformed driver down the stairs in a jiffy, hoping no one has noticed him, before returning to Lydia.
- We are having problems with the Iraqis, is all she says. - They are not happy with our discipline. Suddenly many don’t want to be at the electricity works, but at orphanages and hospitals, and the Iraqis won’t accept that. They aren’t actual targets and they feel stitched up.
- Ah, but I really want to be at an electricity plant, so they’ll have no problems with me.
I return to their headquarters every evening to await some news. One evening I get into conversation with an older woman who has just left Ir
aq.
- It’s no joke any more, she says. - They’ll bomb, no matter what. Don’t go, she insists, and asks what I do for a living. I tell her the same made-up story.
- My dear, she says. - Surely you can do something better in life than chain yourself to a bomb target?
The next morning at last Shane takes our passports to the embassy. He has mustered a group together and we are off as soon as the visas are issued. The same afternoon I turn up at his office and realise that something is not right.