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CounterPunch
December
17, 2002
an Interview
with Iraqi Dissident Ghazwan Al-Mukhti
The Lion, On His Den
by Joe Quandt
"President Sukarno of Indonesia once
said, 'We silence the enemies of freedom.'" Ghazwan Al-Mukhti
slumps back in his chair, silently gauging the effect of that
absurdly ironic statement on his listeners.
And Ghazwan is an Iraqi who lives his
ironies: a denouncer of Saddam regime inequities who continues
to live in Iraq; a man who worked hard to provide for his family
and his retirement, only to have his assets frozen in foreign
banks as a result of U.N. Resolution 687; a heart attack-age
guy who's trying to quit smoking, but liberally helps himself
to my cigarettes all thru 2 separate conversations; a
well spoken professional who peppers his gravel-voiced diatribes
with pungent American profanities.
He's been asked to join the Voices
in the Wilderness Writers Project, a unique attempt to
give Iraqis an Internet forum. VitW is the Chicago-based
group that has been working since '96 to end the economic sanctions
against Iraq. I give him a call, and  he
agrees to meet me in the dining room of the Al-Fanar Hotel,
Voices' headquarters in Baghdad.
Ghazwan studied geophysics at Cal Berkley,
and graduated with an engineering degree from Marquette in '67.
For most of his career, he sold medical supplies to hospitals.
He says he has too scientific a mind to be a writer, yet he has
written dozens of articles over the years, critical not only
of the U.N. sanctions against his country, but also the current
regime in Baghdad.
"I never wrote until I had to vent
my frustration over Iraq being singled out for punishment,"
he says.
Iraq, once boasted the highest standard
of medical care in the Middle East outside of Israel. He bemoans
the 12-year information gap that the sanctions created when they
cut Iraq off from world developments in the medical field. Compounding
the problem, thousands of health care professionals have been
lost to death or emigration. Altogether, 2 million people have
left Iraq since the sanctions were imposed.
"Are they political refugees? Are
they economic refugees? If they leave Iraq, they must claim political
asylum because no country will recognize economic refugees. And
these are highly qualified people we're talking about, scientists,
professors. My own brother-in-law is in a camp in Sweden.
"The U.S. accepted refugees from
the north (Kurdish Iraq) in '92. They took anyone, doctors, peasants.
They (the U.S.) said that Mr. Sadddam was threatening the Kurds.
Then the Kurdish leaders Barzani and Talibani invite Mr. Saddam
to mediate some problems between them. They ask him to
do this!" This request made the American position look ridiculous.
The U.S. retaliated for this affront to their credibility by
bombing Baghdad itself that January. The prestigious Al Rasheed
Hotel took a hit, injuring many foreign guests and killing 2
employees.
We discuss Halabja, the Kurdish town
where Saddam supposedly "gassed his own people". It
is a card that the Bush administration plays often because it
plays well with the American press and public. In fact, the gassing
of the town occurred during a battle between Iraqis and Iranians
at the end of their 8-year war. A U.S. Military College report
at the time found that most of the Kurds there had died of cyanide,
a gas used exclusively by the Iranian army. A Roger Trilling
article in New York City's Village Voice, 5/1/02, confirmed
this.
"Why was the (true) Halabja story
buried? Why, when Al Gore speaks against war with Iraq, does
CNN cut his speech in half? He leans forward in his chair again.."Who
gave the order to cut Gore?"..and let's the question dangle.
"When Jimmy Carter comes out against the war, it's buried.
In the U.S., who do you point at? Here, when we want to
point the finger at our censor, we point at the Ministry of Information."
(I stop the interview, concerned about
printing what he's saying. He assures me that he's been criticizing
his government for years. "If they wanted to shoot me, they
would have done it by now.")
"In 1988, your Congress passed a
resolution calling for (limited) sanctions against Iraq (oil
imports, weaponry) because of Halabja. President Reagan vetoed
it." That House resolution was virtually copied in 1990
to become U.N. Resolution 687 (the sanctions measure that has
been in place ever since).
Yet despite the bitter fruit of those
sanctions, 500,000 Iraqi children dead of malnutrition and treatable
diseases since 1991, Americans seem blithely unaware of it all.
"The average American, when it comes
to international politics, is illiterate. The smallest school
child anywhere knows more about the world than an American. Illiteracy
and democracy-that's a contradiction."
Taking up the oxymoron of America "imposing
democracy" on other nations: "I have a headache ('headache'
is his metaphor for the Saddam regime). I don't complain to you
about it. But you say you want to fix my headache. You will cut
off my head to fix my headache!"
On the Bush administration's current
favorite to replace Saddam: "Impose an Al-Chalabi dynasty?
A crook and embezzler who had to run out of the country in the
trunk of a car?
"That's our middle class now, criminals.
The sanctions squeezed out the middle class, and crooks and embezzlers
took their place." His wife's career is an object illustration
in what happened-she was a gynecologist who in 1979 was being
paid $300 a month by the government. In 1991 her salary shrank
to $60. In 2000 she retired because she was only getting $15
a month.
Ghazwan sold and serviced medical equipment
from '74 to '90, the year of the Gulf War. He had done very well
for himself up to that point, but "I gave myself an early
retirement," meaning that suddenly he could find no work.
"I'm a double victim of sanctions. I put my money in foreign
banks, and then the sanctions froze the Iraqi assets. Now I have
to borrow money to live." He squints and smiles. "I
fight the sanctions now so my kids don't have to leave me some
day, just when I'm too fucking old to do anything anymore!
"I think Mr. Saddam is laughing
now. He's laughing because the Americans are proving him right
with their double standards. Mr. Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to re-establish
relations with Iraq in '85. He was fully aware of the Amnesty
International report on this (the Saddam) regime. But today suddenly
he says that he can't deal with this regime?
"Between 1948 and 1998, there are
50 U.N. resolutions Israel has not abided by. This double standard
of the Americans (ignoring the Israeli government's treatment
of the Palestinians while demanding Iraqi compliance with tough
U.N. resolutions) is making the U.N. irrelevant."
Dennis Halliday, former U.N. Director
of Iraqi Relief Programs, has said much the same thing. Blaming
U.S. coercion and deal making in the Security Council, Halliday
says frankly, "The U.N. is dying." And he labels the
sanctions "a genocide".
The U.S., in its dependence on military
solutions to solve its problems, is sowing the seeds of further
violence against Americans. "And it's not only the poor
and disenfranchised who will be responsible" for acts such
as the recent attacks on Americans in Kuwait and Jordan. America
foreign policy is radicalizing what Ghazwan calls the "Pepsi
Generation", the young and affluent Saudis, Kuwaitis, and
Egyptians.
He tells the story of the Baghdad professional
man who came home on 9/11/01, stupefied by what had happened
in New York and Washington. There, clustered around the TV were
his son and a bunch of his friends-celebrating. What unnerved
the man was not only that they should welcome such a tragedy,
but that these kids, up to then, had never before evinced any
interest in political matters.
When the brother of the man who perpetrated
the Kuwait attacks was questioned, he said that his brother had
seen something about the Palestinians on TV, and had acted out
of a sense of helplessness and rage. No matter how corrupt their
governments are, "average Arabs are in solidarity with their
fellow Arabs. An Egyptian feels the same voicelessness as a Palestinian."
We discuss the depleted uranium (DU)
problem in Iraq. During the Gulf War, the U.S. and Britain fired
300 tons of DU shells and bullets, exposing Iraqis and American
servicemen alike to its radiological and chemical toxicity. 110,000
Gulf War veterans have applied for disability benefits; the military
refuses to recognize most of these claims, which include cancers,
genetic mutations among their children, immune disorders, and
memory loss. Meanwhile, cancer in parts of southern Iraq has
risen by 1800%.
"Suppose a cruise missile hits a
building, a hospital. Reconstruction of the building spreads
the radioactive dust all over. The isotope-it's like you've inhaled
a nuclear generator, and now it's trapped in you. Oxidation takes
place, and the rainwater washes DU oxide into the soil, the plants.
Animals eat the plants."
On what he would do if America invades
Iraq: "I can't leave here, I'm too old. I built things,
I worked on public projects here. I'm a part of this country.
Last night my wife wakes up in the middle of the night, she can't
sleep. She says, 'Ghazwan, what will we do, where will we go?"
I told her, 'we'll stay in our house and wait for the bombs.
What else can we do?' I ask you, is that any way to live?"
He's successfully ducked a writing assignment
by instead giving me a full-length interview. I congratulate
him on the ruse, and that's his cue. "Now I must go. We
are ruled by women. If I don't go now, I won't be allowed to
go out tomorrow night."
By the time the interview ends, various
Voices members who've stopped into the dining room for
a quick meal sit clustered around us. And as he strides out of
the room, someone mutters admiringly, "What an old lion."
Afterwards, Farah Mokhtareizedeh remembers that the first time
she met him he'd said, "Voices in the Wilderness? Are you
sure you don't mean 'Voices Lost in the Wilderness of America?'"
Joe Quandt
is a member of Voices
in the Wilderness. This interview was conducted in Baghdad
in October. He can be reached at: ytonthemoon@aol.com
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