Friends of Jean Paulhan

2003-01-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2003
Baghdad (by way of Amman, Jordan)

Dear you,
This is a quick note letting you know I'm fine but
have been unable to communicate outside of Iraq for
some time because of the FUCKING Pentagon and their
email "attack" (the story broke Saturday morning on
CNN.com). The whole Internet infrastructure in Iraq
was shut down because of it. We couriering stuff into
Amman, Jordan, to be sent out.

The situation in Iraq is the same, which is to say not
much. Those who can afford to prepare for a coming war
do, buying petrol and water parrifin for heat and
lighting. Those who cannot pay pray. The rest are busy
trying to get the international media's attention on
the plight of the Iraqi people and the devastation
another war will bring to this country. War
preparation is above all a class issue for me. There
are divisions between the upper, middle, and lower
classes in their perspectives on what can be done
about living through an invasion. Most of the upper
echelons of Iraqi society think that Baghdad will be
ablaze with street fighters beating back the
Americans. The middle class (if you can call it that)
have largely left it to the fates, having had little
to no history of political self-determination. The
poor of Iraq wants to see the invasion over with. The
sanctions have made their life already impossible, why
not a war to shake things up a bit: what's there to
lose? A young poor Iraqi teenage girl summed it up
nicely when she said that she can't wait for the
invasion so she can marry an American soldier.
Desperation and creativity doesn't make that strange
of bedfellows. Despite the differences on how one will
survive a war and how a war will be waged in the
country, they all agree that if there is a war, it
won't begin until AFTER the invasion. It is
incandescently clear that Iraq does not have the
capabilities to fight the American military
juggernaut. The real story of Iraq's survival will
begin after the Americans come (if they come, yes
there is still time and the means to stop the war,
there is always time because tomorrow is today) and
set up their puppet regime. A media escort and veteran
of the Iran/Iraq war said, "They will have an
occupation in hell."

I'm not ready to live in hell. And I assume the
wonderful people I've met here in Baghdad aren't ready
either, regardless of how many litres of petrol they
buy off the black market. I also assume that you
aren't ready for hell either, since by all accounts,
in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey the sentiment is that
there will be no way to contain the resentment an
unjust war will bring to the Middle East. The
resentment is beginning to build into a political
program that promises nothing short of mass political
insurrection, here and abroad, back home, where I live
and you too.

I have tried to make my work here with a certain
sensitivity and language to describe another kind of
Iraq existing in another kind of reality marred by
economic sanctions, the weight of war, and (American)
popular culture. But I can feel myself losing this
sensitivity. The fear is becoming overwhelming and the
space for describing the taste of lamb's head stew
made with food rations and trash is disappearing.

Perhaps the time and space will come again. In the
meantime (what a word) there is (still) a war to stop.
I am sure you've heard about the January 18th protests
(global by the way, since the German, Japanese, and
Italian delegations in Baghdad have informed us of
their country's intention of doing solidarity protests
on that date). I've been rereading Martin Luther King
Jr.'s moving speech against the Vietman war delivered
at New York's Riverside Church in 1967 and will try to
finish off one more piece of writing based on it
before I return to the States.

My return date is dicey at the moment but rest assured
I'm well taken care of. Support group I will contact
you first regarding my flight back. Let your media
contacts know that I'm returning and that I'll talk to
anyone about the work we've done here (can continue to
do, members of the Iraq peace team continue to come
into Baghdad and will do so throughout January and
February, war or no war).

This turned out not to be such a quick note. I'll see
you soon. Baghdad is tense and beautiful, as usual, by
the way.

P.

2003-01-11T03:57:00.000-08:00

thank you germany!
the only european country to position themselves to an absolute "NO TO WAR!".

2003-01-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

There has been increasing news reports on Iraqi people (artists, support groups....) here.
We can finally detect a Face in the growd!
Hang in there, we are seeing you.

V

2003-01-06T01:57:00.000-08:00

M, I got your email thanks and congrats.

There is a real shift here. Today is Army day in Iraq and the city is at a standstill. A group of peace activists coming back from Basrah, a city south of Baghdad and the one most desvastated by the Persian Gulf War, blew a tire and crashed. One member died and five are injured. The mounting troops around the gulf are beginning to make everything tense. But no one is preparing for war. What does one do when bomb shelters won't save you and the civilian infrastructure is already at abysmal conditions? The Iraq peace team is planning more radical actions in the coming weeks. The air is thick with death and transfiguration.

2003-01-06T01:48:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD, YEAR ZERO?
By Paul Chan

Hijra, the Islamic New Year, doesn’t even begin until March. But if there is any city in the world that deserves to set aside their earthly miseries and celebrate, just for one night, something, anything, with stiff drinks and dancing, it is here.

New Year’s Eve on the streets of Baghdad is a riotous affair, second only to Saddam Hussein’s birthday in April. People chatted and waited in line at the liquor stores on Al Saddoun street, near the city center, to buy whatever was left. Iraqis can’t drink in public anywhere: it was banned in 1995. But that doesn’t stop people from sharing cheap beers and Arak, a traditional Iraqi liqueur, with friends and neighbors at home. Or in vans. Dusty old vans full of young men and spirits sang and yelled out of their windows on Jamia Street, near the Baghdad National Theatre. The traffic, already formidable during regular business hours, turned into gridlock hours before the turn of the New Year. Not to be outdone, young men in Karada, a neighborhood and shopping district in Southeast Baghdad, roamed the streets dressed as dandies, replete with ill-fitting checkered suits and canes, following men with homemade drums as they wandered from intersection to intersection, stopping only to play a few hypnotic beats that would instantly give birth to a dance party. The dandies sprayed matr, a white foamy substance Iraqis like to break out during weddings, onto cars and tempted the passengers to leave their dusty seats and join them on the street, where the real party was.

The police were out in force too. They kept the revelers in line with provocative flashes of their automatic weapons. But beside the guns, not much more separated the two camps on the streets: they were both young and proud and will most likely enter military service soon, called to defend their country against a possible invasion. It is difficult not to see the celebrations as a kind of last hurrah, before the fall and their official status as causalties of war.

This was the sobering thought that kept the rest of Baghdad from celebrating. There are, of course, those who don’t because they are simply too poor. Sadam city, a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Northeast Baghdad remained relatively quiet. There are also those for whom New Year’s Eve is meaningless. Since the sanctions, secular Iraq has turned increasingly Islamic. Saddam and the Socialist Baath party is partly the cause. They have turned the virtues of Islam into instruments of the state, building mosques (when completed, the Saddam mosque in Baghdad will be the largest in the world) and mounting “quality of life” campaigns (like banning the public consumption of alcohol) that have steered many in Iraq toward Islam. State sponsored religions are generally a form of social management. With the aftermath of the gulf war and the punishment from the sanctions, the social fabric of Iraq was unraveling. Islam connected the people back together with the state and provided a framework for rebuilding social order. “This is why,” Allah, a media escort with the ministry of information said, “before the sanctions there were public pictures of Saddam dancing with girls and having a good time everywhere in the city. Now there are only pictures of Saddam praying.”

At a moment when history is teetering between hell and reason, prayer, for people who have known only political impotence, makes a lot of sense. This is the politics of salvation, and tonight it is being practiced by everyone; young and old, Muslim and Christian. Zein is a young Iraqi coordinator for Bridges to Baghdad, an Italian anti-sanctions relief agency. She has lived in the US, Italy, Lebanon, but decided to return to Iraq and be with her people at the dawn of a possible attack. Tonight, like many Iraqis, she has turned down party invitations, opting instead to stay home with her parents, to reflect and pray. For many Iraqis, the coming of the New Year brings only dread. “There is nothing to celebrate,” Zein said. “Maybe the rich can forget what is happening and what will happen to our city if something isn’t done to stop it. But I can’t.”

*

At the Orfali art gallery in the affluent neighborhood of Al Monsour, Black Scorpions, quite possibly Baghdad’s only heavy metal band, played their first gig on New Year’s Eve. It was a short set, with only six songs. Unfortunately, they did not play an Arabic rendition of Guns–n-Roses’ classic “Sweet Child of Mine,” although it was rumored that they would. Instead, the four-man band played traditional Iraqi folks songs. They were nervous at first, playing to the sixty or so guests who paid a hefty $15,240 dinars, or roughly $12 US dollars, for dinner and entertainment. But by the third song, the Scorpions had hit their stride, and the mostly middle aged audience began to sing along. Minutes before the New Year, this party immersed itself in a nostalgic haze, reveling in a past infinitely brighter than the bleak future of a coming war.

Now, there are Iraqis who know about the growing opposition to Bush and company. They know about the global anti-war marches in January. There are even those who believe that averting the war is still possible. Here, however, at this swank art gallery and music hall in Southwest Baghdad, they weren’t taking any chances. They were preparing for war by stockpiling memories of their Iraq through song. The New Year was almost upon them, and their country had to be protected, one way or the other.

2003-01-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

Jean, I'm back in town and have updated NP with most recent essay and grammatically-correct edit. I just sent you a big email to ivoices detailing latest efforts; have you got it, or are they having problems with receipt? In the interim, please note to ONLY use Yahoo! email address; I am receiving mail there fine when I am in town. Also, ZIP attachment and 3-part email effort have not come thru intact. File says it is corrupt. Can you recompress and post to your Yahoo! group in the file section or send as an attachment to my kbuddy address or FTP to NP account?

Keep it real, avoid the steel, and enjoy a good meal now that we're all at the start of the two-trizzy... -miguel

2002-12-30T07:47:00.000-08:00

Miguel can you switch the front of NP to "A Portrait of a Day..." and switch Miserable... to the clean version?
Support team an action is being planned for new years eve here so watch for it on the tele. For those of you trying to reach me by phone keep trying. I'm still at the Al-Fanar, RM 408. Happy New Years and will somebody please stop this march to war.

2002-12-28T02:32:00.000-08:00

Portrait of a day in Baghdad
By Paul Chan
Dec 28

2AM
My first drink of Arak, an Iraqi liquor that tastes like licorice and stings like rock candy. The poet Farouk Salloum told me he was drinking Arak at his house when the missiles hit Baghdad in the first gulf war. After his first glass he prayed the attack would end quickly. After the second he wished he had more Arak at his house because there was no way he was going to get more during an attack. After his third glass he screamed at the missiles to bring it on.

9AM
I remember now the party last night at Farouk’s house. Members of the Iraq Peace Team were invited to a private party of musicians, journalists, and poets. Farouk dressed in casual black. He had sleepy eyes. He was gracious and demanding, ordering drinks to be constantly filled, especially for the women. The Socialist Baath Party banned public drinking in 1995. Ever since, Iraqis have taken their drink underground and at each other’s homes. Farouk’s second daughter is named Reem, which means one who is as graceful as a deer running. She doesn't have her father's eyes.

A droll pianist and a veteran of the Iran/Iraq war in the early 80's played Bach and a jazzy funeral march. Earlier in the evening the pianist told me he killed six men in the war and that the men and women of Iraq are all trained in combat, and will take to arms and stones if need be to stop the Americans from entering Baghdad. I ask him if his experience in killing shaped in any way his piano playing. No response.

NOON
A word or two about Kubbe in soup. At the Al-Shadbandar Café, where the Iraqi literati come to drink tea and speculate about the war and who is the number one poet of the week, Almad, a young sculptor, invites me for Kubbe in soup. It is close and it is good, he says. Fair enough. I’m ready for it. Before I left the states, Aviv, a dear friend and member of New Kids On The Black Bloc, an artist political collective in Barcelona, asked me to seek out Kubbe in soup. “I know you’re not going to Baghdad for a culinary tour, but promise me you will try it.”

It is a meat dumpling the size of my head swimming in greasy soup. The skin of the dumpling is thick and wheaty. Inside, a mixture of ground meat of unknown origins and cinnamon. Other spices too, but who can tell. The soup is hot water with onions. Sometimes with tomatoes.

Almad wants me to come. But Haider, another sculptor, says it may not be such a good idea. It will be crowded, he says, and the water is not so good for foreigners. Okay I say to Almad, next time. I drink my lemon tea and dream of dumplings the size of my head. A cinema critic enters the café. He’s the number one critic in Baghdad, Haider tells me, because he is the only one in the city. He jokes to Ellen, my travel companion for the day and a full time peace activist from Maryland, that he would like to do a cultural exchange with her; she can take his post as the number one critic in Baghdad if he could get a visa and go to the US.

3PM
We wander around the booksellers row, a suk (open market) next to the Al-Shadbandar Café. Former engineers sell their collection of books on statistical analysis here and whatever else they can find in their house. Books are indiscriminately piled on the sidewalk for people to browse through. Iraq had, before the sanctions, one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East and the largest number of PhD’s. This is why you will find not only books on mathematics and structural mechanics, but also Hegelian philosphy, Pop Art, and Modern absurdist drama, in Arabic, English, French, German, and even Chinese. I find a nice copy of Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Also a beautiful book on Islamic Calligraphy.

We have what’s called a magic sheet. On one side of this piece of paper is an explanation of what the Iraq Peace Team is about and why we are in Iraq. On the other side, the same thing in Arabic. We pass this out and hope to enlarge our family. It does work like magic and a bookseller quickly becomes a friend (because not surprisingly everyone is against the war). It is only paper but has the weight of gold.

I meet a poet named Suha Noman Rasheed. He is slowly selling his collection of poetry books on the row to live. He has published three books of Arabic poetry and promises me he will bring a copy of one next week. A writer friend in the US asked me to bring back some books in Arabic so they can be translated into English. This is our rescue mission, he tells me.

4:50PM
Walking back to the hotel, Ellen and I noticed the pristine quality of the Iraqi police cars. Some of the plastic coverings haven’t even been taken off the seats. Ellen, who served for four years in the US army, and I agreed that one can tell the health of any regime by the cleaniness of the police cars.

6PM
An action planning meeting for the Peace Team. Productive. There will be an action on Dec 31st entitled “Resolutions and Celebrations”. The goal is to throw a party and get Iraqi mothers, fathers, kids, poets, writers and peace activists together to make New Year’s resolutions that would replace the UN resolutions now serving as the litmus test for war. I am in charge of the visuals. I imagine 10,000 Iraqi children dressed in white suits and dresses, singing and waving their hands up as if they were surrendering. Musical accompaniment: Aretha Franklin. Special Guest: subcommandante Marcos. I don’t tell the other about the plan. Let’s see what I can do in four days.

7:30PM
Found out George is leaving the team because his father in Massachusetts is in serious condition after he broke his hip. I’m very fond of George. A Lebanese man who also stays at the Al-Fanar hotel who may or may not be a war profiteer said George has a heart of gold. I believe him. He’s been to Iraq nine times and financially supports eight families here. On this trip he brought two suitcases of medicines and toys. Baghdad is the city of infinite need.

8PM
Saddam is on television. He is sitting on a white leather couch. The reception is bad. Just now there was a cut-away shot to the crowd listening to him speak. It is immense. But there is never a shot of the crowd and Saddam together. Did you know the Russian KGB was the grandfather of Adobe Photoshop? Not only did they make people disappear, they made their appearance in photographs disappear as well. With a razor blade, pen and ink they would retouch photographs with such precision that it was as if the person never appeared in the original photograph. Now, the cut-away is the standard, whether it is used to subtract or add people. Reality has never been so elastic. Now a music video of children singing and images of Saddam at various state functions.

11PM
Saf, a young student who I play dominos with sometimes, asks me if I have any asprin for him. I tell Saf tomorrow.

11:50PM
Every night at 11:30 Iraq television plays a movie. Tonight it's "Mission to Mars" starring Val Kilmer. Kilmer, incidently, came to Iraq in 1998 as a part of a campaign called "America Cares". One of the board of directors on AC was Barbara Bush. The campaign was set up to take the media spotlight away from former attorney general Ramsey Clark's delegation called "The Sanctions Challenge", which was in Baghdad at the same time. It worked. No one paid attention to Clark and his crew, who were campaigning to stop the sanctions. All eyes were on Val and his vague promises to bring democracy and bad movies to the Middle East.

1AM
Cannot sleep. The wild dogs of Baghdad are out, barking and laughing at the few cars that are still out on the street. I find the following quote in a book about Laozi, mystical chinese philisopher, that seems appropriate to the times: "Vulgar people are clear, I alone am drowsy. Vulgar people are alert, I alone am muddled."

2002-12-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

jean,
there seemed to be a delay and I didn't get your OK until too late. I'm trying to set it up again. Are you getting the ivoices emails? I got your latest one (wondering if we were receiving) but I'm getting the feeling you didn't get mine explaining all the details. Anyway, I'm passing along your number and hopefully we can pull something together. Thinking of you
Cornelia

2002-12-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

Magnesium dripstones glitter and Europe prints Christmas peace!

There was a wonderful interview by Noam Chomsky. Harry Belafonte had one on Ntv that made me take out my records again and believe that listing to music sung by a fellow who thinks the same might help the echo rebound in the jungle of dripstone. The Pope reminded the World of it too, where ever; "Peace " is in the air. Even G. W. Bush enlightened us with peaceful greetings on the web and that God be with us. But why does this make me more confused than ever?
I have radio connection, an interview. Two important weekly newspapers that will bring stuff on us and people.
I feel better now that the machinery is slowly coming into motion after the cries for Christmas peace are over and the voices turn into actions.

A flamboyant New Year to you all may our wishes and actions be heard.

V

2002-12-26T04:08:00.000-08:00

[ I'm reposting this because I found a bunch of typos and errors in the original post. Forgive. Here is a cleaned up version.]

Miserable Miracles
By Paul Chan

“I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives.” For weeks now, the atmosphere in Washington has been heavy with such promises of humility and restraint. That particular promise happened to be made by Adolf Hitler, on the occasion of his declaration of war against Poland in September 1939, but it serves to illustrate the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy. – Andrew Kopkind.

It is neither the best of times nor the worst of times in Baghdad. Abi Nuwa’s street, which runs parallel to the Tigris River through Baghdad, remains as busy as ever, packed with dilapidated cars careening down the street in a kind of leisurely recklessness that would make Beijing drivers proud. Skinny eight year old boys still hustle tourists (yes, there are still tourists coming to Baghdad) with the promise of beautiful shoe shines and sad stories about a strange fever that only goes away with money or chocolates. Poverty still looms in every house without food or a working toilet. Saddam Central Hospital still doesn’t have aspirin and none of the city power plants are fully operational. The first gulf war and the UN sanctions have crippled Baghdad into this state: a new war threatens to bomb the city into a nonexistent one. But these matters seem minor on a radiant and breezy day like today. There are foreigners to hustle, tea to drink, and dominos to play on the banks of the Tigris. Cities that have gone through the trauma of war either collapse under the weight of their own misery or survive by cobbling together a makeshift life using the rubble from their past. Baghdad chooses to survive.

At a modest hotel near the center of the city called the Al-Fanar, the thirty members of the Iraq peace team are cobbling together the ultimate survival plan for Baghdad and the whole of Iraq: a plan for peace. It is a Sisyphean task. There is not much room to work and likely not much time. The US military buildup in the Middle East increases with each passing day. And it is clear that there is absolutely nothing the Iraqi government can do or say or declare that will change Washington’s mind. How do you stop a future so hell bent on coming?

The Iraq Peace Team is a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. Since 1996, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices, has led nearly fifty delegations into Iraq, bringing with her politicians, writers, activists, medicines, books, and toys to the Iraqi people, trying to alleviate in some small way the burden of the sanctions and to campaign for its termination. For Kelly, the sanctions act like a second war against Iraq, but this time waged directly against the Iraqi people. The sanctions ban all imports into the country except for medicines and supplies for what is called “essential” civilian needs. Essential is the key term here. Is clean water essential? Apparently not, since components to rebuild the water treatment plants in Baghdad did not get clearance. What about electricity? Not essential either. Iraqi officials recently purchased a six million dollar power plant from a British company, only to have it sit in Baghdad because the installation manual, computer software, and technical advisors were all denied permission to enter Iraq. The sanctions were supposed to disable the military regime by denying them the ability to rebuild. But what they have actually done is to deny the Iraqi people the right to be civilians. The sanctions have transformed Baghdad into the world’s largest military prison. And the prisoners are slowly dying.

*

It is the impending third war against Iraq that brings Kelly back to Baghdad. This is her seventeenth trip to this city of five million people. In many of the neighborhoods she works in they affectionately call her Ms. Kathy. She can quote Albert Camus effortlessly and has long gray hair and a slight overbite that makes her smile ever effective at easing nervous Iraqi officials who watch over the peace team, or nervous team members who are, well, just plain nervous about the possibility of war. This is a very useful skill, since the fluid circumstances and the tension that comes from working in a possible war zone demand a mode of mediation that is direct but non-confrontational. This style is also reflected in the goal of the team: be a source of news and inspiration for the anti-war movement outside Iraq by connecting with the Iraqi people and publicizing the suffering the sanctions have created and the chaos a new war will bring to this devastated country. The Iraqi government doesn’t help. Although they have given the blessing of the Iraq peace team to be in Baghdad, there are restrictions about what the team can do in terms of political actions or media events. The US government doesn’t help either. They have fined Voices in the Wilderness over $163,000 and have threatened members with twelve years of prison and fines of up to one million dollars for bringing toys and medicines into the country.

This hasn’t deterred the twenty nine people from around the world to join Kelly in Baghdad. There is John, a lively seventy eight year old World War II veteran and former television producer from New Mexico. John plays both the sage and the fool in the group. At a recent visit to the University of Baghdad, he was the main attraction on the campus square, yelling “I love you” in Arabic to a cheering crowd of students. Bitta is a twenty two year old Iranian activist. She can be radiant in front of news cameras and this is undoubtedly why she is one of the spokespeople for the peace team. There is Peggy, the organic farmer from Ohio, and Tom, the flamboyant deacon and organizer for the Catholic workers movement in New York. There is Theresa, the school teacher from Illinois, who had problems bringing her guitar into Iraq until she played a song for the Iraqi border guards. There is George, the storyteller from Massachusetts, and Micah, the former copy editor from Nepal. They are activists and nurses and artists and lawyers. They come from England, Canada, Ireland, and the United States.

They don’t have the answer for how the war can be stopped. But it is clear that thirty people in Baghdad cannot do it alone. It will take a kind of mass mobilization within the next few weeks, from every part of the globe, to create a critical mass big enough to generate the gravity that can shift the debate from when to why. It will take a scale of organizing not seen since the height of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. But that took at least four years and thousands of dead American soldiers. This war will have a shorter shelf life. And the ingredients for this war will be primarily technological and non-human. One does not mourn the loss of a laser-guided missile. So are the deaths of Iraqi civilians and the extermination of a whole society enough to stop a war waged in the name of freedom and motivated by profit?

The hope is it will be. It is harder to kill indiscriminately when a name is attached to a body. The closer the image of the other is to ourselves, the less likely we are to abstract them into oblivion or indifference. There is the usual grunt work of press releases, phone calls, and demonstrations to work on. But the main task of the peace team is simply to meet people. The extended family of the peace team number in the hundreds. They range from Amal, a painter and mother of seven who lives in the oldest house in Baghdad, to Dr. Saad Al Hassani, the graceful drama professor at the University of Baghdad who asked team members to smuggle in books by Samuel Beckett for his students (the sanctions will not allow books since it is not considered an essential civilian need and weighs over eleven ounces). This informal network of Iraqis, together with the peace team, become a small political ecosystem that sustains the work through mutual support and exchange. Peace team members like George bring chemotherapy drugs, which is virtually non-existent in Baghdad, to an Iraqi friend who has breast cancer. She in turn introduces him to family and friends who are more than willing to befriend an American who does not want to bomb them. George introduces his new friends to the peace team. And the word spreads, to neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, and mosques.

This kind of political work is at once intimate and painful because the connections one makes are intense and in the flesh. After a visit to an Iraqi family’s home, which usually lasts four to five hours, with the obligatory meal made from the food rations given out by the government and several rounds of sweet tea, they no longer look like the wretched of the earth. They are the eleven year old twins, He’be and Du’a, who loves Jackie Chan (Baghdad television broadcasts a movie every night at 11:30PM). And Shouruk, the twenty two year old student who believes sadness is the primary value in music, and thinks Celine Dion is the pinnacle of this value. This is as grassroots as political work gets, which is to say it is slow and the results are hard to quantify. Does it serve peace to know that Sundis, who is thirty three years old and has sparkling azure eyes, suffers from bouts of influenza that cripples her? Yes, if it means the team can get her medicine that will make her healthy again so she can rejoin the constellation of people working in Baghdad with the team. Yes, people can be saved. But peoples cannot. The peace team can only provide the prototype, not the product, of peacemaking. For that it will take movements and actions as well as coalitions and consensus from the outside.

*

Tonight, a wedding party arrived at the Al-Fanar Hotel. Most of the members of the peace team had just returned from a press conference that was staged at a defunct power plant twenty minutes from the center of Baghdad. The goal was to highlight the need to lift the sanctions so the plant can become operational again. There were speeches and the requisite candle-light vigil. A group calling themselves the Japan-Iraq Friendship Committee arrived to lend their solidarity. It was a good event but the timing was bad. Earlier in the day, Colin Powell had delivered his message to the UN security council. The official US position is the position everyone had expected after Iraq delivered the 12,000 page report detailing their weapons production: they are lying. So tonight, at the same time as the power plant action, all the press in Baghdad converged on the ministry of information to hear the Iraqi rebuttal from General Amer al-Saadi, a former scientist and head weapons advisor for the Iraqi government.

Peace team members were being briefed about the Iraqi response in the lobby of the hotel when the music began. Everyone streams out of the hotel to see the ruckus. A cavalcade of thirty or so had set up an impromptu dance party outside the Al-Fanar. The bride and the groom, who were from Basra, a city in southern Iraq, stand on one side, stiff but smiling. Their family twists and turns in front of the newlyweds, accompanied by a three man band playing a kind of music that sounds vaguely like marching songs. All of a sudden, someone grabs me and I find myself in the middle of the dancing. I wasn’t the only one. Sheila, a thirty year old activist and part of the Catholic Worker movement joins the fray with the insistence of three girls. There were others from the team who joined the party but I couldn’t keep count. Men were spraying a white foamy substance into the air and the women were recruiting the elders to shake it. In the midst of the chaos and the reverie no one seemed to mind that on another plane of existence men are planning the city’s destruction. No matter. This is what Baghdad is like. People were laughing and dancing and not yet done.

2002-12-25T08:41:00.000-08:00

SUPPORT TEAM, I just sent you an email. If you get it (or don’t get it) in the next 24 hours please let me know via blogger or the ivoices email address, subject line: for PAUL C. I’m still paranoid about my emails not going out….

2002-12-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

There is a party tonight at the Al-fanar hotel. Everyone is in good spirits from the success of the church action last night. Good coverage from NBC and CNN. Now the focus is on the next event. I don’t feel of much use. The movement needs pops of images and texts that lazy journalists can take out of context and use for their rags. I can only give them long meandering paragraphs about why the wild dogs of Baghdad remind me of the wild dogs of Puerto Rico, which are famous for protecting lost street children. We remember different that is clear. I can’t bear the thought of remembering Baghdad as an op – ed piece or a human interest story. The Press center here in Baghdad is littered with wasted ambitions and short sentences. I have a cough but remain resolute in my indifference to facts.

2002-12-24T00:34:00.000-08:00

let's do it Corny. Is it this Wed? Dec 25th? I will be at the Al-Fanar Hotel. Here is the number. I am in rm 408. tel: 7188007 - 7172833

Thanks also for the Critique of the NYtimes. I passed it around the peace team. did people get my first essay through email? Second one coming but need to know if I need to find another way of sending them out. People are feeling anxious here because time is running out for the Iraqis. The next essay is on the burden of the gift in Baghdad. I hope everyone is doing well. It is another bright day in Baghdad. Last night a group of wild dogs roamed around our neighborhood. Strange.

2002-12-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

jean paulhan,
I need to know if you are interested in doing this interview with The World on Wed, they are waiting info from me. can you let me know either at my yahoo address or here ASAP.
Cornelia

2002-12-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

Support team please let me know if you recieved the email essay I sent today on Blogger. It should come with a pic. Baghdad is beautiful and cold today. The strain of the outreach work is beginning to manifest itself in illness. Several of the members are getting sick. Don't worry I don't think it's chemically related. Yesterday we visted the University of Baghdad and talked to PHD. English candidates there. There is a general admiration for Oscar Wilde but not much love for Joyce. Beckett is a staple for the English/Drama crowd and Mathew Arnold is a real literary playboy here. The history of the British rule here probably plays a large role in Iraq's western literary consumption.

Everywhere I go I'm recognized as Jackie Chan. They love him here (and Also Jet Li but no sign of Chow Young Fat anywhere). One student told me they played Chinses action movies during Ramadan. Next essay is coming in two to three days: Christmas in Baghdad. Happy Holidays to my peeps in the dirty dirty west.

2002-12-22T06:43:00.000-08:00

Miserable Miracles
By Paul Chan

“I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives.” For weeks now, the atmosphere in Washington has been heavy with such promises of humility and restraint. That particular promise happened to be made by Adolf Hitler, on the occasion of his declaration of war against Poland in September 1939, but it serves to illustrate the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy. – Andrew Kopkind.

It is neither the best of times nor the worst of times in Baghdad. Abi Nuwa’s street, which runs parallel to the Tigris River through Baghdad, remains as busy as ever, packed with dilapidated cars careening down the street in a kind of leisurely recklessness that would make Beijing drivers proud. Skinny eight year old boys still hustle tourists (yes, there are still tourists coming to Baghdad) with the promise of beautiful shoe shines and sad stories about a strange fever that only goes away with money or chocolates. Poverty still looms in every house without food or a working toilet. Saddam Central Hospital still doesn’t have aspirin and none of the city power plants are fully operational. The first gulf war and the UN sanctions have crippled Baghdad into this state: a new war threatens to bomb the city into a nonexistent one. But these matters seem minor on a radiant and breezy day like today. There are foreigners to hustle, tea to drink, and dominos to play on the banks of the Tigris. Cities that have gone through the trauma of war either collapse under the weight of their own misery or survive by cobbling together a makeshift life using the rubble from their past. Baghdad chooses to survive.

At a modest hotel near the center of the city called the Al-Fanar, the thirty members of the Iraq peace team are cobbling together the ultimate survival plan for Baghdad and the whole of Iraq: a plan for peace. It is a Sisyphean task. There is not much room to work and likely not much time. The US military buildup in the Middle East increases with each passing day. And it is clear that there is absolutely nothing the Iraqi government can do or say or declare that will change Washington’s mind. How do you stop a future so hell bent on coming?

The Iraq Peace Team is a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. Since 1996, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices, has led nearly fifty delegations into Iraq, bringing with her politicians, writers, activists, medicines, books, and toys to the Iraqi people, trying to alleviate in some small way the burden of the sanctions and to campaign for its termination. For Kelly, the sanctions act like a second war against Iraq, but this time waged directly against the Iraqi people. The sanctions ban all imports into the country except for medicines and supplies for what is called “essential” civilian needs. Essential is the key term here. Is clean water essential? Apparently not, since components to rebuild the water treatment plants in Baghdad did not get clearance. What about electricity? Not essential either. Iraqi officials recently purchased a six million dollar power plant from a British company, only to have it sit in Baghdad because the installation manual, computer software, and technical advisors were all denied permission to enter Iraq. The sanctions were supposed to disable the military regime by denying them the ability to rebuild. But what they have actually done is to deny the Iraqi people the right to be civilians. The sanctions have transformed Baghdad into the world’s largest military prison. And the prisoners are slowly dying.

*

It is the impending third war against Iraq that brings Kelly back to Baghdad. This is her seventeenth trip to this city of five million people. In many of the neighborhoods she works in they affectionately call her Ms. Kathy. She can quote Albert Camus effortlessly and has long gray hair and a slight overbite that makes her smile ever effective at easing nervous Iraqi officials who watch over the peace team, or nervous team members who are, well, just plain nervous about the possibility of war. This is a very useful skill, since the fluid circumstances and the tension that comes from working in a possible war zone demand a mode of mediation that is direct but non-confrontational. This style is also reflected in the goal of the team: be a source of news and inspiration for the anti-war movement outside Iraq by connecting with the Iraqi people and publicizing the suffering the sanctions have created and the chaos a new war will bring to this devastated country. The Iraqi government doesn’t help. Although they have given the blessing of the Iraq peace team to be in Baghdad, there are restrictions about what the team can do in terms of political actions or media events. The US government doesn’t help either. They have fined Voices in the Wilderness over $163,000 and have threatened members with twelve years of prison and fines of up to one million dollars for bringing toys and medicines into the country.

This hasn’t deterred the twenty nine people from around the world to join Kelly in Baghdad. There is John, a lively seventy eight year old World War II veteran and former television producer from New Mexico. John plays both the sage and the fool in the group. At a recent visit to the University of Baghdad, he was the main attraction on the campus square, yelling “I love you” in Arabic to a cheering crowd of students. Bitta is a twenty two year old Iranian activist. She can be radiant in front of news cameras and this is undoubtedly why she is one of the spokespeople for the peace team. There is Peggy, the organic farmer from Ohio, and Tom, the flamboyant deacon and organizer for the Catholic workers movement in New York. There is Theresa, the school teacher from Illinois, who had problems bringing her guitar into Iraq until she played a song for the Iraqi border guards. There is George, the storyteller from Massachusetts, and Micah, the former copy editor from Nepal. They are activists and nurses and artists and lawyers. They come from England, Canada, Ireland, and the United States.

They don’t have the answer for how the war can be stopped. But it is clear that thirty people in Baghdad cannot do it alone. It will take a kind of mass mobilization within the next few weeks, from every part of the globe, to create a critical mass big enough to generate the gravity that can shift the debate from when to why. It will take a scale of organizing not seen since the height of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. But that took at least four years and thousands of dead American soldiers. This war will have a shorter shelf life. And the ingredients for this war will be primarily technological and non-human. One does not mourn the loss of a laser-guided missile. So are the deaths of Iraqi civilians and the extermination of a whole society enough to stop a war waged in the name of freedom and motivated by profit?

The hope is it will be. It is harder to kill indiscriminately when a name is attached to a body. The closer the image of the other is to ourselves, the less likely we are to abstract them into oblivion or indifference. There is the usual grunt work of press releases, phone calls, and demonstrations to work on. But the main task of the peace team is simply to meet people. The extended family of the peace team number in the hundreds. They range from Amal, a painter and mother of seven who lives in the oldest house in Baghdad, to Dr. Saad Al Hassani, the graceful drama professor at the University of Baghdad who asked team members to smuggle in books by Samuel Beckett for his students (the sanctions will not allow books since it is not considered an essential civilian need and weighs over eleven ounces). This informal network of Iraqis, together with the peace team, become a small political ecosystem that sustains the work through mutual support and exchange. Peace team members like George bring chemotherapy drugs, which is virtually non-existent in Baghdad, to an Iraqi friend who has breast cancer. She in turn introduces him to family and friends who are more than willing to befriend an American who does not want to bomb them. George introduces his new friends to the peace team. And the word spreads, to neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, and mosques.

This kind of political work is at once intimate and painful because the connections one makes are intense and in the flesh. After a visit to an Iraqi family’s home, which usually lasts four to five hours, with the obligatory meal made from the food rations given out by the government and several rounds of sweet tea, they no longer look like the wretched of the earth. They are the eleven year old twins, He’be and Du’a, who loves Jackie Chan (Baghdad television broadcasts a movie every night at 11:30PM). And Shouruk, the twenty two year old student who believes sadness is the primary value in music, and thinks Celine Dion is the pinnacle of this value. This is as grassroots as political work gets, which is to say it is slow and the results are hard to quantify. Does it serve peace to know that Sundis, who is thirty three years old and has sparkling azure eyes, suffers from bouts of influenza that cripples her? Yes, if it means the team can get her medicine that will make her healthy again so she can rejoin the constellation of people working in Baghdad with the team. Yes, people can be saved. But peoples cannot. The peace team can only provide the prototype, not the product, of peacemaking. For that it will take movements and actions as well as coalitions and consensus from the outside.

*

Tonight, a wedding party arrived at the Al-Fanar Hotel. Most of the members of the peace team had just returned from a press conference that was staged at a defunct power plant twenty minutes from the center of Baghdad. The goal was to highlight the need to lift the sanctions so the plant can become operational again. There were speeches and the requisite candle-light vigil. A group calling themselves the Japan-Iraq Friendship Committee arrived to lend their solidarity. It was a good event but the timing was bad. Earlier in the day, Colin Powell had delivered his message to the UN security council. The official US position is the position everyone had expected after Iraq delivered the 12,000 page report detailing their weapons production: they are lying. So tonight, at the same time as the power plant action, all the press in Baghdad converged on the ministry of information to hear the Iraqi rebuttal from General Amer al-Saadi, a former scientist and head weapons advisor for the Iraqi government.

Peace team members were being briefed about the Iraqi response in the lobby of the hotel when the music began. Everyone streams out of the hotel to see the ruckus. A cavalcade of thirty or so had set up an impromptu dance party outside the Al-Fanar. The bride and the groom, who were from Basra, a city in southern Iraq, stand on one side, stiff but smiling. Their family twists and turns in front of the newlyweds, accompanied by a three man band playing a kind of music that sounds vaguely like marching songs. All of a sudden, someone grabs me and I find myself in the middle of the dancing. I wasn’t the only one. Sheila, a thirty year old activist and part of the Catholic Worker movement joins the fray with the insistence of three girls. There were others from the team who joined the party but I couldn’t keep count. Men were spraying a white foamy substance into the air and the women were recruiting the elders to shake it. In the midst of the chaos and the reverie no one seemed to mind that on another plane of existence men are planning the city’s destruction. No matter. This is what Baghdad is like. People were laughing and dancing and not yet done.

2002-12-21T22:01:00.000-08:00

JP, NP is now updated as you requested (including a redirection of your PayPal account). :) And by the way, they're chanting "Bravehearts" over and over in the background of "Made You Look." Took a while to figure that one out... -KB

2002-12-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Jean Paulhan,

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article with the title, "Stocks Bullish In Iraq’s Market; Don’t Ask Why." It began with a vignette of the quaintness of the Iraqi Stock Exchange, focusing on the attire of one trader named Abu Zaki--his "finely tailored herring-bone tweed" jacket, his "polished brogues and the 1930’s opera glasses he carries around his neck in inlaid Chinese cloisonne."

Abu Zaki’s panache is shown as comic: "the breeziest boulevardier on the Baghdad bourse." The piling up of similar sounds works toward caricature, suggesting Disney representations of "Arabia."

That there is a Stock Exchange should be our first surprise, and that it has a few aesthetes vaguely aware of culture outside Iraq (albeit decades old) should be our next. (Zaki’s golden age, the article suggests, was the 1950s, before King Faisal II was assassinated).

But lest Zaki’s cultural and sartorial hybridity complicate our picture of Iraq too much, the article quickly moves to its argument: that Iraq’s market knows that its new situation (either passing inspections and having sanctions lifted or being invaded and having a new government imposed) is good for it, and people like Zaki are therefore placed in the difficult situation of explaining why the market is up.

The Market operates as a kind of disturbing unconscious whose desires and, eventually, effects are starting to become legible through the Stalinist censorship. Ultimately it is the special power of "Markets" to challenge such regimes of false representation that the article celebrates: "Don’t ask why."

Markets function as irrepressible baselines of global valuation, and hence "realism."

By the end, then, Abu Zaki’s comic stature has taken on a range of other implications beyond being a dandy in third world nation: people like him must walk the tightrope of explaining this "fact" of a bullish market to investors without admitting why it has come about.

What the article cannot say, and what it somehow offers itself as a compensation for, is that no one now believes that the option of passing UN inspections is real, and that the country will, therefore, undergo a series of massive strikes to its population and infrastructure. And in this way Americans seem to be speaking to themselves through the "facts" of the Baghdad market: even they know, the Iraqis, that invasion is good for them. After the dust settles, the phoenix of The Market.

Friend of Cornelia Hardt

2002-12-19T03:28:00.000-08:00

ML do me a favor and move whatever is the most recent thing on NP as the first thing read. And move the statement of declaration to a link. Essay on Iraqi response to Bush speech soon.

2002-12-19T03:17:00.000-08:00

In baghdad and everything is fine. Cannot use Yahoo or voices email yet. Cannot write long but need Bush's statement declaring Iraq's material breach ASAP. Will get Iraqi response and send back and post to Blogger. Please someone post the statement to blogger or send to me via voices. Baghdad is beautiful and poor. I've never seen so many people laughing at poverty and the immiment threat of war. The must know as many people do that laughter is our bodie's most philosphical reaction: it is our revolt against the absurd.

P.

2002-12-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

AMMAN, JORDAN - First the coffee. Syrian. Thick and black and sweet. It comes in a plastic cup with small tan morels floating on top. They’re ungrounded coffee beans, Nassim said. Special for you, he tells George, who treats Nassim like a son. They go back six years, every since George started traveling into Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, the humanitarian group based in Chicago, Illinois. They call George, Mr. Cappaccino, although his actual name is Cappacio. I don’t have the heart to correct them, George said.

George is a storyteller and writer from Massachusetts. For this trip he brought chemo drugs for a breast cancer patient he met on his last trip, and two large duffel bags filled with aspirin, vitamins and stuffed animals. It is a modest effort to alleviate the Sisyphean suffering of the Iraqi people who have become family to the network of activists who make up Voices. This is his ninth trip into Baghdad. Coming to Amman and especially the Al-Mozen Hotel--where all the Voices in the wilderness members stay before heading into Baghdad by car--is like a homecoming for George. Everyone knows him, from Nassim, the half Indian, half Palestinian desk clerk (there is a large Palestinian population in Amman), to Jemeh, his assistant, to Mr. Mozen, owner and manager of this modest second floor hotel north of city center. The conservations turn quickly, from the health of friends, to the state of Jordanian politics to the impending war against Iraq. It is a race to catch up for lost time. A race everyone runs because no one know when the bombs will start falling and people won’t have time to talk. Mr. Mozen believes it will be soon, right after the New Year. Nassim agrees but thinks it will be thirty to forty days after the New Year. He doesn’t give a reason. Everyone has predictions, which I confuse with premonitions.

Then it was Hummus. Three kinds, swimming in oil, at a small white tiled restaurant. Jemeh takes us there after we settle in at the Al-Mozen. It’s in an area of town where the army of Palestine is stationed, Jemeh tells us. Falafel balls and hot sweet tea too. Jemeh is getting ready to marry a French girl, Constance, in two years. He’s practicing his French now, and teaching Constance Arabic through weekly letters. Hope is always on the other side of the border, Jemeh said.

We flew into Amman in the early evening. The bright lights and billboards cloak my sense of foreignness. They break the Jordanian skyline so many commas and use the same language one sees in New York City, or Chicago, or Dublin, or Vienna, or Taipei: cars and girls, insurance and girls, internet access and.... The airport cab driver informs us of all the monuments on our way into the city. I nod politely but imagine a time when speaking is replaced with animals on the side of the road who smile sympathetically at cars, and who, when asked, give directions. That would be a sight. It would certainly kill any conversation: Too busy looking for animals. I have nothing against speaking, but I have no confidence in it these days.

We are Quakers and journalists and filmmakers and artists and Micah is from Nepal. We all meet at midnight at the Al-Mozen, after everyone arrives. There are twelve of us in this delegation. We head into Baghdad tomorrow.

2002-12-16T07:20:00.000-08:00

AMMAN, JORDAN -- The resignation that the United States will do what it wants, when it wants it, has transformed Amman into a city full of premature mourners. The streets still sting with the smell of diesel and cheap perfumes. The downtown area, near a ruin of a Roman Ampitheater, is noisy and friendly, even to Americans. It is not you, they say (and who are they? Every cab driver, Iraqi refugee, Palestinian shopkeeper, every passerby who walks up to help you find your way around this serpintine city), it is not you we don't like. It is your president. There must be a planet where presidents are liked. Perhaps Saturn, where the citizens are treated with sweets every other hour and only kiss during certain alignment of their moons. Or so Fourier tells me.

2002-12-13T05:48:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK CITY, USA -- I am filled with coffee and quotes. So early in the morning with so many tasks at hand before I leave, these are the only things that keep me going. I start with Kopkind and continue with Camus, who wrote in Combat, the French underground resistence paper, on the bombing of Hiroshima " Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments—a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason."