Iraq
Sara Cameron... Inside stories
Just before the 2003 invasion I travelled to Iraq to write about a polio campaign. At first my visa was rejected because of my British nationality. I am told that the UNICEF Iraq office sent my Colombia book, Out of War, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a character reference. Apparently it was Tariq Aziz himself, “or someone even higher”, who eventually approved the visa based on the book.
There were no flights to Baghdad so I drove from Amman with several Iraqi colleagues from UNICEF. At the border I was separated from them and shown into a large room for the foreigners, that was fitted with plush crimson cinema style seats. One wall was taken up with a huge portrait of Sadaam. The head of immigration came to sit with me, offered me tea and asked me if I knew Christine.
- Christine who?
- She is British as well, he said. She goes to Baghdad all the time. She tells me I am very handsome.
The guy was a dead-ringer for Sadaam whose massive portrait bore down on me - same moustache, same dark hair, same wave. Clearly I was already into appeasement because I quickly agreed with “Christine”, whoever she was, that the Immigration Chief was indeed very handsome. It was only later that I realized that a lot of Iraqi men had adopted the Sadaam-look. Why did he need to invest in all those doubles?
We drove to Baghdad through a landscape that seemed strewn with rubble as far as the eye could see. There’s a lot I liked about Iraq but the landscape I couldn’t understand. It was as if a fleet of bulldozers had churned over the earth on a massive scale. The rubble plains were dotted with cement bunkers with no apparent sign of a road leading to them. No one seemed to know the purpose of these cement buildings. Of course this was in the days before we knew the truth about the weapons of mass destruction...
In Baghdad I checked into the approved hotel where the receptionist made a big fuss about giving me the so-called “best room.” It had a double bed rather than the single twin beds that were in the other rooms, and two windows. When I lightly boasted my good fortune at the office the next day my Iraqi friends laughed.
- They call it the best room because it doesn’t just have the audio recorder, it has cameras too!
It seemed far fetched but the next day one of our security officers actually found two cameras in his hotel room, including one in his bathroom.
The next day we drove to Basra - through more rubble-strewn landscape. I had been assigned a minder, called Khalid. He was maybe 30 years old. Dark glasses, leather jacket, worn with a swagger. Like a few others on that trip, he asked why everyone in the world hated the Iraqis. He scoffed at the idea that Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction. On the way we stopped off at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates which was supposed to be the site of the Garden of Eden. There was a broken down hotel, garbage floating in the river, a few shepherds with goats. Khalid, asked if I wanted to see the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and led me to an old blackened and gnarled olive tree with not a sign of a leaf. I mentioned that it looked kind of dead and maybe this wasn’t a good thing for the world. Khalid chuckled. Then a young boy carrying a large knife ran over, hacked off a sliver of the bark and gave it to me. The old men sitting around yelled at him - no wonder the tree is dead, I thought, slipping good-and-evil into my bag. I still have that piece of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
As we drove, Khalid quizzed me on my intentions. He asked if I was I going to interview young people in Iraq, like I had in Colombia - so he had been briefed! I said no, I was there to write about the polio campaign. On the drive back to Baghdad I told him I was Scottish (which I am by choice, marriage, name and home). That night I went to an Italian restaurant with some friends from the office. I didn’t eat all my calzone so I asked to take it with me. The waiter brought it back in a box which had the word “Scottish” written on it in English. So I was being watched closely and Khalid was reporting on me - and promptly too. I told him the next day that I’d got his message. He laughed. He gave me a Donald Duck key ring as a memento which I thought must be bugged.
There was a lot of laughter during that trip - most especially from my friend Haydar who was a health officer for UNICEF. Yet everyone knew that the war was coming and a couple of months later the invasion began. I don’t know what happened to Khalid or many others I met on that trip - the doctors and nurses whose stories are told here. Some died, including an extraordinary and much-loved colleague from UNICEF, Chris Klein-Beekman, who was killed in the bombing of the UN in Baghdad.
When I visited Baghdad I was still based with UNICEF in New York. Right after the invasion I was asked if I would join the Iraq office. By the time the paperwork was done the UNICEF international staff had been evacuated to Amman so I never went back to Baghdad. I arrived in Amman in October 2003. It was a desperately sad time. It was only weeks since the bombing of the UN. The loss of Chris hung over everyone in the office. It was hardest for the Iraqi staff who were separated from their families who were inside Iraq and still at risk from the war and the surge in criminality.
The situation got worse. Day after day we went to work and then went home and wept out of frustration and anger, We trained for re-entry, practicing driving though road blocks, ambushes and imaginary mine fields. We bought armoured vehicles and flak jackets. We scratched off the UNICEF logo from our vehicles, because this logo which had always offered such protection was suddenly a liability. Inside Iraq UNICEF worked through contractors who rehabilitated schools and health centres and provided back-to-school packs for every Iraqi child - but without a UNICEF logo in sight. I wrote a paper titled “No logo on any child” - which also meant we would not use the logos, slogans and flags of our donors. Some were unhappy but the argument against was unassailable - what if a clinic or a school was targeted for having a plaque carrying a UNICEF or a donor’s flag on its door?
Soon after the Abu Ghraib story broke we learned that there were also children in the jail and my courageous colleague Ban, who was still working in Baghdad, found a Major in the US Army who was willing to talk. In those days UNICEF was keeping the lowest of media profiles, because we did not want to draw attention to the work we were quietly supporting or more especially the courageous people who were carrying it out. I spoke to a lot of journalists off the record, told them everything I knew and put them in touch with extraordinary stories - on condition they never revealed the source because it could put lives at risk. I wanted to tip them off about important stories - but my motivation was also to put a stop to stories about UNICEF abandoning Iraq.
When we learned about the children in Abu Ghraib I called a couple of journalists and told them about the children in the jail and connected them with the Major, on condition that UNICEF would not be mentioned. After the story came out we issued a statement on behalf of UNICEF condemning the military for keeping children in jail, and calling for their release. We became experts at leaking information. Once one of the confidential bulletins I had written appeared on German TV. Publicly we protested about the breach of confidentiality, but quietly we were thrilled. That bulletin - again about the detention of children by the British and the American forces - kept cropping up in the news in Norway, the UK, the USA and more. We were hampered in our ability to speak out partly because much of the information we received, while we believed it to be accurate, could not be corroborated - but we also felt politically compromised and unable to speak out against our primary donors. Many of us objected to the way in which the humanitarian work of the UN agencies was co-opted by the American and British forces, as if our work were part of their invasion plan. It was that association that left the UN exposed and vulnerable to attack. Many of us believed that UNICEF should not have accepted funds from the US for Iraq, and yet without those resources many more children would have died. The compromise and appeasement that we succumbed to fed my nightmares.
I joined UNICEF Iraq in October 2003 and left in November 2004. I had wanted to stay longer but my family prevailed - they were not willing to see me in that flak jacket riding into the Green Zone in an armoured vehicle. When I explained, UNICEF was completely supportive, both in Iraq and Headquarters, and within two months of beginning my search for another job I had the offer letter for Kenya.
That year in Amman was without doubt the hardest of my life for there were other struggles that I won’t write about here, yet Jordan was also staggeringly beautiful and many of the friends I made there - like Haydar, Ban, and Shoubo - I’ll always treasure and thank from the bottom of my heart for their kindness, joy, generosity, courage and wonderful sense of humour. And I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the karaoke nights in Amman when Geoff and Gina and Wolfgang took to the stage and we sang and laughed until our ribs ached. It is often in the bleakest of times that we can discover the most ridiculous joys.