Finding Samiya in the Chaos of Baghdad

By ANN KERR Special to the Palisadian-Post There it was in my mailbox ‘a beige envelope addressed to me in simple handwritten script with a colorful stamp covered with exotic fish and Arabic writing, postmarked Iraq, March 9, 2004. I had been hoping for a letter from Samiya since 1990, when I visited her in Baghdad but I knew it might be risky for her to write. My visit 14 years before was the first time I had seen her since we were roommates at the American University of Beirut in 1954-55. ”Samiya had been reluctant to meet me at the home of an American diplomat, where I was staying in January 1990 and working on a student exchange program, so we met for coffee in the lobby of the Babylon Hotel. She was nervous about being seen with an American, so our visit was disappointingly short. She spoke in hushed tones about the difficult times they had been through in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. A quarter of a million people had died, among them her youngest brother. Samiya was the eldest sister in a Christian family of 10 children originally from Mosul. She had not married and had helped support her younger siblings as a high school math teacher. Now she was caring for her ailing mother, but they had suffered a setback two years earlier when their house was confiscated by the government with only modest compensation. Her voice lowered as she told me this, and then she explained, ‘I have to be careful’I am a teacher in the school where the children of government officials study, and information is quickly passed around. I could lose my job if they thought I was against the government.’ I learned this month that she had taught three of Saddam Hussein’s daughters. ”I opened Samiya’s letter, almost in disbelief, reading her straightforward language written in blue ink on both sides of a single piece of paper. ‘You asked me how I feel about what is happening in Iraq,’ she responded to the question I had asked her in a letter at Christmas time. ‘I will write how I feel and people around me feel. ”’Last March, I moved to my sister’s house with her husband and daughter. We made one room as a shelter. It was difficult days. One day they fired guns in our district, 35 were killed and 64 wounded. We left to my cousin’s house in the other side of the city. It was worse. I stayed six months with my sister. It was not safe for me to live alone. We thanked God my family was saved during the war. After that, as [with] other people, a car was stolen, my brother and his wife were attacked with arms as they were walking’they took money and a gold bracelet in which was written Glory to God. We didn’t have kidnapping in the family as others because we are not rich. ”’My brothers are three engineers and two computer specialists’they are good at their work and heads of their sections. They have small families, one, two and the largest three children. After the war of 1991 [the first Gulf War], all these families were not able to live with their salaries. ”’I have one brother who has lived in Germany more than 40 years. He started helping us for the last 13 years. He sends the money to me and I give it to nine families and keep $1,000 for emergency. Those who couldn’t [get] help from outside have either to bribe or steal, especially when they have big families. The government gave each family the essential things like sugar, rice, oil’The monthly salary for a teacher or a doctor can help him buy 30 eggs. My pension could help me buy 20 eggs. You can’t live a month on such a salary. ”’I am writing all this to explain to you how sanction has affected Iraq and its people. Before, all children were oblige to study at least six years. Teaching was a respected job. After the sanction, some children [couldn’t come to] school. The sanction has changed many things, the relations between people, the morals of the society. I don’t blame Saddam, only for what happen to Iraqi people. All leaders in different countries are as criminal as Saddam. They all help to keep him in his position. They all sold him weapons, they know how much he used and got rid of, but kept the sanction for 13 years. Mr. Bush the father, who had good relation with Saddam, could get rid of him in 1991. He didn’t’they say [because of] politics which I don’t understand. Now they want to give us freedom and democracy. They can rebuild a better bridge or a house, but they can’t heel the soul and the character of people. It needs years and it will not be the same. It all showed in the behavior of people in this last war. I cried only for the museum, which I love, and for the books that were stolen or buried. A year has passed and life is worse than before. We are afraid in our houses, afraid to drive and afraid to walk.’ ”Samiya ended her letter with a sympathetic story about American soldiers who had searched their house in May. ‘One of them saw my niece’s picture with Santa Claus. He called his friends and showed them the picture. I told them that I hope they will be with their families at Christmas. They said pray for us to go before. I wonder which one of them went. I feel sorry for them to be killed for what?’ ”A second letter from Samiya arrived at the end of September from Germany, where she was visiting her brother, another single page covered on both sides in her tidy penmanship. On the back of the envelope was her brother’s address. I rushed to the post office with a letter to mail to her, giving her my telephone number and asking her to phone me before she returned to Iraq on October 13’hoping she wouldn’t see evidence of the high cost of sending a letter by express mail to Germany. Meanwhile I read and reread her two letters. She had traveled with some of her family members overland in an 11-hour drive by minibus from Baghdad to Amman where she had waited 20 days to obtain a visa for Germany. ‘Here I am having a very nice time. We visited Koln which has the biggest cathedral in Germany. I attended a noon service and prayed from all my heart to have peace in all the world.’ ”’The Red Cross group in this city invited me to talk about life in Iraq. I told them how it is difficult to go by car or to walk. People are afraid that something will explode any time. The American soldiers are afraid too. If they give a sign to stop and the person doesn’t see it, they shoot and many innocent people died in this way. I told them about the electricity cuts for many hours a day and sometimes for many days and it is very hot in Iraq so we can’t keep food. They asked if it was better before. I said I don’t care about politics, but many things were good: Making teaching (required schooling) till the age of 12, or teaching the older people who didn’t have the chance before, and building schools and hospitals. Building big houses for the president and his relatives and many mosques was not good. I preferred if they had built houses for the people. Now, one and a half years have passed and they haven’t built a single school or a hospital in all Iraq. They have painted some schools, and say we are going to do this and that and make contracts, but there is nothing. ”’I told the group also about the situation of Christians in Iraq. I think you heard when they exploded six cars at six services during Sunday service. Many were killed and wounded. After that these fanatic Muslims who entered Iraq, said that Christians in Iraq should leave, and some got letters asking them to change their religion. They think Mr. Bush is our relative because he is Christian!’ ”Life in Iraq is becoming worse. Mr. Jacques Chirac, [president] of France, said a good sentence. He said they have opened one of hell’s doors and don’t know how to close it.’ Calculating that my express mail letter to Samiya in Germany would take about three days, I tried to stay off the phone in the morning hours when I told her I was usually home. Her call came about six days after my letter was mailed. I couldn’t believe I was hearing her voice’the 50-year period since we had been roommates at AUB with all its ensuing tragedy receded into the background as we renewed our friendship. I was tempted to jump on an airplane and go to Germany in the few days she had left there before returning to Baghdad, wanting desperately to do something to counter the helplessness I felt that my government had launched a preemptive war against Samiya’s country. Instead, I asked her if I could phone her several times over the next few days. ”In those phone calls I asked Samiya what she thought would happen if the Americans left Iraq. Immediately she answered, ‘There will be civil war. Bush has put his feet in the Iraqi mud’ believe me, only another Saddam can hold Iraq together. Now it is worse than before. Thirty professors were killed. The radicals want to get rid of educated people. They say it was a Zionist project. There is chaos. The world mafia came in with the American invasion. You will never know the truth from your television. Many thousands have been killed and many of the wounded die and are not counted. The Iraqis think the Americans came to control oil. They have all the Gulf States and now Iraq, tomorrow Iran. We never thought about terrorism.’ ”Samiya said she did not have the choice of staying in Germany where the country was already overflowing with refugees. But I suspect it was her feeling of responsibility as the senior member of her family to return to her siblings, nieces and nephews that enabled her to face the return journey to Amman and then the overland trip by minibus through Fallouja and Ramadi to Baghdad. ‘I will try to write you when I get back, but it might be difficult,’ she said. ‘I mostly stay at home, I read and knit. I have three good friends and we all read books and talk about them. They were teachers and professors’ and all Muslim. This was not a problem before, but I don’t know what it will be like now. The radicals came to a Christian pharmacist’s house last week and told him to convert to Islam or they would kill him. I hear they come to houses of women who live alone and kill them. Saddam kept this down.’ ”I couldn’t conceal my worry for her safe return, and the thought that having finally found her I might not be able to see her again. Hearing the concern in my voice and probably trying to quiet her own, Samiya said quietly, ‘We don’t know when we will die. I depend on God and leave it all. We cannot know when we will die.’ ”Samiya was to arrive in Baghdad last Friday. The front page of the Sunday New York Times had a color photo of Christians attending a blackened church in Baghdad, one of five that had been bombed that weekend. I searched for Samiya in the photo but couldn’t find her. (Editor’s note: Ann Kerr is coordinator of the Visiting Fulbright Scholar Enrichment Program at UCLA. In 1954-55 she studied at the American University in Beirut her junior year in college. There she met her husband, UCLA Professor Malcolm Kerr, who served as president of American University in Lebanon until 1984. That year he was assassinated in Beirut by unknown assailants who claimed responsibility in the name of Islamic Jihad. Ann is the author of two books on the Middle East.)