Iraq: Changing Skins

Haifa Zangana says little as I apologise profusely for dragging her out of bed into the wind and snow of a typical Edinburgh winter’s morning. It is unsurprising. Zangana, an Iraqi author, journalist and political activist, was tortured and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein, and has spent more than thirty years in exile; fretting over the weather mu st seem trivial.

Once we find a warmer, quiet place to sit, she opens up. Conversation moves firstly to her newly republished book, Dreaming of Baghdad, her memoirs of childhood in Iraq and imprisonment as a member of one of the communist party factions in the early 1970s. Her writing style is sparse and non-linear, reminiscent of William S. Burroughs or Jack Kerouac - an inconsistency that represents the inconsistency of her memory, particularly in prison. "Ha!" she exclaims, as I compare her to the Beat generation, "They took drugs, LSD and all that! I suppose when you are imprisoned under dictatorship you don’t need drugs to write about this stuff". Her style is clearly her own. "I never liked the Arabic sentence. It goes on and on with lots of adjectives... I’m not re ally a poet, although I tried my hand as a teenager, like all Arabs. I think language should be economic. What you can explain and write about in a hundred pages shouldn’t need to be written in five hundred".

Her writing is brutally personal – Zangana describes in shocking detail her memories of beatings and interrogation – yet she is quick to stress that her story is not exceptional. "This could have happened, or did happen, to many women and men in Iraq. I just happened to be able to write about it, so my personal is really 'public-personal', if we have a term like this... I mentioned some names in the book, they probably passed through the same experiences I did".

Talk of Iraq then moves quickly to Iraq now. "What’s happening now is more horrendous, even to the extent that people are saying 'they were fantastic days then'", she tells me. Under the Ba’athist regime, Zangana was tortured and forced out of her homeland. Many of her friends and family were killed, yet in spite of all this she is vehemently opposed to the "so called liberators" that removed her torturers from authority, and remains sceptical of the need for US invasion in order to have rid Iraq of Saddam. "Okay, our personal political struggle did not change the regime" she admits, "but in Europe, there was another example that succeeded in giving us an idea of what might have happened in Iraq. Spain. Franco was a dictator. However, rather than invading Spain, there was a slow process of building democracy that worked and that could have happened in Iraq."

As an academic, the distress she feels over the brain drain of intellectuals and the consequences of a collapsing education system for future generations in Iraq is almost palpable. "Academics can’t go back, a big chunk of our academics are in exile," she says. "I know students at the medical school in Baghdad. It used to be the best in the whole Middle East. They have one professor coming from Amman once a month. They go there for an hour a day and yet they graduate. They appear in the statistics to show that things are settling and there are no problems. They graduate as doctors and pharmacists without being taught... The standard is collapsing."

Zangana insists that the disintegrating social fabric of Iraq will have dire consequences for the Coalition in years to come. We speak of the Iraqi death toll over the past seven years, and the estimated five million Iraqi children that are now orphans. "The whole world is talking about how to put an end to terrorism!" she shakes her head. "They are creating terrorism. Imagine those people growing up in Iraq, with no education. People who had hopes in democracy are more angry than old people like me who really were questioning the invaders bringing democracy... They lost their family, their jobs, their houses... I leave it to whoever reads this to think about how they feel about it. It is frightening to me as well, to many of us. These are traumatised people, how to deal with them? In Baghdad I spoke about my hopes for the future. They laughed at me."

Accountability for what has happened to her country is important for Zangana, who is a signatory of the Blair War Crimes Foundation petition to the United Nations General Assembly and the UK Attorney General to indict Blair for his actions in Iraq. Regarding Blair’s prosecution, she is hopeful. "The lawyers who are involved are international lawyers, they have concerns about the respect of international law" she reminds me. "They are working on it and they will continue to work on it... Maybe it’s just another dream, but we have to keep dreaming."

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I move onto the next generation of Western leaders, to President Obama and his pledge to remove combat troops from Iraq this year. With an almost condescending smile she transliterates an Iraqi expression for me."‘We say they are 'changing their skins'. Military personnel or commanders are called advisors now, consultants (50,000 US personnel will remain in Iraq following the departure of combat troops). They are there. No one is really strong in Iraq, there is no central government which is powerful, there are no federal regions which are strong, everyone is weak... They are there to stay as long as there is no real power to push them out, to force them out." I attempt a lame defence of Obama, but do not get very far. "Iraqis realise that the system is more concrete than one person can change" she interrupts, "and foreign policy is not easily changeable. Really, it’s not realistic even to put the most honest person on earth in power and ask him or her to change all of that. It shows now, the disappointment is great for anyone who had any hope in him."

Zangana changes her tone when we speak of her future. Will Iraq ever be safe enough for her to return? Will she die in exile? "I don’t know!" She smiles. "I think I’ll go back". She pauses. "Definitely".