I went to Iraq over Christmas a couple of months before the bombing
started. The idea to go came from Tom Cornell, a longtime peace
activist I had met 20 years ago. In July 2002, he sent an e-mail
that read simply, "Christmas in Iraq? Could happen."
After kicking the idea around for a few months, we arranged
to go as part of a delegation that would obtain visas at the Iraqi
embassy in Amman, Jordan, and drive as a group into Iraq on December
17. The plans came off without a hitch, a remarkable achievement
for an organization operating on the anarchist principles that
mark so much of the Catholic peace movement.
The organization is Voices in the Wilderness, taking its name
from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark: "A voice cries in the
wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord" (Mark 1:3). Voices was
founded in the mid-1990s to draw attention to the suffering of
the Iraqi people under the economic embargo that had been imposed
by the United Nations since August 1990. Speakers from Voices
had visited Notre Dame twice in recent years and had described
in graphic detail the damage done by the first Gulf War on the
country's hospitals, power plants and water treatment facilities.
Both speakers told of the lethal effects the sanctions were having
on the people they had met there. And both generated the intended
goal: They left many of us with a desire to do something. As one
student later wrote: "This is going to be one of those things
where people look back in 20 years and wonder why no one said
anything, why no one did anything."
That pretty much summed up my reason for going. Of course, I
didn't put it like that when explaining the trip to my students
and colleagues, friends and family. It's a way of "showing solidarity
with the people of Iraq," I declared, of "embodying our unity
with Iraqi Catholics and other Christians there." In a more practical
vein, I added, we would bring embargoed medical supplies ($30,000
worth of antibiotics) to people desperately in need of them. This
"work of mercy" is also an act of civil disobedience that could
result in 12 years in jail and $1 million in fines. But basically
the trip was a way of saying and doing something about the sanctions
and, by the time of my departure in December 2002, about the all-but-inevitable
U.S. invasion of Iraq. Saying and doing something. Anything.
What I did, when all was said and done, was meet and come to
know some Iraqi people. The first Iraqi I came to know were Satar,
who drove our delegation from Amman to Baghdad, a 14-hour trip
through some of the most treacherous traffic and magnificent desert
landscape any of us had ever seen. He had had a professional job,
but in the paralyzed economy driving turned out to be the only
way to feed his family.
At our hotels, the al Fanar and the Andaloosa, I met several
bellhops, all dressed in well-pressed black pants and white shirts,
black ties, all sporting closely trimmed moustaches. All of them
greeted us, as they would unfailingly throughout our stay, with
a resounding "welcome!" The next morning I met the waiter who
always had a towel over his forearm. He brought us rolls and jelly,
eggs and juice, and coffee and cream, and gave a brief bow as
he left our table. Then I met the night clerk, a Kurd who spoke
English with a British accent, taught at the university during
the day and took this second job because he could read into the
night. The next day I met the tailor down the street who mended
my passport pouch.
Then there was Hassan, a 10-year-old shoeshine Kurdish boy who
accosted us every time we entered or left the hotel. "Mister"
(Mee-stah), he would insist, "polish shoes?" He would
unpack his brushes and polish before you could answer and start
in. The taxi drivers hanging around the hotel warned us not to
pay him too much. He's an "Ali Baba," they told us, a thief. Before
long, Hassan and I were playing soccer most afternoons in the
dusty park between the boulevard and the Tigris River. The next
week I bought him a soccer ball. Whenever he scored, he would
lift up his arms and shout "Allah!"
Parts of our three-week tour were planned for us courtesy of
the Iraqi government, complete with "minders," as they were called,
to keep an eye on us. We went to local hospitals, to the University
of Baghdad and to the al Amariyah Bomb Shelter, where a "smart"
bomb had been dropped on the night of February 13, 1991. It had
incinerated more than 100 families who had taken refuge there,
leaving images of sleeping children burned into the concrete walls.
But the most fruitful encounters with Iraqis came when we met
them without official chaperons.
One encounter that stands out was arranged by Cathy Breen, an
old friend from the New York Catholic Worker House who had been
in Iraq with Voices since October 2002. Resolved to stay through
the war, she took it as her main task to help families in the
neighborhood by collecting bottled water, food and medicine, and
most importantly by just being with them. One afternoon Cathy
took me to see Kareema, a 30-something mother of six who wore
a black head scarf. The place was tiny: two rooms connected to
the back of an abandoned garage, a couch, a few chairs and a TV
in one room, kitchen table and stove in the other. I sat on a
rug as we talked for a couple of hours about the loss of her husband
in a car accident, her experience during the last war, and her
apprehensions about the war that was on the way. Her main concerns
were having food and water and about her oldest son, Ali, who
had been inducted into the army. I asked about a religious picture
of Mary on the wall. With the help of a friend's translation,
she said she is devoted to the mother of Jesus because she was
obedient to God's word.
Many traditional Muslims harbor a deep appreciation for Christians
who, as it was often explained to us, have a crucial part to play
in the Qu'ran and are thus people of the book. This explains,
in part, the surprisingly felicitous relations we observed between
Muslims, who constitute 95 percent of Iraq's population of 26
million, and Christians, who constitute about 3 percent, somewhere
under a million people. The other part of the explanation has
to do with the government's policy of squelching any form of Muslim
fanaticism, which is why Saddam Hussein was hated and feared by
many Shiites. Under Saddam, Christians fared relatively well in
Iraq compared to such countries in the Middle East as Saudi Arabia.
Baghdad, we were told, has 57 Christian church buildings.
We entered our first church the day after we arrived to attend
a prayer service for peace led by Catholics of the Chaldean Rite.
The event brought together Dominican nuns, Missionaries of Charity,
Redemptorist priests, dozens of seminarians and about 100 lay
people. The archbishop of Baghdad presided. They all spoke Arabic,
but the prayer itself was in Aramaic, the native language of most
Iraqi Christians and, as they noted with soft-spoken pride, "the
language of Jesus." These were descendents of some of the oldest
Christian communities in the world, founded by Thomas the Apostle,
as the tradition has it, on his way to India.
The next Friday, the primary day of worship in Iraq for Christians
as well as Muslims, we attended an Armenian Orthodox church not
far from our hotel. The priest then invited two of us to his house
for tea that evening. A big, burly, bearded man with a deep, stentorian
voice, he told us the story of the Armenian Christians in Iraq.
Then we asked him about the war. He assured us that Bush was bluffing,
that he wanted oil but didn't have the guts to take it. If Bush
tries, the priest told us, the Iraqis will win. "I fought in the
Iranian war," he said. "I know what war is like! Iraqi soldiers
don't have the technology, but they know how to fight!" His wife
shook her head as she brought us anisette and cookies.
The next day a Dominican convent hosted a citywide veneration
of the relics of Saint Therese de Lisieux. All day long people
came to the little chapel, knelt, made the sign of the cross and
prayed to the Little Flower.
My most memorable contact with Christians came on Christmas
Eve in Basra. The second-largest city in Iraq, Basra has a population
of 2 million and is the center of production of the country's
two largest exports, oil and dates. Earlier that day, four people
in our delegation and a government minder named Zaid flew down
in a commercial jet (which made us anxious, given that we were
passing through the no-fly zone). We ate dinner at a restaurant
(chicken and rice, an inexpensive and intestinally safe meal),
visited the family of a girl whose arm was severed and another
family of a boy who had been killed, both the result of recent
U.S. bombing attacks, and then went to see Archbishop Gabriel
Kasab, pastor of Saint Therese Parish and pastoral leader of the
Chaldean Catholic Church of Basra. Like most Iraqi Christians,
Kasab is from the north, a small Christian village near Mosul.
And like an increasing number of Iraqi Christians, many members
of his family had immigrated to the United States. Seven of his
brothers and sisters live in or near Detroit, where he visits
them every July. Only a few days before, he had spoken on the
phone with his brother, who filled him in on the latest U.S. headlines
and pleaded with him to come to Detroit, to which Kasab responded
that he would be staying with his flock.
The flock came out in droves that night for Midnight Mass. It
began at 8 p.m., when a handful of men in the parish gathered
to chant psalms, an ancient custom that Kasab had revived. They
stood chanting while hundreds of well-dressed parishioners trickled
into the church and its balcony area.
I was asked to concelebrate and thus processed in as part of
a long line of acolytes, seven deacons, three other priests, and
the archbishop. Chaldean liturgies are far more complex than the
Roman rite, and it was in Aramaic and Arabic. With the help of
the other priests I managed to follow some of the prayers. But
for the most part I was lost -- until the Gospel, when I recognized
exactly five of the words: "Jesus," "Mary," "Joseph," "amen" and
"alleluia."
After the archbishop proclaimed the Gospel, several teenagers
enacted it in a Christmas pageant that took place right in the
sanctuary. The climax came when an olive-skinned, almond-eyed
angel carried in a live baby, all wrapped in swaddling clothes.
A wave of oohs and ahhs came forth from the pews. As if this were
not enough, a white-bearded figure dressed in red flannel and
black boots made his entry from the back of the church while the
congregation broke into a resounding chorus of "Jingle Bells,"
in Arabic no less.
Santa Claus made his way up to the sanctuary, moving from one
group of kids to the next, ringing handheld sanctuary bells all
the while. It took a full five minutes for everyone to settle
down for the homily. I didn't understand much but was told that
the archbishop preached on what was on everyone's mind that night:
peace on earth. It gave a somber feel to the rest of the liturgy,
which was interrupted for me as we approached the part to which
I was assigned, introducing the "Our Father" in English. The entire
Mass lasted about three hours.
People expressed their gratitude in the parish courtyard afterward
for my being there, but our conversation was cut short when Zaid,
our officious minder, took my elbow and said firmly, "It is time
to go." In the car on the way to the hotel I told him that Archbishop
Kasab had invited me for breakfast the next morning. "It is not
permitted," he said. After my mild protest he relented. But breakfast
in the rectory the next morning was brief, only 30 minutes, and
it was chaperoned, although Kasab made the minder sit in the next
room. We talked about the difficulties created by the war in '91
and the sanctions, the war that was coming, and of maybe meeting
again in Detroit in July.
Later that day we visited one of the largest mosques in the
city. Because it was a Wednesday, the mosque was empty. As the
staff walked us through its several stories, each designated for
men or for women and each equipped with a large-screen TV for
watching Friday sermons, we realized that two days from now the
people gathered there for prayers would number literally in the
thousands.
After our tour the sheik of the mosque invited us to dinner.
For two hours we sat cross-legged in our socks eating chicken
and comparing notes about Islam and Christianity. He showed a
grudging respect for Kasab. Then we asked the standard question:
"What do you think is going to happen?" To which he gave the standard
answer: "As God wills."
On our way to the airport we saw jet fighters flying low overhead
and heard bombs exploding in the distance -- training exercises,
we were told, just over the border. Our flight departed as the
sun sank. Looking out the window, I counted a dozen oil rigs burning
like matchsticks on the orange horizon. Beyond them, to the east,
were the hills of Iran, and to the south, barely visible, the
deserts of Kuwait.
Leaving Basra was like leaving the outer banks of North Carolina
as a hurricane is approaching. Over the next two weeks a similar
feeling descended upon me about the country as a whole. On the
Feast of the Holy Family I said Mass at Saint Raphael's Parish
in Baghdad and preached about us all being brothers and sisters.
Afterward Tom and I had tea and cookies with the Iraqi Dominican
sisters who direct a hospital adjacent to the church.
We also spent a day with Archbishop Jacques Isaac, rector of
a seminary on the outskirts of Baghdad that trains scores of seminarians
and more than 100 laypeople for ministry in parishes of central
and northern Iraq. He took us to a local community of Little Sisters
of Jesus, the order founded by Charles de Foucald, a monk who
lived in the North African desert side by side with Muslims. "What
are you doing to prepare for the war?" we asked. "We are waiting,"
was the reply.
On our last weekend, a group of us visited two Dominican communities,
one of sisters and one of priests, in the northern city of Mosul,
site of ancient Nineveh. On our way out of town, we stopped at
the huge stone gates of that city and read the Book of Jonah aloud.
The story has twists and turns, but it's basically hopeful: When
Jonah finally gets around to preaching the word of the Lord to
Nineveh, the entire city, including the animals, immediately repents.
But the news on Syrian television that morning indicated that
there was little chance of the great cities of our own day repenting
any time soon.
Back in the States, people would come up after a talk to commend
our "prophetic action," taking medicine to Iraq and breaking the
law. Before going, I thought of my trip primarily as a way of
doing something in the face of the war, of protesting and helping
out in some concrete way. And I still think that civil disobedience
can be important means of Christian witness. But at some point
in Iraq I came to see my trip less in terms of prophetic action
and more in terms of personal action, or what Peter Maurin called
"the art of personal contacts."
As artistic endeavors go, it is a relatively easy one. All it
takes is sitting with people and listening to their stories over
little glasses of sugar-saturated tea. And while this art does
not stops wars, it does help us to see through the rhetoric politicians
use when leading us into war, deploying such phrases as "imminent
threat," "weapons of mass destruction," "liberation of the Iraqi
people," "stabilization and democratization of the wider Middle
East." This is the kind of rhetoric that draws us into justifying
the loss of life to fend off some great fear or to promote some
high ideal that appears if you keep your eyes on "the big picture."
The problem is that against the background of this so-called big
picture, real people appear expendable, or they fall out of the
picture all together.
On the night the bombing started, I was able to reach Cathy
Breen from my phone in Moreau Seminary. She said the staff at
the al Fanar had stockpiled water and kerosene in the basement
and were bringing their families to live at the hotel, figuring
it would be safer than their homes. Before hanging up we prayed.
Then I went to play noontime basketball at Rolfs. Coming out of
the locker room, the television caught my eye. There on the TV
screen, half a world away, were the rockets' red glare and the
bombs bursting in air over the night skyline of Baghdad. The newscaster
said the target was the presidential palace on the west bank of
the Tigris, right across from the al Fanar.
For the rest of that day I heard nothing about Cathy. Neither
did Tom. A couple of days later, an e-mail from the Voices office
in Chicago reported that the 13 people still in Iraq were okay.
Then e-mails came on an almost daily basis, informing us of what
was happening in Baghdad: the Shock and Awe bombing campaign,
the destruction of the homes of some families near the hotel,
the tension of waiting for the "Siege of Baghdad," the staged
toppling of the statue of Saddam (only a block from the al Fanar),
the chronic power outages, the upsurge in crime, the looting.
Cathy remained in Baghdad until May 2003. In July, at a gathering
of Catholic peace activists in New York, she recounted the toll
the war had taken on the people she knew in Iraq, and not only
Iraqis but also U.S. soldiers, some of whom confided in her as
they patrolled the street corner outside the al Fanar. "I've seen
terrible things," one of them said, "terrible things." In September
Cathy returned to Iraq for two months and came back saying things
were bad and getting worse. Now she is making plans to go again.
When Cathy Breen talks about her time in Iraq, she talks about
the people with whom she has lived on and off for more than a
year now, people she actually knows. She recounts the concrete
experiences they have been through, from their fear at the sound
of a bunker buster bomb to their daily search for water to their
struggle to come to terms with losing their homes and livelihoods
and family members. She speaks with the kind of detail that comes
from taking the war personally.
Looking back, I think this is what drew me into going to Iraq
with Voices in the Wilderness: the prospect of taking the war
personally. In the days and weeks after last year's bombing started,
I thought of Satar, who drove us in and out of the country; of
the hotel staff and their families; of the taxi drivers on the
corner and the tailor down the street; of the parishioners of
Saint Therese in Basra, the Dominicans in Mosul, and the nuns
running Saint Raphael's hospital in Baghdad.
When reports came out on the supposedly low number of civilian
casualties, I thought of the young soldiers -- kids really --
on the roads outside of Baghdad. I wondered how many of them
had been killed. The Red Cross couldn't keep up the count
because the fighting was too fast and furious. And I thought of
the students I'd known at Notre Dame who were now deployed in
Iraq and wondered if any of them had seen terrible things. Soldiers
on the road from Basra to Baghdad reported walking into some cities
and finding the streets knee-deep in body parts.
And I wondered about Hassan, the Kurdish 10-year-old kid I played
soccer with in the park along the Tigris. I learned he survived
the bombing in an e-mail from Cathy last April, and she said he
was hanging around outside the hotel when she was back last fall.
But Tom Cornell was back in Baghdad this past February, and he
said there had been no sign of him. His family, we heard, went
up north where it was safe.
* * *
Father Baxter is an assistant professor of theology and a fellow
of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
(April 2004)
