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Window
on War Peshwaz Faizulla is an Iraqi Kurd visiting the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship. He briefly studied English and journalism at the UO before heading to Columbia University in New York to pursue a master's degree in journalism. I met Faizulla in a journalism class, and over the course of several months, we became friends. Faizulla speaks thoughtfully and precisely, his eyes sharp beneath unruly black brows. Bits of gray pepper his dark hair and his face is etched with memories of struggle. "I am 28 years old, but I have the soul of a 40-year-old," he told me. He grew up in Suleimany, a mountain-rimmed city of 700,000 in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Despite Saddam Hussein's despotic rule of Iraq, the Kurds have administered the region independently since 1991. Faizulla was born in 1975, one year after the collapse of the first Kurdish revolution. When he was 13, Saddam's army advanced on the region, burning villages and killing civilians in a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. When he was 16, Saddam's army once again encroached on the autonomous region, and Faizulla's family abandoned their property in Suleimany to seek temporary refuge on the border with Iran. By the time he was 28, Faizulla had witnessed the regional impacts of the second Kurdish revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War, the mass exodus of Kurds to Iran and Turkey, and the American invasion of Iraq. Faizulla earned a BA in English from the College of Languages in Suleimany and went on to work as a translator and a journalist. After the start of the American war on Iraq, he translated for the American media and military and worked as the regional coordinator for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic and English. The following dialogue is excerpted from two conversations we had in late July and early August, just before Faizulla left for New York City. How do you view the American invasion of Iraq? It was a good thing. We didn't call it an invasion; we called it liberation, because it was the only chance to get rid of Saddam. Forty-five years he was ruling, and we couldn't do anything. It was just about time. We loved the Americans because we hated Saddam. So for the Kurds, the American war was a liberation. How do you feel about Bush? He's a pawn in the chessboard. I don't think he has control over anything; he's just another number in the whole system. He's not the devil himself; he's one of the disciples. Because the devil is running the whole world and this country. The devil is the corporations and the money. What do you see as the biggest problems facing the U.S.? I don't think this is a free country. People here are just led by the media, and the media make people become so transparent and so superficial that they can get excited by a rise in the price of milk or a financial crisis at Delta Airlines. And it's amazing that a nation like this, that considers itself one of the most democratic and free nations, could be driven into all these conflicts in the last decade just because the administration can play on the people's emotions. 9/11 was a big shock to Americans, so they gave up their freedoms because they wanted to be safe. And this is the game that the Bush administration is playing successfully. The government doesn't come from the sky. That's the old interpretation of government, that it is a different entity from the society. But the government is the society — the crystallization of the society. If people wouldn't join the Army, Bush couldn't go to war, for example. And why people join the Army has lots of reasons, one of them being money. You see a young girl or boy who is 20 or 21 and goes and joins the Army just because he or she wants to pay tuition. And he can't afford it, so he joins the army, and he will get killed. Do you think it's odd that 9/11 led to the overthrow of Saddam? Is there a connection in your mind? 9/11 is not a war. Who are you fighting after 9/11? You don't know.
I'm starting to realize that 9/11 was not something that America was
not aware of. Even if they In a nation that has a crisis that it doesn't know how to deal with, you have to create an external enemy and attach all the evil things to that. In America, the situation got so complicated that the people couldn't handle it. They had to have an external enemy so that they could attach all the negative things to it. I heard that America couldn't live for more than 10 years without having a war. And the other wars that they fought before — the last one was the Cold War with the Soviets — were not that effective. So the new enemy is one that doesn't have an identity. It's not the Soviet Union, it's not Japan, it's not Korea, it's not Vietnam. It's Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which doesn't exceed 1,000 members. And they don't have a land, they don't have a shape, they don't have a face. But they can do whatever they want. They can destroy America. They can have atomic bombs. They can launch an atomic bomb. This is the image that your media give you. How do you view America now versus before you came here? I was disappointed when I came here. I thought that the American people were deeper and more critical. I was sure that they were, because you get an image of democracy and freedom, and you think that this is authentic. But I came here and I found people so unaware and so incapable of seeing things the way they are. I remember talking to one of the officers in the American Army. He was 10 years older than me, and I told him that the plan to invade Afghanistan and Iraq is not a plan that just came two or three years ago. It is an old plan of America to have another footstep in the region to get power to face the Soviets and get the Gulf and the oil and things like that. And he was making fun of me. He was saying "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did that in the '70s." He was laughing. And only now you realize that this is all a colonial plan. The foreign policy of America was to get a footstep in the Middle East. Especially next to their beloved son, who is Israel. I think I'm hearing a contradiction. You are pleased that the Americans came in to overthrow Saddam, but you resent the colonial role that America is playing in the Middle East. This is not a contradiction. Let me talk to you about the oil. I know that the Americans are stealing the oil, but there is one practical fact to that. We, the Iraqi people, never had the oil. The oil was nationalized in 1973, but we never had the revenues. The revenues were always used for strengthening the Army and killing the people. We should have lived in prosperity and luxury because we are one of the richest countries in oil, plus we have other revenues. But we were not. We were desperate. The average Iraqi family was poor. It was like this in Iraq under Saddam: You have this tyrant who can
suppress you not only through his armed forces but also through his
media and through his image, which is everywhere. Saddam's photo was
on the first page of every textbook that kids can open. There wasn't
a room in an office, in a school, in a hospital anywhere that He was everywhere. He could make Iraq a huge prison. He could make every single Iraqi spy on other Iraqis. He could make a man suspect his brothers and think that if he talks about his political beliefs, his brother will go and inform on him and he will never see light again. Imagine a society like that. How could you get rid of that image? We tried for 45 years. We had almost one million martyrs — people who sacrificed, who were fighting, who were victims. We did everything, but we couldn't get rid of him. What would be the alternative to an American liberation? We have a saying that when you are about to drown in a river, you are so desperate that you can get hold of a straw. You are sure that the straw can't save you, but you are so desperate that you will hold that straw to save yourself. And this is how we handled that issue. When you are helpless, you will do anything. What do you view as some of the illusions of the U.S.? The value of freedom and independence gave me the notion that Americans know why they are free and how to handle freedom. But when I got here and had a chance to talk to many people about politics, about the future of this country and about the lifestyle that they have, people seem to be more driven by the system rather than driving the system themselves. The difference between the Eastern world, which is the world that I am coming from, is that the system is so repressive that you can't even express yourself. Here, it is not that repressive. People are free to express themselves. But the bad point is that the system has another feature: You have the freedom of talking but not the value of changing. You don't see much change occurring? No. The system is more rigid than any other country. I don't see you having a third party that will take the elections and win. It's a game between the Democrats and the Republicans. Kerry talks exactly the same as Bush, with different terms but the same mentality. To me, this is not very far from fascism when you address every class and every segment in the society. Politics, in other words, just becomes a game of gaining people, getting the power and then administering their affairs. I don't see people get too much into politics here, except when the elections come. When the elections come, everybody is agitated; they talk about politics, they discuss things like Bush is bad, Kerry is better, or the other way around. Movies and campaigns come out, but by the time the elections are over, everybody goes back to being quiet. It was so funny for me when I heard that Bush stole the elections. I would expect that in a country like Iraq. I wouldn't expect that in a country that has this value of freedom. This is ridiculous. How could Bush do that in this country that is symbol of freedom, as you claim, and as everybody sees it in the outside world? Is that the government's fault or the people's fault? Both. The government is part of the people, and the people accepted that. They could have gone to the streets and stopped him from becoming president because they were sure that he stole the election. But not doing that means that people don't care, and so people can't have a say in changing the reality. That is a sad story. There is a divorce between people and politics. We talk about politics,
but we don't do politics. We always criticize each other and claim that
we know better than others, but when it comes to reality, what happened
in Iraq is exactly what happened in America during the election. Bush
stole the election; well, Saddam did the same. He had an election three
years ago, and he got 99.9 percent, and he said he got elected. No! People ran to the boxes and they voted for him, but guess what? They couldn't vote for anybody else. And guess what? They didn't have any other choice but going to vote. So I think that this is something that is not promising. And this game is repeating itself again and again and again. Do you think that America is vulnerable to the kind of dictatorship that Saddam had over Iraq? In our part of the world, the dictator is one person, and he forces his ideas on people through his oppressive organizations. Here, you have another dictatorship with a different system of repression, of controlling the minds of the people: You have the corporations. You have the advertisements that you can't get away from. These advertisements are just a way of eliminating the differences between people. We all use the same products, we all watch the same media, we all have the same rhetoric in our heads, we all consume the same political discourse. We are all the same. Well, if we are all the same, what is dictatorship wanting? To get us to be all the same, all the pawns on the chessboard. I think this country is not much better than any other country. The only thing that you have is the economy is stronger. People are stuck into working all the time and paying the bills, paying back the debts that they have, just to make their lives. This cycle got them far away from the real experience of living. You would compromise on values to keep your job, to keep your life going; otherwise you can't survive. Criticizing the system here doesn't mean that you don't have high values. You do, and they are beautiful values that you have. But my worry is that continuing in this way is not promising for the future. We Iraqis don't have anything that we should be proud of. I am not proud of anything — neither politically nor socially. Everybody dreams to come and live this lifestyle here. But when you come here and you touch up on the real things, and you see what is going on behind the scene, that's depressing. Do you see hope for change based on the people you've met? Of course. I've met people who are very open-minded, who are critical of the system. And I think this is the hope every society has, or should have, in terms of change. It is very important to make the American young generation be critical and not just follow what is fed through the media. TV is one of the disasters in this country. You sometimes are slaves, slaves for hours in front of the television — changing the channels, navigating between CNN and FOX and MSNBC, getting all these bits of information that sometimes contradict each other. You get lost and you can't find your way because you are not prepared to recognize bias. But I think you will be fine with this. The game will continue — the Republicans and the Democrats will argue and agree, and then you go to war, and then you protest, and the system works, the health care will be better, and then it collapses. The economy will improve and then collapse. I'm waiting for the time when the oil in the world will come to an end, which is not very far from now. And that will be the real job for the whole world, because lots of the economies in the world are chained to America. The economic system is controlling most of the world from here, and you can see the immoral impact that the system has on those countries. It exploits them and brings them down on their knees just to look up at these richer countries for help and for support, which they won't get at all. When the oil runs out, things will change. The Saudis will not be loved anymore; Iraq wouldn't be a focus of attention anymore. The strategy for the wars will change. Maybe they will come up with a new thing to play with. I don't know — water or milk. Do you think the invasion of Iraq was about oil? Well, it wasn't just about oil. It will be very superficial if you say it was just about oil. It's about interests, and America had to have a footstep in the Middle East. That was a dream during the Cold War, and Iraq had one of the richest economies in the region, one of the largest pieces of oil. Plus, America had to have a war to keep it safe at home. So Iraq was a very good, vulnerable choice. You had an experience with Iraq in 1991, during the Gulf War. I don't see any reason why Saddam stayed in power then. He was the same Saddam as now. Plus he added some crimes of genocide that I think the Americans are responsible for. The Americans promised that they were going to overthrow Saddam, and this is what made people confident to fight and to take cities. When they saw that the Americans were supporting them, they rose up. They were strong, and they took control of most of the cities in the south and in the north. And then all of a sudden the Americans said "OK, let's stop." Once they decided in Washington that it was not in their benefit to overthrow Saddam at that moment, they just stopped. And they screwed all these people who were given a chance to get something. That's immoral, and I think this is one of the charges that the Iraqi people should have against America. Now the Bush administration is talking about Syria and Iran as possible future targets. Do you feel that the people of the Middle East need the U.S. to liberate them? The problem is that the regimes in the Middle East are mainly backed by the U.S. You would get sick if you knew what they do in terms of women's rights and human rights in Saudi Arabia. You will be shocked if I tell you that a young college women in Saudi Arabia has never talked to a man face-to-face. She can't go out of the house; she can't do anything because her father will kill her. This is the system in Saudi Arabia. Egypt is supposedly one of the biggest democratic countries in the Middle East, and it's the most suppressive and totalitarian regime. Nobody talks about it because, well, Hosni Mubarak is a friend. What about other countries that do worse? Turkey is a corrupted totalitarian regime. They treat the Kurds with a fist of iron, but at the last major summit in Turkey, Bush didn't even give it a second thought, saying that Turkey is a great democracy in the Middle East. It's not a great democracy. I don't think there is a good state in the Middle East that could be considered as a model of democracy and values and human rights. There are violations of human rights everywhere. Even in Iraq, by Americans. As a supporter of the U.S. invasion, how do you react to the photos of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison? I don't think that anybody deserves to be treated like that, no matter what beliefs they have. Because when you are detained in prison, you are helpless. You can't do anything. What they did was a very deep example of how the military treats people in the occupied countries. It was done under the education that the soldiers got before the start of the war, when the military told them that every single Iraqi is an enemy. This is when Saddam claimed that two million Iraqi people are armed and ready to fight the Americans. So the Americans came and they took every single Iraqi for an enemy, and they lost their friends. All of a sudden they won the fight, and overnight they said, "OK, let's treat the Iraqi people as friends and let's help them to restore their country." Well, take an 18-year-old American man who was never been out of his town, send him overseas to a country that he never heard of — with a different environment, everything different — and don't give him a shower for 20 days, no comfortable food, no sex, and tell him that the Iraqis are enemies. What do you expect from that kid who will the next day have a chance to get one of these Iraqis under his control? You had them seeing their friends killed in front of their eyes. What do you expect from a soldier like that? Won't they get revenge? They will. If you are in the place of power, what stops you from being violent? I don't think any of these soldiers are responsible for what they did. The system is responsible and the Army is responsible. |
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