born 1976, political Scientist and freelance journalist
[01/03/2010]
I visit the Fine Arts Academy of the Baghdad University. The size of the theater that is being built there is surprising. Ali Kareem is hoping to perform there before the end of the year. This edifice was built by the British in 1932 and in the 50s it was one of the most avant-garde theaters in Iraq. Every Thursday the students would perform plays translated into Arabic or directly in English. From the 60s until the present, nobody bothered to give it any maintenance, so it degraded to the point of absolute ruin. In fact, all the Al Kasra district is pretty much in the same state. In front of the University there is the old Royal Palace and a set of swimming pools, also from the British era. Nothing is workable. The Al Kashafa -the Olympic stadium and the only football ground in Baghdad until the 60s- is now surrounded by checkpoints and also offering a deplorable appearance. It goes without saying that, on a working day at 11 A.M., all the facilities of the Theatrical Department of the Fine Arts Academy of the University of Baghdad are only lit by natural light. There is no electricity.
Nibras Al Rubaiee is the supervisor of the theater's reconstruction, the person who coordinates the communication between the Americans and the University's directorship. "What is happening with theater here is a good metaphor of the whole country", according to Ali Kareem, who openly criticizes the way in which the building works in the University are being managed: -"the Americans come, leave the money and do not control how it is spent". The supervisor tries to justify this: "the problem is not corruption, it is lack of planning. We are given closed budgets and we cannot change them". Ali is not convinced. "The old building, even in ruins, was more sound proof and was better insulated than this one because now the local contractors save money in materials and nobody supervises that the building works are being properly done". No Iraqi institution controls the fulfillment of the budget or the deliveries. "There is no Iraqi money involved. This is a big business for some but we do not have computers or electricity, and obviously no air conditioning either. When it rains, we can even get rain in the building. It is shameful". It can be easily assesed that the fittings in the building are not of good quality. They are very shoddy. The group of students clearly agrees when the word corruption is mentioned. The coordinator disagrees. An open and intense argument ensues. Endless details (too complicated to mention) that clearly transmit an unmistakable feeling: corruption is rife in the reconstruction works with which the Americans are trying, to a certain extent, to win over the hearts of the Iraqis. They overlook the obvious lack of correspondence between the money spent and the works undertaken.
Ali, concentrating on the day when the theater opens its doors again, is starting to imagine the stage design, "I will put the professors and the authorities in chairs and I will ask some members of the audience to lie in tombs placed in the stage, because that is where most of the Iraqis are now. This is the new Iraq, a place where we all talk to the wind, with the dead unable to do anything and leaders who do not listen to the population". Bilal intervenes in the impromptu debate taking place in the ruins of the theater: "Real artists have to create in any circumstance or situation, and probably with even more intensity in a situation like the one we are living. During the worst moments of the sectarian clashes I would go down to the streets and find three corpses in front of my house. But even then I decided that I needed colors and brushes, I did not give in. I never stopped living my life as normally as possible. Even if it was necessary to avoid the militias that where fighting against the Americans. Assim, Ali and I would meet every morning to go to the University and we would continue to study with the relentless sound of shots surrounding us". Assim, who is now 24, asks: "How old are we? And what have we -the ones who have never left Iraq- known so far? War, Hunger, destruction and occupation. We do not have any future but we continue to study and create. Managing to create out of nothing. Always surrounded by debris. Look at this building. It used to be a police station of the Ottoman Empire that occupied Iraq decades ago. We are still here, discussing exactly the same things as our fathers, our grandparents and great-grandparents".
Ali remembers a flatmate who asked a neighbor to bring him to the University in order to sit an exam. When they were leaving the house, someone approached them from behind, killed his neighbor and continued walking. He did not stop, he did not say a word, nobody ever knew who did it or why. They all share similar stories. Whole nights in the roofs of their houses listening to the shots in the streets, fearing that their house would be the next one to be invaded by one of the many militias that were fighting over Baghdad.
They do not want to look for names, to look for the people responsible. They simply suggest. They agree in pointing towards certain religious groups. They smile with complicity. They will not pronounce direct accusations in front of a camera. They will not position themselves. But they explain it anyway: mujaheddin and Sunni terrorists in some districts, along with foreign combatants, facing the Mahdi Army in others. Always looking for the ethnic cleansing of their streets, terror and the economic benefits generated by violence. There are dozens of similar examples. One of the most meaningful ones is that of all the personnel in an Education Ministry building (wherer university degrees were validated in order to study abroad), in Karrada. They were kidnapped by dozens of policemen. "Policemen?". - "Probably yes. And if they were not policemen, the police lent them cars and uniforms". The bodies have not yet been found. - "Why don't we go and drink some juice in the cafe in front of the University?". They quickly change the subject. One of the consequences of everything that has happened is that the UNESCO no longer recognizes as valid the university degrees that Ali, Bilal and Assim will be receiving.
Meanwhile, even they, a bunch of friends, do not share the same explanation for the events unfolded between 2006 and 2007 and they avoid to debate and compare their hypothesis in public. They are content with the fact that the street from the theater to the cafe, crisscrossed by entry and exit walls, is once again theirs. "At least we can move peacefully from one faculty to another. The walls are still there but now we can cross them. When we are allowed, we paint them and put our posters here". Bilal has an anecdote about this. "One day I was walking down the street with my paintings and a folder with my drawings , when a group of militiamen stopped me. I thought they wanted to kill me, but no, they took me to a street I did not know and they asked me to draw Muqtada Al Sadr on the wall". - "And did you?" - "No.". He laughs and changes subject again. "The holes through which we cross the walls are not fit for fat people or pregnant women, they are only for thin people". Ali explains that "in fact, these walls are only useful for those behind them. Many people have died when the shock waves have blasted them against the walls" while they continue to exchange jokes and memories. With the same smile, but with a radically different background from ours, stuck in their present and, sadly, with few possibilities to define their future. The most repeated comment during our stay, while we record interviews in which they hardly ever look at the camera, intent in scrutinizing their surroundings, is "don't be over-confident and do not forget that even if things seem to be calm, everything could change within an hour".