After watching men burning transformers along the banks of the Tanjero/Quilisan River in Iraq

Neglected River, Neglected Mother

You gave birth to a city that has turned its back on you.

Abused River, Abused Mother

You washed us and gave us clean water to drink

But we let the users and the rapers take you.

Abandoned River, Abandoned Mother

You were our very source and life's blood

But we grind your bones and burn our wastes upon your shores

Polluted River, Polluted Mother

As you flow, so shall we.

Protests come to Iraqi Kurdistan

Though its not covered much in the press the way Tunisian, Egypt, and others were, there have also been some significant protests in Iraq. I've been talking to people who were at the first protest in Sulaimani (Kurdistan, Northern Iraq). Friends had posted videos of the early protests that were quite disturbing and several people had been killded. The protests have continued and I went down to the Suq (the center of the rallies) myself last Friday. Apparently there were a few violent clashes the first five or six days but then everyone sort of got control of their respective selves and its been peaceful since. One guy I know who has lived here for years told me that the protests is simply over jobs and money. Its a socialist system gone overboard here with everyone working in the government and only small private sector development, but the population is relatively large and every year, new students are graduated expecting to work in the government sector but the system is already bloated so much that there are only a limited number of jobs to be had.

Plus when you go to a government office the whole system is Kafkaesque, with 5 people doing what one person can do and half of the office always taking breaks to drink tea.

The demands of the protesters, according to my friend, are not about changing the fundamental system. Yes, they call for stopping the corruption but to replace it with what kind of system? No one seems to be articulating it. The protesters would be happy just to have a nice paying job where they don't have to work too hard within the exact same system.

This is what my friend says and he may be partially right but I don't think it is the full story. There are other demands. I know one is that the political parties should get ride of their private militias. And they don't want the political parties to be so tightly in control of the government. As I wrote to my father recently, we may have problems with our political system in the U.S., but imagine if in the elections there we had zero choice .... it was just the Republican party (of the Democratic Party) that ran everything and you couldn't even get a job in the government without being a party member or you couldn't open any kind of business without the party directly sharing in half of the profits. It would tend to put a damper on things even more, don'tcha think?

Visit to Baghdad

It's been well over a year since I was in Baghdad but after my Xmas holiday, I got the call that I needed to get down to Baghdad to do a training for one of the ministries. I was the only foreigner on the flight into Baghdad and thus the only one who needed to have their visa processed at the Baghdad airport. I guess they don't have much call for that because I had to wait an hour for someone to notice that I was still waiting to be processed through. (Though I live and have residency in Iraqi Kurdistan, this does not seem to count in Baghdad and I must get a separate visa to go there .... which too me seems rather odd. If the Iraqi government feels that the Kurdish region is really a part of their country, then they should honor the visas that are provided there. To not do so is to treat Iraqi Kurdistan like a separate country, which I guess the Kurds don't mind one bit).

Finally I was in and driving through the streets of Baghdad rubbernecking with my hijab on to see familiar places. There was the status of Abbas Ibn Firnas, the poet, musician, engineer, aviator of Andalus, outside the airport; there were the dull sandy-coloured neighborhoods; there the Jadriyah Bridge across the Tigris and the Baghdad University campus on its banks where I had once lived; there the ice cream shop that specialized in bizarrely colors and decorated sundaes that my dormmates once treated me to; there the Arasat hotel where some of my journalist friends used to live, and there the semi-palace I once stayed at along the Tigris (now nearly hidden behind concrete blast walls).

But I wasn't to see much of the city. I was taken to a small house where I was to stay for 3 days, not being allowed out except for the daily trip across town (during rush hour) to and from the training location.

How was Baghdad? Crowded, grimmy, huge, full of traffic jams and checkpoints. Just as it had been back in 2004 and 2005.

How was the training? Chaotic, poorly organized but, I think, well received (and needed).

The Spittin' Hasidims of Al Quds (Jerusalem)

I recently came back from a holiday trip that involved traveling with two friends to Jordan and Israel/Palestine. We had a lovely trip working through Petra and staying at the Ammarin Desert Camp and then returning to Amman on the King's Highway, then on to Al Quds where we took one day to go down to Al Khaleel (Hebron) and Bethleham (Literally in Arabic, this means "House of Meat"). We saw the ridiculous wall and the massive checkpoints of Bethleham and later Ramallah.

But it was while were were in Jerusalem that we had one of the more memorable events of our trip occur. One of my friends had read in the Lonely Planet that the the Hasidic (Ultra-orthodox Jewish) area of Jerusalem was an interesting places to visit. We needed to wear conservative clothing but it should be fine.

So on Christmas Eve at about 4:30 pm, we took off to find this area ... which wasn't too hard (just watch for the men wearing long, black frock coats and big black hats or fur hats on their heads, which also featured long hanging side curls of hair on either side of their face). As we approached the neighborhood though we saw a sign that said "Groups entering our neighborhood are offensive to our community. Please stop this."

We hesitated a moment but felt that the sign was referring to big gauking tourist groups, not to three conservatively dressed and respectful women such as ourselves. So we forged ahead. There were many people on the street ... men and boys dressed as previously mentioned and women in long shirts. It was the start of Shabbat and many were heading to the Western Wall or to Synagogues. We did start to feel that we stuck out a bit.

Then once we were in the heart of the community, I passed a middle-aged man in a large fur hat, with my friends close behind me. Immediately, a string of Yiddish explatives exploded behind us (in which I distinctly heard the word "Shiksa", a pejorative term for non-jewish women) and the distinct hocking sound as the man spit at us. I never looked back (forge ahead and damn the torpedos being my usual motto) and my friends scooted up close behind and beside me.

We looked for a side turn to get us out of the neighborhood but once we found it faced another spitter! Finally we were free and high-tailed it back to the old city.
After we got back my friend looked at her Lonely Planet guide a bit more closely and saw that it advised avoiding the area during Shabbat. Dang, if only we had known!

Later that night we decided to go to a bar and each drink a shot and make a toast to the spitters. I toasted them, "To the spitting Hasidims of Al Quds, may they learn some tolerance." Then we made a dismal job of burning an effigy of that very intolerance (we soaked the napkin in too much vodka!).

We later had a field day classifing everyone we saw as either potential "spitters" or "smilers" ... and we definitely steered clear of all the Hasidims we later saw ... maybe they are not spitting, but perhaps they are thinking about spitting!!!

Ah what a world we live in!

Eco-Tourism in Iraq

Recently there has been a new effort to start an ecotourism project in Iraq. There is the development of a national park in the south and also talk of other such parks in the north (Iraqi Kurdistan) and if ecotourism could be started it would really demonstrate to the local people the intrinsic value of their local environment. Fish, birds, reeds, water would all have an additional value that they never had before. Tourism has got to be part of the picture with the development of a National Park if you are to achieve some level of protection for its natural resources.

But starting ecotourism is also risky, certainly in Iraq. Right now, we seem to be operating under the philosophy, "If you build it, they will come." For anyone starting eco-tourism as a money-making venture that has little background or experience in promoting and running tours they will face many challenges. And certainly, starting up such work in a post-conflict setting, will represent additional problems.

There has been some discussions whether a non-governmental organization, such as the one I work wtih, which is focused on environmental protection and restoration should take on such a project ... especially for an organization that already has an hugh work load of projects as it is. My feeling is that, while I recognize that at some point eco-tourism needs to be developed in Iraq, it's too much for an organization to start a big program in ecotourism. Something informal yes perhaps but to create a who new project represents a significant investment that I worry will impact our other work.

There are so many environmental problems in Iraq and to me the biggest and most important issue to address is the overall lack of awareness and education on the environment that exists within the general population of the country. If I want to affect these people, affect their daily interactions with the environment and get them to think about ways they might make that interaction more healthy, what will be the most effective tool? An eco-tourism project or perhaps a general educational media campaign?

Which will reap the greatest reward for Iraq's environment? What will be the comparitive return on the money invested? How many Iraqis will I affect doing an eco-tour vs. a Public Service Announcement (PSA) played on Iraqi Television?

For sure, it is true that an educational media campaign wont touch people as deeply as getting them out into the environment on an eco-tour but I still remember when I was a kid seeing the "Crying Indian" PSA from the Keep America Beautiful Campaign. It deeply affected my whole generation. This campaign started in 1953 and really got off the ground when First Lady Lady Bird Johnson joined the campaign in the 60s ... The "Crying Indian" PSA, with its Native American standing alone with a single tear rolling down his cheek as he watches the lands and water of American being polluted is an iconic symbol of environmental responsibility. It was one of the most successful media efforts in US History. A few thousand dollars spent wisely had an enormous impact on the country.

For an Iraqi organization, I simply wonder if the money we spend developing a full-scale eco-tourism project that may or may not be successful is the best use of our limited time, energy and funds.

Tree Planting? Is that all you can do?

Last week, the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government of Northern Iraq) kicked off an environmental improvement campaign that will include the planting of over 2 million seedlings in the region. The opening ceremony for this campaign featured Prime Minister Dr. Barham Salih at the Hawari Shar Park near Sulaymaniyah.

I'm really glad that these guys are getting out there and getting their hands dirty planting a few trees (I do hope that they are atleast native species ... maybe too much to hope for). The forests of Northern Iraq have been decimated over the last century ... and they need to be re-planted. But there is a part of me that still wanted to go out to Hawari Shar Park and lead a counter-demonstration.

As much as I like a good tree-planting, I would really like to also see the KRG tackle some of the other big problems facing the region. Like how the sewage of the entire city of Sulaymaniyah goes completely untreated into the Tanjero River (acutally every town and village in the country is putting their sewage into local surface waters untreated). I'd love to see them really deal with the local cement factories that are destroying the river in the their rush to mine for gravel or address the emissions from these and other industrial establishments that pollute the land, air and water. I'd be really impressed to see the cities do proper waste managment and recycling and finally close the Sulaymaniyah Dump (which I like to call Dante's Inferno) with its open pools of waste oil and muck trainting the grownwater and river below.

Trees are great, I'm all for trees ... but I want to seem them do these other things too. These problems are directly and quite literally killing people here. Killing the kids and the grandkids ... and these problems get worse and worse every year. I think it's long overdue that we saw an opening ceremony for the Sulaymaniyah Waste Water Treatment Facility or a new state of the art recycling facility. We can even plant some trees there.

Book Ideas
I always marveled at all the people I knew who wrote books about their experiences in Iraq, some after living in the country for only a few months. I don't dispute the validity of their experiences or the worthiness of the final result; I just couldn't see myself doing it. I always felt, "How can I write a book about what's going on here. I hardly understand what's going on here!" In Iraq there is so much history and so many cultural issues dripping off everything that is said and done that I don't know how to interpret what's happening most of the time and it felt impossible and presumptuous to write about it.

In fact, I think I felt I wasn't smart enough to do it. I have always had difficulty getting past the surface of things in Iraq, which my friends seemed to have had no problem passing. And I felt that a book needed a unifying theme and my experiences have been so diverse and eclectic that there was no central thread. But I've now lived in the Middle East for, all told, almost 7 years and 4 of those years have been in Iraq and I've felt the need to process this whole experience - from the time before I came to live here when I was active in the local peace movement of my town before the war in 2003 through to the present, working for an Iraqi non-governmental organization. Perhaps I'll never do it but at least this blog and all the posts here might be some of the source material I could draw upon. Or maybe I'll just throw it all out and start over.
Anyway, I was considering some of the things I would write about and came up with a few chapter titles that I thought I'd share:

Title: Sophia's Peace Work (We'll it can be a working title for now)
Chapter 1: Civil Disobedience Clusterfuck (is that one word or two?)
Chapter 2: Wide-eyed and Bushy-tailed in Saddam's Iraq
Chapter 3: Iraqi Students and not teaching them a thing
Chapter 4: Sex in Iraq
Chapter 5: Dijla: The Tigris River Boat Trip
Chapter 6: The Great Director: "I am God!"
Chapter 7: The Iraqi Tick
Chapter 8: Romance (strike that and replace with "More Sex") in Iraq
Chapter 9: A night at the hospital
Chapter 10: The Fighting Bird Men of Iraq
Chapter 11: Ministry madness
Chapter 12: (There's the rub ... I don't know how to end this thang!)

Any thoughts, advise, anyone?

What is missing is outrage

The team had found lakes of oil in the desert caused by the SOC (Southern Oil Company of Iraq). I asked, "What are we going to do about this?" "We will talk to the Minister," said the Director, "These lakes are continuing to kill."

"Yes, everyday!" said one of our staff, "We watched as Martins came upon the lakes, thinking it was water in the desert and diving down to drink."

"You could just stand there and watch it happen?" I asked aghast, (but I feel now that I was really asking two questions. One saying, "Are you for real?!" and another saying "how could you just stand there?!") But of course it was for real. Those lakes are killing machines ... species are dying there needlessly because people are too damn lazy to clean up their messes 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And they have been there months, probably years.

But his response had something of a barely perceptable shrug that seemed to say both, 'Of course' and 'Oh well.'

The Director said to him, "You will be a leader when you find a way to immediately take some kind of action about things like this."

I thought, what is missing here is outrage, but who am I to say this to an Iraqi who has faced outrage upon outrage and was forced to be silent. They are innured to it. It's banal now. The banality of evil.

We need real help here to protect Iraq's biodiversity and in a country that is throwing everything into oil development to ressurect itself, a few birds (thousands) are not even discussed or thought about ... but once the oil runs out, what will be left? No one in Iraq can stop oil development and it would be a waste of time to try. Iraq needs that oil to develop but it's got to protect its environment along side that development if it wants to be left with something more than a wasteland.

There was a recent story on the Mesopotamian marshlands done on PBS (The Public Broadcast System of the U.S.) ... I noticed a comment on the story from an Iranian gentlemen named Parviz, that I just had to respond to. I've repeated these two exchanges below:

parviz said:
November 5, 2010 at 9:23 pm
this is wonderful to save and vivid that lands i am a Persian from south of Iran

BUT:
can you Please tell me where is Arabian Gulf is? and when it existed? why do you change the name of Persian Gulf in your Articles. there was not ,is not ,and will not be such a fake name for our Persian Gulf please correct yourself ( see the maps ) or we might thought you got some money from rich Arab Shaikhs to use a FAKE Name Persian Gulf is where that all those water finally end in thanks
and hope one day see that Place become as it was for thousands of year
Parvzi



My response:
This issue of whether to call it the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf always gets people riled up. Remember what Juliet said:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

I suggest you do a little search on wikipedia if you want to hear the whole tired story on what this area is called ... essentially Arabs, particularly Iraqis, perfer to call the area the Arabian Gulf and people working in Arab countries get a similar lecture to Parviz's if they use the term "Persian Gulf." I guess you just can't win. I myself, who work in the Middle East have sometimes written it the "Persian/Arabian Gulf" ... this is done in a similar vein to what may be the more politically correct term "Isreal/Palestine."

Personally, I find these debates all rather silly ... far more pressing are the many problems of the Gulf including the environmental devastations of wars, oil and industrial development, municipal pollution, and overfishing that this body of water (call it what you will) has faced. This rose doesn't smell so sweet. I suggest we focus more on that.

I am in love with Massoud Barzani’s daughter

The big issue around here these days is the killing of Sardasht Osman, a young Kurdish journalist and a student. Osman was kidnapped and assassinated on the 4th of May 2010. His satirical poem “I am in love with Massoud Barzani’s daughter” written for kurdistanpost.info states that the only way to be successful in Iraqi Kurdistan is to marry the daughter of the president. Many suggest this and other writings of Osman lead the KRG government to call for his assassination. The following is a translation of the poem that I found on-line.

I am in love with Massoud Barzani’s daughter By Sardasht Osman

I am in love with the daughter of [Iraqi Kurdistan president] Massoud Barzani, the man who appears here and there and claims he is my president. I would like him to be my father-in-law and also I would like to be a brother-in-law with [former Prime Minister] Nechirvan Barzani*.

If I become Massoud Barzani’s son-in-law, we would spend our honeymoon in Paris and also we would visit our uncle’s mansion in America. I would move my house from one of the poorest areas in Erbil to Sari Rash [Barzani’s palace complex] where it would be protected by American guard dogs and Israeli bodyguards.

I would make my father become the Minister of Peshmerga [the Kurdish militia]. He had been Peshmarga in September revolution, but he now has no pension because he is no longer a member of Kurdistan Democratic Party.

I would make my unlucky baby brother, who recently finished university but is now unemployed and looking to leave Kurdistan, chief of my special forces.

My sister who has been too embarrassed to go to the bazaar to shop, could drive all the expensive cars just as Barzani’s daughters do.
For my mother, who is diabetic and has high blood pressure and heart problems but who is not able to afford treatment outside Kurdistan, I would hire a couple Italian doctors to treat her in the comfort of her own house.

For my uncles, I would open few offices and departments and they, along with all my nieces and nephews would become high generals, officers, and commanders.

All my friends said Saro, let it go and give it up for otherwise you will get yourself killed. The family of Mulla Mustafa Barzani [Massoud Barzani's father] can kill anyone they want, and they surely will.

I told them I did not commit blasphemy and I swear to the dagger of [Massoud's late brother] Mustafa Idris Barzani that my father had spent 3 nights with him on the same mountain [during the fight against Saddam] and so why not say those things? Massoud Barzani claimed himself that he is a president,www.ekurd.netand I would ask him how may time has he visited Erbil and Sulaimaniyah in the last 18 years?

My problem is this man, Massoud Barzani, is so tribal that so arrogant that he does not recognize anybody from even the other side of Sari Rash. With a few clicks, I can out more about any leaders’ wives in the world but I have no idea who my mother-in-law would be and what she looks like.

I have no idea who I should take with me to ask Massoud Barzani to give me his blessing to marry his daughter. From the beginning, I thought I should take with me few religious figures, some respectful old men and some old peshmerga, but one of my journalist friends told me that I should find some Saddam collaborators and those who participated in the Anfal operation [ethnic cleansing in the late 1980s] with Saddam because they are all around Massoud now and he likes them. Another friend suggested that I should go to one of news conference of Nechirvan Barzani and make friends with him and ask him to do me a favor. However, if he doesn’t help, then I can ask Dashne [a Kurdish singer] because she meets them frequently and might help out.

* Nechirvan Barzani is a nephew of Massoud Barzani and he is married to one of Massoud Barzani’s daughter.