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http://electroniciraq.net/news/1904.shtml "I want Baghdad to be like New York" Cathy Breen, Electronic Iraq, 16 March 2005 Amman, Jordan Last night a dear Iraqi friend and I were visiting and just enjoying one another's company. She was teaching me a new card game. The three children were off watching cartoons. She and her children go back and forth from Baghdad to Amman, risking the dangerous highway that connects these two cities. They are searching for a safe place to live. We know each other from pre and post-invasion times. I was a frequent guest in her home in Baghdad, always welcomed. Since she was little, my friend tells me, she has always wanted to visit the United States. The children have lost a year of school. In a rare moment alone with my friend's 12 year old daughter the other day�she was helping me with my Arabic study�I asked her "What do you dream?" I remembered back to when she was 10 years old; at that time she wanted to be a ballerina. Now two years later, unprompted she answers "I wish the soldiers would go home. I want Baghdad to be like New York....When American soldiers see people out at night, they kill them." She told me that her 13 year old cousin, a girl, saw a woman shot in the head. "The insides of her head [she was struggling to find the words], was on the street! When an American soldier saw the dead people, he was drinking Pepsi, it was like he was happy." I miss my school, she said. Last night before I visited with the family, I walked up one of the many hills in Amman to an internet center. There was a message from the young friend I recently wrote about, telling me he had returned safely to Baghdad after our visit in Amman. He related how he arrived home to find his mother crying. "They [his family] told me she hadn't stopped crying since the night before. They heard someone shouting outside their home. My brothers went to help him. The man was blindfolded and had been beaten. He was on his way to Jordan as he is working in a restaurant in Amman. Somebody had kidnapped him, stolen his money and dropped him in front of my home. It was a gang. He spent the night and went home the next day. My mother thought of me, and compared him to me. We are the same age, and both of us going to Jordan. So I will be in trouble she thought. Baghdad is worse than before [less than a week ago], especially in my area where a lot of violence happened after I left for Jordan.... Life is hard here in Baghdad." During my stay in Amman, I have had frequent opportunity to visit an area of the city where there are many Iraqis. In a tiny dingy little restaurant, I have been able to meet several young Iraqi men who work there serving rice and beans, kabab or Iraqi tea. That is the extent of the menu. The welcoming atmosphere overrides the dismal surroundings of the place. Unable to work legally in Jordan, they are constantly on the alert for police wagons. I have been in the restaurant when, in a moment's time, the place has emptied out. Any of the young men there could easily have been the one that my friend in Baghdad described�blindfolded, robbed and beaten. I long to hear their stories and their dreams, so that I can pass them on to you. I long to put a picture of their young faces with their words, to make them real to my own people. But even this I cannot do. To take their photograph, to write their names, would put them at too great a risk. I also long to tell them that there are people in the U.S. who oppose the war, the continued violence and carnage. I will continue to do this on behalf of all of you. As I write this to you, I am aware that many people in my country will take to the streets this week as we remember the invasion of Iraq 2 years ago. Know that I am very present with you, just as you are very present here with me. Cathy Breen, with Voices in the Wilderness, is currently in Amman, Jordan. Cathy has been talking to many Iraqi friends that have made there way to Amman, Jordon. She has also had conversations with Iraqi refugees in Jordon and in Syria. ------------------- http://electroniciraq.net/news/printer1901.shtml Iraq Diaries "That Happens to Iraqis All the Time" Sheila Provencher, March 7, 2005 Our new 23-year-old, Metallica-T-Shirt-wearing translator is fun to be around. I tease him by saying that he is more American than me, since he knows so much of the pop culture. But he possesses a seriousness beneath the pop-culture exterior: a year ago, he spent 11 months in Bucca prison camp in southern Iraq. After all that time he still does not know what his charges were. He told me about his experience: "Sometimes, we became friends with the soldiers. They were more like friends than guards. They would tell us, 'You know, it's like we're in prison too.' They didn't want to be there. They would come into our tent and play cards. "When I got out of prison, I felt lost and depressed. In Bucca Camp, at least I had work to do--there were 500 detainees in my camp I had to translate for. I could forget that I was in prison. When I was released, I had no purpose anymore. I felt confused. When I tried to use my computer, it was like I had forgotten how to use it. One day I was at the market, and I reached into my pocket to use cigarettes to pay for the food. In prison we used cigarettes as cash. It was hard to adjust. And so I started volunteering at Women's Will, a human-rights group that my mother works at. Now I can look back and feel that it all happened for a reason." March 8, 2005: International Women's Day Four of us CPTers attended a demonstration in Firdos Square, Baghdad, with the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. It was amazing! Little girls with head scarves holding banners, older women draped in full black abaya and hijab, young women in jeans and T-shirts. They chanted for equality, separation of religious and state law, and an end to the American occupation. They seemed delighted to see four Americans there who also wanted the occupation to end. It was a beautiful way to resist with voices rather than with violence. Along the road from the demonstration, tiny yellow flowers pushed their way through cracks in concrete only yards away from razor wire. Later, Cliff and I went to Women's Will, an organization for women's rights founded by Hana, a dynamic woman whose eyes snap with both mirth and determination. We talked about Iraqi women detained without trial in U.S. prisons in Iraq. At the idea of an action to highlight their situation, Hana practically leapt into action. "Yes, we must do this," she said. "Even if only five of us march, if we take one step, others will follow. I believe this!" March 9, 2005 Life in Iraq is like a rollercoaster. At 6:30 this morning I woke up because the bed and windows were shaking. A car bomb had exploded about a mile away. As usual I went to the roof to see what had happened and guessed it must have hit a fuel station because the clouds of black smoke just kept coming and coming. After two weeks of quiet in the neighborhood, dull "booms" continued throughout the day. It would be easy to look at bombs as something that only terrorists do, but every time I feel an explosion here in Iraq, I wonder what it was like to be beneath the "Shock and Awe" of March 2003. Every Iraqi I've ever asked has said that there is nothing like the American bombs. This morning one of our translators said to me, "You cannot imagine it. It was like traveling through hell." Later today I was at a meeting with the UN representative for human rights and one of my Iraqi colleagues from a village west of Baghdad. My Iraqi friend walks a tightrope between the resistance and the U.S. military presence: his humanitarian organization received CPA funding for their projects, so he is viewed by the resistance as a collaborator. His best friend, a kind man I met last summer, was shot dead by resistance a few weeks ago. But to my Iraqi colleague, the U.S. military occupation is just as dangerous: last fall they wrongly detained him for six weeks, suspecting him as resistance just because he is on the governing council of his village. His car was in an accident caused by a military convoy, caught fire, and was later crushed by a tank. The military refused to give him compensation. He told the UN worker about the problems happening in his village. "There is a curfew between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.," he began. "What happens if you break the curfew?" asked the UN rep. My friend's face became grave. "There have been many accidents because of this. Soldiers have shot whole families by mistake--if we break the curfew because someone needs to go to the hospital, because someone is sick, anything. Many mistakes." Listening to my friend, I remembered my reaction when I read about the Italian journalist and her guards being shot by U.S. troops. Once the shock passed, the first clear thought in my mind was: "That happens to Iraqis all the time." I have a photograph of the bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi man accidentally shot at a checkpoint a year ago. Tonight, I spoke by phone to an Iraqi woman whose sister has been taken to the high-security airport prison. The woman and her sister were imprisoned for more than seven months last year, during which time their detained brother's dead body was thrown into their laps. They finally were released last July after authorities concluded that they were not involved with the resistance. Two weeks ago, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers raided her sister's home again and took her away. The woman's voice was tired and sad. "Maybe we will talk later," she said. Going to sleep, I remembered something my Iraqi friend from the village west of Baghdad said: "You are very brave to be with us through all this. I feel that you are my family." Little does he realize that he is the brave one. _____________________________ Note: This message comes from the peace-justice-news e-mail mailing list of articles and commentaries about peace and social justice issues, activism, etc. If you do not regularly receive mailings from this list or have received this message as a forward from someone else and would like to be added to the list, send a blank e-mail with the subject "subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can visit: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news Go to that same web address to view the list's archives or to unsubscribe. E-mail accounts that become full, inactive or out of order for more than a few days will be deleted from this list. 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