- We were back in Marsh Arab country yesterday, Haidar
and I, scouring the country west of the infamous Hawr al-Hawizah marshes
where Saddam first used gas against his Iranian enemies.
-
- We stopped on the ribbon of torn asphalt where, almost
two decades ago, Iranian tanks crossed the main highway from Baghdad to
Basra.
-
- The Tigris was drifting past the small village of Al-Zahra
and we'd followed a track in the hope of finding some Marsh Arabs still
living in their reed huts. Instead, the track ran out at the edge of the
river - you could see it restarting on the other bank - and two men came
up to us in gowns and keffiyeh scarves, quite directly, to ask us what
we were doing. We told them and they looked at us with hard eyes.
-
- "We are Marsh Arabs," the younger man said.
"We used to live in reed houses until Saddam dried out the land and
now we live in Al-Zahra. It's just made of concrete and mud."
-
- And the track? Jabar Khaddam Malzum - the younger man
had given his name in a very formal way - said that it had been built by
the Iraqi army during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, that the river had long
ago washed away the supports. "There was another bridge over there,"
he said. "It was the front line on the other side of the river. That's
where they used the gas."
-
- So we looked across at the flat, dun-coloured landscape
beneath the lowering winter clouds, much as I had done - almost 20 years
ago - from the Iranian side of the line. "We still find the dead,"
Jabar said. "We found a group of dead soldiers the other day - Iraqis
and Iranians all mixed up together ..."
-
- So what did they do with them, Haidar asked? There's
no longer a Red Cross in Baghdad where you can report their identities.
In Iraq, no one any longer cares about the war before the war before last.
"We left the bodies where they were and pushed the earth over them
again," Jabar said. "What else could we do?"
-
- Iraq is haunted by its wars. Just up the road is a partially
burnt power station, bombed by the Americans in the 1990-91 Gulf conflict
and, a mile or so further up this grim highway, a cremated T-55 tank, victim
of last March's Anglo-American invasion - although some of these old behemoths
have now been taken away on trucks. "Many are still here, even the
Iranian tanks from the 1980s," Jabar said. Then the older man - he
never introduced himself, but he looked like Jabar's father - pointed to
the gas-soaked fields of Hawizah. "We heard the guns every night,"
he said. "We heard them every night, every week and month, year after
year."
-
- A British Land Rover patrol, followed by a Warrior armoured
vehicle, hummed down the dual carriageway behind us. Did those young soldiers
know what had happened here around the time of their birth? Yet even this
last war has not ended.
-
- On the walls of the great, shabby, sewage-stinking city,
someone has written in impeccable English a leading question. "Where
are our requirements - petrol, medicine and other services?" I liked
the "requirements" bit, it had a kind of official ring to it.
The same wall-scribbler might have asked where all those old, blackened
tanks are being taken. Many were hit by depleted uranium shells and are
still contaminated.
-
- Well, some are being taken to a huge steel plant in Basra
where, so Basrans say, they are melted down into prefabricated bridges,
litter bins, even pots and pans. It makes sense. Maybe Iraqi housewives
who live through nights of power cuts can now spot their household utensils
glowing quietly in the darkness of the kitchen.
-
- http://bt.premium-link.net/$59122$1046924269$/story.jsp?cb_content_name=
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