The journey starts when the bureau phone rings and it’s one of our stringers in Baghdad telling us that a car bomb has exploded or an official has been assassinated. I worry more when I hear about explosions because they cause more casualties and most of them are innocent civilians or security forces who are trying to earn a living or do their jobs. I can’t understand who is fighting whom; all that I know is that it is the people who pay the price all the time.
Tracking the traces of death in every spot of Baghdad has become a hobby, as if I were a detective. It awakens my curiosity, but never puts an end to my questions every time I attend one of these scenes — who are the criminals and what are their real intentions? It shakes my faith and I wonder what we have done in our lives to deserve all these attacks.
Mudhafer al-Husaini is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.
The call was so splintered, so far off, so utterly melancholy in its resonance, that for once he was caught still. Surely this couldn't be the sum total of everything, where all those adventures, all that firm belief, had led. He knew he had been betrayed long ago. But somehow, some sort of faith had lingered on, that it wasn't all in vain, that there were other reasons for being, that all those experiences, brief catastrophes, adjourned crisis and splintered moments of faith, that it had all meant something.
The currawong hopped across the brown grass looking for worms. It had been dry, after all the talk of the drought being over, and the briefest moisture as the clouds rolled over and past them was the subject of much speculation. He couldn't be assured that these scenes, these vistas of Australian landscape, would really provide resonance in a departed soul. Everything was grinding to a halt. The kids were growing and no longer needed him as they once had. He looked at other families now, their tight necessary circles, their closed forums, their instant purpose, and longed for a different time.
If it was all that he could make, if it was all the shape of gums against the sky, then his dream of dying a junky in Calcutta was just as cheap and pointless as everything else. Meanwhile the triumphalism of the left knows no bounds, with thunderous applause for the country's 1,000 greatest intellects, so-called. A strange exercise for its exclusivity, its instant elitism, substantially rorted to arrive at a profound call for Labor policy, meant it was treated with a division of hope and derision. Here, deep in the bush, miles from anywhere, the self-congratulatory applause seemed very distant indeed.
Here's a radical idea: treat everyone the same. Then what would happen? His sense of justice had been ill-founded. The more the victims the more harm the luvvies did. Their cries were constant. Walk a mile in my shoes. The carers cried out, our $1600 bonus, suddenly it had gone from being a bonus to an annual top up. The pensioners $500; now that equally had become an expectation, not a bonus. All these things cost trillions, well billions anyway; vast sums as the welfare budget ballooned ever larger. Once it had always been the government's fault; and he would play staunch advocate for whatever disadvantaged group; the homeless his own.
Now there was a cacophony of victimhood; as an exuberant government assured the Australian Council of Social Services that at last a government was in power receptive to their concerns. Receptive to their ever greater cries for more money, for more categories of victimhood, for defeat. The dispossessed had become so well serviced by government that there was nowhere to go for a bleating heart, not these days. Declare yourself a true victim and then get out of the way before you get trampled in the rush. Unfair? Try suggesting people should be encouraged to stand on their own two feet and see how far you get.
All the meanwhile thousands, nay tens of thousands of poor bastards laboured away in the city's sweat shops, their faces smudged with grease, their faces lined and tired by the long hours, the ever more difficult job of making ends meet keeping them going long hours in not one but often two or three jobs; sitting in countless traffic jams kilometres long; their despair never filtering up to the academic9c gloss, the so-called champions of the poor. Every one's rush had become unlivable, every caution a despair at unpaid bills, swiping a fringe of sweat from a dedicated face, where had it all gone wrong?
Can I get a card, I'm 18 and I'm pregnant, says the girl at the public library counter behind me. She's already pushing a pram. She's already got her career for life; her baby bonus and her parenting payment and everything else which will keep her occupied, a brood mare as many of the critics were cautiously saying. Is this the way we want to go? Well yes, once he would have said yes, what had the traditional family ever done for him? Sent him out on the road at a terrible young age and fought off every sense of normality that had ever come his way.
It couldn't be true, this complete deterioration. What he had fought so firmly against had completely disappeared. Once it was a crime to be gay, now it was de rigeur. Once a single mom had been a rarity, to be cossetted and protected, preserved, an opportunity to reach out, to be strong, protective, caring. He had done exactly that. Now the traditional family was out of fashion, as the useful fools busied themselves in massively complex bureaucracies, dishing out money those sweat stained souls had worked so hard to provide. It wasn't fair. He knew it wasn't fair. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to take the issue. The useful fools had won; and common decency was dead. The government owned everything; and voices outside the tent were nothing but a diminished cry; what happened, what happened...?...
Many times, I have to walk for yards to get to the scene because the road is blocked by the police or the army. The smell of death overwhelms you as you get there, the smell of gunpowder and grilled flesh. I try to act normally, like one of the residents who have gathered there to see what’s going on, before I start working as a journalist. I try to console people and start my job at the same time by getting detailed information. Some cooperate and complain, while some attack you as if you were one of the bombers.
It is normal to see see old men, women or adults gathering there, but it startles me when I see kids there, scrambling to see the dead people. They act happily, as if they were in a playground. “Death has become so normal for us,” a 13-year-old boy told me when he was helping to collect the scraps of flesh after one of the explosions that killed at least 50 people. Sometimes I even see people walking normally as if nothing had happened. Some of them continue eating lunch, and a few streets away, women continue shopping.
Collecting the corpses after the explosion is terrible because the collapsed buildings make the mission almost impossible, but people have gotten very used to that. I sometimes arrive early at the scene when the corpses are still there. I see an arm here or maybe a leg there and that’s how they are buried later on. The destruction is indescribable. It takes a long time to build something, but a few seconds to destroy it. Much worse for me than the destroyed buildings are the shattered psychologies, because those who die may rest, but what about their relatives? And what about those who are wounded or lose limbs knowing that we have miserable hospitals?
I spend about an hour or two at the explosion site. The people’s sorrows add to my own because at some point they believe I’m a savior, or at least the harbor where they can unload their afflictions. My journey sometimes continues to the hospital where the casualties are taken. There I see another tragedy. The relatives of victims start to arrive at the hospital. They have to go to the emergency room, and if their loved ones cannot be found there, they may be lying among the heaps of corpses. The relatives feel relief if they do not find victims there, believing that they are still alive. But in many cases, their bodies have either been taken to other hospitals, or have been so disfigured by the explosion that their relatives can’t recognize them.
Mudhafer al-Husaini is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.
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