Endgame in Baghdad

By John Ross, AlterNet. Posted March 12, 2003.

AMMAN, JORDAN (March 11). This past Friday (March 7), the day the fatal Blix report would be broadcast to an expectant universe, my Turkish comrade, ex-Greenpeace Mediterranean campaigner and Elvis Presley lookalike Tolga Temuge and I were perched upon the rickety roof of the engine house at the Daura oil refinery in west Baghdad, marking the site with industrial black paint, when the Human Shield action finally fell irrevocably apart.

We had already filled in the six-meter-long H-U and were outlining the M in the words that, when spelled out completely, would signal George Bush's death-dealing missiles that the refinery was a United Nations-certified civilian site that provides fuel and home heating oil to the residents of Baghdad and beyond, and that by blasting the plant off the face of the earth, the U.S. president would also be endangering the lives of his own citizens and those of many other nations, when a delegation from the Organization of Peace and Friendship, our hosts in Iraq, summoned us down to the ground floor to read us the riot act.

Under a fatwa issued by Dr. Abdul Al-Hasimi, the NGO's director, we were banished from this beleaguered land because we had usurped the function of an existing NGO by facilitating the deployment of over 100 Shields to five key infrastructure sites in and around Baghdad. Now the NGO and the government of Saddam Hussein would take control of such deployments. Others to be forcibly departed would be Gordon, a rangy, spike-haired Australian who was now coordinating the site assignments; Eva, an archly uppity woman lawyer from Slovenia who had led many of the unprecedented anti-war demonstrations on the streets of Baghdad that were an essential adjunct to our work; and the off-kilter initiator of the Human Shield Action, ex-Desert Storm Marine Ken Nichols O'Keefe, whose confrontational style and delusions of personal aggrandizement had thoroughly disaffected the Iraqi government during the weeks we spent in Baghdad.

The eviction order had actually been called out by Dr. Hasimi at a disturbed meeting the previous evening, during which he trained a fat finger upon the culprits and accused us of, among other heinous crimes, "forcing volunteers to attend three-hour meetings against their will." The expulsions effectively decapitated an action whose autonomy had become a thorn in the side of Saddam just as George Bush was revving up his killing machine.

Even as Hans Blix was pronouncing his weasle words to the U.N. Security Council on the east side of Manhattan that evening, we villains gathered at the luxurious Meridian Palestine Hotel for our ordered leave-taking. Previously, Tolga and I had motored over to the International Press Center to say our good-byes, but the media, mesmerized by the magnum events on the CNN screens, did not even blink when we enunciated our dilemma.

Now my Turkish pal and I argued that we needed to depart quietly into the night so as not to hand Bush new ammunition for his crazed crusade to "liberate" Iraq. Saddam was a problem, as are all two-bit dictators installed by CIA fiat, but not the primary enemy of world peace. Now it was time to go home and deepen the larger movement, the one against Bush's reign of terror, of which the Human Shields had always been just a sideshow.

But Ken was not to be swayed. His movement had been "rubbished," he kept whining, and determined to force a nose-to-nose with the minders, he resisted their efforts to pack us off without a final tantrum, and eventually he and Eva ran off into the Baghdad night reportedly to yet another swank hotel, the Rashid, to which the police were soon dispatched to round them up.

But by this late hour, three of us had embraced dozens of the Shields we left behind, led a rousing chorus of "No War!" and, accompanied by four drum-pounding Buddhist monks who kept muttering about what a crazy world they had walked into, were already on the road.

Out there in the dark of the desert only marginally illuminated by the sliver of a new moon, with an uncertain destination in our immediate future, my cohorts dozed while I eyed the thick necks of our minders. Would our hosts veer suddenly into the widerness, order us out, strip us naked, and riddle our corpses with dum-dum bullets as payback for our gratuitous disobedience? Would the iron gates of Saddam Prison ominously yawn open to receive us?

None of the above.

Our hosts were genuinely embarrassed by the prospect of expelling us from a country we had come to protect with our lives from U.S. Murder Incorporated, and they treated us with kindly kid gloves, shaking our hands at the border, and inviting us back once the terrible deeds up ahead were done with and the Iraqi people could finally live in peace. I reflected on other deportees, on Mexican workers back home in my own country, chained up and dragged back to their own border for the sin of working a job so low on the ladder that no one else would do it.

Ironically, we passed in that dark desert night a carload of eight Mexican compas, one of them a nun from the San Carlos Hospital down in the Zapatista zone of southeastern Chiapas, on their way to Baghdad to relieve us as "escudos humanos."

The illuminated sign at the Iraqi border featured the usual portaiture of Uncle Saddam and the unusual inscription: "Isn't it nice to come to the border of a country where no one has impeded your mission?" The gods of irony were working overtime in that frigid desert dawnlight.

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