Report #15 - Where Have All The Love Birds Gone?

by Jerry Levin

Amman, Jordan

April 10, 2003

At dawn Thursday in Jordan, the huge refugee tent cities readied for an influx of thousands of dispossessed Iraqis, in the vicinity of the Jordanian border town of Ruweished, remained almost empty.

At least for the time being.

It is too soon to know whether or not the vast humanitarian crisis still being foretold by international relief specialists may cause defenseless Iraqis to try to ride out at home the still hard to predict aftermath of the allied invasion and the first days of a U. S. run occupation, or instead take flight to Jordan or Syria.

Given the sudden collapse of the central government in Baghdad, Wednesday, a decision to cut and run will depend on what additional storms of violence, looting, and shortages of food, drinkable water, and medical supplies may be in the offing: either because of the enormity of the job of meeting the needs quickly of a nation suddenly without a distribution infrastructure, not to mention supplies, or, because, despite the efforts of the occupiers, the nation declines swiftly into civil war.

A convoy of a hundred or so international journalists-especially TV and wire services-who had been waiting impatiently for the first opportunity to join their stranded colleagues in Baghdad, was among the very first to stream out of Amman toward Iraq late Wednesday night. They were hoping to enter Iraq without benefit of visas.

The Iraqi Embassy in Amman had been denying them visas since before the war began. Not waiting for another turndown, the newsies simply took off, not knowing what they could expect at the border. Would they even be allowed to leave Jordan when they did reach the border? And, if permitted to leave would they find the Iraqi border station still staffed? Or would it be deserted?

When they arrived before dawn Thursday morning, they found the border station still intact. But they weren't allowed in. By early afternoon Thursday the caravan, which had, swelled considerably during the night, was still stymied. Few if any had made it past the Iraqi immigration building, where three pictures of Sadaam Hussein (one of him in a tailored blue suit, another in traditional Arab garb, and the third in military uniform), for more than two decades, had been one of the first sights to greet those trying to enter the country. A journalist friend traveling with the group trying to get in has not checked in with me yet to let me know whether or not the triptych is still there.)

Back in Amman, the Jordanian government has posted extra heavily armed security guards around the Iraqi Embassy in response to telephoned threats the jittery staff had been receiving. So, mindful of what happened Wednesday at the long closed Iraqi mission in London, which had been broken into and looted, the young Jordanian officer in charge of the armed chaperons, told me, "We are here because we must help them. They are our brothers."

The question over night for those of us still in Amman but also anxious to get back into Iraq was: would the embassy even be open for business Thursday? It did open on time under the continuing protection of those Jordanian guards. But internationals seeking visas, including humanitarian volunteers, such as our small Christian Peacemaker Team five person contingent, were being turned away

The reason for turning down the internationals according to a tired, clearly bewildered and depressed embassy contact, who in the past had helpfully facilitated hard to obtain permissions to enter Iraq, was, "We have no one to talk to in Baghdad. We worry about the road. We cannot be sure it will be safe. And we do not know if we even have a job and authority at this moment? So, I think, we cannot let you in."

At the moment, then, those of us who had been in Baghdad after the war began, but who had to come out a few days before the curtain rang down Wednesday on 24 years of police state rule, are trying to assess at a distance the significance of both the jubilation and the looting-especially in the cities-which we have been witnessing on both Arab and English language television.

The joy in the Kurdish North, the Shiite South and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, is comprehensible. The Kurds and the Shia combined have been the oppressed majority in Iraq for decades. So their joy is the simple relief of their touching belief that they have indeed been liberated.

The jubilation with respect to the equally oppressed Sunni branch of Islam, from which the only nominally devout Sadaam Hussein had sprung, is perhaps a bit more complex. Besides presumably being happy to be on the verge of living in a potentially less autocratic environment, they are also clearly ecstatic at not being among the perhaps as many 1,250 civilians killed and 5,100 wounded in allied air raids and fighting on the ground since the war began March 20th.

While our CPT delegation was in Baghdad, we visited civilian neighborhoods that had been hit with cluster bombs, which on impact spew forth a blizzard of jagged projectiles whose only purpose is to pepper their civilian victims with countless painful bleeding wounds: wounds that certainly are going to be difficult if not impossible to forget. Outside one shattered shop along a main thoroughfare hit by two such bombs, I came across a victim desperately holding open his shirt so that my colleagues and I could see and make note of what had happened to him and his hapless neighbors.

On the ground at his feet was a bird cage with two sets of Love Birds inside. Each set was perched on its own little swinging bar. But instead of the birds cuddling up to each other in stereotypical Love Bird fashion, all four were sitting-it seemed to me warily-as far from each other as their perches allowed.

Talk about alienation and mistrust. I thought, now I've seen it all. Surely the Love Birds weren't blaming each other for the chaos around them. But then I realized that, in a world in which cluster bombs exist in order to shock and awe, neither no one nor no one thing in Iraq can be too careful these day or too wary where trust is concerned.

That in part explains the every-person-for-him-or-herself looting that is now underway: the clearest indication of lapsing order and deterioration of interpersonal confidence in devastated Iraq, especially in the cities. As a result, the allied forces are going to have to figure out how to not only control the looting and its attitudinal fall out, but end it.

And they are going to need to accomplish that critical task quickly. If not the historically divisive forces in Iraq, described earlier, could catch on to the fact that--despite the occupation and U. S. notions concerning regime change-what's left of the nation is in reality up for grabs.