Here and There – Iraq
We didn’t mean to go to Iraq. We were taking the slow boat to China: well, a series of flights as we moved from London to Adelaide, stopping off at various places. It began well, with a few days in each of Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Rome and Athens. Then we flew over to Egypt. One of my PhD students in Edinburgh, an Egyptian, had taken over making all the arrangements for our time in Cairo. We knew we had arrived in a different world when we walked over to his car and, as we started to get in, a man opened my door and put out his hand: “baksheesh”. Whoa!! Well, I’ll have more to say about Egypt in another blog.
However, while we were in Cairo a civil war broke out in Lebanon, and Beirut was to be our next scheduled stop. A few days there didn’t seem such a good idea: we had to change our travel plans. After some discussion with the airline (we had been travelling with Alitalia for this part of the trip, which was linked with Qantas at the time), we decided to go to Baghdad, yes Baghdad (!!). Off I went to the Embassy of Iraq, to be told a visa would take two weeks. Two weeks? The man at the desk nodded sadly and waited. Slow, but I got there: of course, baksheesh. A few Egyptian pounds and an hour later, the visas were in our passports.
We flew on to Baghdad, and a shambolic arrival. After going through immigration and into the arrivals area, we saw a mountain of cases within a square of tables, and three men collecting cases and bringing them over to their owners. Cases had to be opened to be enthusiastically searched – for alcohol, pornographic videotapes or magazines, and whatever else they decided was banned. We waited our turn and got through the appalling search process (had I forgotten about baksheesh already?), and then went over to the small booth dealing with accommodation. There was nothing available. We were visiting Baghdad at the time of an international dentistry convention in the city, and not a single hotel room was vacant. I took a taxi up to the city and went to see Alitalia, but they couldn’t get us out until two days later. We spent the next two nights sleeping at the airport. Fortunately, the airline staff were lovely, giving us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all with the compliments of Alitalia, although the meals comprised chicken and salad with a bread roll each and every time!
By the time we were to depart we were better organised. No seat allocation, so the three children pushed their way to the front of the queue, and when the door was opened rushed over to the plane, up the stairs, and bagged two sets of three seats. My wife and I came along behind, fending off an Iraqi security man trying to grab my carry-on bag (no way, it had our money and passports) and battling past we got on board. In our seats, we watched a scene of amazing unfolding chaos. One lady had brought on a cardboard box with what sounded like two chickens inside. Another had a hip bath, yes, a hip bath, and since it was too big to go under the seat in front of her, or in the overhead luggage containers, she put it in the gangway. Children climbed over seats, falling into other passengers’ laps. A woman sat next to me, in the one vacant seat in the set of six the children had grabbed. I looked around, and saw it was one of the flight attendants. She smiled and explained there was no point trying to do anything, and so she was going to sit with us until the flight landed in Bahrain. The flight departed, with my few remaining memories of Iraq comprising an airport waiting area, a hot taxi journey to the centre of Baghdad and back, chicken salad meals, and our flight out.
In fact, that isn’t quite true. Our time in Egypt had been the first experience of leaving the familiar, staying in a country where language, culture, religion, and social mores were all different, foreign in a very real sense. Iraq was like that, only more so. Watching the staff throwing cases around and earnestly grubbing through each passenger’s belongings offered another insight. We were in a country where we didn’t matter. Those enthusiastic airport staff didn’t bother to look at us, only in the suitcases and what they hope their searches might reveal for themselves.
It might seem an odd comment, but we were lucky to be flying with Alitalia. They had a couple of airline staff working at the airport, the ones who made sure we had food while we waited for a flight out. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but they were ‘like us’, while everyone else we saw was not. I don’t think we were scared while we were stuck there, but I suspect we did feel a little uncomfortable. To be honest, I can’t remember how I felt at the time, but I do know the presence and help from those two allowed us to conclude that we would be able to get through this strange interlude.
Looking back at that visit to Iraq, I wonder how far I had reflected on the fact I had studied social anthropology as we were dealing with the staff at the airport. Reading about other cultures, other religions, other values, all that is relatively easy when it is an academic exercise: on the ground, it can be very different. You are no longer looking at another society from a distance. The pane of glass has been removed, and you are in contact, engaged with those other unfamiliar people. That close interaction takes on yet another dimension when there is a power imbalance, when you are dealing with officials, guards, and others who can make decisions which affect you. While we confront similar experiences all the time when we’re being observed by security staff in various locations, or dealing with police, customs officers, and similar officials, the situation is far more confronting when you are an outsider, and all the more so when even the language is truly ‘foreign’.
In Baghdad, it wasn’t just that. This was also a very gendered world. We were dealing with men in a masculine environment. Indeed, the only two women we engaged with were the two staff from the airline, except when a flight arrived or departed when we would see other flight attendants briefly as they went quickly through the airport. What is that line from Thucydides I like so much? ‘The strong do what they will, the weak do what they must’. Here it was quite clear: the men did what they wanted, and the women did what they were told. The religious and cultural imbalance between men and women in Iraq seemed greatly amplified in the rather artificial environments of the airport and the airline office I visited.
Many people from the Middle East came to settle in Australia, especially in the years after the Second World War when refugees and other frightened people wanted to find a new, safe place to live. Working in multicultural affairs at the federal level, I met many individuals and community groups whose culture and languages were Islamic and Arabic. Most had acquired some facility in English, allowing me to sit and talk with them. Even more enjoyable, I would sometimes find myself having dinner with a family and their friends. Away from the more formal community consultations and meetings with representative groups, these social occasions meant I met people as individuals. What did I discover? They were like other people I knew, of course. They had their family worries, issues at work, favourite foods and music, thoughts about television programs and books they had read, children who wouldn’t sit still or wanted to go off and read, elderly parents facing illness, many of whom wanted their children to take them back, so that they could end their days in their ‘home’ countries.
Perhaps I should have seen that crazy day in Baghdad rather differently. Those aggressive men in the airport, scrabbling through the luggage, were fathers, brothers, sons, from families just like those I was to meet in Australia. Sure, they had different values and perceptions, and certainly many of the Middle Eastern people I met in Australia shared similar views with those I saw in Iraq about relationships between the sexes, husbands and wives, good behaviour, and other aspects of how people should live and behave. Even in Australia, those differences weren’t trivial. Back then, Arabic women were likely to be treated as subservient in many ways, boys in a family privileged over the girls. Many were devout Moslems. At the same time, over a home-cooked meal, we were chatting about school, television, and politics as I would with anyone else. In at least some ways we weren’t that different, surely?
Of course, that glosses over change. Those people I met in Australia had already ‘migrated’ in the sense they were shifting their views on some issues as a result of living in a new and different country. Some changes were obligatory. Australia doesn’t recognise Sharia law. Australian education is gender blind. Well, I guess I have to be careful. It tries not to discriminate between traditional genders, so ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ are educated in the same way, (when it comes to other categories, such as those who identify as trans-sexual, for example, this is a somewhat more controversial area). I would suspect that many Australians who had been born in the Middle East but who had been educated or lived here would be regarded as ‘progressive’, or ‘loose’ or something like that if they returned to the country of their birth. On the other side, some of those who’d moved to Australia would be viewed by many with a European or North American background as restrictive, misogynistic, or unfairly controlling.
It is easy to criticise those unlike ourselves. Many portray Moslems as ignorant, hidebound, living by a violent creed and out of step with the ways of the world today; the Chinese are communists, shifty, trying to take over the world. Such perceptions are misleading in at least two ways. First, they fall into the old ‘us good, them bad’ trap. Once you start real dialogue about how to live and what matters for people, you discover we often share more than we disagree on. Much of the business of living is universal: children misbehaving, families arguing over money, clothes, where to go for a holiday, and so on. That was obvious when I was able to sit down and eat in a household with a very different background from my own.
It is the second problem that is the more challenging, and the one that is harder to overcome. That is our mistaken confidence that we are ‘right’, and all others are wrong when it comes to morals, bringing up children, family values. We can’t see things from the perspective of an Iraqi or a Chinese, and since we can’t, we judge them in our terms.
I know the argument about this. We read about terrible things that are done in China or the Middle East. The Chinese are locking up millions of Uyghurs. They are restricting access to the internet. They stopped families having more than one child and carried out state-required abortions or did so until recently. In Arabic countries, they lash women for adultery, chop off the hands of thieves. You can add dozens more points like these. Having done that, are you willing to stand on the other side? We keep our native people in marginal outback areas, starved of resources, with inadequate education and health care. We keep millions close to poverty, while others live in opulence. The US incarcerates millions of black citizens, often arbitrarily; Australia does the same, only the numbers are much smaller. We allow drug use. We have one educational system for the rich, and another for the poor. We make people take vaccines in order to work. We allow many different religions to flourish, many gods, many moral systems. We cherish individualism at the expense of families and communities.
In our own way, we allow the government to constrain and control behaviour. If we look at countries all over the globe, the ways in which the state uses violence vary, but every state uses sanctioned violence to ensure people do ‘the right thing’. When he was writing his book of advice for a ruler, at one point Machiavelli addressed cruelty, and the fact leaders might kill some subjects. He observed, “A prince, therefore, must not mind incurring the charge of cruelty for the purpose of keeping his subjects united and faithful; for, with a very few examples, he will be more merciful than those who, from excess of tenderness, allow disorders to arise, from whence spring bloodshed and rapine; for these as a rule injure the whole community, while the [few] executions carried out by the prince injure only individuals.” That rather topical extract comes from The Prince, and the aptly titled Section 17: ‘Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared.’ In other parts of the world, we are often perceived as doing little to keep our citizens ‘united and faithful’.
To be clear. I am not an apologist for a Chinese, Iraqi, or any other regime. Rather I am suggesting there is more than one point of view on how societies operate, and that we are all similarly imperfect. We do some things well, and some things less well, and some really badly. I don’t know of any country that offers the ‘right’ way to do things, even if I have a sneaking and quite unsubstantiated love for Scandinavia. We are at the mercy of others, and Thucydides comment could have been written this year, not 2,500 years ago. Academics and commentators fill thousands of pages on the topic of what we should do, but practice only changes at the margins. Despite this, I think many people would agree with me when I claim there is at least one ethic that should drive all countries, whatever their religious beliefs and political systems, the rule not to do harm to others. Versions of that rule, ‘do not do unto others what you would have them do to you’, appears in creeds and moral philosophies from every region. Yes, indeed. The only problem is that I don’t know a single country where those words have been systematically and universally applied to practice.
Once more I return to my recollections of that brief time at Baghdad Airport. Those men rummaging around in the visitors’ suitcases were doing so with the reassurance that this was what the local imams had instructed. Root out Western influences, pernicious thoughts, and keep the country clean. Just as is the case in so many other regimes, there would also have been a tacit understanding that you could keep some of what you found, as long as it was kept under wraps, at home, or maybe with the guys after hours with drinks (yes, I later discovered, many Muslims do drink alcohol, but that it something done in private). This is the familiar divergence between public morality and private practice, a divergence sustained by the requirement to ‘be discreet about it’. It’s true in Iraq, in Australia, in the UK and the US.
Why is it so hard to make changes, to limit exploitation, to get rid of arbitrary violence? I can’t help but be reminded of the words of a Cambridge professor of ancient philosophy, Francis Cornford . In 1908 he completed a brief book of satirical advice on academic politics, its target new staff. In Microcosmographia Academica he observed: “Since the stone-axe fell into disuse at the close of the Neolithic age, two other arguments of universal application have been added to the rhetorical armoury by the ingenuity of mankind. They are closely akin; and, like the stone-axe, they are addressed to the Political Motive. They are called the Wedge and the Dangerous Precedent. … They are as follows. The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future — expectations which you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy … The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.” Cornford was writing a witty piece of advice for a young academic. As is often the case with wit, his humour is only a tiny distance away from the truth.
