A Hundred and One Days

Title: A Hundred and One Days - A Baghdad Journal

Author: Åsne Seierstad

Publisher: Basic Books, 2005 (First published 2003)

ISBN: 9780465076000

Pages: 321

Iraq is a land of paradoxes. It hosted one of the oldest civilizations known to the world and is currently the theater of the most savage ideology of all in the form of the Islamic State. It is rich in oil wealth, but the people are poor in the war-ravaged country. The pathetic fall of Iraq is the handiwork of a dictator named Saddam Hussein abd-al Majid al-Tikriti, who ruled the country for 24 long years (1979 – 2003), before he was thrown out by American troops. His tenure as President of Iraq was torn with continuous warfare. In the second year itself, he took on Iran, but the bloody war went on inconclusively for eight years. Soon after, he invaded Kuwait, another disastrous decision. He was ousted from there after a humiliating defeat in the First Gulf War in 1991 and put under crippling sanctions. Saddam was a laughing stock in other countries for his grandiloquent rhetoric with nothing much to show for it. When he continued to show defiance against international weapons inspectors, he was brought down by a coalition force led by the U.S. We later came to know that as per international law, the western powers had no basis for attacking the country, but Bush and Blair, the President and Prime minister of the U.S. and Britain respectively, fabricated evidence to ‘prove’ that Saddam had hoarded weapons of mass destruction. However, the good thing that emerged out of the war was that the tyrant was deposed and the majority Shias got their voice back. Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian reporter who has much experience in covering battlefields like Afghanistan, Kosovo and Chechnya. She has received numerous awards for her journalism. She is retelling the events that unfolded in Baghdad in 2003 immediately before and after the occupation of the city in this book.

After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Iraq sunk into anarchy. Exploiting the chance, people with extremist ideas and uncontrolled lust banded together under the banner of the Islamic State and set up a regime covering a large part of Iraq and Syria. The plight of Christians and other minorities like Yasidis had been terrible. They were forcibly converted en masse. Those who resisted were brutally murdered. Their women were taken as sex slaves and traded online. But what was the condition of the minorities under Saddam himself? Did they get an equal status with Muslims, who constituted the majority? We shouldn’t here lose sight of the time-invariant truth regarding Muslims’ religious tolerance. Wherever they are in a minority, they demand the society to be secular. But the moment they reach a critical mass, everything gets topsy-turvy, Islamic Sharia is imposed by force and people of other religions are relegated to the pathetic state of second-rate citizens or even outright slaves. In Saddam’s Iraq, Seierstad remarks that in Mosul and a few other towns, mosques and churches stood shoulder to shoulder. It is also true that we find a few broadminded Iraqis who pray at the mosque and light candles at a church for fulfillment of their wish. But the real plight of the Christians can be deduced from the comment by a knowledgeable man the author came across in a Baghdad church. The number of Christians in the country had halved over the previous fifteen years! The Islamisation of Iraq and the increasing influence of Imams worried them. The best jobs and the best pay were reserved for Muslims (p. 86-7). The career growth of every Christian would be stunted after a short while. It was true that they were well represented in the Baath Party and Hussein’s forces. His deputy, Tariq Azeez, was a Christian. But the sad fact was that Azeez was not allowed to go on foreign trips with his family, who were always under house arrest when he travelled overseas. They were held as some kind of hostages to guarantee his good behavior in foreign lands. Thus it is quite evident from Seierstad’s narrative that the minorities were still not much more than slaves in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

A true picture of Saddam Hussein’s regime can be gleaned from the book. The level of censorship and surveillance was enormous. All mass media were strictly controlled by the regime. News programs were nothing but propaganda of what the president thought and did. Government establishments were decorated with massive portraits of Saddam in various poses. His Baath Party controlled all aspects of social life, including maintenance of law and order in emergencies. Foreign journalists were required to follow the program charted by the Ministry of Information. They were always accompanied by government-appointed translators. Any conversation with ordinary citizens without the presence of minders was strictly banned under the pain of expulsion. Common folk were afraid of the minders as well, since they represented the regime. Usually, when they demanded an interview with a citizen as part of the journalist’s work, the people quickly obliged without any demur. All activities were subject to formal permission granted by venal bureaucrats, which led to widespread corruption. The author herself had paid bribes to extend her visa while in Iraq in response to threats from the officials that they were planning to revoke it. Once, she had to return to Jordan before paying another hefty bribe and coming back to Iraq. The bureaucrats, street vendors, and common people – all alike repeated the words of official propaganda when asked about their lives or what they thought about the president. The entire Iraq of Saddam Hussein was a theater. They hated him thoroughly, though they hated America in equal measure. When American troops finally converged on Baghdad, Hussein’s frantic calls for resistance went unheeded. They rejoiced at the downfall of the tyrant who ruled over them. Saddam had to flee, but was soon caught and hanged after a brief trial. It is curious to note that even though Saddam exhorted his followers to fight till death, he meekly surrendered when the time came!

War brings out the hero hidden inside every man and woman. The book has captured the spirit of endurance and calm courage exhibited by Iraqi people against all odds. Some people had actually fled Baghdad before the war began, to seek asylum in Jordan or even in the countryside. But the majority braved the situation heroically, without complaint at the war thrust on their shoulders by the stubbornness of one man who ruled over their lives for the past three decades. As the war neared, life became even tougher as the exchange rates skyrocketed against Iraqi Dinar. Another remarkable point to note is the great tolerance extended to foreign journalists covering the war. Even when their country and their lives were falling apart, they admitted the white journalists into their homes, cooperated with their work and made their lives easier! Sporadic incidents in which the grieving relatives of people who died in air bombing raids vented their ire on journalists are recorded by Seierstad, but they were rare. The journalists also showed exemplary courage. They withstood the American assault on Hotel Palestine, where they were staying. Amid the war scenes, we also see the rise of unconventional warfare in the form of suicide bombers on behalf of Saddam. When his rhetoric and arsenal miserably failed to contain American ground troops, he imported Islamist fighters ready to lay down their lives in the cause of religion. For Saddam, religion was fine if it suited him. However, the fidayeen poured across the desert in droves from Syria and attacked unsuspecting American soldiers by detonating themselves in their midst. This hardened the invasion forces, who then shot anything that moved, including civilians.

Iraqis were jubilant at first at the overthrow of Saddam, but soon grew disillusioned with American occupation. The author gives many indications of the deteriorating situation before she left the city. Shias were elated at the downfall of the president, who persecuted them, while the Sunnis resented the occupation forces’ high-handed manners. Iraqis seemed to have believed that the U.S. troops would act chivalrously towards the people, by not bombing residential areas or shooting civilians. This is strange, as they didn’t harbour any such illusions towards the Iranian military in the eight-year war that ended in 1988. Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons and lethal firepower against targets in enemy country indiscriminately. But, the Americans must behave decently, thought the average Iraqi. Exasperated with fighting in the desert and pestered with suicide squads, the trigger-happy invaders were not in a mood to oblige. As we know, Iraq descended into civil war as soon as the Americans left.

Seierstad’s narrative presents a true picture of Baghdad immediately before and after the war. She has championed the cause of individual Iraqis, but never once of the regime. Even after acknowledging the bone of contention of ordinary people against Western forces, she reiterates the arguments that can be laid against it. She is expressing doubt on many occasions where an American bomb is alleged to have landed, that the culprit might really be the anti-aircraft rockets falling back to the ground and exploding. Also, being a journalist’s narrative, readers should not expect much depth in the book.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star