And Know the Place for the First Time

BAGHDAD — At first I didn’t feel different. I missed my daughter and family very much and I was very happy to return.

Later, however, I came to realize that the difference between living in Iraq and outside is the difference between living in a state controlled by parties or individuals and a state controlled by institutions.

Here the biggest danger always comes from the government and the political parties who share in the government. After them is the danger from the armed groups and the militias.


Under Saddam’s regime I knew the red lines. All Iraqis knew the red lines, and you could avoid them: Don’t get involved in any work against Saddam Hussein, the Baath Party and Uday Saddam Hussein. You could do anything else, just not that.

If you did, they would “send you behind the sun” [this is an Iraqi phrase meaning to "make you disappear"] with all the members of your family, or put you under the earth while you were still alive. No one would know anything about what happened to you.

But the former regime recognized a distinction between the government and the Baath Party. For instance, at that time you could criticize the interior minister as a minister — but not as one of
the leadership of the Baath Party.

Now there are no red lines. Or maybe there are really thousands of them, and I just don’t know where the green lines are.

You can speak about anyone and everything. But everyone can attack you. Not just two people, like in the old days.

I don’t mean by words, I mean by destroying your reputation, or maybe shooting you.

I knew before I went to America that there was a big difference between their lives and ours, but there is also a big difference between knowing something and seeing it.

In America people know what they have, what they want and what they need. Here, you can have everything one moment and nothing the next, depending entirely on your relationship with the people around you.

If you want to keep everything you must try to keep everyone around you happy, because everyone is potentially a dangerous enemy.

For example they can publish lies about you, and no-one can prevent them because there is no authority which will demand that they prove it. Under the past regime even ministers couldn’t attack journalists without proof.

America did not change me but it made me focus. After I came back I began to realize how limited my bonds were here, beyond my family.

I have no job from the Iraqi state.

I don’t receive a salary from it, and I don’t own anything here. My husband and I rent our home.

I realized that everything that I worked to help my society build as foundations for a better future — honesty, integrity, freedom of expression — has been destroyed.

I cannot speak my mind. I can’t say “I don’t like this, this is wrong, this is right.” I can’t declare my dreams — that I want to live without extremist religious limits, freely, in an open environment.

And everyone else faces the same restrictions.

In America, ordinary people have a strong relationship to law.

In Washington and New York, people said that you can’t live in America without a lawyer. The law is a way to organize life.

In Iraq, the law does no such thing. In 100 years, I think, it still will not.

Because, in America, politicians are bound by laws and rules. Here, our politicians do what they want.
Baghdad Buraeu