Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/18/2003 3:12:21 PM PDT by MadIvan
IN THE subterranean gloom the cry goes up: “I see fingers, someone is in there.” There is a cheer from the thousands of Iraqis crammed into the underpass in central Baghdad. They believe that rumours of a secret underground prison will prove true and that the dungeon will deliver up their long-lost relatives.
Among the sweating throng are hundreds of desperate Baghdadis searching for the disappeared: brothers, fathers and sisters snatched from their homes by the Mukhabarat and never seen again.
Some hold aloft pictures they took 15, 20, 25 years ago of young men with narrow waists and flared trousers, either executed long since or by now middle-aged men grown grey under incarceration.
“My brother. The Americans must use their technology to find my brother,” goes the cry when a Westerner, any Westerner, is seen.
There is no prison. The rumoured dungeons are service tunnels occupied by nothing more than rats and a few old fruit boxes. The jail’s existence is a Baghdad urban myth, sired by hope born of desperation and feeding on tales of inmates entombed beneath secret police headquarters.
Some myths are of underground chambers from which prison guards have fled; others of prisoners slowly drowning in basement torture chambers that have been flooded by broken water pipes.
Yet still the crowd persists. Impatient, a handful of young men drive a bus into the tunnel, parking it beneath the row of huge lights which illuminated the dark passage in better days. From the top of the bus the glass is torn away and a young child is pushed into the narrow passageway to see what lies inside.
Behind him goes Hashem Ibrahim, a 35-year-old Shia whose brother, Mohammed, disappeared in 1985 after he was led away by Saddam’s secret police, accused of joining a banned Shia opposition party.
“He wasn’t a member of any party — he was just praying in a Shia mosque, and this was during the Iran war when Saddam was suspicious of all Shias,” Mr Ibrahim said.
“I have been looking for him ever since. Somebody told us there was a prison in Adamiyah and I went there but we didn’t find anything.”
As he speaks Haid Ahmed pushes his way to the front of the crowd, proffering a photograph of his missing brother, Moayed, an agricultural student last seen in June 1981. “We haven’t been able to search for him until now, we were too scared even to try,” Mr Ahmed, 32, said.
“My brother could be anywhere. This is just a possibility but any place I hear there is a prison, I go there. I have been to four prisons now and I am going to keep looking because my father and mother have asked me to. We have talked about him every day since he was taken. His life inside prison is now longer than his life outside. In my heart I think he is alive, but only God knows.”
Talking to others reality stares them in the face, but they still refuse to accept it. Shaukat, an engineer, still holds his brother Ali’s file that he seized from a deserted Iraqi security headquarters a week ago.
On it appear the words, in Arabic: “Executed criminal, accused of writing against Saddam Hussein.”
Iraqi opposition groups claim that tens of thousands of people simply disappeared under Saddam’s regime, but Shaukat is still looking. So are all the others in the underpass.
“My brother, my brother. . .”
Regards, Ivan
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