Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

	Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters

Cairo-Baghdad-Cairo

By Nur ELmessiri

"I'm going back to Baghdad -- first class of course," Alaaeddin's lamp genie tells Bugs Bunny in "Bugs Bunny in Baghdad" one of the items in the in-flight entertainment programme of EgyptAir flight MS 380011 which departed Cairo for Baghdad on 11 October carrying The Egyptian People's Delegation for Lifting Sanctions on Iraq. "This trip," the Delegation's 10 October press release reads, "has the explicit purpose of busting the decade-old genocidal sanctions which killed over a million persons, mostly innocent children."

Baghdad or bust: more than 175 passengers on board (there was also a long waiting list), a mixture of people, a common motive, and possibly some mixed. "Do we all like sports?" words on the mini-screen asked us. The assumption was yes, because then words flashed: "I hope you enjoy this part." After basketball we had elephants, a fashion show, Charlie Chaplin hicupping, the making of Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor and an ad for yet another shopping mall (with bowling alley) newly opened in Madinet Nasr. And then: "Some singer (sic) make video clip to express their point of view. So let's enjoy this show." Blondes and brunettes gyrating and revealing flat tummies against a backdrop of Tunisian bird cages and white washed domed villas is not my cup of tea. I prefer Bugs Bunny. True, he is very American -- but then so is Huckleberry Finn (one of the most charming people to have ever existed), and Thoreau (one of the most inspiring).

So, even though it was not very politically correct of EgyptAir to show "Bugs Bunny in Baghdad" on this particular flight, let alone to show anything -- can't a body sit for two hours without an active screen in the vicinity? -- still, after the ad advertising the fact that you can advertise on this screen, I put my earphones on and proceeded to enjoy. Childish this? Or simply sinful?

There were no children on board -- the charming 16-year-old who was draped in Iraq's flag as she descended the staircase in Baghdad airport is unlikely, it is safe to assume, to consider herself a child. And though it was a "people's" delegation, a wafd sha'abi, there were no gallabiyas either, mostly 50-60-something men in suits -- businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, academics, medics, syndicate representatives, public figures -- and, ah, stars which twinkle twinkled. A certain type of intellectual likes to knock business, but if it were not for the sponsorship of a number of public-spirited private sector businessmen -- this flight would never have gotten off the ground... nor would -- rumour has it, so generous were the donations -- the next flight to Baghdad, hopefully, with more children, more shabab, more colour, local and sartorial.

Though there was no member of the age group for whom Bugs Bunny does his canny cut-the-crap-out thing, the concept of child, children and childhood figured prominently on this daytrip. The flight itself was dedicated to the memory of Mohamed Al-Dorra, "one of the many Palestinian children killed by the Zionist occupation forces over the past two weeks while," the Delegation's press release states, "their counterparts in Iraq meet the same fate of demise, albeit through different means, at the rate of 6000 child deaths per month" -- this in flagrant violation of Article 25 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children... shall enjoy the same social protection." Stickers on our shirts read: "We will not forget the children of Palestine" -- words written above a satellite TV image become icon; colours: red, green, black and white.

The daytrip was a statement, words become action, albeit 10 years after the fact. If you were one of those fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity, you were flown -- and fed -- for free. A day in Baghdad, and the itinerary was: depart a.m. Cairo Airport, arrive Baghdad, visit the Ameriyiah shelter, open buffet dinner, press conference and entertainment (this last, courtesy of members of the Delegation) at the Al-Rashid Hotel, back to Baghdad Airport, arrive p.m. Cairo -- always, always to the accompaniment of cameras.

For a historic visit, there wasn't much fanfare at the Cairo Airport. It was all quite 'aadi, as if a plane left for Baghdad everyday. The mood was good on the plane, and there was much backslapping and boyish banter. People exchanged cards -- and furtive glances. Childhood friends surfaced. We flew above the Dead Sea and someone said that atfal al-higara are down there. We thought, if we strained our eyes, we might catch a glimpse of those spirited, nimble Davids taunting with their slings and stones the cumberously clad machine gun wielding Goliaths. In spite of death and dying there is something like euphoria in the air, on the plane, in Cairo, a return to an earlier time when things were simpler, when dreams were part of the fabric of daily life.

Mesopotamia, green and brown and yellow rectangles, from the sky looked calm, the Tigris was straight and narrow. We step out of the plane and the air is a sweet, unpolluted desert breeze. Down the staircase, cameramen et al, and one by one we shake hands with a long line of Iraqis -- officials? Who were they? What were there names? Few of us learned.

Voices chant in Arabic they will not forget Al-Quds or Baghdad, that they condemn Israel and the United States of America. More voices, banners and flags and for a moment it seems like the good old student days -- 1960s, 70s, early 80s: student movements, pan-Arabism, the beginnings of the Intifada, the rage at Sabra and Shatilla. But turn away from the satellite TV cameras (themselves so emblematic of the 1990s and after), let your gaze disengage itself from the group hug, and it's a vast, empty, well-maintained piece of tarmac.

Inside the terminal, too, the infrastructure of modernity is intact. We fill in our landing cards, our hosts interspersed amongst us (the biggest group so far, we are told, to arrive at Baghdad Airport), and get our passports stamped. Media personalities -- singers, writers, intellectuals -- air their views in the well-lit space that will, if they provide good sound bites, become the TV screen.

Bus drivers who quietly went about their business as if tour groups hosted by the government arrived in Baghdad every day took us through excellently maintained highways and avenues, past furniture shops, shoe shops selling shoes and backpacks, household goods shops with bright pink green blue red plastic household goods, barbecued chicken shops, stands selling cigarettes, an amusement park, shops called "Ana wa Laila" and "Today," and hundreds of attractive, simple two-storey earth colour adobe style houses amid palm trees. From the moving vehicle's window, one saw beauty and order -- and the dignity of everyday life, jay walking, proceeding unharassed and unperturbed by embargoes, media coverage or lack thereof, or historic solidarity visits which took 10 years to materialise.

We were on our way to malgaa' Al-Ameriyah, and to some of the Egyptian ears on board, that meant an orphanage, children, still alive, suffering malnutrition and illness. Children did greet us as we descended from the bus -- not the offspring of officials, some barefoot, all smiling and with beautiful, curious, intelligent eyes. They waited outside, the children, as we filed through into the malgaa'.

Dark and cavernous, a visit to the underworld. No children or voices of children. Charred black walls, be-suited members of the delegation, bouquets of flowers, photos on the walls: of women, men, but mostly children, not hungry, sick, or orphaned, but dead. They had taken refuge in, laga'ou illa, this malgaa', purpose-built war shelter strong enough to resist the mightiest of bombs, had come to this makhbaa', hiding place, where if you are a civilian you should be safe. A guide told us the story about the fire that must be suffered and endured before you acquire the baptismal name of "collateral damage." Men and women wept. The cameras documented these tears. The place, a holocaust museum, was stifling and oppressive, like original sin. What would the child have made of what is made of him in a memorial? And who is anyone to know the difference between tears, idle camera tears, and the real thing? For the stern, taciturn and puritanical among us who do not understand how guided tours can sprout from fury in the face of acts of genocide, or how the inconceivable can generate endless words, there is Dylan Thomas's response, in "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London":

"Never until the mankind making/.../Fathering and all humbling darkness/Tells with silence the last light breaking/And the still hour/Is come of the sea tumbling in harness/.../Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound/Or sow my salt seed/In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn/The majesty and burning of the child's death./I shall not murder/The mankind of her going with a grave truth/Nor blaspheme down the stations of breath/With any further/Elegy of innocence or youth."

"After the first death," Thomas's poem ends on a note that Gilgamesh came to understand, "there is no other."

Outside the memorial grave there was fresh air and excited children. They gathered round actress Athar Al-Hakim who with impressive grace had established an immediate rapport with them and they beamed at the camera. Like a mother hen Al-Hakim had her arms around the whole group at once, at least 30 children, and, with the protective homeliness of an older sister sticking up for her little siblings against the neighbourhood bullies, she fulminated in English. She named the Big Bad Wolves, one by one. She knew they were looking at her from beyond where the camera at the moment was, and got so worked up you would have thought they were really there. The children looked like they felt safe and happy in the magical space of what becomes later the screen, a space that, for that moment, was coextensive with the breadth of an angry woman's arms.

Back on the buses, past daily life, signs to Basra and Mosul, the monument to the unknown soldier, to Al-Rashid Hotel: 5 stars, VIP, public sector and sparkling fancy -- a cross between Cairo's Al-Borg and the Semiramis. "Tourism," a sign, recalling those on Cairo's Saqqara Road, by the entrance reads, "is the way of intercivilisational dialogue around the world."

There was no time for the delegation to sight-see, stroll through Baghdad's downtown, sit on its qahwas and smoke its shishas, meander through its markets, chat with its inhabitants, buy souvenirs. One member, though, artist Mohamed Abla, did strike out on his own, and visited the Hewar, one of the many recently opened art galleries in Baghdad, where Iraqi artists and writers meet and which regularly hosts cultural events. At Hewar, Abla met sculptor Ismail Fattah who said that they were all happy that Egyptians had landed in Baghdad. In fact, the Hewar crowd had been hoping, and half-expecting, that the delegation would have visited them. Fattah spoke of a wish on the part of many Iraqi artists to do a group exhibition in Egypt soon and told Abla that Iraqi art has continued to thrive and develop during the past 10 years. Buyers? They come from the Gulf.

As for the downtown -- Al-Rashid Street, Abu Nawas -- Abla describes it as very similar to what he remembers from 20 years ago. "The bookstores are there, and the markets, but you feel there isn't much money circulating. There is less electricity, the qahwas are quieter, people seem poorer... There are fewer people around, less energy ..."

So, at least according to one eyewitness, change has been quantitative, not qualitative. Ten years of isolation, and downtown Baghdad is still itself.

For the rest of us, the itinerary continued as scheduled. Step through the front door of Al-Rashid Hotel and you find yourself stepping on the likeness of George Bush's face -- in sparkling marble inlay. Suppertime and the open buffet was generous. "We are eating the Iraqi people's food," someone with a sense of guilt and of the irony of our situation said. One wanted to thank someone for this generosity. Whom? Everywhere you looked it was Egyptians -- and, thanks to the colour white, the waiters. Handsome posture, dignified carriage, self-effacing, cordial and elegantly combining invisibility with attentiveness -- not the slightest hint of either obsequiousness or surliness -- the waiters, for at least one member of the delegation, were so remarkable that the word "Baghdad" will be associated in her visual memory with these angelic creatures. Eye contact, a smile and shukran: an encounter. Coffee, madhboud law samahti, given and received, the loudspeakers announce that Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz is due to arrive. Members of the Egyptian Delegation meandered past the 5-star hotel Khan El-Khalili type gift shops, into the Al-Zaher conference hall. We waited, and waited some more. Soon someone got the idea that a bit of entertainment wouldn't hurt.

The show, put on by Egyptians for mostly Egyptians (and cameras) began, and Mohamed Fouad sang about how "Real love/Lives for my love/It teaches us to forgive/Makes us forget yesterday/Makes us think about the future...." Hardly an expression of radical politics and, in spite of the ad lib additions that made reference to Baghdad, the tune was a bit too hishik bishik for a conference hall in which sat a Delegation for Lifting Sanctions on Iraq and which had arrived on a flight dedicated to the memory of a Palestinian child shot to death by Zionist occupation forces. Still, the good-natured audience clapped and sang along.

"When exhausted, O Cairo," poet Gamal Bekheit recited his rhyming Egyptian colloquial poem more à propos the visit and October 2000 than the previous item: "Rest on a Damscene breast/Let fly a Baghdadi bird.../Breathe with a Hegazi heart/And sing the sira of Bani Ghazi/And arm yourself with what could protect me/.../Stones with a Palestinian pulse/Stones with the pulse of an eager homeland/Looking out from Lebanon's loss/Granting motherhood to Dorman/Granting to Tunisia its greenery/.../Who can bring me back to life?/Stones with a Palestinian pulse."

Tareq Aziz and his entourage arrived when Bekheit was in the middle of reciting his next offering, "I Long to Enter Any Heaven", dedicated to 19-year-old Sanaa Mehidly who, in 1985, carried out a suicidal operation against the Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon. Aziz did not want to disrupt the Egyptian programme, and asked Bekheit to continue:

"I long to drink from the thirst of Sayidna Al-Hussein/I long to embrace the two seconds/That escaped from Sanaa/When the extent of her desire/Made the homeland explode in her/.../I long to enter any heaven..."

The poems went down well and energised the hall. And though Aziz has arrived, the show must go on, and it did. A good thing too because Azza Balbaa has an angelic voice. She sang Fairuz's haunting classic Shawari' Al-Quds Al-Atiqa (Al-Quds's Ancient Streets) and dedicated it to Palestinian and Iraqi children. "I walked in the streets/Al-Quds's ancient streets..." Hands building, homes coming into being, windows blossoming, children, and in their hands, books. Doors prised loose and homes emptied. "Keep flying voice of mine/Tell them of what is taking place..." The words and voice haunt, a fugual counterpoint to daily shelling and half-hourly network news cacophony.

"I remember the days when I was a university student..." In addition to a deliberate, well-thought out strategy of linking Iraq with Palestine, the past with the present, there is a hint of something like nostalgia in Aziz's speech. "Our cause is one." Egypt 1956, Iraq 1990, Palestine today. Aziz links and the audience is spellbound. He is not reading a pre-written speech or from notes. In the age of the sound bite and the vulgar quip, it is a pleasure to hear good syntax, well-pronounced words, the weight of language, to be reminded of how rhetoric is an art with an ancient pedigree.

The plane crew exits the conference hall. Time paid for is running out. The audience is beginning to disassemble, to stand in the back and smoke, while the speeches -- by intellectuals, men of religion, businessmen, sports personalities and syndicate representatives -- continue. Speeches over, the dispersal was slow. Things did not come together, but the mood was still good, and some women gathered round Azza Balbaa after the talks were done and began to sing Ya Falastiniya.

We petered out slowly from the Al-Rashid Hotel. The dates, yellow, tart-to-sweet, brought back by Abla from his visit to the market, provided something like a cornucopian touch to the airport terminal lounge, and as dates passed from hand to hand it felt like communion.

The mood was good on the plane, and there was much backslapping and boyish banter.

---

Related stories:
Flight no.1 to Baghdad

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg