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Fear of freedom - -

By Waddah Ali

Fear of Freedom
Published: November 20, 2006

UNDER Saddam Hussein, if you were not a member of the Baath party, you wouldn’t get rations, you’d be forbidden to carry on studying, you wouldn’t be on the earth but in the sea.

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Christophe Vorlet

These contributors are Iraqi writers and English translators, two of whom worked for the American military. Because of their work, they were hunted by death squads and only escaped Iraq with assistance from PEN and the Norwegian government. Larry Siems, director of the Freedom to Write Program at PEN American Center, interviewed them in Norway, where they have political asylum. These essays are adapted from his interviews.

Lost After Translation, by Basim Mardan (Nov. 20, 2006)

Republic of Dreams, by Omar Ghanim Fathi (Nov. 20, 2006)

I was invited to join the party in 1976, when I was doing my compulsory military service after earning my first degree at Mosul University. The colonel in control of my camp wanted to sit for an examination, and he asked me to join the party and translate the Oxford Companion to Military History into Arabic for him.

I’m very ambitious. I wanted to carry on with my studies. And so I joined the party, and when I finished my military service I was appointed to the university. They never appoint anyone unless you’re a party member, it doesn’t matter if you’re Plato or Aristotle.

In 1982, when Iraq and Iran were at war, they asked me if I wanted a promotion within the party. To get this, I would have to go with some other comrades and execute deserters from the war. I told them I was not an executioner.

They put me in prison. Through family contacts, I got out after one month. They expelled me from teaching and transferred me to clerical work.

I tried to escape Iraq for Turkey in 1995. But the Kurds in northern Iraq demanded money I didn’t have, and I decided to go back to Mosul, where I had a 300-meter plot of land given to me by Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein gave everybody a plot of land. He was the most generous president, but also the most severe. He was a god, and gods are arbitrary.

In Mosul, men in a black Cadillac stopped me, blindfolded me and drove me to Baghdad, to Hakmiya Prison. After three months of solitary confinement, torture and electric shocks, I was accused of spying for Turkey. When I went in, my weight was 242 pounds. I came out only 121 pounds. I was divided in half by the torture.

After a year in prison, I came home. We were impoverished. My wife and children were living with her father in Karbala — they are Shiites — and my salary wasn’t even enough for transportation to visit them. After a long time, I was reappointed to a university near there. I had been there for three months when the Americans came.

Nobody in Karbala dared to work as a translator for the American soldiers, so I was pushed into the first ranks, translating between the military commanders and the governor every day on TV. I found myself riding a rocket of fame and prestige, but no money. Just $20 a week, and a stigma in the eyes of others.

I translated conferences and debates with the Karbala city council. I even translated for L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, when he came. Before he arrived, the colonel I worked for told me, “Waddah, don’t tell anybody he’s coming.” They trusted me, and I was worthy of their trust.

I tried to solve problems. Once, when students had a sit-in demonstration against the Americans, I told them: “Be quiet, be careful in your way of dealing with them. If you’re impolite, suppose they are impolite, too — you could be killed.”

Many times when



    
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