By Gina Chon
Finding the truth can sometimes seem like an impossible task in Iraq. The full, accurate picture of what happens on any given day can be elusive. My Iraqi friends say there is no black and white here, only shades of gray.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. As Sarmad reports below, rumors and misinformation have been a constant of life in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein and during the U.S. invasion, Iraqis were hit with a barrage of propaganda. And it’s not just the government that feeds the flow of misinformation. There has long been a culture of rumors, created by absence of a strong, free news media and by individuals, sects and parties that use half-truths, or lies, to their benefit.
One recent example of the flow of misinformation is the case of Iraqi journalist Dhia al-Kawazz and his family. Late last month, Mr. Kawazz, who lives in Jordan, dramatically announced on his news Web site that 11 members of his family in Iraq had been massacred. On his Web site, he has often been critical of the Nouri al-Maliki government and said Iraqi police were involved in the deaths.
Iraqi journalists are targets for insurgents, militia members and other groups, and many local reporters have been killed, kidnapped and threatened. So Mr. Kawazz’s claims didn’t seem far-fetched. Local and international journalism advocacy groups denounced the news.
But the government immediately denied Mr. Kawazz’s claims, and — much to observers’ surprise — a few days later several of Mr. Kawazz’s family members appeared on TV to show they are alive. Since then, Mr. Kawazz has recanted his assertions and said he had been misled by another family member who told him that relatives had been killed. But Iraqi authorities still issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Kawazz for making false accusations. (According to a media reports, some family members said Mr. Kawazz’s motivation was to try to secure refugee status for some of his relatives. Mr. Kawazz has denied that.)
In Iraq, perceptions of reality can change quickly. Some of the thousands of local security volunteer recruits not long ago were insurgents fighting against Americans. Now, they are praised by the U.S. for finding weapons caches or leading U.S. troops to al Qaeda members. The change from enemy to friend is acknowledged by U.S. military officials. Reconciliation, they often say, is done with your enemies, not your friends.
Filling a Vacuum With Rumors
By Sarmad Ali
Even before the U.S. invasion, rumors and stories spread quickly in Iraq. There was a dearth of factual information. People lacked access to real news and lived on an information diet of government propaganda, which was largely pro-Saddam and anti-West. There were really no alternatives to the two state-run TV channels and the handful of government-owned newspapers. So people were prone to believe word of mouth.
People believed that Saddam traveled in convoys of same-colored Mercedes — a way to minimize the risk of assassination — and in clandestine tunnels that were built under his palaces and in and out of Baghdad. Iraqis also often talked about Saddam funneling Iraqi money by the billions into Swiss bank accounts and they swapped stories about his personal life.
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Iraqis place their feet on the face of a statue of Saddam Hussein on the streets of Baghdad in April 2003. |
As a child growing up in Baghdad, I heard stories about how Saddam loved to eat venison and had huge farms where a large staff of breeders fed his deer cardamom, an aromatic spice. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that venison simply wasn’t widely available. Perhaps it was sold in fancy markets, but in my 25 years there, I never saw venison sold, served or eaten.
There were rumors about how Saddam found and married his second wife, who was particularly mysterious because no one actually saw them together in public or on television. The story went that Saddam encountered the woman at a party and had his bodyguards fetch her husband. Saddam asked the man to immediately divorce the woman so he could marry her. The man, said to be an Iraqi airline director, complied and, to save face, was said to have resigned his position and sought asylum in Europe.
Stories like these were ubiquitous. People traded them at their homes, in their neighborhoods and quietly in cafes.
When the U.N. inspection teams started looking for Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, rumors among Iraqis about the caches of weapons abounded. People started spreading uncorroborated stories about how Saddam hid his weapons in secrets tunnels under the Tigris River and that even if the inspectors were to spend years in Iraq looking for the weapons, they never would have found them. Other stories claimed that Saddam had his WMDs on mobile trucks that cruised the country without stopping anywhere so no one, even U.S. intelligence satellites, could locate them.
And even as the U.S. troops were patrolling the streets of Baghdad and other cities, and statues of Saddam were destroyed, people still believed that Saddam would be back. One day as I was trying to fill in a bucket with some water from a hydrant in my neighborhood, I saw a teenager climbing a brick billboard with a large Saddam poster affixed to it. The boy was holding a slipper in his hand, preparing to hit Saddam on the mustache — a major insult in Arabic traditions, which view shoes as dirty and the mustache as a symbol of manhood — and then tear the poster down. He paused to make sure no one was watching. Although Saddam was no longer in power, he was afraid that he would be punished or killed if Saddam were to regain power. So he thought better of his plan, he hit the poster but then jumped down and ran.
I was in Baquba, 35 miles north of Baghdad, with my family staying with relatives when the U.S. forces entered Baghdad. Baquba became a mecca for families from Baghdad, like mine, who fled the heavy U.S. airstrikes. Many of those families stayed away from Baghdad after the airstrikes stopped because of rumors that Saddam, still at large, was trying to lure U.S. soldiers to Baghdad and would then unleash a chemical strike on them.
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A U.S. Marine on the streets of Baghdad in April 2003. He is wearing glasses akin to the kind that Iraqi rumors said could see through walls – and clothes. |
Reporters in Iraq find it challenging to gather facts in this culture of rumors. When the U.N. compound in Baghdad was bombed one afternoon after the U.S. invasion, I, along with other reporters at the newspaper I worked for, drove to the site, which was only 10 minutes away. As soon as we got out of the car, we were surrounded by locals who lived in apartment buildings across the highway. Trying to be quoted, they started telling us how they saw “the missiles” that shattered the U.N. building being launched from Sadr City, a short distance away. We soon learned that a suicide bomber had driven his car into the building and there were no missile attacks at all. It seemed that Iraqis — who for so long had no outlet to speak their mind and who had spent years obeying orders imposed on them without asking why — were eager to speak their minds, even if it meant making up stories in order to get noticed.
Rumors also affected Iraqi perceptions of U.S. soldiers. Influenced by action movies, Iraqis spread stories about U.S. Marines, whose dark glasses allegedly let them see through walls and clothes. People warned their wives, sisters and daughters against walking in front of the Marines wearing these glasses for fear that the soldiers would see the women naked. Some went so far as to claim that the glasses the soldiers wore were the same ones worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in some of his action movies.
People have many different motivations for spreading rumors. Like anywhere, sometimes people are just trying to help themselves, though in Iraq the circumstances are far different than what you’d encounter most other places. Right after the U.S. troops invaded Iraq, they imposed a curfew that started early in the evening and ended early at dawn. Since nothing was functioning at that time and there wasn’t much to do, I used to spend part of my days visiting a close friend and his family who lived a few blocks away from my house in Baghdad. One of his distant relatives, much to his family’s chagrin, lied to get money from the U.S. military. The relative started a rumor that his brother had been shot dead by the Americans as he tried to get to a medical clinic during the curfew. A different version of the story later came to light that his brother had been shot while trying to loot metals from an uncompleted government project.