Three hours before the first U.S. fighter jets left central Saudi Arabia for Baghdad, Kiren Chaudhry sighed and told the 99th reporter of the week what she had just told me: that the sanctions against Iraq were working. She’d been in Iraq a week and a half before, tagging along with an eclectic contingent of U.S. peace activists, including Vietnam veterans and Grandmothers for Peace. When she’d left Baghdad, the stores were still full, but a sack of flour was selling for 260 dinars–twice a soldier’s monthly wages. There was no bread.
The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Swedish American mother, Chaudhry grew up in a Punjabi village in Pakistan. She speaks Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and Arabic. Her background, she says, makes for good media fodder, but she resents being looked at as “a queer cultural artifact.”
Laura Hagar: You were in Iraq ten days before the U.S. attack. What was the mood of the people in Baghdad when you were there?
Besides the war with Iran, Iraq also went through a period of economic liberalization in which the government tried to promote the private sector and made all kinds of reforms, including the privatization of industry. They dissolved the labor unions. Wages dropped. There was unemployment. There were all the kinds of stresses that we see in Eastern Europe right now, that same kind of economic instability and collapse. All this was going on from October 1988 until the initiation of this new military venture. So Iraqis, I think, are generally fed up. They don’t understand why it is that they have to bear the burden of the Arab cause time and time again. They thought that’s what was going on with the Iran-Iraq war, and now they’re doing it again.
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KC: Well, each one of these conflicts for the Iraqis and the Arabs has been framed in terms of opposing an external non-Arab entity. The Iran-Iraq war of course was about opposing the Persians and particularly the Iranian revolution. And that’s why all the Arab countries supported Iraq in this war–Kuwait and Saudi Arabia loaned Iraq billions of dollars to fight the war against Iran. The current conflict, which started out as a financial disagreement with Kuwait, has now been posed in terms of first, a conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, and now, a broader conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, or Arabs and the West. So in that sense it’s very abstract for most Iraqis. They can’t quite understand why basic goals that they have–such as getting a better standard of living, having their children educated abroad, living the kind of life that other people in oil-exporting countries live–have been shelved once again for these abstract ideological causes.
Another thing is that all of these borders were drawn somewhat arbitrarily. When Britain and France carved up this area, they did not pay very much attention to the ethnic and religious composition of these countries or to the economic resources that they had. I’m not suggesting that there was a deliberate negative agenda, but there certainly wasn’t careful attention given to what these countries were going to look like afterwards. Under the Ottoman Empire, Kuwait was part of a province that was actually administered from Basra, which is a city in Iraq. So that whole historical dimension of the unity between the two countries is actually there. There are a lot of older ties as well. A lot of tribes that you can find in southern Iraq will have kinsmen in Kuwait, there are a lot of trade ties, and so on. I’m not suggesting in any way that therefore the historical claim that the Iraqis are making is valid. I’m just saying that Iraq’s claims didn’t appear out of nowhere. They came right out of the colonial period and affected what happened later.
LH: That’s also the kind of thing that makes Americans throw up their hands and say, “See, all Arabs are crazy!”
