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Phone calls and arguments

Set out today with hope for filming the court room appearance of Saddam Hussein which takes place in Iraq tomorrow. Finally the project I originally came here to set up in January 2004 looks set to happen; A behind the scenes documentary of the trial of Saddam Hussein. At the same time I am filming the final installment of my film about ‘the pianist’ Samir Peter who hopes to follow his dream and live in The States.

Today was fraught with phone calls trying to get through to my contact, the President of the Iraqi Tribunal who has approved the documentary. Finally I get through to him, he tells me he is unsure whether he can get me into the court room tomorrow where Saddam will appear in front of a judge, shackled in chains. We hear that only 4 journalists will be allowed in. I’m told to call back at 4 this afternoon but as normal the Presidents phone is constantly engaged. I keep trying as I write this now anxious as what happens tomorrow would make a great opening for the film.

Amidst agonised attempts at calling the President I have been filming ‘the pianist’ at his home. His daughter has been visiting from The States but is now preparing to return home. Samir is waiting for his papers to come through after being given a Green Card.

It is an agonising wait for him. He is torn about leaving his daughter and son here in Iraq but hopes to get them to The States one day soon. His anti-American daughter Saha, has always resisted, a proud Iraqi she wanted to stay here, but seeing her sister and hearing news of her mother also living in America has made her reconsider things. She seems willing to give The States a go. It is Samir’s dream to gather his family there after years of struggling in Iraq. “Things have to get worse here before they get better” he insists, and he is getting on in life now, he wants to spend his last few years in peace. He is also concerned for his 25 year old son Fadi, also a talented pianist, but who now refuses to play, not wanting to end up like his father playing in an empty hotel bar to earn money to get by. Fadi wants money, but in a country where the only work available is putting your life on the line as a policeman he prefers to stay at home, although he’d heard of a Safeway’s supermarket opening and hopes to work there.

The house was tense today. Fadi wasn’t talking with his father or his American sister. his sister had insulted him by insisting that he should not marry his Muslim girlfriend. He should find a Christian girl instead. It is a sore point, Samir doesn’t mention it much, but is does disturb him. As a Christian family they are a minority in Iraq and Fadi would have to convert to Islam to marry his girlfriend. In the end a good argument cleared the air and Samir slipped Fadi $20. Then I spoke with his daughter about her mother, and whether Samir would get back together with her when he goes to the states. I put my foot in it though, Samir hadn’t told the kids that they had separated…. and I did. The daughter left the scene in tears. I didn’t know what to say. I hope Samir can patch things up. Half of him hopes to get back with his wife but the other half knows that their love is dead.

Now I must get back on the phone to try see Saddam tomorrow.

Welcome to the new Iraq

Came back to Iraq to film my story with the ‘pianist’ at a historic moment – the hand over of power to the new Iraqi government. Journalists still take the expensive plane route into Iraq from Jordan as the road remains dangerous and kidnapping is still rife. After the familiar corkscrew landing into Baghdad International Airport, avoiding any surface to air missile attack, I headed into Baghdad. There was a much greater presence of Iraqi police, one standing proud with a shining new machine gun next to a police car riddled with bullet holes. An ominous sign. “It is quiet at the moment” my driver said, then looking at me out of the corner of his eye, “it is the calm before the storm”. The next round of attacks are never far away. Having lived in my secured hotel compound for 5 months on and off since January 2004 we had been on high alert for an attack. It never happened but as I arrived back after 6 weeks in England I realised it had and I had narrowly escaped it. 

I was just settling in my hotel when the Iraqis around me noticed the handover of power taking place in front of our eyes on the television. We broke from conversation momentarily acknowledging it and then continued talking about a suicide bomber who had tried to enter the heavily secured hotel compound where I stay a week after I’d returned to England. The bomber was prevented from entering and blew himself up on the street wrecking the front of another hotel building and killing many bystanders, including a 13 year old boy, who Samir (the subject of my film) used to buy his cigarettes from everyday. 

We went to buy bread, the bakery windows were smashed and the bakery boys were in bandages. The bomb blast had thrown them from one side of the bakery to the other. Then on our way back to the hotel we met the father of the 13 year old cigarette seller. His father, a man of my age, held the arm of his younger son tightly. I shook his hand, I didn’t know what to say. Some things are so desperate, so sad, that you cannot say anything. But then a few hours pass and I find myself not even thinking of the boy or the plight of his father, I am sat poolside at the hotel drinking a long cool beer with other journalists enjoying the luxuries that the air conditioned hotel provides in a country that still struggles to get electricity for half the day, where the temperatures rage to 55c. 

I notice the absence of the heavily armed mercenaries (ex army/sas soldiers employed on mass here to protect everyone from contractors to journalists, to the US army convoys) the pool looks more beautiful without them I note. The most notorious company were at our hotel, the ‘blackwater’ guys, famous after some of them were lynched and set on fire when caught in Fallujah. They all left, I am told, after another 4 were killed in an ambush in Baghdad. Around the same time another mercenary had killed himself in his room over-dosing while injecting drugs into his arm. We finish the beer and order more. 

“Welcome back to newly liberated Iraq” my friends tell me.