“When Iraqis first come to America they only speak against their country in a whisper because they are afraid — but then their voices grow stronger,” said Dr. Nadia Kaisi last night at Simmons College.
Kaisi and three other Iraqi women joined together at a panel discussion to voice their opinions on the current Iraqi conflict. The women spoke to a crowd of more than 100 students and professors in an effort to bring an Iraqi face to the issues that print and electronic media besiege the public with daily.
The four women, who have all lived in Iraq for some portion of their lives, included Kaisi, an associate pathologist at Parma Hospital in Cleveland, Dr. Sahar A. Bazzaz, a professor at Harvard University, Zainab Al-Suwaij of the American Islamic Congress and an anonymous speaker introduced as “Z.”
“I feel there is this notion of the Iraqi nation as being opaque and being voiceless,” Bazzaz said. “We have info from pundits, columnists, editorials, but the real voices are not accessible. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have voices or that we do not have different perspectives.”
Each woman gave their distinct and sometimes dissimilar opinions on a broad range of topics ranging from the necessity of a regime change in Iraq to the United States’ motives for wanting a war with Iraq to whether democracy in Iraq was even possible.
All four women agreed that Saddam Hussein should no longer be in power; however, their opinions varied over whether there should be a war.
“Will Iraq benefit from a regime change? Definitely,” said Kaisi, who grew up in Iraq but left to pursue a college degree and remained in the United States once the Gulf War began.
“Iraqis used to be fond of their country,” she continued. “There are very strong ties of Iraqis to Iraq — but after the Gulf War, 90 percent of the Iraqi people living abroad stayed where they were because life in Iraq is intolerable.”
Some of the women shared stories of terrible things they had seen or witnessed personally while living in Iraq.
Al-Suwaij told of going to an jail opened after the Gulf War to help bring the freed prisoners to hospitals.
“Many of these people had been in the jail for decades and they got sick when they stepped outside because they hadn’t seen the sun in years. I saw the tools that they used to torture the prisoners, like human meat grinders, chemical pools to melt your skin — tools you can’t imagine.”
“Whole families are killed everyday and their houses are burned,” she described. “Iraqis complain of seeing torture every day.”
“For a lot of Iraqis that is home,” “Z” said. “It is a way of life they have sadly gotten used to.”
The women stressed the conditions in Iraq have not always been this way. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the highest number of educated people in the Middle East, “Z” pointed out. In 1982, Kaisi said, one Iraqi dinar was worth $3.22 — but since Hussein’s rule, the dinar has been severely depreciated. Now, one U.S. dollar is worth 3,000 dinars, leading the once wealthy country down a path toward economic devastation.
“More than half the population of Iraq would leave if they could,” said Kaisi. “It’s very difficult to leave because they have to pay $200 to $300 per person and a lot of people only earn $100 a month — doctors, army officers, and women without male relatives aren’t even allowed to leave — and their life savings are worth nothing with depreciation even if they find a country willing to take refugees. Then they are treated like second-class citizens.”
“Ninety-eight percent of the people are waiting for the moment the government changes, they don’t care how,” Al-Suwaij said. “American forces probably won’t need to go to war because people are just waiting for a force to support them.”
However, some speakers were not sure that U.S. intervention is the right answer to Iraq’s problems.
“I don’t think this government has articulated a policy that is sufficient — I don’t think the U.S. going to war shows a good precedent for aggression or for policing the world,” Bazzaz said. “I don’t believe there is a precedence for good faith for U.S. policy in the Middle East and I don’t think there is a reason this would change now.”
Most of the women noted there was a definite discrepancy between the Iraqi reasons for a regime change — mainly to liberate the Iraqi people — and the reasons put forth by the United States concerning weapons of mass destruction and international safety. All four women believed that the Bush administration has ulterior motives.
“There are a lot of economic interests in Iraq because it is the world’s second largest oil reserve,” Kaisi said.