GUEST COMMENTS
Some comments on Iraq and responses to the featured artworks
Please send any comments you may have to:
ABOUT THE ART
“The paintings are brilliant - powerful and moving and will have a great impact on those who come to see them”
Tony Benn
“Very powerful images”
Robert Fisk
"To have these brilliant artists together in one exhibition is a powerful statement about art and war - go and see them"
Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition
"Art should never be polite or careful. It must risk being distasteful and offensive. Be proud of the impulse that made you start and execute the paintings. There is tremendous power in what you have done. I love your painting and your politics. Just don't forget to dance once in a while"
Tim Robbins
"To those who reject committed art as agitprop, the works in Birds of War demonstrate that political painting can be witty as well as powerful, abstract as well as figurative, and elliptical as well as direct. With a comforting dose of agitprop as well"
David Edgar
"Art cannot influence politics directly, but it can commemorate events both good and bad so that they do not slide into oblivion. Who would remember the bombing of Guernica if it were not for Picasso's painting?"
Gerald Laing
NB: In what was to become the first of many cover-ups, a copy of Guernica was famously draped and concealed for Colin Powell's February 5th speech to the United Nations Security Council, while he set out America's case for war with Iraq.
Wonderful - I'm with you in the fight.
Chris Mars
ABOUT IRAQ - some comments, articles and links
A small selection of Steve Bell's observations over the last four years...
Many thanks to Steve for kindly letting us use his images.
WOMEN UNDER OCCUPATION
An extract from Nadje Al-Ali's forthcoming book:
Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present
Iraqi Women under Occupation
I want my country back. Why do I have to pay the price for their bad government? Since the occupation, I do not feel safe to go out. I can not socialize. I can not visit my friends. I cannot even read when I want, because there is no electricity. I cannot even attend an exhibition. My salary has increased, but I cannot buy things anymore, because prices have risen. I do not know if I come home alive if I go to university. Many people I know from our university have been assassinated. Every day life is hell because we have to queue for everything. Even petrol. Imagine, we are one of the countries with the largest oil reserves and we have a lack of gasoline and petrol. And my students are dropping out all the time. It is not only that they are scared to come, many are simply too weak because they are too poor to eat. Others have no money to buy shoes (Hana G., professor of philosophy, Baghdad university).[1]
Iraqi women like Hana used to enjoy going to attend cultural events and were themselves at the forefront of developing new trends in the arts, in literature and music. Even during the 13 years of devastating and debilitating economic sanctions, Iraqi women and men would visit museums, attend exhibitions and visit the theatre. Now museums have been looted, all major galleries had to close down due to the violence, and most women are too scared to leave their homes.
Everyone in Iraqi is suffering from the incredible violence, lawlessness and chaos, the worsening humanitarian crisis, lack of electricity, poverty and sheer madness of it all. But it is Iraqi women who appear to be the biggest losers. They are being used to justify both the invasion and ongoing occupation at the same time as they have become symbols of the break with the previous regime and resistance to the occupation. Women have been harassed, threatened, violated, abused, and raped by occupation forces and Islamist militias alike. For the majority of Iraqi women, the struggle for sheer survival is more crucial than any sort of politics.
This is the story of Reem R. who almost lost her baby daughter:
I’ll never forget the day my daughter, Rifqa, was born; she was born in 2004. The whole time I was pregnant I prayed to God that the birth would happen in daytime and not at night, because at night there were curfews and the streets were full of gangs hijacking cars and killing people. And that’s aside from the random firing of US soldiers – they shoot whenever they see a car coming anywhere near them. And the streets are completely dark because there’s no electricity. But in fact I went into labour at 11:30 at night and I was really in a quandary: do I wake my husband to take me to hospital or do I try to put up with the pain and wait till morning? I prayed and prayed to God to help the time pass quickly, but time played tricks me on. My pain got worse and worse, my contractions faster and faster and yet time seemed to slow down – the hours just crawled by. I started to cry in silence so my husband wouldn’t hear. I was terrified for my child – thinking she might die or she would be damaged in some way. It went on like this, hour after hour, till 6 in the morning, when I finally screamed at the top of my voice for my husband to wake up: ‘Wake up, wake up, I’m dying’. He sprang out of bed, without saying anything, gathered everyone in the family together and they all took me to hospital. There they found the baby was drowning in fluid and they began to blame me for delaying for so long – but who was really responsible? Was I?
Reem R. was lucky in many ways: her daughter Sumaya was actually fine after she was born. Other young Iraqi women have had even worse experiences, trying to postpone birth out of fear that something might happen on the way to the hospital in the particularly insecure hours of darkness. Many have been shot at on the way to hospital by soldiers of the occupying army or lost their husbands who were driving and became victims of random shootings. Reem, like many other women of her age, wonder what will become of her daughter when she grows up, if she grows up…
Quotes taken from Nadje Al-Ali (2007) Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, London & New York, Zed Books
http://zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4111
For further information on the situation of Iraqi women, see www.acttogether.org
WHERE HAS ALL THE MONEY GONE?
According to US investigators, bundles of $100 bills were taken from the Federal Reserve in New York, loaded onto wooden pallets and flown into Baghdad. “Who in their right minds would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?” asked Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives oversight committee.
Missing cash
$8.8 billion - total spent by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and never accounted for
$12 billion - cash shipped to Iraq from US in 2003-4
$2.5 billion - Iraqi money spent by CPA from oil-for-food programme without proper accounts
$800m - amount missing from Iraqi defence ministry
$500m-$600m - missing from transport, electricity and interior ministries
$69m - value of fuel missing from oil ministry
To see the full article, please click on this link:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/wireless/story/0,8262,11-21361918,00.html
HEALTH IN A SHATTERED STATE
An extract from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jo Wilding’s book:
‘Don’t Shoot the Clowns’
December 2003
Hikmet lived in the village of Abu Ghraib, close to the infamous prison and bordered on one side by Baghdad airport, a key battle zone during the invasion. Immediately after the bombing of the airport, Hikmet said, thousands of trucks started removing the soil from the complex. The locals didn’t know where it was dumped but other trucks brought fresh soil to replace it and tarmac trucks came in to cover it over. The process is called ‘landscaping’, which makes it sound pleasantly aesthetic.
About a month after the bombing, the trucks started leaving their loads closer to the fence, tipping rubble, metal, broken crockery and general debris in the 1st June sector. Kids played and men, including Hikmet, foraged in the heaps between the houses. Someone else explained: “There are no jobs. Sometimes useful things are dumped and we can find them and sell them”. Later some of the kids told us about sweets, ready meals and mineral water being thrown out. They went and ate the sweets and brought home the rest. “No you don’t”, scolded one of the mothers. “I do, I do”, her child said with a gleeful grin. She went red and said: “Well…sometimes”.
Hikmet showed us white patches on his neck, shoulders and back. They itched ferociously and had been spreading since they first appeared, after he started going scavenging in the piles of soil and junk. Had he stopped going there, Hamsa demanded. He grinned triumphantly: no, he hadn’t. Under her glare, the grin turned sheepish. There was no work. You couldn’t pass up useful stuff dropped on your doorstep.
I scoured the internet for any clue as to what might be causing Hikmet’s problem and came up with a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Committee: “Witnesses living next to the airport report 3,000 civilians were incinerated by one morning’s attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since the cessation of the main phase of battle, several of the Baghdad area battlefields…(were) landscaped by the US forces and Iraqi contractors, thus preventing a thorough examination.
It meant that nobody could take soil or water samples and people could only guess at the type of weaponry that was used there...they couldn’t prove anything. Depleted uranium was a possibility - the radioactive waste product of uranium enrichment for nuclear fuel and weapons, itself used as a weapon for piercing tank armour and bunkers. Other suspects included napalm, white phosphorus or other chemical or toxic weapons or a cocktail thereof.*
*It appears similar ‘landscaping’ was undertaken in Fallujah after the November 2004 attack where white phosphorus had been used. “In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which had been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed were left as they were”. A doctor said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it onto trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used ‘special munitions’ he said 200 square metres of soil were being removed from each blast site. From Dahr Jamail, “I treated people who had their skin melted” - The Independent, 15 November 2005
Along the road from Hilla to Baghdad, burned-out tanks marked the kilometres, some tucked in among the palm trees, some stark at the roadside. Aala went there daily to cut bits of metal off the tanks to sell; Kurdish men came to buy from the people who scavenged a precarious living there. It was divided into territories within which a particular group or family had the salvage rights. Aala’s mum died when he was still in nappies. His dad had left them for a new wife and the older brothers and sisters took care of the younger.
Now 16, he was fairly independent but, tiny and powerless, he was only paid 1,000 dinars - about 50 cents, for a day’s worth of metal. I asked him if anyone had warmed him it was dangerous to cut metal from burned-out tanks. No, he said. It used to be that a lot of people died from explosions there, but there were not so many now. A memory caught him: there were some journalists who came with a machine and they said there was a reading on it, that it was dangerous to climb on the tanks and take the metal, there was something…what was it called? Radiation. But he didn’t know anything about that. Like Hikmet in Abu Ghraib, the risks of illness later were less than those of present destitution in a country with unemployment running between 60 and 80 percent.
Jo Wilding
From Hanan Alkadhi
I miss my family very much and worry about them all the time. We came to England from Baghdad in 2001 for my husband’s work and studies. Now it is impossible to go back.
NASA have a powerful satellite…we look at pictures of Baghdad online. It is so clear and so close. We pretend to walk through the streets where we used to live. I ‘visit’ my mother’s house and wish I could see her. Recently I noticed that all our orange trees…20 or 30 or more around the front garden had all disappeared. I grew up with those trees and they always bore beautiful fruit. I spoke to her on the telephone and she told me she had to cut them down…she wanted a clear view of anyone approaching the house because she is so afraid. The nights are dark, there is no electricity.
One time the American soldiers came at 3 o’clock in the morning and beat on her door. She didn’t know who it was. She opened the door and many men stood outside with guns. They wore lights on their heads which shone in her face so she could not see. She did not understand them. They wanted to come in because they said a sniper was on her roof. They entered the house and searched everywhere. There was nothing. My mother was very scared. She is 73 years old. Nobody in Baghdad can ask the police or the army for help. These men are walking targets and nobody wants to be near them.
I worry for my sisters and their children. I have 12 nephews and nieces…what will happen to them? There is no school, the teachers are being shot and the children will be kidnapped if they leave the house. Everybody is scared, the children are kept indoors every day. My nephew is 25. He has spent five years studying to be a vet. He just sits at home with nothing to do. No electricity, no TV. One of my sisters is expecting a child in a few weeks. There are no doctors, and it is not safe to go to hospital. You are shot if you go to the hospital. She wants to go to Syria to have her baby, but travelling is very dangerous. Nobody knows what is going to happen. We feel like they are cleaning Iraq of Iraqis. Tell me, what is going to happen to my country?
Hanan Alkadhi, 2007
'BIRTH AMID THE BLOODSHED, THEN SOME TOUGH CHOICES'
Iraqi parents agonise over fleeing their homeland to protect their children.
Read Peter Beaumont's article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2025756,00.html