The Weight of a Mustard Seed (15 page)

His idyll in the country was short-lived. On Army Day in January 1992 he was invited to the Palace.

Shortly afterward Saddam appointed him Governor of Maysan Province.

I
WENT TO MAYSAN IN FEBRUARY 2005 ON A PRESS
junket organized by the British Embassy in Baghdad. We took a succession of bone rattling aircraft: Puma helicopter from the GreenZone to the airport, C–130 transport plane from the airport to Basra, Sea King from Basra to Abu Naji, the British base outside the provincial capital Amara. To say this was the long way round would be an understatement. A year before I had driven through Amara on my way to Basra; it was only two hours by car from Baghdad. Now it was too dangerous to drive down any highway anywhere in Iraq (except Kurdistan), two friends had been kidnapped in the summer and foreign journalists had a price. Even in Baghdad it was too risky to drive into most of the city's neighborhoods (resistance gunmen on corners, interviews as lures, sudden gun battles, car bombs, pick-up truckfuls of motley camouflage, balaclavas and Kalashnikovs—police, commandos, Iraqi army, Mehdi army, militia—who could tell?). I always wore a big black tent
abaya
as disguise in the back of the car, texted my whereabouts to a friend every hour, and took care never to walk down the street.

When we arrived in Amara we were put on yet another helicopter and hopped south so that we could see the good news
story of how the marshes were being reflooded and villagers returning. From up high the scars from the Iran-Iraq war and the bandit skirmishes of the decade of sanctions were still visible. The land looked like an abandoned battle map of criss-cross cicatrices: ditches, trenches, horseshoe embrasures for artillery, berms, fields scraped for shallow graves, tire tracks, single file paths meandering between scrub; a land plowed by guns up to a flat-line horizon. In places salt dregs glimmered like powdered bone. We touched down in a cloud of dust, loaded into a convoy of Land Rovers and were shaken past a row of mud villages filled with buffalo and ragged children with flies in their eyes. The villages ran like a ribbon along the edge of a great wide lake; I remember watching a fragment of extraordinary beauty as a flat bottomed canoe piled with bright green rushes glided through the azure water in the golden sun of the late afternoon—before we were herded back onto the helicopter, flown back to the camp, fed beans on toast with little packets of Marmite, and deposited in a press conference, our brains so rattled we could hardly form a coherent question.

The next day we were escorted by a platoon of Welsh Guards through the narrow streets of Amara's market. We wore obligatory body armor; the traders watched our alien white faces and our guardian phalanx with a mixture of suspicion and reticence. Moqtada's face, black turban, black beard and black scowl, bisected by his trademark pointing accusing finger, was posted up all through the market lanes. We tried to stop and talk to people but our escorts held their submachine guns in the ready position and discouraged any lingering.

It was a couple of weeks after the first elections for the Iraqi parliament that had been characterized by Shia smiles and indigo fingers, stained to prevent re-voting. Moqtada's block had won control of the council in Amara and the British Em
bassy press woman kept trying to tell us that they were nice technocrats really, despite the fact that Moqtada's Mehdi army had attacked the Pink House, the municipal governorate building, the previous summer and besieged the British garrison inside. The British officers who briefed us gave the impression that all was progressing well with phrases like “focused and dedicated,” “fair and fair play,” “precise surgical operations” and “the elections actually went incredibly smoothly.” They were keen to show that they were reasonable in an unreasonable situation and not like those trigger happy Yanks, but it was spin all the same.

We were given an audience with the governor in an office that was gilt edged and decorated with plastic flowers. The governor had a broad jowly face with the requisite mustache above a shiny tie and played the concerned politician. He was flanked by a British official from the Ministry of Defence and Colonel Ben Bathurst, the commander of the Welsh Guards in Amara. We journalists asked desultory questions about democracy and the local elections. The governor replied with noncommittal diplo-utterances like “It is the first step” and “the political process is very, very long.”

At some point I stopped copying these useless quotes into my notebook and looked over at the British colonel. He had a clean-shaven boyish face that had sagged a little in middle age but remained frank and open. Everything in his upbringing and his experience of life had taught him the superiority of reasonable civilized behavior, even-handedness, temperance and fair-mindedness. I looked into the governor's eyes, dark and burned black with a viscous mobility about them. He kept his hands carefully in his lap, as a show of outward composure. We were all stuck in the deference and the formality of the charade.

After the interview various local dignitaries and council members arrived to see us. Moqtada's councilors were young, ascetic and unsmiling with carefully trimmed beards, and talked about regeneration projects; the local sheikhs swirled their robes, complained about the Americans and gave ponderous pronouncements, the religious men in turbans studiously avoided my female eyes and talked courteously about respect. I asked one councilor, more jolly and independent than most, how the election had been conducted. He rolled his eyes and mentioned certain “Shia groups” and “ballot stuffing” and cast a careful glance over his shoulder in case someone had overheard his remarks. I smiled back to reassure him. He said he had been a professor in Amara for many years; I asked him if he remembered Governor Kamel Sachet. “Yes, of course!” He smiled warmly. “He was very much popular in Amara, yes, of course! He did many things for the Shia poor in Maysan!”

 

I
N
B
AGHDAD, SPRING
of 2004, through the network of former Special Forces officers, I found Major Nejar, sometime adjutant and close friend of Kamel Sachet. Major Nejar was the stereotype of the Sunni officer class: tall, well-built, fit, neat hair cut short, well pressed shirt and trousers, mustache. He hectored and puffed, direct and emphatic. His eyes bored, his finger jabbed, his arrogance inflated and then he would exhale with exaggerated bonhomie. He laughed to provoke me: “You might call me a terrorist if I tell you what I have done!” He proceeded to tell me that the previous year he had fought the British alongside Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's supreme commander in the south. They had made their way back to Baghdad together, a long drive through tank country, sandstorms and shot up highways, skirting the American advance on back
roads, spitting at the lack of resistance. “Ha!” he roared his audacity at me. “They said to me when I got to Baghdad, why don't you kill him? But I would never betray him. No!”

Nejar explained, drawing a line across his throat, that Kamel Sachet could not refuse the appointment as Governor. His family would stay behind in Baghdad; he must take up his post immediately. But as he had burned his uniform (after 1991 provincial governors were formally military governors), he and Nejar drove to the row of military tailors the other side of the Thieves' Market in Baghdad and ordered up a new uniform in an afternoon. “We needed a maroon beret and we couldn't find one.” Nejar remembered, “I had to go back to my house in Diala and get one for him.”

They arrived in Amara in the evening of 28 April 1992 and Kamel Sachet informed the Mayor that he was relieved of his duties, moved into the Governor's compound, billeted Nejar in the guesthouse and posted two guards at the gate. A few days later Kamel Sachet carried out the orders of Saddam to execute two senior Baathie officials who had assassinated a third Baathie official on his doorstep in front of his children. Saddam wanted them shot in the exact place of their crime as a revenge show for his aggrieved family, and this was done. Afterward, Nejar told me with a tight smile, “Things went more or less smoothly.”

Kamel Sachet inherited a difficult province. Maysan's people were poor Shia, cowed by the
intifada
crackdown; the borderland was a smugglers' zone crossed with agents of the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade infiltrating sabotage; the highways were hijack alleys; and the outlaw Marsh tribes, led by the dashing “Prince of the Marshes,” collected bands of deserters and ambushed army outposts. Saddam, long incensed by the lawlessness and rebellion of the Marsh Arabs, ordered the entire
marshes drained so that their villages, hideouts, livelihood and heritage would be destroyed. Maysan was the buffer zone that absorbed assassinations and insurrection funded and fanned from Iran; Kamel Sachet understood very well that he must walk the line and hold it.

During the day it was safe enough in the city of Amara, but when he went to Kut or to an outlying town Kamel Sachet traveled in an armed convoy of six or seven cars and machine gun mounted pick-ups. At night the roads were treacherous despite military patrols, and party offices were sometimes broken into; odd bombs and arson. The Baathie head of an Amara city district was assassinated one dusk on his way home and there were other corner killings; none were ever publicly announced by the government.

In any case, the government, whatever was left of it, had been badly damaged by the American bombs and the uprising of 1991. The rubble was cleared, the bridges in Baghdad rebuilt and opened to much fanfare, but the country was divided into no fly zones, American and British and French planes patrolled the skies and continuing UN sanctions had razed the economy. There was no state to speak of, only one man, the Wizard of Oz with a trilby and a pistol, ordering vast palaces and giant mosques to be built, empty edifices and void facades. A quarter of Iraqis worked in the public sector and salaries fell to $5 a month. No satellite TV, virtually no Internet (a single government controlled server, under close surveillance and out of reach for most), no foreign literature, the airports were closed, imports were squeezed to a trickle and taxed, the economy sank inward and broke down, society was stifled, hermetic; families sat silent in sufferance and mistrust. The missing salaries were replaced by corruption, handouts, patronage, nepotism: passports were sold, exit visas bribed; prisoners paid for separate
cells. There was only the will of the President surrounded by a brutal and nefarious inner court of Tikritis who turned mafia and internecine and shot each other at family parties. Saddam had ruled his republic of fear with a terror whip, now he was forced to harness the old systems of authority, tribe and religion, through sheikhs and imams whom he manipulated and killed as necessary to maintain the grip of his choke-hold.

In Maysan Kamel Sachet also relied on the local tribe structure. He rewarded sheikhs with weapons licenses, protected their tribes from army infringements and punishments, and excused their sons military service; in return they policed their own territory. Problems, as they arose, were negotiated within this alliance.

For example, about a year into the engineering works to drain the marshes—a military campaign that was not under Kamel Sachet's command—renegades, probably under the Prince of the Marshes, attacked a digging party and destroyed the bulldozers. The nearest forward army post twice sent units to retrieve the bodies and twice they came under attack. The commander then appealed to Kamel Sachet to intervene and help broker a deal that would allow the bodies to be recovered.

Abdul Qadir drove Kamel Sachet in his armored Mercedes at the head of a convoy of fifteen or so vehicles, bodyguards, pick-ups, an army unit in jeeps and elders from the Albu Eitan, the local tribe of the killed bulldozer drivers. They drove forty kilometers on rutted, dusty, summer-baked mud roads into the desiccated marshes. They passed collapsing reed thatch huts, abandoned villages, army tent encampments. The road was uneven and full of holes and the going slow. It was evening by the time they arrived, radios crackled static in the still uncertain gloam, several soldiers went to lift out the black burned shad
ows inside the charred yellow diggers. The truce was slight, the dried land open and exposed, Kamel Sachet watched the horizon with an expression of sadness on his face. He did not agree with the draining of the marshes, he said it was too hard a punishment to turn thousands from their homes and their sustenance, but the marshes were base and bridge for the rebels and the command could not let such insolence stand.

 

T
HE NINETIES WERE
the decade in which the sadness bit into soul. The war with Iran had gathered bitter energy in a rolling swell, the wave had curled in Kuwait and smashed itself on the shore of Basra, flooded the South and the North until there was only an island left in Baghdad. In Baghdad there were fewer electricity cuts, more power to light the propaganda on TV, the all night arc lights over the construction follies and the marching parades on the President's birthday, but everyone understood now that it was only madness acting whim behind the stage sets. Kamel Sachet's pride in himself, his position, his achievements, his country and patriotism, was spent. His sense of duty had curdled. When he came out of Kuwait he had been angry and now, beginning a new chapter in Amara, he was full of something that he would not have known how to call remorse. He fell back to the Koran, truth and salvation, God's laws to govern his conscience, not man's. He tried, I believe, in his own way, to atone.

Kamel Sachet imposed his tenets of discipline, modesty and piety upon those around him and on the tone of his regime in Amara. His bodyguards, a separate (almost private) military unit made up of tribal relatives, were required to pray five times a day and he continually impressed upon them the need to adhere to the correct timetable for prayer. They grumbled
about having to wake up for dawn prayer after a night on duty, but never to his face; his anger could extend through his fist in a heartbeat if he thought God's word was being mocked. His office was piled with newspapers, books, papers and letters and petitions and overlooked by framed verses from the Koran that he had hung on the wall. He kept a prayer mat unrolled in one corner where he prayed, even interrupting meetings and delegations to do so. The men who staffed his office (there were no women; if a woman came to a meeting he respectfully declined to shake her hand) also prayed five times a day. Kamel Sachet did not directly order them, he did not need to, his authority was enough to make it clear that anyone in his orbit must follow his example. Even one of his staff, appointed by the Mukhabarat as an internal spy, was careful to pretend to be especially devout.