Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 10/19/05: A Country That Doesn't Exist

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

SEPTEMBER 27 – AN AIRPORT LOUNGE – 6 A.M

There is an old man who lives on my street who spends all day sitting outside his sons’ vegetable shop on an old olive oil can, spinning his prayer beads and staring up at the sky. I have been acquainted with him for pretty much the entire time I’ve lived in Jordan; I pass his shop often, and wave and say “marhaba.”

Last night, the night before I left, as I passed, he reached out, unexpectedly, and grabbed my hand as I walked past. His legs were shaky, and he had to use me to help him pull himself to his feet, at which point, he shook my hand vigorously, and then reached down and pulled up an extra oil can, and asked me to sit. So I did.

And then he hands me his prayer beads. He looks at me, then up at the sky, then back at me. “You hold those,” he says, “and you think. You think about God.” Again he looks at me, then the sky, then back. He raises his steepled hands to his lips, and then shakes them at the sky – a gesture stuck somewhere between supplication and “hey, God, how ‘bout those Yankees?”

I smile at him, which I can’t understand – possibly because I’m wondering why it is this particular day, when I’m about to get on a plane for a country that doesn’t exist, that he chooses to press these beads into my hand and tell me to think about God, but I don’t have an answer for that one. So I tell him I have to go, my friends are waiting for me, which is true, and that I will see him soon, which I hope is.

SEPTEMBER 29 – MAYOR’S OFFICE, G** -- 11 A.M.

The NGO I’m working, Company F, has a meeting with the mayor of this small town with no vowels in its name, to discuss a site for a refugee camp. Of course, for some reasons, half of Company F has to go to this thing, so we all pile into the hulking white SUV’s with the tinted windows – humanitarian workers, drivers, and guards with AK’s – and head off. Of course, all these oversized vehicles get into a huge bottleneck at the front gate of the NGO’s walled compound, because there’s some complicated security protocol about how people have to enter and leave, and everyone’s getting in and out of cars, and moving back and forth and trying to be helpful and making sure there are enough Gun Dudes in every vehicle.

My boss tells me a story of how the company used to lunch at a restaurant 5 minutes away over the ring road, but as security got tighter it started to take more than half an hour every day just to get everyone into the cars and out the door. Finally they just built a restaurant in the compound.

In the car, I notice that the guys who ride shotgun hold their AK’s between their legs with the muzzles pointing up at their faces, and I wonder what the life expectancy on that job is.

Once we get to the mayor’s office, I realize why everyone came: that’s what makes it official. So there’s the head of my NGO, plus five more guys, including me; and an equal number from the project sponsor (a major international aid broker), plus the Mayor and two or three guys from his office, plus all our Gun Dudes. We all pile onto the couches in this shabby little office, arranged in a big semicircle in front of the Mayor’s big old formica desk, while the Gun Dudes hover in the hall outside – there’s four or five I can see, and at least as many more out in the parking lot.

I’d hate to be the CIA guy assigned to assassinate the mayor of this town of 100,000 people.

I’m wondering if this is what working in the old Soviet Union felt like. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the omnipresent military force, maybe the shabby attempts at ostentation, or maybe just that everyone is speaking Kurdish.

Kurdish sounds rather like Russian, spoken backwards, and liberally mixed with words from seven or eight other languages, most of which are now extinct. I asked a co-worker over lunch how many languages he spoke every day, he said four – Kurdish, Arabic, English, and Assyrian.

People speak to me in Kurdish all the time, because they of course assume I’m a Kurd, just like everyone in Jordan assumes I’m Arab, for no discernable reason. God knows what would happen if I went to Uganda.

Welcome to the nonexistent country. There are nearly ****** stateless Kurds liberally distributed between Turkey, Iran, other bits of Central Asia, and Northern Iraq, where I am. Supposedly. But almost the first thing you realize here is that it is not Iraq. Of course, it’s not Kurdistan either, though it puts up a good show. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as Kurdistan; kind of like the tooth fairy. And even after a few days here I can tell that the thing called “Kurdistan” and the thing called “Iraq” have about as much in common as my ass and a barrel of monkeys (to wit – though I may once or twice fall ass-first into a barrel of monkeys, that should not be taken to imply any relationship or affinity between the two).

So, back to the Mayor.

First, he has to go on in Kurdish for a good ten minutes before my boss asks someone to translate, and then they go back and forth for a while. Here’s the deal: Company F wants to build a refugee camp, and the Mayor of G** has volunteered this lousy little strip of dirt on the side of the highway, baked dirt in the summer and mud in the winter, which, ironically enough, is only empty because Uncle Saddam kicked out the original inhabitants in the 60’s to build a collective town there which conspicuously failed to thrive, leaving a tiny slice of the space so lovingly cleared of its former inhabitants unused. And the Mayor is assuring us that the land belongs to the municipality of G**, he can provide a piece of paper (which is of course utterly meaningless), and the head of Company F is saying, no, there has to be a consultation with the official property claims commission, because it wouldn’t do to drop three million U.S. on a refugee camp and then have someone show up and say the land it’s built on is really his because he was displaced from it in the early ‘70’s. So the argument goes.

Now, I should explain something about land in Kurdistan, or at least in Erbil: its crap, but everyone seems to want it.

In fact, the town of Erbil is without doubt the single ugliest place I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s flat and dry and featureless – imagine Illinois if it never saw rain, and the soil was incapable of supporting anything but tiny little tufts of brown grass, and even if it were, every patch of soil seems to have been ripped up for some construction project which remains uncompleted. Even in fall, it’s too damn hot, and there’s no shade from anything, and the air is a haze of orange and brown dust.

Despite this, there’s a construction boom going on: every third lot is vacant, filled with piles of stone and building materials and garbage; half the houses are in the process of being torn down. The streets are all in ruins; most are down to one lane, and even when they’re not, people drive on the wrong side just for fun. Everything not surrounded by concrete blast barriers is surrounded by rubble and stacked piles of cinderblocks and road barriers. And of course, every pile of rubble has six armed guards around it, to ensure security.

The place looks like a war zone, which is curious, since the war was not actually fought here; only a few bombs have gone off in the city, and most of those were outside important buildings which have since been repaired and reinforced – they’re the only buildings that look solid at all.

As if to make up for this palpable disrepair, the buildings that do get completed are unconscionably horrid. There’s a new monstrosity being erected on every corner. The bigger and gaudier, the better. Three-story Italianate villas made out of stacked grey cinderblocks are going up beside enormous government buildings in some kind of neo-fascist Bauhaus, but faced with glittering pink reflective tiles. Huge neocolonial mansions go up next to cement factories with giant rusting water tanks and smokestacks belching black all over the white porch columns. Yet despite the fact that anyone with any sensibility would flee Erbil immediately, land prices continue to soar, as do costs of labor and construction.

EXTERIOR – MIDDLE OF NOWHERE – MID-AFTERNOON

After the Mayor’s office, we all have to drive out to this tiny strip of dusty land, in a caravan of SUV’s bristling with automatic weapons. Guards form a perimeter as we get out and stand, and a new issue emerges: the collective town next door to our site is the worst of northern Iraqi rural. A cluster of low mud huts with walls built out of tin cans, and a rusted out water tank connected to a tangle of ancient pipes. You can’t build a resettlement camp – with roads and schools and ten story concrete housing units – next to this disaster. Nearly as much money would have to be put into the local population as into the refugee community that’s being resettled.

As the argument drones on, one of my bosses – who everyone agrees is a little bit touched – breaks away from the group and wanders through the village, snapping pictures left and right, and calling out to the women who stand on top of the houses re-turfing their roofs. The guards try to follow him over the rough ground in an SUV, but eventually give up and get out and walk.

He laughs at the security, out here, in the middle of nowhere, and wanders on – looking, perhaps, for a moments relief from the omnipresent menace of the armed guards.

There are guards everywhere. In the offices, along the roads, at checkpoints, outside buildings and construction sites; nearly every building of any structural stability has concrete barriers out front, and a table full of dudes with automatic weapons guarding it and playing cards (possibly not in that order). These are the people you say hello to as you walk down the street.

You’re never really alone here, never unwatched. It’s a constant, unnerving part of the fabric of life.

SEPTEMBER 29 - NIGHT

A strange thing just happened. I couldn’t sleep. I can never seem to sleep here; maybe it’s the heat, or the roaring of the generators, or just Iraq. Company F has two houses, across the street from each other, and I stepped out of the house for a moment, to cross to the other side.

The street was dead quiet. Not even a wisp of smoke from the ashtray on the Gun Dudes’ card table. Two AK-47s were leaning against the guard house wall. There was no one there. It was perhaps the first moment since I arrived I felt unobserved. It made me nervous. Any break in the routine here is enough to set off alarm bells in my head. Why was no one at their posts?

I went back inside the house, to look for someone to tell, but there was no one else there, so I went back to the street, figuring if the guards were still gone, I might walk up to Fortress America, around the block. But when I emerged again, the usual guys were back, sitting at their table, talking quietly. They’d stepped out for a glass of water, or a chat, or a joint in the guard house; nothing much. All quiet again.

Just another Saturday night.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/19/05

Posted by rjt at October 24, 2005 12:09 PM