Iraq: Unsanctioned Voices

Telling this story as he drives through Baghdad's darkened streets, Ahmed breaks into laughter even before the punch line. He tells another joke, one that imagines a deposed Hussein fleeing a mob of Iraqis. But it is too crude for a family newspaper.

Ahmed's dissent only goes so far. Over the years he has watched the regime silence its enemies with death, imprisonment and fear. He concluded long ago that any sort of organized, violent struggle against Hussein and the Baath party was futile. What he has seen and heard helps explain his enduring fear of arrest.

In the early 1980s, the authorities detained one of Ahmed's cousins, and the man's wife, and accused the couple of spreading rumors about the regime. The cousin disappeared. Eventually the government sent his family a death certificate. "We consider him dead, but there is no coffin, nothing," Ahmed says quietly. The wife spent 15 years in prison and was released in the late 1990s. She has moved abroad.

A few years ago, a friend of Ahmed's disappeared for a week. When the friend resurfaced, he explained that he had been detained by the authorities and then released after they realized they had mistaken him for someone else. The man was clearly in shock from the experience, but refused to discuss the treatment he had received. After several months, he and his family emigrated to Canada.

Charles Tripp, a British historian of Iraq, has written: "[T]he selective, exemplary, and often terrible use of violence and the seductions of privilege have been used to drive home to all Iraqis the rewards of conformity and the price of dissent." Ahmed is living testament to Dr. Tripp's observation.

In the early 1990s, Ahmed says, he heard that Raji Tikriti, a prominent military doctor from Hussein's own Tikrit region, had been arrested for not revealing the existence of a plot against the regime. He was reportedly killed by hungry dogs as Hussein and several cabinet ministers watched. "It shocked everyone," says Ahmed.

True or untrue, it is exactly the sort of story that the regime promulgates, says Tripp, who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, because the fear it instills helps Hussein maintain control. If Hussein could brutally kill someone from his own clan, many Iraqis would conclude that he could do the same to anyone. "We are hopeless," Ahmed sighs, speaking of the Iraqi people as a whole. "We are controlled." And later: "Maybe we are defeated within ourselves."

He wrestles constantly with the temptation to leave, but worry about those he would leave behind keeps him home. That is not all. "It's my country; I feel comfortable here. Why should I have to leave?" Referring to the regime, he adds: "They should have to go."

With President Bush threatening to depose Hussein, Ahmed has begun to consider an American intervention in Iraq's affairs, one that might end the regime. Would he support the US in such a war?

The quandary pains him. "This is the critical question," he says, rubbing his eyes and forehead. "We want change but we want it a different way." He is skeptical about the aftermath – the prospect of a US occupation followed by the imposition of a leadership made up of members of the exiled Iraqi opposition, many of whom are regarded as cowards and opportunists by those inside the country.

The problem is that change the American way seems to be the only option available. "They always say, let the Iraqi people decide," he says. "That's like telling a man in jail to free himself. He can't."

The only thing Iraqis can do, Ahmed says, is wait. They have no influence over the US. They can't change their government themselves. "We are like cockroaches feeding on sewage," he says. "We survive."

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