Five years into war, local Iraqi sees progress, mistakes
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By MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star
Some days, he wakes up with shoulders so stiff they can barely move.
On those days, he remembers.
Remembers casually criticizing the Iran-Iraq War’s effect on his country’s economy as a 21-year-old studying food and dairy technology at an Iraqi college.
Being tattled on, he presumes, by a Baath Party spy.
Being arrested on his way home, blindfolded and whisked to jail by Saddam Hussein’s officers.
Having his hands tied behind his back, then being lifted to the ceiling by his wrists as questions were fired at him: Who told you to say that? Why did you say it? Which party are you working for?
Offering no answers. Wondering when it would end.
A quarter-century after he was tortured nearly to death by Saddam’s forces, Mahedi Al-Hamedi still struggles to find the words to describe that wasted year of life — and indeed, on a spring day in his Lincoln home, on the eve of his 46th birthday, 1983 feels very far away.
Except when his shoulders won’t budge. That brings him back.
Al-Hamedi supposes it’s enough to simply say you’ll never understand what Saddam’s prisons were like, unless you, too, have been there, hanging from a ceiling in the middle of the Iraqi desert, arms coated in blood, shoulders straining from their sockets, eyes bulging.
“You can’t imagine. It was not human.”
Al-Hamedi and more than a dozen fellow prisoners were fed just enough scraps of bread to stay alive. With temperatures outside topping 120 degrees, their torturers cranked on the jail’s heaters. In his first four months there, Al-Hamedi didn’t get one bath.
Some prisoners died. Sometimes, Al-Hamedi feared for his own life. Thoughts of family — his mother, five sisters and five brothers — got him through.
After a few months in torture, Al-Hamedi says, officers seemed to figure out he was an innocent college student. He was moved to a more humane section of the prison.
And after nearly a year, he says, the suspicions against him apparently waned. He was driven home, lucky, he knew, not to have been unjustly executed, as was common under Saddam’s regime.
He’s never seen joy like the look on his mother’s face when he walked through the door.
Crying, she told him she’d slept on her bedroom floor every day of his absence. She couldn’t enjoy her bed if he couldn’t enjoy his, she said.
Al-Hamedi ate a huge meal with his family.
He took a 1½-hour bath.
And then he went back to school to finish his food and dairy technology degree.
Al-Hamedi eventually fled Iraq, arriving at a Saudi Arabian refugee camp in 1991, then moving to California in 1994. When he couldn’t find a job there, he says, he moved to Lincoln.
He now works at Nestle Purina Petcare Co. in Crete. He’s proud to provide a decent life for his wife, son and two daughters.
His mother, 10 siblings and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins remain in Basra. He’s on the phone with them at least every other day.
Five years into the war in Iraq, Al-Hamedi says, his family has seen mixed results.
Some parts of life are better. Saddam’s execution, for example, has ended the government-sponsored torture Al-Hamedi and so many others endured.
Violence is down in some parts of Iraq, he says, a fact some media outlets seem to avoid.
And Iraqis are freer than before, he says. His family members walk to school and the market almost daily.
All five of his sisters are teachers. One says her school has been re-built, equipment has been re-stocked and a generator has arrived in case the electricity goes out.
“Most Iraqi people, they say now is better,” Al-Hamedi says. “This is the first time they feel freedom.”
But the violence has not ended. Even though Saddam was overthrown, extremists are fighting among themselves, he says, making some parts of the country less safe than before the war began.
Al-Hamedi reads his local newspaper daily and watches as much television news as he can, mostly CNN and the three Arabic-language channels he gets thanks to a satellite dish.
Every time he hears of a bombing near Basra, he reaches for the phone.
He’s been fortunate so far. No members of his immediate family have died in the war.
“But nobody can feel safe 100 percent,” he says. “They live under pressure but they have no choice.”
And some schools are worse. Another sister tells him her building is without electricity most days.
Hospitals are in worse shape, too, Al-Hamedi says. On a 2006 trip to Iraq to visit family, he took his nephew to the emergency room after he severely cut his arm.
He expected immediate help.
“But I found slaughterhouse,” he remembers. “Blood everywhere. Dirty.”
Al-Hamedi took his nephew to a different hospital, where conditions weren’t much better. He took him to a private clinic, where a doctor finally was able to help him.
Lawlessness still rules in parts of Iraq, Al-Hamedi says, and with no one to hold employees accountable for their work, some “aren’t doing their jobs properly.”
Two of his brothers want to make it to the United States, but the journey is difficult and time-consuming. His mother, nearing 80, doesn’t want to move.
For her, Al-Hamedi hopes for a brighter future in Iraq.
“We hope it’s going to get better.”
There are signs.
Twenty years ago, he recalls, a friend took his broken television to an electrician.
The electrician didn’t quite get the job done.
When Al-Hamedi’s friend got his TV back, the set was stuck on a still picture of Saddam.
“There’s no one else,” the electrician said. “Just Saddam.”
Today, Iraqis are free to channel-surf.
Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.
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Tell wrote on March 24, 2008 10:44 am: