Texts for Translation 2009:
  Caroline Wyatt

Baghdad From our Own Correspondent 1: 

This week, 98 countries have been gathering in Sweden to discuss the state of Iraq, and what progress has been made. The US military say Iraq is now experiencing its lowest level of violence for four years, as a ceasefire in the poor Shia area of Sadr City and in Basra holds, while the Iraqi government has tried to clear the northern city of Mosul of Al Qaeda. Despite the good news, though, life remains far from normal for many of those who've had to live through first Saddam Hussein's rule, and then the violence of the past five years. Our correspondent Caroline Wyatt returned to Baghdad after an absence of ten years:  

The Baghdad I remembered was a sprawling city, a place of honking horns and barely-controlled anarchy on the roads. Amid the narrow, uneven pavements of the gold market I jostled for space with shoppers peering closely at the gold necklaces given to brides at their wedding. As a westerner I felt safe. After all, the secret police were everywhere. My government minder was never more than 2 steps behind, sometimes so close he'd trip over my microphone lead, apologising profusely.

There was no forgetting who was in charge in those days. Every government building bore images of Saddam Hussein, in all his guises: holding the scales of justice at the couryhouse, cockily brandishing a shotgun as an Austrian-style huntsman in lederhosen, or my favourite - the massive poster on the telecom building showing a grinning Saddam chatting on a bright pink telephone.

This week, I've been driving through Baghdad in the back of an armoured vehicle. No government minder this time; four British security advisers instead. The traffic around us is as anarchic as ever, now jammed together as cars approach the frequent armed checkpoints, as the old bustle starts to return. If this was a city ruled by an insidious, creeping fear before, the new nervousness is much more concrete, quite literally: big blast walls everywhere by the sides of the roads, to contain the force of a suicide or roadside bomb.

The scars of the past five years of war and anarchy are visible everywhere; the bright blue of the summer sky now shines through the bombed carcass of the telecoms ministry, its poster long since ripped down. The mental scars are harder to see.

At Baghdad's only psychiatric hospital, the chief consultant Dr Amir Husain has devoted the last five years to treating patients traumatised by the violence. In the busy waiting room, the paint is peeling from the walls, as if scraped by desperate fingertips. An anxious woman in black puts her arm around her young son, and smiles a nervous greeting, before we disappear into Dr Husain's tiny consulting room. He has a kind face and a soothing manner.

He nearly didn't make it in to work today: an explosion near his home saw the streets sealed off by the army. So he abandoned his car and walked instead. The day before, yet another colleague was killed. He himself is one of just four psychiatrists; the other seven were killed, kidnapped, threatened or fled abroad.

"Before the last war," he tells me "we faced many psychiatric problems because of the hardship of life under sanctions. After the invasion, everything changed. Some said life was better, some that it was much, much worse."

His list of patients grew. From mild anxiety, to grief and depression, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress, it strikes me that his patients' symptoms were a sane response to the madness around them.

Dr Amir and his colleagues also seem a little anxious. They, too, suffer from insomnia, and a tendency to duck at loud noises. "We are having our own psychological difficulties," he admits, with a tired smile. His eyes are bloodshot with lack of sleep. "We are always racing against time, dealing with shortages, fighting with the ministry for drugs or equipment to help our patients."

At first, he's reluctant to talk about his own problems, but then he admits: "I have lost my colleagues, my friends, some of my family - but we are used to it now. Our emotions have been frozen."

So why doesn't HE leave Iraq? "I won't. We come because we've given our patients a promise to help them, and we have to continue. Things will get better."

He says a new doctor arrived today, a man who specialises in child psychiatry. It is, he believes, a small sign of hope.

Six checkpoints later, behind the even thicker blast walls of the green zone, I talk to the softly spoken UN envoy to Iraq, a Swedish Italian with a sing-song voice, Staffan de Mistura. He's taken on one of the U.N's riskiest jobs, in part to prove that his friend and predecessor Sergio Viero di Mello did not die in vain, when he was killed by an insurgent's bomb that shattered the UN compound.

"This is not a poor country, with 70 billion dollars in oil revenues this year," Staffan de Mistura points out. "As security improves, there is no reason why there should not be sanitation, medical care or electricity - quickly."

So what makes him work in one of the world's most dangerous places? It is, he says, the Iraqis themselves.

"Have you seen the people in the streets just after a bomb attack?" he asks me. "A few minutes afterwards you see them cleaning up, turning the page. For a moment, they cry and they show their anger - but then the Iraqis go and just get on with the job, as they have throughout their history. Now we need to give them the feeling that they are not alone."

Baghdad FOOC 2

Iraq has seen many symbolic changes so far this year - the hand-back of security in the Green Zone to Iraqis by American forces, and the return of some of its sovereignty. But the past 10 days have also seen several suicide bombings, and the deaths of at least 80 people. Our correspondent Caroline Wyatt has just returned from the city, where she went to visit Baghdad university, which suffered the loss of 65 students and staff in a car bombing this time two years ago.

It's dusk in Baghdad, my favourite time of day, as the sun sinks lazily over the tall palm trees that dot the city's skyline. There's something comforting about the distant sound of Baghdad's rush hour - a constant impatient tooting of horns as people try to make their way home from work. The blast walls and checkpoints everywhere in the city make that difficult - creating huge traffic jams. And Baghdad's drivers were never patient.

But it's been a good day. There were no explosions in the city today, little gunfire, and no dead. For once, the police sirens are quiet. But for Riham Saleh and Muna Hady, two female students at Baghdad university, the daily commute is a journey they often dread. Two years ago, their campus suffered one of the worst attacks in the city - a double car bombing, which killed more than sixty people, and wounded many others. It went off at the busiest time of day, around dusk, as students gathered to leave for home.

As I arrive at the campus, it's hard to imagine the horror of that day in this peaceful oasis of green land on a bend in the Tigris river. This quiet spot was chosen by its German architect Walter Gropius in the 1950s, when Baghdad was famed as a place of learning and modernity. But these days, the university and its wide, tree-lined avenues, has few visitors from abroad.

The gate arches over a checkpoint, where our car is thoroughly searched for explosives. Once inside, though, it feels like a campus almost anywhere, if you ignore the barbed wire and the checkpoints outside each department. Groups of students hang around in the winter sunshine, chatting and smoking. The young men, in their own groups; the women, slightly apart in theirs. I can hear the sound of laughter, not something I've heard often in Iraq. The campus has a rare atmosphere of normality - in a city that still feels far from normal.

In her office, Professor Manahil Al-Nawas, deputy dean of the womens' college, offers me sweet black coffee and a warm welcome. Her English is perfect, even though she's not had the chance to visit in recent years. She smiles often, but has a manner that suggests a steely determination beneath after 20 years of teaching. Two of her students, Muna Hedi, and Riham Saleh, have agreed to talk to me, and both are nervous about their English, though they needn't be. It's rapid and clear, although neither has ever visited England.

Both dream of doing so. Now in her late 20s, and with two children, Murna would love to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, to see the birthplace of the poet all three women can quote by heart. She'd like to study in England one day. But for now, that's unlikely. It's hard for Iraqis to get visas to go anywhere. The authorities abroad are worried they might claim asylum.

The deputy dean was there when an Allied bomb flattened much of her old building, killing many of her colleagues and students during the bombardment of Baghdad in the lead-up to the invasion - and when insurgents targeted the campus.

Over her shoulder, her bookshelves are full of class photos from past years, students and teachers smiling stiffly for the cameras. The groups of the past few years are smaller, when the violence was at its height. All three women have lost friends, family and colleagues, and seen many others leave the country. Yet they're determinedly optimistic, though their hopes are expressed with a murmured 'inshallah'.

Murma Hedi admits she's still nervous when her bus is stuck in a traffic jam, the thought of a car bomb always in the back of her mind. And if the bus doesn't come, she gets a taxi home, but worries if the driver takes an unfamiliar route. "I fear being kidnapped, or raped," she tells me, her brown eyes clouding over, and her voice dimming to a whisper. "I have black thoughts. There is still a terror deep in our psyche."

Yet all three women continue to come to the university every day, and say others are at last returning from exile. And today, it's the everyday problems that preoccupy them, too. Finding the right text-books in English, no easy task, or a particular edition of Coleridge that they need for their studies.

Riham tells me they have learned to rely on themselves - both as Iraqis, and as women. Menahil al Nawaz nods agreement. "Iraqi women have a challenging soul," she says. "We are housewives, and mothers - but we also work hard outside the home. And we all work to help our country - to build something new together."

All three say the Iraq we hear about in the news every day - a country still torn by sectarian violence, and ravaged by bombs and bullets, is not the real Iraq. And all three women, in their own way, are trying to change it, day by day. And as I leave to do battle with Baghdad's rush-hour traffic, I realise I've rarely felt so hopeful that I may - one day - come back to visit the real Iraq they dream of rebuilding.

Basra FOOC by Caroline Wyatt May 2008

Flying into Basra, the region's history is seared into the land beneath. The dry sands give way to a mud-green canal snaking its way from the Shatt al Arab river; waters bitterly fought over in the Iran-Iraq war. Then come salt-water marshes, drained by Saddam Hussein, whose Shia enemies were forced into slums without sanitation or water.

And then we land in Basra itself, once a louche but cosmopolitan place that Iraqis would visit for their holidays, or do business on the waterfront corniche. Old photos show why they called it the Venice of the East; yachts bobbing gently in the palm-lined harbour behind the casino and busy cafes.

But in a land that's long been short on luck, Basra has been one of the unluckiest places for thirty years.

Starved of funds, the most basic services and any political influence under Saddam Hussein, a city that should be rich with the oil flowing into Iraq's only sea port became the home of the dispossessed. The British and American invasion brought with it hope, quickly dashed, as Iran meddled and rival militias fought, turning Basra once again into a battleground.

As we drive into the city, the familiar smell of Basra's slums catches my throat, the smell of excrement running through the rubbish-strewn gutters where small children play. We drive on to a slightly better-off area, full of family homes, but the smell remains. The afternoon heat hangs lazily over the street, and it seems peaceful enough.

I get out, just as a small boy is driving a herd of goats past once smart houses, the animals picking their way nimbly over broken pavements. A little way ahead, workmen in blue overalls are busy laying new paving stones, and digging up a stretch of road where - one hopes - sanitation pipes may soon be laid.

I'd been nervous about coming here. I hadn't been into Basra since 2003, when I drove in behind British tanks to a distinctly ambivalent welcome. Anxious families at first welcomed the British forces. But the warm greetings quickly turned into angry demands: for water, electricity, sanitation and jobs; the fundamental needs of a city left to rot. For five long years, Britain failed to provide much, and till recently there seemed little hope the Iraqis themselves would do better.

Just eight weeks ago, the news from Basra was grim. On a visit to the British base then, we were advised not to go in to the city. Militiamen loyal to Moqtada al Sadr controlled much of it. A corrupt police force with questionable loyalties did little to stop the kidnapping, killings and extortion that were part of daily life. It was a place ruled not by the Iraqi government but by fear, suspicion and mistrust.

Then, a sudden offensive by the Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki sent 30,000 newly-trained men of the Iraqi army and police force onto the streets - provoking bitter daily battles for control. Yet after a shaky start, flooding the place with Iraq's own forces suddenly seemed to be working. Cafes and restaurants were full once more, the Corniche bustling with trade. So now, we were being invited in to witness the new Basra, a city on the cusp of what many hope will not be another false dawn.

But we weren't taking any chances. The rattle of the armoured British vehicles that accompany us our day trip brings a swarm of curious children, their parents hanging back, peering over the walls at the smartly-dressed soldiers of the Iraqi army and the British troops who mentor them on their patrols.

Mohsin, a plump forty-something English teacher, calls out as I walk past. "I want to say thank you, to you the British for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and to our brave Iraqi army for coming here. The past weeks have been bloody, but things are better now. You know, we used to live here together in peace - Sunni, Shia, Christian - and we can again."

His words are echoed by the woman next door, Dorothy, an Iraqi Christian who says she's now able to leave the house; she too is grateful to the Iraqi soldiers.

They seem to be welcomed by everyone I speak to. I stop at a nearby corner shop, which sells everything from bright red plastic flowers to the football shirts that the young men outside wear as they mooch in the shade. They don't want to give me their names, but one, a 23 year old engineering student, is happy to talk.

"We'd like the British troops to leave Iraq now," he says diffidently, as if wary of hurting my feelings. "We only want the Iraqi army here." But what about the militias? Isn't he worried that they're still armed - and the ceasefire may only be temporary? Yes, he's worried. But for now, there is peace and there is something else new. "We have hope again."

There's just time for a quick glass of hot sweet tea before I clamber back into the safety of an armoured vehicle, thinking of Mohsin's parting words: "life will get better in Basra again, inshallah. God willing."

ENDS

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