Mayada

Oh God! I was reading ‘Mayada – Daughter of Iraq’, the story of Mayada Nizar Jafar Mustafa Al-Askari as told by Jean Sasson. Sasson is the same person who authored the ‘Princess’ trilogy, a story of a princess & about the state of the women in Saudi Arabia.

Mayada is Mayada’s life story and her version of the sufferings Iraqis, women in particular endured during ‘The Baath Regime’ especially under the criminal rule of Saddam Hussein.

There is a part where she (Mayada) happens to be arrested and is sent to prison, the Baladiyat. There, she shared a tiny cell with many other women who are referred to as ‘the shadow women’ for supposedly having committed crimes, crimes that range from having a deserter for a brother to losing a passport to as ridiculous as having by-now-dead sons who happened to stare at someone on the streets!!

Forget the reasons why these women were arrested, the way they were arrested- like a bolt of lightning shocked the lives of those innocent souls. But even worse was the torture. Here, by writing this, I only intend to convey that the torture those prisoners went through, you’d feel awful. Awful is not the word. I had tears flowing all the while I read that prison part. In fact, the part that refers to a particular torture session of a woman named Sara, I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop from crying out loud. Normally my emotions do get stirred up a wee bit when reading certain things, but this was way beyond that. In fact I was disturbed, and still am.

The Saddam Hussein regime was so much more gruesome than the Adolf Hitler Regime. Under the WWII Nazi rule, it was the sheer number of Jews being persecuted that shocked the world most. Yes, there was a lot of torture, the main one being that one knew that death was sure once you stepped inside the concentration camps. There were as-a-sport random shootings by the officers; days filled with hard work, barely any food, worse than miserable sleeping quarters. They were being killed because they were Jews.

But in Iraq, no Iraqi was safe, absolutely no one. Anyone could be arrested for any crime - could be that a person disliked another person; a woman living alone with her children without a male member because he died; or it could be that the person was of Iranian origin, or reads the Quran often which leads to being branded as an Islamic activist; or may be even that a greedy official didn’t get his quota of bribes. And once a person was arrested, he’d either be killed right away or be sent to a prison (a torture center). There there’s a routine of torture that goes on for months and years. Each session, he is slowly but brutally tortured until he reaches just a breath away from death. And die he does, someday. If the methods of torture are gruesome, the torturers just made it worse with their own fun tactics, just for kicks. In the book it is mentioned that worse than being tortured is to hear the screaming and wailing of one being tortured, it just psyches you off. Remember back in college those Lab Exams where the external examiner is a dragon, you are nowhere near getting the output, you are about to be called for your Viva and you can see the examiner grilling the guy before you - same feeling, but on a much more larger scale.

Back to the Iraqis in detention - it is all very pathetic. I would call parts of the book as gruesome as I couldn’t stomach those scenes. The thing is this is was no fiction, not one of those Grisham or Sheldon books where the CIA tortures the Russian spy or a Mossad agent on a secret spy mission. This was something that was really happening, people in real flesh & blood being slowly smoked or beaten to death. The absolute reality of it is what makes it all the more agonizing.

I’ve read a fair share of books on WWII, Nazis and the concentration camps, all the atrocities that fell upon the Jews. I was drawn by it all and avidly watched most of those World War based movies, read a lot of books and real life accounts by Jews who survived the camps, and I was astounded by the facts but never did they 'intensely' disturb me. And religion cannot be held as a factor against my reactions coz I consider all victims as human beings above anything else.

Now that I think back about how the US military humiliated Saddam by photographing him in his underclothes, or for not holding a fair trial, I don’t care. All I care is that God show him no mercy and please let him rot in the deepest of hells like how he let his people rot their lives away. In spite of the head count, in my eyes Saddam has done far more evil than Hitler himself. [This judgment could be coz of a rebound from the book.]

Warning: Mayada is not for the faint-hearted; it will make you cringe with pain. (I am not faint-hearted, but I winced.)