Barefoot in Baghdad (9 page)

One hour later it was clear that this was not going to happen. The deputy minister was visibly insulted that I had the audacity to bring such a case to his attention. I tried every avenue to convince him that Kalthoum was not a lost case, that he shouldn’t be so quick to throw her to the wolves. Yet he was steadfast in his decision, and he dismissed every argument I brought forward. When I tried to point out that she was underage, he countered with the fact that she was a married woman, which placed her in the category of adulthood. Orphanages were for children only. I tried to argue that she had been forced into marriage at the age of thirteen, which was illegal according to Iraqi law. He shook his head, pointing out that it was a common occurrence during the years of UN sanctions.

“How else were parents to secure their daughters?” he asked.

After sixty minutes of arguing with him, I threw up my hands and tried a different approach. Long ago I had learned that the damsel-in-distress strategy often received quick and candid results.

“Sir, I am at my wit’s end. I cannot think of anything else to do. All I know is that I have a problem. Can you help me with the solution?”

The deputy minister leaned forward. He shook his head and then leaned back into his chair. “Do you really want to know what the solution is?”

I nodded.

“Let the natural process go forward,” he said. “Her father is the person to decide what will happen to her. If it was my daughter, I would want the same.”

“But we both know her father will most likely kill her.”

“The problem with you Americans is you ask the questions, but you do not want to listen to the answers. Again, if it were my daughter, I would want the same.”

I could not accept his response, but all my phone calls to Iraqi women’s organizations resulted in dead ends. Kalthoum was too much of an extreme case, most of them argued. We cannot help her without making ourselves vulnerable to verbal and physical attacks.

I was not surprised by these responses.

***

A month earlier I had come across two sisters, ages fourteen and sixteen, who had been kidnapped and raped by a local gang. The two girls knew their attackers, and the Iraqi police carrying out the investigation interpreted that to mean they were complicit. The girls were from a poor neighborhood in southern Baghdad. Before the fall of the regime, one of the neighbors had asked for the sixteen-year-old’s hand in marriage. The mother had refused, hoping that her daughter would be able to complete high school.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the boy gathered some of his thug friends and stormed the woman’s apartment. He dragged both sisters out by their hair and took them to a private place. The boy raped the sixteen-year-old but argued to keep the fourteen-year-old “intact” so they could sell her at a higher rate. According to the sixteen-year-old, this led to a violent exchange between the two thugs that resulted in their shooting each other. She took the opportunity to escape, but she was forced to leave her sister behind. Three days later the fourteen-year-old was dropped off in front of their building. She had been raped and was in need of medical attention. The gang warned that they would be back to kill them if anyone tried to turn them in to the authorities.

What the gang didn’t know was that the authorities were not interested. The local police insisted that the girls had a link with the gang and refused to offer any assistance. The young girls’ mother could not afford to move out of their apartment, and the three lived in fear that the gang would be back. Not only was finding the girls a safe haven difficult, but even getting them examined by a gynecologist proved impossible. In most cases in Iraq, forensic officers conducted examinations of rape victims because gynecologists feared repercussions from the family if they confirmed a girl had been raped. In some cases, after hearing the news, angry fathers or brothers had executed the gynecologist.

I had spent days speaking with women’s organizations who explained that the sisters’ situation was too volatile to tackle. They argued that taking in rape victims would make the organizations vulnerable in their communities, and any woman who was associated with the organization would receive a bad reputation.

There was only one organization in Baghdad at the time willing to take the risk. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq was founded by Yanar Mohammed, a Canadian Iraqi activist. Yanar herself had already received many death threats for her liberal views since her 2003 return to Iraq, and I had visited her office during my first weeks in Baghdad to determine what protections she had to offer women in need. Indeed, she was one of the only women who had built an intricate and highly secure underground shelter for cases like that of the raped sisters.

I tried to offer the sisters the option of going to Yanar for help, but they refused. Yanar was perceived as a controversial figure, painted within mainstream Iraqi society by women and men alike as a leftist feminist who hated Islam. The mother and her daughters feared that being associated with the Organization of Women’s Freedom would forever seal their excommunication from Iraqi society. Instead, the mother opted to take her chances and stay in her small apartment. Her plan was to lie low long enough and pray the gang would forget about the incident.

Somehow I managed to convince her to allow the sixteen-year-old to enroll in the Women for Women program. The first day, through tears, she shared the story of her rape with the women in her circle. A safe space had been created where she was able to share her trauma. Most of the women were older than she and instantly took on protective roles. They provided her with emotional support for the following three months. After that, she stopped coming. I visited her home on two occasions afterward, but her mother made it very clear she did not want her daughter to continue in the program. One of the trainers suspected they had received a death threat. The next time we went to visit, the mother and her daughters had vacated the apartment.

***

From the moment I saw Kalthoum in the police station, I knew that helping her would not be easy. If helping two teenage girls who had been kidnapped and raped had been so difficult, I could only imagine what helping a married, pregnant teenage prostitute would be like.

I knew I would have to pressure the deputy minister to provide me with a solid option. In the end, I used a wild card Ivana had told me about. Several international agencies such as USAID and the World Bank were poised to provide large grants to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs for the purpose of helping marginalized groups. I pointed out that the deputy minister’s lack of cooperation could be an obstacle to the ministry’s receiving the grants if word were to get out that he was refusing to help the most vulnerable people in Baghdad.

The deputy minister responded with a compromise. He set up an appointment with the director of one of the orphanages for girls. If I could convince the orphanage director to take the girl, the ministry would not object.

It was as good a compromise as I was going to get.

I had to fight back tears of anger as I got back into the car. The deputy minister’s answer angered me as much as his arrogance, his passing judgment so quickly on a sixteen-year-old girl.

Fortunately, the director at the girl’s orphanage was much more sympathetic than the deputy minister. Yet Asma’s answer was the same. She could not accept Kalthoum in the orphanage. She candidly explained that the benefactors of the orphanage would be upset if they learned that Kalthoum was not a virgin. Her being in the orphanage would be seen as an attempt to corrupt the younger girls, and overnight every girl in the orphanage would be labeled a prostitute. Asma explained she had seen many cases such as Kalthoum’s, and it deeply saddened her that the state could provide no real solution. She believed it not only failed the individuals but the families as well. In most cases, the fathers would happily relinquish responsibility to the state. But since there was no place to put them, they often had to bear the responsibility and shame themselves. More often than not, the solution was an honor killing.

Asma stated that without even meeting Kalthoum, she was sure the girl would not keep her past a secret. In fact, in the beginning she would probably brag. I did not argue. I knew she was right. Asma walked me out to the front door and reiterated that she was sympathetic toward Kalthoum, but she could not risk the reputation of the three hundred girls under her care.

Before I left I asked her, “If you know the need is there, why don’t you fight to create something for these girls?”

“Manal, you need to understand that we are tired of fighting,” Asma said. “That’s all I have been doing; it’s all my mother did. We don’t want to fight anymore. It doesn’t mean we have given up. Far from it. It just means we want to find a more peaceful way to live something that may resemble a normal life.”

***

I sat in the backseat of the car. It was now almost noon, and I was nearly comatose from a lack of food and water. Yet I was nowhere near ready to give up. The clock was ticking, and by the end of the night I would need to go back to the U.S. MPs and Iraqi police at the Karada police station knowing that I had a place to relocate Kalthoum.

“Why is this your problem?” Yusuf asked. “I don’t see anyone else in this country running around the way you are. You tried. Can you please call it a day and go home?”

A part of me wanted to lean over and smack him. It was the part of me that knew he was right. But I had not tried all the avenues I knew to resolve Kalthoum’s situation: the director of the girls’ orphanage had given me another solution. It was one I was not very happy with, but it was a potential solution nonetheless. Asma explained that, in the hierarchy of orphanages (yes, even orphanages apparently have a standardized hierarchy), the bottom of the food chain was the special-needs orphanage. She suggested that my best bet was to take Kalthoum there. She knew the director. Although he was on an indefinite leave of absence, he still called the shots. Asma had called him and made the necessary arrangements. All I had to do was to deliver the news.

“Yusuf, I am not comfortable with the solution she has given me. It feels like a cop-out.”

“But you have tried everything,” he said. “They all should be grateful you even came up with something. I know I am utterly amazed. It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution.”

I knew he was right, so I told Mais to head back to the police station. As we came nearer, Yusuf handed me a bag.

“Put these on,” he instructed.

The bag had a long black abaya and flat black shoes. It also had a compact mirror and a makeup kit with a bronzer and a brush. Yusuf smiled and told me to bronze myself so I wouldn’t stand out so easily. He also pointed toward my black MBT sneakers and said that they were a telltale sign that screamed American woman. He suggested I wear the flat shoes. I smiled at Yusuf, pleased with the disguise kit he had put together for me.

When I entered the police station, Munther seemed the most pleased to see me, but Tom the MP was a close second. They both rushed toward me and asked the same question in two languages: what are we going to do with Kalthoum? I explained Asma’s solution. Both Tom and Munther looked skeptical but shrugged their shoulders. They probably reached the same conclusion I had: there were no real solutions.

As always, Yusuf had planned ahead and produced a disguise kit for Kalthoum too. Dressed in abayas, she and I slipped out the back door of the police station and headed toward Yusuf’s car. Before I left, I thanked Munther and Tom. I knew they both had taken professional and personal risks by allowing Kalthoum to stay overnight in the police station.

“I just want you to know that you two probably saved her life,” I told them.

Munther nodded. Tom smiled and gently touched my arm. “I want you to know,” he said, “you just gave me my answer when my grandchildren ask me what I was doing in Iraq.”

I smiled at the two policemen, pleased at the new alliances I had just made. Naturally at that moment I was not thinking of the future, but it turned out that these new alliances would come in handy.

The orphanage for special needs was a disaster. The entire orphanage was in chaos, and the young children had been left with little or no care. Children were lying in their own urine in unmade beds, and each room contained at least thirty beds. There were only three wheelchairs, and the majority of the children needed wheelchairs for mobility. Worse yet, the caretakers were obnoxious and rude and openly gawked at Kalthoum and me, black abayas and all. I could not bear to leave her, but I also knew I had no other choice.

I turned to Yusuf for advice, as he was the only one willing to come into the place with me. Mais had abandoned all hope in talking sense into me, and although he accompanied me on my expeditions, he refused to get out of the car.

Yusuf shrugged and muttered that the call was up to me. Every bone in my body urged me not to leave Kalthoum. Yet I knew I had put Mais and Yusuf through enough. Sunset was only a few hours away, and I could not bear the idea of breaking fast yet again in a police station or, worse, on the street. They deserved to break their fast at home. I deserved to break my fast at home.

“Let’s go,” I said. I hugged a silent, weeping Kalthoum and told her I would come back first thing the next morning to check on her.

Five minutes after we drove away I began to cry. Perhaps it was exhaustion or hunger or the brutal summer sun. I felt completely beat. Yusuf pulled over, and Mais turned to look at me with a mixed look of sympathy and worry.

“We cannot leave her,” I said through my tears. “It’s just wrong.”

Mais slapped his hand to his forehead. “I knew this wasn’t going to be over,” he muttered.

Yusuf said nothing. He turned the car around and headed back to the orphanage. There, he instructed me to stay in the car, and ten minutes later he brought out a grateful Kalthoum. She entered the car and hugged me and then tried to kiss Yusuf’s and my hands to demonstrate her gratefulness. I could not stop crying, especially as I realized I had almost left her there to be raped or worse.