The USA Is Not My Enemy: Coming to America after Operation Iraqi Freedom
Luma Ateyah loves America, so much so that when the Army rolled through her hometown in Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks last year, she made a flag to wave as they passed.
But Ateyah is not from the United States. She is an Iraqi from Baghdad, and the flag she waved had 51 stars.
“I tried to welcome the troops in my own way,” she says. “I wanted Iraq to join the United States, you see.”
Now, almost a year later, Ateyah sits next to American students in American classrooms, surrounded by classmates who overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Santa Cruz may seem a far cry from Baghdad, where Coalition forces still battle with insurgents and the U.S.-appointed Governing Council struggles to ready the country for sovereignty on June 30. Ateyah, however, doesn’t feel out of place.
“Here in California, I don’t feel that different,” she says, sitting in her University Town Center apartment where she has lived since her arrival on February 6. “I am a student, and I have been a student before. It’s just like life in any other place in the world.”
Ateyah is one of 25 Iraqis participating in a new Fulbright scholarship exchange program, the first such program in Iraq in 14 years.
According to the Center for International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the Fulbright Scholarship, the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs worked to re-establish the Fulbright Program in Iraq in order to help the country reconnect to the U.S.
Two independent, bi-national committees in Iraq reviewed the applications and nominated the finalists who were selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Paul Bremer, the U.S. Administrator for Iraq, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced the re-establishment of the Fulbright Program in Iraq in October 2003.
Growing Up Without Peace
Ateyah was three years old when the Iraq-Iran War started. She remembers the random violence and being surrounded by terror. She remembers fear, but not her own.
“They (the Iranians) would bombard randomly,” she recalls. “There were children so afraid. I don’t know, I wasn’t afraid of all that.”
Her own confidence often coincided with concern for friends. “I couldn’t stand seeing some of my classmates who were afraid about their fathers and brothers,” she says.
Ateyah’s life in Baghdad has always involved conflict.
“I don’t remember how life was before the war,” she says. When asked what life is like growing up surrounded by violence and death, she retorts, “What is peace like?”
“I’ve been there for all the wars,” Ateyah says, shifting her gaze as the memories return. “Every time I leave, I see people crying after receiving their son dead.”
Her country has never known peace in her lifetime.
“Iraq is one of the few places that is quite different from the countries of the West,” she says.
The war with Iran ended when Ateyah was 11 years old. Two years later on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Iraq was again on the path to war, this time with a coalition led by the United States and backed by the United Nations.
America, however, was a far different opponent than Iran had been.
“The USA was much more peaceful because they don’t target random people,” Ateyah says. “I feel the USA was the enemy of the Iraq leadership.”
She quotes a Dari proverb: “Having an educated enemy is better than an ignorant friend.”
The Final War
“The final war was the happiest one,” Ateyah says with a grin. “Iraqis were waiting for that war. We were the ones who were liberated. We wanted the war. This was going to be the final war.”
She is insistent that the American invasion was justified. Iraq, she says, is a far better place now than it was during Hussein’s rule, despite the ongoing violence.
“The most important thing is that we’re liberated,” she says. “Life now is much better than it was at the time of Saddam. As a Shiite, I was discriminated against before. I was not a member of the Ba’ath party.”
Ateyah explains that Iraq now has hope of joining the world community. Under the old regime, the only hope for a better life was in getting out of the country.
“Your dream was to escape Iraq and get to a Western country as a refugee.”
Ateyah, a 26-year-old Shi’a Muslim, lived through more than a decade of UN economic sanctions that devastated the country’s economy.
“There were so many problems in Iraq,” she says. “People died from lack of medicine. They have to eat unhealthy food because it’s cheap.”
Despite the overwhelming depravation brought by the sanctions, she does not blame the UN. “I blame Saddam,” Ateyah says emphatically. “They would never have suffered from sanctions if he had agreed to the (United Nations) Memorandum of Understanding.”
In February 1998, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan signed the Memorandum of Understanding, guaranteeing that Iraq would cooperate with international weapons inspectors and re-iterating that UN would respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq.
Within months, the UN Security Council had again condemned Iraq for not following through with its commitment to fully disarm.
While Ateyah rarely left Baghdad, much of her family is in mostly Shiite Southern Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, Shiites in Basra were brutally repressed after an uprising against the Hussein regime. Ateyah was barely a teenager at the time, and her parents said little of the rebellion.
“Usually in Iraq, parents don’t let children of that age listen to the news,” she says. “If a child says something against Saddam, the parents are in danger.”
She explains that the government had spies everywhere, and parents would often be held responsible for the words of their children. Ateyah only heard about the 1988 gassing of the Kurds in Northern Iraq when she was in her 20s.
Ateyah insists that most media outlets are presenting the wrong image of Iraq, especially Arab news.
“I have to tell the truth,” she says with a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “When I talk to journalists, I have to tell the truth. That’s why I stay away from Arabic media. They either get the story wrong or they wouldn’t say anything. They think this is something scandalous against an Arab nation. We say, ‘This is not an invasion. This is liberation.’ They try to offend you when they find out you’re happy for the liberation of Iraq.”
Santa Cruz Responds
Peace Activist Nick Reynolds, a third-year Merrill student, was one of the many students who organized rallies and marched against the Bush administration’s drive to war last year. Now, he tries to empathize with Ateyah’s perspective.
“It’s understandable for people under these dictatorships to want the U.S. to come in and liberate them” Reynolds says. “My opinion is that they are misled—just as many Americans are—to think that warfare is the right way to go about it.”
Santa Cruz Mayor Scott Kennedy wrote the City Council resolution opposing the invasion of Iraq. He remains committed in his rejection of war, even after hearing Ateyah’s words.
“One of the major problems with the U.S. war on Iraq is that we’ve never explicitly acknowledged our role in propping up Saddam,” he says. “When it suited our purposes, we’ve never had any problem with Saddam. Do we want to live in a global order where the law of the jungle prevails? The UN needs to develop effective means to deal with dictatorships.”
He is, however, understanding of Ateyah’s position. “On the other hand, most of us in the United States have never had to live in a dictatorial regime,” he says. “I visited Iraq in 1990, and I’ve never seen the level of repression and fear to talk for fear of reprisal that I saw in Iraq.”
He adds, “Bombing a country to oblivion doesn’t mean that you transition to a democratic, secular government.”
America, Kennedy insists, cannot continue to enforce its will at the barrel of a gun. “People don’t want to live in a world where the biggest guy on the block can do whatever it wants,” he says.
The mayor, who has worked to promote peace for years through the Santa Cruz Resource Center for Non-Violence, says he would still have sponsored the anti-war resolution. “I’m too old and wizened to see this as a melodrama where all the good is on one side and all the bad on the other side,” he says.
The Iraq that Ateyah returns to in two years is likely to be far different than the country she left. She will have a master’s degree in literature, and experience that she hopes will help her bridge the gap between the two countries she loves.
Pondering the future, she muses about foreign service jobs and bringing people together. She says, “I’d like to do something for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or an embassy or something like that.”