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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
The Prince of the
Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of
a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
Harcourt - July
2006
The
British Camp
A Prince cannot avoid
ingratitude.
--Machiavelli, Discourses, Book I,
Chapter 29
Pursuant to my authority as
Administrator of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA), relevant UN Security
Council resolutions, including Resolution
1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of
war, I hereby promulgate the following:
The CPA is vested with all executive,
legislative, and judicial authority
necessary to achieve its objectives . . .
This authority shall be exercised by the
CPA Administrator.
Coalition Provisional
Authority (Iraq)
Regulation Number 1
Monday, October 6, 2003
On the three-hour drive north from
Basra to take up my post in Maysan, I
passed through the territory the Prince of
the Marshes claimed to control. I saw the
canal Saddam had dug: some reeds, a few
fishermen in tin boats and some water
birds. Long parallel lines stretched for
miles across the drab earth. There were
very few people to be seen: most Marsh
Arabs now lived in slums on the edge of
cities. Boats were no longer the standard
method of transport and the buffalo herds
had gone. The thicket of six-foot reeds in
chest-deep water that once covered
thousands of square miles had become
parched and barren mud.
We turned off the highway down an
avenue guarded by two rusting Iranian
tanks kept as souvenirs, one with a
drunken turret. We passed buildings whose
roofs had collapsed under the impact of
American J-Dam explosives, came up along
the edge of a bastion wall serving as
protection against car bombs and stopped
at the guard house of Camp Abu Naji. Six
months earlier it had been the base of the
semi-mystical Saddam-funded terrorist
group, the Mujahaddin-el-Halq.
A private from the King's Own Scottish
Borderers approached the car, recognized
the driver, saluted, and lifted the drop
bar for us. On either side were low,
shabby concrete buildings, rolls of barbed
wire, and corrugated iron. There were
soldiers on the roofs, presumably sleeping
outside because there was no
air-conditioning in the tents. I dragged
my bags out of the Land Rover and was
shown to a room.
Pushing back the heavy black curtain
that served as a door, I lifted the nylon
mosquito net and put my sleeping bag on
the camp bed and brushed some sand off the
tin trunk. The window frames were lined
with duct tape and the curtain-door
stretched to the floor but, as I was to
find over my next six months in the camp,
nothing was able to exclude the sand,
which accumulated in a thick yellow film
across the cement floor and the canvas
chair.
We ate at six-thirty. At the entrance
to the cook-house an Iraqi in a blue
boiler suit was pouring bottled water into
a large tea urn. A private stood next to
it, making sure that everyone, officer and
civilian alike, washed their hands from
the urn to prevent the spread of
diarrhea.
I sat with a group of young officers
and the regimental padre. A subaltern
barked, "Red or green?" and returned with
plastic cups filled with juice of the
relevant and astonishingly intense
chemical color.
I was, it seemed, the first civilian to
live in the camp. The officer on my left
glanced at me and asked, "Do you work at
the airport?" He assumed I was a soldier
from the divisional headquarters.
"No, I'm the civilian who is setting up
the Coalition Provisional Authority office
in the province," I replied.
"What's that?"
"It's the new civilian
administration."
"Thank God you've arrived at last and
we can all go home," he said, pushing his
chair back. "Cake in a box, anyone?"
To shower after dinner I walked around
the accommodation block, across the edge
of the runway and behind the hangars.
There was a roar from the diesel-powered
generators, and the beat of the
rotor-blade of a Chinook helicopter on the
landing zone. I had to use a flashlight to
avoid the rubble on the uneven sand.
Above, I could see stars in a clear sky
and imagine something of the desert just
beyond the perimeter fence.
The showers were well-lit. There was a
thick slurry of brown mud on the floor
from combat boots and camouflage uniforms
piled on the wooden benches. While someone
cursed the lack of hot water, men dried
themselves ostentatiously in the center of
the room, talking about the day's patrols,
apparently oblivious to the two female
officers brushing their teeth with mineral
water at the sink.
The next morning at eight, I called on
the colonel of the battle group. He was a
slender man in his early forties, with
gray hair scraped severely back from his
head, dressed, like everyone, in desert
camouflage. His office was decorated with
the Leslie tartan of his regiment. He
introduced me to the province with another
PowerPoint presentation; one he seemed to
have given many times before. He did not
encourage questions.
"Maysan," he began, "is the size of
Northern Ireland, and we are running it
with only a thousand men." He explained
that it was a very volatile place, and the
battle group were short of equipment and
development money. The regional corps
headquarters of the Iraqi army had been
looted, and all the weapons were now in
the hands of the local population. The two
key arteries of the province were Route 6,
the highway that connected Basra and
Baghdad, and the Tigris River.
"As for you, Rory--" I looked up,
midway through my sixth packet of crackers
"there are very high expectations here
that the British will achieve things. If
things don't happen they believe it is
because we are deliberately trying to
suppress their economic and political
future. There is no possibility of a
Baathist revival here. It is a small place
and the Baathists would not be able to
move here. There is a potential for Shia
opposition here, connected to Iran and
criminal gangs. I believe that the
supervisory committee we have appointed
here is relatively representative."
He brought up a new screen on the
monitor: "Vital Ground: Our vital ground
is 'the concept of regeneration.'"
The colonel seemed confident that he
could keep order. He had been in command
of his regiment for nearly three years and
was a month from the end of his time in
Maysan. He answered to no one nearer than
a brigadier, two hundred miles away in
Basra, had absolute control over his men
and weaponry, and traveled incessantly. He
knew the district well enough to answer
the detailed complaints of local mayors.
He had become close to the Beni Lam, an
"aristocratic" tribe that had once been
famous for their horses. But his strongest
relationship was with Abu Hatim, whom the
colonel described as "our local Robin
Hood, sometimes known as the Prince of the
Marshes." The two of them ran the province
together.
I had no opportunity to discuss the
briefings I had been given in London, and
I left without a clear idea of our
relationship. I had been told in Baghdad
that, as the deputy governorate
coordinator, I was to be "the deputy and
alter ego of the governorate coordinator,"
in charge of a civilian team of eight that
would include a political officer, a
development projects officer, and others.
But there was as yet no governorate
coordinator; a U.S. State Department
officer was supposed to be arriving in
that role in a few weeks' time. Nor was
there yet a political officer, a projects
officer, or an Iraqi governor in Maysan.
For the time being, I was a team of one,
responsible for overseeing development
projects and setting up Iraqi political
structures. I had been told to act as
something like the de facto governor of
the province.
The colonel had been ordered by the
commander-in-chief to support our office.
But he had little interest in the
constitutional relationship between the
CPA and the military. He was critical of
the CPA, which had so far done little. He
was doubtful that I would be able to do
much. But, he said, the military were
forced to perform political and economic
roles that were better done by civilians,
and it was about time civilians took up
their responsibility. He suggested I could
start by getting money. He referred to
himself as the de facto governor of the
province.
Outside the colonel's office, I was
introduced to a tall man with a mane of
black hair who was wearing dark glasses
and a cream linen jacket over a crisp
checked shirt with cufflinks, suede
trousers, and suede boots. This was A.J.,
currently in charge of CPA finances. He
was a territorial cavalry officer and the
only man in the camp, apart from me, who
wore civilian clothes. He offered one of
his collection of exotic confiscated
weapons for the ride into town. I took a
chrome-plated Kalashnikov because it was
the only one of the weapons I thought I
could remember how to use. The bodyguard
team I had been promised by the Foreign
Office had not yet arrived.
I sat in the front passenger seat with
the rifle between my legs as we drove
north from the camp. After about ten
miles, we reached the outskirts of Amara,
where there were jerry-built brick houses
with fancy new concrete columns. We turned
past half-decaying apartment blocks,
villas, an old covered souk, and an avenue
of mature willows and clanked across a
pontoon bridge over the Tigris. On the
main road was the pink tiled façade
of the building that would have housed the
Iraqi provincial council and governor, had
either existed. We stopped across the
road, facing heavy metal gates set in a
high concrete wall. They swung back,
revealing British soldiers and men in
Iraqi police uniform, a dusty yard the
size of a soccer field, an empty swimming
pool, and the white villa that housed the
new CPA office. The Tigris, sluggish and
brown, rolled past two sides of the
compound. Across the water was a date-palm
grove and a small white mosque. This tiny
CPA compound on a peninsula in the heart
of the old Ottoman city of Amara, fifteen
miles from the British military base, was
surrounded by three hundred thousand
Iraqis and protected by a guard force of
thirty.
At the door stood a man with neat
pressed desert camouflage, a dark blue
engineer's beret, gray hair, dark brows,
and a huge smile. The badge on his chest
said Butler. Major George Butler was the
commanding officer of the civil affairs
team, had set up the office and had been
in Iraq for four months. He was a reserve
officer, a senior water engineer in normal
life and had worked in Egypt. He was
friendly, explained that he already had my
office prepared and guided me round the
compound.
The villa had originally been the home
of the young and newest wife of the great
Albu Muhammed Sheikh, Majid Bin Khalife.
She had been murdered here in the early
1950s by her stepson, who had in turn been
murdered in the date palm grove across the
river, probably by his father. It had then
become the residence of the Iraqi
governor, who had added the glass-fronted
bungalow on the waterfront. There was no
longer any electricity or furniture in the
villa -- it had been looted before our
arrival -- and there were only two cramped
bathrooms. Major Butler had been saving
money to paint the walls, install a
generator, and provide some hot water.
There were offices like these in the
capitals of every province in Iraq,
established by military civil affairs
teams. During the first five months of the
CPA's existence it had not deployed
officials to the provinces. In Maysan,
Butler's team had taken on the role of the
CPA and grown from managing small popular
engineering projects into providing
support for twenty Iraqi ministries.
I was the first civilian administrator
in Amara and part of the first group of
British CPA administrators across the
country: as I arrived in Amara, Mark
Etherington, who had traveled into Iraq
with me, was arriving upstream in Kut, and
a veterinarian who spoke fluent Arabic had
just settled into our twin province of
Nasiriyah on the Tigris.
I was led to a large meeting room
filled with heavy yellow and purple
cushioned sofas and decorated with garish
local paintings of Marsh Arabs. On the
sofas sat the dozen heavily tanned young
men and women of the British military
civil affairs team. The electricity had
failed, and the air conditioning with it,
and there were sweat patches on their
desert camouflage.
Most were reservists who had been
called out of civilian jobs to serve six
months in Iraq. Major A.J., the
linen-jacketed finance officer, was a
banker; Private Charlotte Morris, the
social affairs officer, was a
twenty-five-year-old who had been running
a project for street children in Egypt.
They had only one week's leave in a
six-month tour in Iraq, and they slept in
dormitories. Their lavatories at camp were
unlit green plastic Porta-Johns. This was
an innovation. Previously there had been
long benches without partitions where the
men could chat Roman-style as they did
their business. The women were forced to
wait until late at night and to cover
themselves with sheets of newspaper. Flies
were everywhere. The female captain who
dealt with walk-in inquiries had just
tested positive for malaria and, despite
the enforced hand-washing, many soldiers
from the colonel down had diarrhea and
were vomiting much of the time, which made
the privies unpleasant, especially during
the heat of the day. There was a rumor
that one soldier had died of heat
exhaustion while sitting inside. Civilian
contractors in Basra could earn a thousand
dollars a day; Private Morris was managing
projects worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars and earning less than fifty
dollars a day.
Although I was impatient to appoint a
new provincial government, to develop key
relationships with Iraqis and with the
Coalition, and to acquire new funds and
implement new projects, I spent the first
couple of days learning from the civil
affairs team. Every time I walked through
the open-plan space on the ground floor of
our villa office, I passed groups huddled
in different corners, each consisting of a
civil affairs officer, who often appeared
to be striving for patience, a young Iraqi
interpreter struggling to translate
technical terms, and a couple of Iraqi
civil servants nodding politely. Strewn
across the tables were databases of the
four hundred schools in the province,
plans, tender documents, and bundles from
the local kebab shop, waiting to be opened
for lunch. Nearly fifty projects were
waiting for money from Basra, and each
officer continued to produce a flood of
proposals and ideas. In addition to the
half million dollars' worth of wheat and
barley seed requested by the director of
agriculture, the prison specialist sought
four hundred thousand dollars for a new
prison, and another civil affairs officer
wanted to refurbish the souk. They had
already repaired about a quarter of the
schools in the province and most of the
key ministry buildings. They did many of
these projects by providing money to one
of the half dozen international
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in
the province, who managed and monitored
the projects for them.
The civil affairs officers showed a
sharp, ironic grasp of Amara's needs and
seemed tough and sympathetic in the right
measure. The health officer had concluded
after a survey that there was no need to
build new hospitals and clinics: the real
priority was training and hygiene in the
existing facilities. Some were learning
Arabic, and all liked dealing with
Iraqis.
And yet, despite the energy and
competence of the civil affairs team and
the hundreds of productive projects, they
were failing to communicate their
achievements to Iraqis. This may have been
due to the soldiers' modesty or a distaste
for politics or a lack of understanding of
Iraqi expectations. Whatever the
explanation, Iraqis were suspicious of our
motives, disappointed by our performance,
and often contemptuous.
Each morning, the convoy left for the
office at eight, the civil affairs team
gathered for our daily meeting at 8:30,
and the rest of the day I found myself
either talking to Iraqi officials or
dealing with office problems and politics.
Each evening, I drove back to the base and
went for a run, shirtless in the
astonishing heat. After supper, I saw the
colonel. I went to sleep with fragments of
Arabic in my mind, no longer hearing the
roar of the generators, and woke often
repeating the same fragments.
From one perspective, I had acquired
near-absolute authority over eight hundred
and fifty thousand people. A CPA
governorate coordinator ranked
theoretically as a one-star general, and
the main mission of the lieutenant colonel
who commanded the battle group was to
support the CPA by keeping security. From
another perspective, I was almost
powerless. The Iraqi state was large and
functioning, however poorly. I was
constrained by the Geneva Convention and
occupation law. The battle group did not
take their orders from me. Even the newest
private was part of an army with 150,000
men and clear lines of command. I was a
lone foreigner who commanded nobody. If
the Iraqis or the British chose to ignore
me there was very little that I could
do.
Copyright
2006, by Rory Stewart. All Rights
Reserved. Published here by permission.
For more information, please visit
www.rorystewartbooks.com.
Rory
Stewart has written for the New York
Times Magazine, Granta, and the
London Review of Books, and is the
author of The Places in Between. A
2004 fellow of the Carr Center for the
Human rights Policy at Harvard's John E.
Kennedy School of Government, he was
awarded the Order of the British Empire
for his foreign services. He now lives in
Kabul, where he has established the
Turquoise Mountain Foundation.
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