The British Camp
An
excerpt from Rory Stewart's The Prince of Marshes
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.
___
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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.
For more information, please visit www.rorystewartbooks.com.
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