NEWSWEEK: Explain your group’s mission in Baghdad.
Scott Kerr: We are there to be with Iraqi civilians, to tell their story, to be international eyes and ears. Our teams go there to try to prevent war crimes from happening, by physically putting ourselves in the way of violent acts…We are there to model nonviolence to our churches in America and to our president.
Is part of your mission, as a Christian organization, to convert Muslims to Christianity?
If we are looking for converts to anything, it is for converts to nonviolence. I celebrate mass on Sundays and we worship as a team every day, but we don’t do any other kind of preaching.
How do Iraqi Muslims respond to the fact that you are Christian?
I haven’t really experienced any hostility. The Iraqi people are very hospitable people. I learned a lot about the Muslim faith, the difference between Shiites and Sunnis. On one of my last days there, I had the chance to go to mass, and one of my Iraqi friends, a Sunni Muslim, came with me and actually celebrated communion. He just wanted to experience it. My team has also prayed in mosques and has participated in the call to prayer.
Did you experience any hostility because you were an American?
I was in Iraq for over two months and I didn’t meet one enemy there. After the bombing started, there was a run on food. I went to one market to buy chips and pop for my shelter, comfort food stuff, but I ran out of money. The shopkeeper told me not to worry about it. Then he gave me all my money back and said, “Why don’t you just keep it and pay me later? You should really have some money.” I thought, this shop owner has at least half-empty shelves, his currency is being devalued every day, and he’s willing to give me, an American, credit. I don’t even know this guy. There was quite a bit of hostility to George W. Bush, but there wasn’t really any to us.
How do you explain it?
A number of people told me that they understand the difference between people from the United States and the Bush administration. Every day on the Iraqi news you’d see war protests from the United States and Europe. So the Iraqis can see that people from America are against the war. Many Iraqis are well-educated. Many speak English; there are many doctors, many engineers. A taxi driver friend of mine, for example, has a bachelor’s degree in French and English literature. They know people from around the world do not want war.
How would you describe the overall mood of the city since the bombing began?
In the city center of Baghdad, I’d say about 90 percent of the stores and restaurants are closed. Traffic is way down. In the surrounding areas, in the poorer areas, there is a lot more traffic. The shop owners can’t close or they’ll lose everything. People are shopping everyday for what they need. The people of Iraq have been in wars now for 20 years, with the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf war and now this. They know how to deal with bombings. They hear the sirens; sometimes they even go out to watch the show.
How are children in Baghdad handling the bombings?
The parents seem to be very good at keeping the kids calm and focused. Still, they get very tense, scared, quiet. We were holding a vigil outside of the Palestine Hotel, and a boy who was somewhere between the ages of 7 and 10 years old, a really skinny kid who is always on the streets polishing shoes or asking for money, was tearing up because he knew what was going to happen. The sanctions in Iraq have been going on for so long that many people are dependent on the country’s food rations program. Any disruption in that program is going to cause a lot of suffering to the kids. I met one kid who is 16 years old, but you’d think he was 12. He is very underdeveloped. And there’s no reason for it–his parents are big. But some of these kids are chronically malnourished.
What sense do you get about how the Iraqi people feel about the U.S. invasion?
I get the feeling that people are really angry and scared. Anger is not a strong enough word. I went to the market place that was bombed recently, about 20 hours or so after it was hit. There were still pools of blood on the sidewalks and on the street. It was just devastating to the community. You could hear women wailing and crying, while shells were going off in the background. People were so angry at the U.S. government that it was difficult for us to get out of that neighborhood. I wonder how many terrorists were born that day.
But would you say these same people would be happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein?
My whole time I was in Baghdad, I probably heard about five people say that Bush is good and it will be better [after Saddam Hussein is gone]. But not many people said it. Very few people in the Middle East see this as a war of liberation.
What problems were the people of Baghdad encountering when you left a few days ago?
Access to health care seemed to be a problem. Some hospitals were overrun with injuries and casualties. I know that they lost electricity so that is a huge burden.
What is the state of the hospitals?
They’ve been crippled with sanctions and now they are being forced to deal with these serious war emergencies. They are running out of basic types of things. In Baghdad people generally have beds. But during the bombings, a lot of injured people are being rushed to the hospitals. Kids are coming in with serious abrasions because even when a bomb hits its target, windows are blown out for blocks. The glass shatters and cuts people. So there are lots of injuries from that kind of thing.
Are the people of Baghdad concerned about being hit by bombs? Or do they feel relatively safe?
Your average Iraqi citizen is definitely concerned about it. There are security offices all around Baghdad. Every street has a police station, a government office, things like this. I have one friend who lives a couple of doors down from a police station. One night he said the police station was hit three or four times with a missile. Every window in his house was blown out–his house was rattling like you wouldn’t believe. So some of these targets are very close to civilian areas.
Why did you spend time at the water-treatment plant?
After water-treatment plants were shut down during the first gulf war, many civilians died because they lacked clean water. We wanted to shed light [on this]. This water treatment center is a part of the community. There is a hospital and apartment buildings near it. At night we would sleep by the water treatment center in tents and during the day we would be a part of the community.
Did you have any interaction with the Iraqi government? How did they treat you?
Most foreigners doing the work we do, and especially journalists, have a minder, a guide. Probably about 20 percent of my time in Iraq I was with a minder or had to go to meetings with a minder. I was pretty impressed with the amount of freedom they gave us. I wasn’t in the United States after September 11, but I’ve heard about how much suspicion there was of people of Arab descent. But here we are, a bunch of Americans, in their country with a bunch of technology–satellite phones, computers, digital cameras, video cameras–and they let us use this stuff and they don’t accuse us of being spies. It’s really quite remarkable.
Did you ever feel threatened by them?
I didn’t. We had some co-workers who were filming at a recent bomb site without permission from minders and they held them for a little while and later made them leave. They have rules and if you break them, you are going to get kicked out.
Those co-workers encountered some problems on the way to Jordan. Can you explain what happened?
A few days ago a number of my teammates [mentioned above] had to leave the country. They were traveling from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan. The road to Amman is really poor. I just traveled it a few days ago. There are bombed-out ambulances, buses, downed bridges, craters in the road, a lot of shrapnel. We also saw dead Iraqi soldiers on the road. It’s really nasty. My teammates’ car hit some shrapnel, blew a tire and rolled off the road. People were pretty badly injured. There was a dislocated shoulder, some head gashes requiring stitches, broken ribs, these kind of things. Some Iraqi civilians saw what had happened, pulled over, put all the injured people into the back of a pick-up truck and took them to Rutba. But the hospital had been bombed two days earlier. Still, there was a doctor who did the best he could to patch them up to send them on to Jordan. It sounds like he gave them pretty good care, all free of charge.
Did you have any interaction with Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad?
There were some Iraqi soldiers guarding the Unicef building. Every day before the bombing began, and even after the bombing, a little bit, I’d walk by and sometimes we’d drink tea together and sometimes I’d do a magic trick for them. They were always kind to me. They are just kids, my age or younger.
How do Muslims and Christians in Iraq get along ? Is there any hostility between the two groups?
I never heard anyone talking about religious persecution. Still, I did hear a story about an Iraqi nun who was riding in a taxicab one day and the cab driver said to her, “You must be pro-Bush, because you are a Christian.” In some ways, President Bush’s use of religious rhetoric has put the Iraqi Christians in an awkward position. They accuse Iraqi Christians of supporting Bush, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The religious community around the world has said this war is unjust and morally unacceptable. When George Bush invokes the name of God in this war, I think it does a huge disservice to Christians around the world.
