Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch
Occupied Amara 11/1/2004

It’s a bright-cold Tuesday morning in Amara and a man who’s too afraid to be named is talking to us frankly at a local kebab street caf. He’s a former Daawa party activist and current member of the Union of Political Prisoners, a nationwide group formed to pick up the pieces, collectively, of the lives and pasts of some of Iraq’s most obvious walking wounded. Regime-labelled as the enemies of Iraq; they were disfigured, thrown in acid, sliced open, stabbed with electric rods into involuntary limb flipping unconsciousness, stretched, torn, hammered and placed in rooms: dark rooms, dank rooms, rooms with floors turned black with freely and frequently spilt blood, rooms with hooks where a man would hang, broken shouldered in agony, rooms infested with cockroaches, rooms hidden underground unopened for decades, rooms locked behind urban underpasses, internees beaten daily in thick dank darkness to the sound of traffic streaming, the steady hum and sigh of cars passing by, life passing by to the daily corrosion and gnaw of being ignored, being so close to ordinary life but unable to see or touch it; and the insanity rooms, rooms painted red, bright red, with bright lights on every day, all day, for years.