By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

Friday, July 16, 2004

The morning promised to be a hot one and I was already having problems. People were having couldn’t find the drop off location. It’d spent two months trying to get this boat trip on the Tigris River ready and no one could find where it started. So I went up on the bridge and stood around like some hopelessly lost Westerner, a stranger in a strange land. Everyone gaped at me and honked their horns but it was better then any signed that read “Tigris River Project, Turn here!”

Finally everyone (or nearly everyone) had arrived. I had three staff from the Ministry of Environment’s Baghdad Office ready to take their first samples of Tigris River water since the war. I had representatives from three different Iraqi Environmental NGOs (aka. Non-Government Organizations): The Iraqi Green Peace Organization, the Iraqi Human Rights Association and the Green Iraq Organization. And I had reporters, photographers, and camera operators from major Arabic and Western Press who had come to document the first environmental survey of the river (there had been a previous attempt in March, which had ended badly with the Ministry engineers being shot at, dragged ashore, hooded and cuffed, interrogated, with their work of three days destroyed).

The goals of the trip were to help the Ministry conduct its survey; give the Iraqi Environmental groups some much needed exposure, and allow Iraqis a chance to travel down their own river (hopefully) unmolested. But there were a whole host of problems with this idea. First off the river is dotted with American/Coalition obstacles … Adhamiyah Palace military base, the Green Zone and the 14th of July Bridge. Special permission would be needed to travel past them. Secondly there was the problem of approaching sensitive installations like Water Treatment facilities to take samples … I faces hassles with security guards at numerous sites on all of the pre-surveys I had done prior to the final trip (usually these ended amicably but once there was a few particularly tense moments when I could hear quite clearly hear bullets being loaded into chambers). Then there was the resistance to consider, particularly on the lower river, which is filled with farms and has an isolated feel to it … a perfect place for insurgents to hide and strike from.