Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)

August 18, 2003 Monday
SECTION: METRO; UPDATE: Newsmakers revisited; Pg. 1
BYLINE: By Bill Grady

With war looming in Iraq, Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley joined five other peace activists on a privately funded fact-finding tour of the country aimed at bringing back to the United States the viewpoints of ordinary Iraqis.

After 10 days in Iraq, Quigley came home with insights that confirmed his long-held belief in the commonality of all and the need for American understanding of the plight of the Iraqi noncombatant.

In addition to a significant degree of poverty, Quigley found in Iraq a pervasive sense of powerlessness among the citizenry, fear of the impending conflict, cynicism about the motives of the U.S. government and a cordiality toward Americans that humbled the New Orleans lawyer.

With Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship still in power, Quigley and the five others sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness were restricted in their movements, as well as in the degree of candor they received from ordinary Iraqis. Voices was created in 1996 to raise awareness about the effect the United Nations’ economic embargo against Iraq was having on Iraqi citizens

Still, Quigley made fast friends with those he encountered on a daily basis: his driver, the shoeshine boy outside his hotel, the man who ran the gift shop there. He left with a promise to learn their fates in the months after the war and a sense of dread about their future.

Quigley, 54, has kept his pledge, indirectly through friends who either stayed in Iraq during the bombing or visited the country after major combat ended.

“I talked this morning with some of the folks in the American Friends Service Committee who have come back from Iraq to visit their families,” Quigley said Wednesday. “I checked up on the shoeshine boy, the guy that runs the gift shop, and my driver, Satar, a civil engineer.” Satar — Quigley never knew his last name — had long since suspended his engineering career for the job of chauffeur. During the bombing, Quigley said, Satar was a volunteer at a hospital.

“Anybody would be honored to be a friend of this guy,” Quigley said. “He’s a kind and wise fellow in his 40s with a couple of kids. I don’t think he lost any family members in the bombing, but the most telling story about him is when the war was over and the U.S. Army came into Baghdad. At that time, some of the Voice in the Wilderness people talked to him and said, ‘You must be glad at least that the bombing is over.’ They said he started crying and said, ‘I am glad, but we have lost our country. It is your country now.’ “

The man from the hotel gift shop also was fortunate in that he lost none of his family in the fighting. However, the hotel has closed, and he has gone out of business. Quigley said the man has joined a large number of Iraqi men who are trying to find jobs driving representatives of the many nongovernmental organizations now flooding Iraq.

Finally, Ahmed, the shoeshine boy from the teeming Baghdad neighborhood Saddam City, has found the number of shineable shoes in steep decline since the war’s end. Also, buses are erratic now, so he cannot always get to the heart of Baghdad from Saddam City, now renamed Al Sadr City in memory of a Shiite cleric.

“But he is still alive,” Quigley said. “He has an older brother who was forced into the army before the war started. He was in the army maybe two weeks when his commander said, ‘Anybody who wants to leave, leave.’ People just took off running.”

As for Quigley, he said he is handling legal work for Voices in the Wilderness related to the group’s activities in Iraq. He also plans to return to the country, though he is uncertain when.

“I would like to go when the story of Saddam is finished and the occupation is over and life is great,” Quigley said, “but I don’t know when that will be. A number of people I know are saying that now is the time we should consider going back to Iraq, to tell the story of what life is like there now.”

Bill Grady can be reached at wgrady@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3323.