On 26 January, 2002, Lisa Ndejuru and two other activists from Montreal/Ottawa communities left Montreal for Iraq. They were going to Iraq to join the Iraq Peace Team, an international solidarity effort organized by Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness. Voices in the Wilderness has been actively opposing the sanctions and ongoing bombing of Iraq since 1996. In the face of mounting threats against Iraq, they initiated the Iraq Peace Team project in September 2002, which has maintained a constant presence of international activists in Iraq, standing in solidarity with the Iraqi people and working to prevent the invasion. The Iraq Peace Team intends to remain with the Iraqi people during an attack, sending back reports about how the assault is affecting people on the ground. This is Lisa Ndejuru’s first of a series of dispatches for rabble. At the time of writing, she had been in Baghdad for almost a month.

When I am afraid I can’t remember why I am here. What seemed to be a good reason comes apart at the seams. Advocacy, accompaniment, witnessing. Reason, I find, does not have much room in matters of war.

How I came to be here…

I was born in Rwanda in 1970.

When colonialists came to Rwanda, first the German, then the Belgian, they must have come in waves, first those who needed to get out of Europe, see new things, try their luck. Find “virgin” territory. Then the clerics to bless this “new” soil, its people, the endeavour. Then maybe the salesmen and the army.

I don’t believe I can answer all my questions or resentments through the study of colonialism or missionary work for I don’t believe that is all of the story. Even then there were power plays, and if the Germans and the Belgians managed to divide and rule in Rwanda, then it was because we, the people, were divided to begin with. As are all people.

Today there are three words for Rwandan — Tutsi, Hutu and Twa — and, sadly, only the first two really count. There is still only one word, “Musungu,” for the white man, be he French, German, English, from the North or the South, rich, middle-class, poor, moral or amoral, friend or foe, soldier or president.

I never lived in Rwanda. My parents were able to leave the country when I was still a child. My father was able to secure a scholarship in a German university, and my mother joined him on a refugee visa when I was fifteen months old. For ten years she went through visa renewal every six months. “Ausländer” means Foreigner in German.

The family was all together except for my aunt, the eldest of the girls, who tried her luck in Canada.

My mother went to Canada to give her sister-in-law away. The wedding took place in the summer of 1977 in Montreal. The story goes that mama saw the rue St. Denis with the people happy and the bistros outside, fell in love, and knew her children would have a bright future there. She applied for immigrant status and it was granted. I came to Canada in 1982. I didn¹t know what “immigration” meant. I was eleven years old.

Immigration means starting over. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s never quite a blank new page, “virgin territory.” Today I have a status; I have rights. My vote counts. I am a Canadian, une Québecoise, a Montrealer. With my passport I can travel all over the world.

Why am I here?

If I answer this question again and again I may yet come up with a satisfactory answer. (Bear with me.)

I saw Rwanda again in 1990. I was nineteen. We visited Uganda first. My grandfather lived in a refugee camp in the south . He had been able to flee in the time of the Rwandan civil war in 1959. What I remember most is his tireless devotion, the red dust everywhere and his shiny shoes, the beautiful huts, the children carrying water and the old people drunk before noon. All of the young had gone to Kampala, the city, to find work. Uganda was trying to heal from twenty years of dictatorship under Idi Amin. Museveni, the new leader, had been in power only two years; there were still bomb holes everywhere, and soldiers. My cousin was a soldier in Museveni’s army. He was a sergeant and fifteen years old. Many Rwandan refugees of my generation and older living in Uganda were soldiers in that civil war. And when it was won, they were still only foreigners — people without status, without rights, who didn’t count.

In 1990 they had enough, they were going home. For over thirty years, the Rwandan government had forbidden the Rwandan refugees to come home. This time they would not be stopped, gathering from all the neighbouring countries, from all over the world, where time and circumstance would find them they gathered in this will to go “home,” by force if necessary.

I remember crying.

Was it acceptable that people should be denied full human status, dignity, belonging, a future? Was it acceptable to claim these things by force? How could this end but badly?

In fall of 1990, the war started. The Rwandan Patriotic Front fought its way into the country. Four years of guerrilla warfare. The government was going to fall. Peace negotiations were organized in neighbouring Tanzania. In April 1994, on its return from the peace negotiation, the president’s plane was shot down. It was a signal. The government’s army and the militia turned on the Tutsi population. The whole country had been organized into killer factions. Neighbours killed neighbours; wives were killed and husband, Nobody was spared, not the old, not the women, not the children. It was a killing frenzy that lasted more than two weeks.

Over a million Tutsis were slaughtered. Hutu sympathisers and moderates were also murdered. I was in Montreal with my family and other members of the Rwandan community. What I remember the most is the utter helplessness, the horror at the pictures, the absurdity of live coverage without live relief. And, on the other channel, the news on the crisis in the Balkans.

I tried to make sense of it all. I tried to understand how it could all happen. How people could grow to hate so much. How the whole international community could know and stand by. Afterwards, I read most of the books analyzing, commenting, casting blame, passing the buck. One could presume it was an internal tragedy but there were so many layers — so many international players were involved in one way or another for years and years and years.

I went back to Rwanda in 1996. I have not mentioned the displaced, the prisoners, the mentally ill, the orphans, the children of rape, the widows, the broken families, the new wave of refugees outside of the country. The trouble in the neighbouring countries. I have not mentioned the international tribunal, held up for years. The UN peace keeping force, ordered not to intervene.

Life goes on in Rwanda. In spite of it all, life goes on. A tribute to human resiliency.

* * *

Today I am in Baghdad. I came to join the Iraq Peace Team, an initiative by Voices in the Wilderness.

Our statement reads as follows : “We pledge to do all we can to be voices for our brothers and sisters in Iraq, by reporting to our home countries the situation here, we hope to bring awareness of the reality of Iraqi life, a reality that is not available on most media outlets. Our intent is to take up residence in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities before and during a U.S. assault, should a new attack occur.”

When I left Montreal all I knew was that I could never again watch another war on TV. I only knew what I heard on the news, and what I had understood from the anti-war movement and the movement to end the sanctions on Iraq. When I left, I wasn’t sure who to believe, but I knew I had to do something. So I came here to see more clearly.

The situation is terrible. The people here are stuck between an all-powerful, righteous local elite and an all-powerful, righteous international elite. The latter is hell-bent on creating a world in its image (or, rather, at its service) and will stop at nothing to secure its absolute hold on the region. It’s cheaper to start from scratch than to restore. The people of Iraq are surrounded by noncommittal neighbours, save one outrightly hostile ,and an international community lining up to share the spoils of war. They are weakened by twelve years of economic sanctions, arms inspection, regular bombing as well as the memory and the toxic residue of the last war and the drawn-out, escalating threat of imminent destruction.

Seventy per cent of the population here is dependent on the food rations provided by the food-for-oil program. There are places of abject poverty and no more middle class. Twelve years ago, the dinar was worth $3.30 U.S. Today it won’t buy you a penny (250 dinars = 10 cents). Their fate is being played in an international context where they are asked to produce weapons of mass destruction: they are damned if they don’t (non co-operation) and damned if they do (material breach). Completely ignored by the media, the people of Iraq are watching the world behave as though there were only one person in the country: Saddam Hussein.

In terms of food health and sanitation, Iraqi’s infrastructure is now stretched beyond its capacity and would not be able to absorb damage inflicted by war. By conservative UN calculations, war on Iraq would be a humanitarian catastrophe leaving more than four million people unaided.

Iraq is under constant satellite and radar surveillance. U.S. and British planes are flying in the no-fly zone. And bombing by the U.S. has gone on constantly since 1991, in the south of the country. The depleted uranium on the warheads and vehicles used by the U.S. in the last war have contaminated the people, the water, the air and the soil in the south of the country for millennia to come. Birth defects and cancer have risen dramatically.

Today, even though there has been massive popular opposition to the war by people from countries all over the world and especially in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia, over 150,000 U.S. troops are amassed all around Iraq ready to wage war with an arsenal of weapons so sophisticated just conceiving them should have been a crime (never mind producing them and acquiring them, and planning to use them). Forty-seven per cent of the country’s population is under sixteen years of age.

Why am I here?

When the genocide happened in my country of origin, I thought the victims were the price everybody was willing to pay to get their way. I was told that things were so very different here. I’m sitting here in Baghdad, and I wonder.