Will You Publish This Story?
By Nida Mariam
23 October,
2008
Combat
Law
Lubna, a young woman from Baghdad, mother of four, stranded in Cairo, narrates her ordeals to Nida Mariam
She
left al Doura, south Baghdad, in the darkness before dawn.
At five a.m. one morning, in mid-2006, 40 days after her father had
been murdered by militiamen in front of her mother's eyes, Lubna Hamed
Rasheed, 35 years old at the time, bundled up her belongings, collected
her courage, and told her toddler, "As soon as we cross the Iraqi
border, we will be out of danger."
There was a stream of cars moving together from her street. And when she, her children, and her neighbours got into the bus station, to take the land route to Syria, it felt as if all of Iraq was waiting to flee.
***
In the moments before Lubna was to arrive for our appointment, I quickly
scanned my email to find the record I had been sent of her. No testimony
about her experience in Iraq showed up. Five short depressing sentences
describing her situation since she had come to Egypt—that was
all I had.
The doorbell rang. Dressed in a black abaya, clutching her phone and
a loosely wrapped headscarf casually under her chin, she walked in.
She had something of a spark in her smile. She greeted us with warmth.
Few minutes later, seated side by side on the comfort of a couch, I suggested something through Omaima, our translator, who sat in front of us, “We can keep your name and other details anonymous, if you’d like.” Lubna stirred some sugar into her tea, set the spoon down on the metal tray, and shook her head resolutely, “No, I wish you could publish this. I want everyone to know.”
***
They shot her father in the leg when he tried to escape. They shot
him eight times in all.. But the hospital report said it would have
made no difference had they not shot, at all. By the time they took
out their guns and fired, his spleen was already bleeding. They had
beaten him up badly enough.
That morning, Lubna's mother ran out of her home in al Khadra, west
Baghdad, to save her husband from the militiamen. Again and again,
she kissed their feet, begging them to stop, begging them for mercy,
begging them to leave.
***
I requested Lubna to tell us about her life in Egypt.
Lubna left Baghdad in the darkness before dawn in mid-2006. She bundled
up her belongings, collected her courage, and told her toddler: "As
soon as we cross the Iraqi border, we will be out of danger"
“I will speak in an Iraqi accent,” she stated, checking
with Omaima that her speech was comprehensible, before offering us
the first-round, watered-down version, of the trial that was her life.
“I have four children—three daughters and a son. In Iraq I was married to this Egyptian man, when I came here with my children, he divorced me.”
Trite and tragic, that’s how she began.
“We didn’t find any housing. I didn’t know what to do. For six months we were homeless. We slept in the street.”
That the divorce was ugly and unfair and unresolved was sad, not surprising. But the legal particularities of her marriage to that man unravelled a little later.
Her four children, though born in Iraq, were by virtue of their father,
registered as Egyptian citizens at birth. Now that he had abandoned
her, she had no one else to turn to in Egypt. “And we can’t
go back to Iraq because my children are Egyptian and I don’t
have anyone in Iraq. I don’t have a house in Iraq. I have nothing
there,” she explains. But even if Lubna were to decide to go
back to the dangers of Baghdad, she could not take her children with
her. They would be denied entry. These were the citizenship laws of
the Arab world. Despite their mother’s nationality, as children
of an Egyptian immigrant, they had no current legal status in Iraq.
She lay down her cup of tea and reiterated for a second time that afternoon, “My children are not in school. I am very upset because my eldest daughter is 14 years old and cannot read and write.” She explained that her daughters had been out of the classroom for three years now.
But why, if they were Egyptian nationals, were her children not able to enrol in public school?
When Lubna finally found a place to live in October 6 City just months ago, she had approached the local school authorities, “But they wanted the children's documents from their schools in Iraq, and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring them. My father was killed in the war. My brothers are in detention. I don’t have anyone to run for this and bring the papers.” For all she knows the teachers at that school are dead; and from what she remembers the US Armed
Forces occupy the building now.
And then
there was the issue of rent. For five days the landlord had been knocking
on the door, demanding the payment, threatening to throw her out again.
The last time he had come she had pretended as if she was not home.
She could not bear the thought of being back with her children on
the street.
Was there anywhere that she had tried to go for assistance?
When Lubna went to the Cairo offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), she was turned away at the gate. The security guards informed her that, despite her Iraqi nationality, she was not eligible for refugee status. “Because my children are Egyptian, we can stay here, so they don’t consider me a refugee.” Omaima, who works extensively with all refugees and helps them with their applications to UNHCR, explained that though Lubna was, in a sense, a refugee, she had a better legal standing than other Iraqis in Cairo, who are granted recognition as asylum seekers primarily in order to be issued residency permits. These other Iraqis do not have the right to employment. As a mother of Egyptian nationals, Lubna has the right to live and work in Egypt.
Lubna’s life has been triumph more than tragedy. For one, despite
the legalities surrounding the fact that her nationality is different
than her children, she managed, against the odds, to bring them with
her to Egypt
Lubna tried to work as a housemaid, but had a lot of problems because of that. She can’t leave her children out of her sight, often afraid to even take them outside. She thinks someone might kidnap them. She gets frightened every time the doorbell rings; she thinks someone has come to attack even though she knows ‘these things’ don’t happen in Egypt. “I have something like a phobia”, she reveals, “Maybe from Iraq, because our life was just in horror. I was seeing people being killed and being raped and being abducted and everything.”
Her mind switched tracks for a brief moment. “Will you publish this story?” she asked in anticipation. “Maybe someone will have a good heart to help me,” when the idea of what we had just begun started to sink in.
***
Lubna decided to leave al Doura because of "those men who cover their faces and only show their eyes". She doesn’t know who they are. Sectarian tensions erupted in this part-Shia, part-Sunni neighbourhood where people once inter-married. These men had gone in and mutilated her neighbour's son. These men started breaking in, looting houses, murdering people, and raping girls. There were blackouts, randomly. She no longer felt safe for her daughters and stopped sending them to school.
She used to make a good living off the lorry that was in her name. She didn’t ever have to work as such, as the lorry driver would transport cement and other building material from construction companies to markets around Baghdad. Then the men stole her lorry, and she lost everything.
The war did not leave anything behind.
II
The second time I met Lubna I drove out to her place in October 6 City, with my friend, Mai, who was kind enough to come and play translator. The weather was gorgeous and Lubna came out, her younger daughter and youngest son trailing behind, to the main street to meet us. Once again, her headscarf draped loosely around her head, she held her phone in her hand. And as before, there was warmth.
As we sauntered back to her block, and up her building stairs, I prepared myself for what I knew from the email would be in her apartment. Nothing. “Lives in a bare flat with not a single piece of furniture; needs clothing—has only one blanket for all five of them to sleep under,” part of it had read.
As we entered, Lubna’s two elder daughters emerged from the bedroom and gathered around us with shy smiles. The younger two children went out to the small balcony to play. We sat down on mats on the floor in the living room, and I gleaned from her manner a newfound sense of belonging, “We didn’t have a place before, but now this is considered our place,” she said. The worst had come to pass, and she was picking up the pieces and beginning to provide for her children a notion of normality that she knew she must maintain.
“You know what you’re like when you don’t sleep for a day?” Lubna directed the question toward me, to get me to fathom what it had been like when she was homeless on the streets. “I would take the children to many places, from morning to night, we would want to sleep but couldn’t. We were very tired.”
Poignant and pointed, she continued, “We’d stay around Saeeda Zainab, or outside the Iraqi embassy. Sometimes, if I had money enough from people at the masjid, we’d go to Mansoora, other times we’d go to Alexandria, and stay at the homes of other Iraqis. For example, in Syria, I met this Iraqi woman, so I went to spend the night with her. In Alexandria, I knew some Iraqi people so I went to spend the night with them. Sometimes I’d stay at some person’s place, sometime in the street, sometime in another person’s. I would just go because I needed to sleep.”
But it wasn’t as easy as that; there were issues of personal pride and cultural etiquette involved, “As soon as I started to feel that they were not very welcoming anymore, I would leave. I would take my children and walk in the streets again.” I hadn’t noticed, but Haneen, her eldest daughter had gone into the kitchen. She came out carrying a tin tray with three small glasses of tea. She set it down between us and rejoined our circle of conversation.
***
Months after Lubna’s husband had divorced her, her husband’s uncle’s wife called and asked to take her eldest daughter, Haneen, to their family home in upper Egypt for a wedding. Lubna went to the police station and signed papers to ensure that she was the sole legal guardian of her four children. She then made her husband’s uncle’s wife put her palm on the Koran and swear that she would return her daughter to her. Then she let Haneen go.
When her husband’s uncle’s wife returned to Cairo after the wedding she told Lubna that Haneen had decided to stay on with her father.
In upper Egypt, Lubna’s mother-in-law told Haneen that Lubna was dead. She then put Haneen to work in the field and to milk the cows in the shed, which Haneen did not want to do.
One day Haneen managed to call Lubna. She was crying. Her grandmother, Lubna’s mother-in-law, was planning to sell Haneen’s hand in marriage to a much older man for a sum of 9000 LE.
From then on, with the help of a sympathetic aunt, Haneen would call Lubna crying almost every week. Lubna used all the tactics she had. And even threatened to fax President Mubarak and inform the police until she had her daughter back. It took eight months before Lubna had Haneen back in her custody.
***
Lubna’s life has been triumph more than tragedy. For one, despite the legalities surrounding the fact that her nationality is different than her children, she managed, against the odds, to bring them with her to Egypt.
When coming to Egypt via Syria, the fact that she was Iraqi and her children Egyptian caused her much trouble. She explained, “I had my passport, I could easily get into Syria with no visa, because I am Iraqi. But as Egyptians, my children should have a visa, even simply to pass through.” Furthermore, as they were minors they were all registered on her husband’s passport, and he had already left. With no Egyptian embassy operating in Iraq at the time, Lubna had to issue them some strange one-way transit document that nobody had seemed to recognise and sign a paper promising to leave Syria for Egypt in two weeks time. But the authorities wouldn’t let her in easily, the bus driver begged the police on her behalf. Lubna faced much harassment from then. Then they let her through into Syria but refused to let her take the road to Jordan. They insisted she take a flight. And then there was a ray of luck, “The Egyptian ambassador sympathised with me, when he saw me crying at the Egyptian embassy. He called me in, asked them to bring me food, and he took the children and got their photos taken for the travel document, even though it was after hours, and at 2 pm the embassy closed its doors. But he sympathised with me when he saw the little one crying. He was a young man, and had very good, kind manners.” She considers him the one who saved her life, kept her family intact. By then, however, Lubna was already out of money, so she sold her cell phone, borrowed money from some generous refugees and bought five plane tickets to Cairo. She arrived in Cairo with not a guinea in hand.
Lubna’s present legal predicament is her own nationality. Her passport has expired. “I wanted to renew my passport and when I went to the Iraqi embassy they ask me where my mehram is! I went three times to Iraqi embassy in Mohandiseen last month.” Lubna is 37 years old she and is still considered a minor and requires an immediate male relative in order to renew her citizenship documents. The male relative has to be Iraqi so even her husband coming, were he to oblige her, would not do. Lubna has no other relatives in Egypt. With her father dead, and her brothers traumatised, she has no one to help her from Iraq.
“How can I bring those here?
Everyone has their own problems and we are all scattered around the globe, I cannot reach any of them. How can I bring you someone if I don’t have anyone?” she asks rhetorically. As for protection for her children, “They said, ‘we are not responsible for them, they are Egyptian, ’” explaining how she is falling through the crack. Lubna’s situation presents the precariousness of a woman’s legal status in the current socio-political milieu of the Middle East.
Despite her divorce and everything else, Lubna has kept her children
together, and when I asked if they have any physical or psychological
problems because of everything they’ve been through, she praises
God, “Besides Mohammed’s cough, the kids are fine, mashallah.”
The toll has perhaps all been borne by her, “I have a problem.
I get nauseous quite often. When I put cold water I feel better, and
it affects this area,” physically indicating a searing pain
around the crown of her head. “The pain stays,” she says,
“And sometimes I feel faint.”
***
Before the fall of Baghdad, Lubna says she would never bother to have breakfast at her home in al Doura: "I would take a cab, and go to my mother's in al Khadra to have breakfast there every morning. Every morning, I would go to have breakfast with her. We would have thick cream and hot bread.”
“We were something beautiful back then."
That is:
> before her father was killed;
> before her mother withdrew from social life;
> before her brothers were tortured;
> before her family was scattered—her sisters seeking asylum in Syria, her brothers getting detained in Buka prison and Abu Ghraib;
> before her brother-in-law was caught in a landmine;
> before her cousin was cut up;
> before another was blown up;
> before yet another went to the market and never returned;
> before all of that,
>
before the fall of Baghdad, while still sitting around and chatting
in the garden over breakfast, they were something beautiful.
