Entire Sgrena article up. No typos!
Mon Mar 07, 2005 at 12:16:32 AM PDT
I wrote the first part in the previous diary.
La Repubblica has filled in where Il Manifesto left off, and I translated that part as well in the previous diary! (Not like anyone read it or anything) The rest of the article is on the flip.
This was the most dramatic day. But the month that I lived as a confiscated one has probably changed my existence forever. A month alone with myself, prisoner of my deepest convictions. Every hour was a piteous verification on my work. Sometimes they took me around, they arrived to ask me why I ever wanted to go away, to remain. They insisted on personal relationships. It was they to make me think about that priority which we often put aside. They pointed on the family. "Ask your husband for help", they would say. And I said it even in the first video that I believe you have all seen. Life is changed for me. The Iraqi engineer Ra'ad Ali Abdulaziz told it to me, about "a bridge for" being kidnapped with the two Simonas, "my life is no longer the same", he said.
I did not understand. Now I know what he meant. Because I felt all the hardness of the truth, its difficult proposability. And the fragility of who tests it.
In the first days of kidnapping I did not shed a single tear. I was simply infuriated. I said in the face of my kidnappers: "But how, you kidnap me who am against the war?" And at that point they opened a ferocious dialogue. "Yes, because you go to speak with the people, we would never kidnap a journalist who stays in a hotel. And then the fact that you say you are against the war could be a cover". And I retorted, almost to provoke them: "Is it easy to kidnap a weak woman like me, because you do not try with the American soldiers?" I insisted on the fact that they could not ask the Italian government to withdraw the troops, their "political" questioner could not be the government but the Italian people who were and are against the war.
It was a seesaw month, between strong hopes and moments of great depression. As when, it was the first Sunday after the Friday of kidnapping, in the Baghdad house where I was confiscated and on which a satellite dish topped, they made me see a Euronews TV report. There I saw my photograph blown up hung up on the town hall in Rome. And I was heartened. Then however, immediately after, arrived the vindication of the Jihad, who announced my execution if Italy did not withdraw its troops. I was terrorized. But immediately they reassured me that it was not them, I must distrust those proclamations, they were some "provokers". I asked often that one who, from his face, seemed the most available who, however, had, with the other one, a soldier's appearance: "Tell me the truth, you want to kill me". And yet, many times, there were strange windows of communication, precisely with them. "Come to see a movie on TV", they would say to me, while a Wahabi woman, covered from head to foot, turned through the house and attended to me.
The kidnappers seemed a very religious group to me, in continuous prayer on the verses of the Koran. But Friday, at the moment of my release, that one who seemed the most religious of all and who got up every morning at 5 to pray, made for me his "congratulations", unbelievably, pressing my hand strongly--this is not a usual behavior for an Islamic fundamentalist--adding, "If you behave well you leave immediately". Then, an almost amusing episode. One of the two guardians came to my location terrified both because the TV showed my pictures hung up in the European cities and because of Totti. Yes, Totti, he declared himself a fan of Rome and had remained disconcerted that his favorite player had gone down in the field with the writing "Free Giuliana" on his jersey.
[Iraqi soccer: uniting everyone]
I have lived in an enclave in which I no longer had certainties. I have found myself again deeply weak. I had failed in my certainties. I maintained that it was necessary to go to tell about this filthy war. And I found myself again in the alternative of either staying in a hotel in order to wait or to finish confiscated by fault of my work. "We no longer want anyone", the confiscators were saying. [Aha! They are holding her to kick out the Western journalists!] But I wanted to tell the bloodbath of Falluja through the word of refugees. And that morning already the refugees, and some of their "leaders" did not listen to me.
I had in front of me the exact verification of the analyses on what Iraqi society had become with the war and they hurled their truths in my face: "We don't want anyone, why don't you remain at home, what's the use of this interview to us?" The worse collateral effect, the war that kills communication, crashed upon me. To me who risked everything, defying the Italian government who did not want journalists to be able to reach Iraq, and the Americans who do not want our work to witness what that country has truly become with the war, notwithstanding what they call elections.
Now I ask myself. Is this refusal of theirs a failure? ["Fallimento" also means "bankruptcy". Irony abounds].
Gilgamesh had some of this. I think the article ended properly. Iraqis' refusal even to give an interview shows that they have given up on the ability of the West to interfere in their lives for any good.
Update [2005-3-7 3:32:23 by 4jkb4ia]:
Oh, hell, Cohe has the whole thing up already translated. Why can't I read?
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