The men with the noose Ali Fares and Khaled Hamid
When the US armour arrived at Firdous Square on April 9, Ali Fares and Khaled Hamid gravitated towards the commotion. "I brought the ladder," says Fares. "We asked the Americans to bring us this rope with a noose. I climbed the ladder myself. To begin with, I was scared, but when I climbed the ladder, the Iraqis started clapping, even the American soldiers. I heard them saying nice things about me. I couldn't reach Saddam's head, but by that time there was no fear. I was sure we'd got rid of him." In the end, he says, he managed to sling the noose around the dictator's neck. "I felt so strong then. I wasn't scared of him any more. My job was finished and, as the leader of our country, so was Saddam."
Hamid says: "We weren't able to catch Saddam himself, so the statue had to stand in. I was happy. I was proud. I know that even President Bush was watching us." But the pride was tinged with revulsion. "To be honest, I was upset about the Americans coming. Nobody accepted the occupation. But we were ready to be allied with the Jews, with Satan, just to get rid of Saddam."
In fact Fares and Hamid played their part in Saddam's downfall long before they helped to topple the statue. They were both deserters from the Iraqi army. Fares, who is 21, fled his unit, which was based in Tikrit, on the same day that he joined it. His friend Hamid, who is 10 years older, was more organised. His unit was based on the Kurdish front, north of Baghdad. Hamid never turned up. All he had to do was go to the Baghdad home of his commanding officer every once in a while and deposit a no show fee of 50,000 dinars (about $30).
"Saddam was a pain in the arse," observes Fares, a wary, diffident man who runs a tea shack behind the modern blocks of flats that overlook Firdous Square, where Saddam's statue stood. Hamid lives around the corner. A year later, Fares does not regret what he did, but he is not happy with the way things have worked out. It is hard graft in the tea shack. The kettle hisses on the hob and deafening music squawks from a radio, but there are not many takers for tea, and the half-dozen ornate hookahs go unhired.
"We're depressed and we're frustrated," says Fares. "We thought the coalition forces came here for reconstruction, for the prosperity of the people. It hasn't happened. I was glad to get rid of Saddam, but that doesn't mean I like the Americans. I don't regret pulling down his statue, because if I hadn't done it somebody else would have, but if the situation had remained as it was under Saddam I personally would have been better off now."
Fares' complaint is characteristic of Iraqis; high expectations unfulfilled, and an unending affront to their dignity. Fares lives with his mother and stepfather. He wants more money. He wants a car. Most of all, he wants to be able to go and work in Europe, but besides the fact that Europe does not want him, the temporary travel documents that the Coalition Provisional Authority is issuing are not valid for crossing any border.
Since the international bonhomie of April 9, Fares hasn't met any Americans. "Even if they passed me by, I wouldn't wave at them," he says. "They are in the same position as we are. They are scared of us, and we are scared of them."
Hamid, who has trained to be a sports schoolteacher, is unemployed. He is as ambivalent a year after the toppling of the statue as he was at the time. His immediate response when asked how his life has changed since April 9, is to say that it has improved, for one reason: his brother Raed Hamid, an engineer, has found a good job in the postwar oil industry in Basra. His salary has increased tenfold, to more than $150, which supports the family of four unmarried sons and their parents.
I visit the Hamid family house on the day of the bombings in Kerbala and Baghdad, which left scores of people dead. The Hamids are Shias. Khaled says that he was supposed to have gone to Kerbala, but the car didn't turn up. Khaled has a scratch on his nose from their cat, Kuti, who was born on the day the statue fell. Their house is an unlived-in space that looks as if it were offices until recently; the family say they rent it from the religious affairs ministry. There is a suspicious mound of fire extinguishers and old pipeline parts in the garden. The Hamids say that they are just looking after them for a friend.
Khaled talks about his life since the day the statue fell. He occasionally goes to the education ministry to ask if it has jobs for sports teachers, but it says it does not have the money. In October, he went down to Basra as he had heard the British there were handing out back pay to demobbed soldiers. He witnessed a riot in which the British were attacked by hundreds of former soldiers, and they mistakenly shot a school watchman who they thought was firing at them. "It was a hell of chaos," he says, sitting cross-legged on a fine rug.
Raed Hamid, who also witnessed the fall of the statue, is there, too, on leave from his job. "I think our country is like other countries occupied after wars, like Germany, like Japan," he says. "What happened in this year happened in those countries, definitely ... what I need from Iraqis is for them to be patient. Everything isn't going to calm down in a moment."
Khaled says: "The Americans should leave our country, but I'm 100% sure they're not going to. They came all this way. They experienced all that sacrifice, lost hundreds of men and spent so much money. Do you think they will leave this country so easily? No. There will be American bases outside our cities."
Later, Khaled takes me across the road to visit a friend, Hussein Abdul Bari Obeid, whose house was broken into by US troops on a raid on Eid, the last day of Ramadan. Khaled went to see if he could help, but the soldiers warned him off. "They started shouting 'Go! Go! Leave this area!'," he says. "I wasn't in a position to tell them that I was one of the ones who had toppled the statue. There were machine guns pointed at my head."
Obeid explains what happened to him. Three American soldiers entered the yard, told Obeid and his friends to put their hands up while they searched for weapons, took hold of Obeid's chin, moved his head from side to side, and ordered him to take his shirt off and stand facing the wall. He refused. He was handcuffed and taken into the street. Against a background of screaming, weeping and protesting by the family, male and female, the Americans broke into the house and searched it, finding two Kalashnikovs, which they confiscated, although Obeid insisted he needed at least one for his job as watchman at a car park.
"After that, the American officer untied me. I didn't say anything. They wrote some words on my forearm, three lines: the day, the date, the kind of weapon, the serial number. Then the officer said: 'Happy Eid!' And he left."
Later, another US unit came through with a kind of "How's my driving?" mopping-up operation, asking locals whether the first unit had treated them courteously. They handed out leaflets with an Arabic translation of a speech by George Bush talking about the spirit of peace and love in Ramadan.
"Well, they gave me this paper, but they hadn't respected their own president," says Obeid. "They went into my house with their shoes on and they pointed a gun at my mother. That wasn't done under Saddam. We were repressed, and now we're going to be repressed again." JM