It has been so long since Kanan Jalal Ibrahim heard the joke that he has forgotten it. He thinks for a minute, scratches his short, well-trimmed beard and apologizes. It just doesn’t come back, he says.
But he says he never will forget the despair it caused him.
Ibrahim, 47, takes his time recounting his tale in the hushed courtyard of a small Shiite mosque in a down-and-out West Baghdad neighborhood, a place where he has found peace over the years.
It is a story about injustice and government abuse that is hardly rare in these post-Saddam Hussein days. It’s also nearly impossible to corroborate because of the loss of prison records in the fury of war and the looting that followed.
Ibrahim says he was thrown in jail for six years and all his savings were taken away because of the joke. His three sisters and five brothers were reassigned in their government jobs to distant locations, and they too became pariahs.
At Iraq’s worst prison, Abu Ghraib, he was tortured along with political dissidents, murderers and thieves. He rarely washed, was often sick and seldom received medicine, he says. He almost never saw his family or relatives. Some of his cellmates lost their minds.
Some inmates also saw female family members dragged to the prison and stripped naked in front of them and their interrogators to make the prisoners talk. But Ibrahim was spared that, he says, because his crime was less serious than theirs. He only heard a joke about Hussein and was suspected by the government of belonging to an underground Shiite movement.
To be precise, he heard a friend in a coffeehouse tell a joke about Hussein. Six months later, after joining the army, he was arrested and brought before a military court, where he was asked why as a loyal Iraqi he had not informed on the person who told the joke.
His manners did not permit him to do such a thing, he recalls saying. He later learned it was his friend who fingered him, allegedly after undergoing extensive torture.
Interrogators thought Ibrahim was a member of the Islamic Dawa Party, the largest of the Shiite opposition groups and a target of stiff suppression by Hussein’s regime. Though he supported the party, he was not a member, he says. Since then, however, the party has honored him as one of those who suffered on its behalf, he adds.
Upon leaving the prison in 1986, Ibrahim was forced to return to the army. Excused from the military four years later, he planned his survival in a system that had marked him. He would leave his family behind in his hometown because he knew nobody would hire him.
Opportunities lost
Ibrahim moved to Baghdad from his town about 60 miles away. He took another name, tried to look different and start over on his own. But it didn’t work. He barely could find a job.
He attended Baghdad University, where he says he completed a doctorate in Islamic studies. His specialty was ancient Koranic calligraphy. Barred from teaching at a government-run university, and unwanted by most companies because of his prison record, he went from job to job, he says.
He found a small room to rent near the Al Zoua Mosque. About a dozen of its members disappeared into Hussein’s prisons over the years. Their pictures are pasted on the front of the mosque.
“Look at him and him,” Ibrahim says, walking up and down the row of pictures. “I knew many of them.”
When Iraqi Shiites rose up after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he traveled south, he says, to join the revolt. But it was quickly suppressed, and he was given 3 months in prison for taking part.
Since his second prison term, job offers have been rare. Because he earned so little money, he could not bring his wife and two young daughters to live with him in Baghdad. His salary as a salesman at an electrical-parts store is not enough for him to find a larger place to live.
`The price of freedom’
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As he recounts the turns his life has taken, there is no anger or sadness. Just a matter-of-fact telling by a short, silver-haired scholar with thick glasses and a thick sheaf of papers that looks like a manuscript, which he clutches under one arm.
Against the chill he wears a crumpled jacket.
“I learned to be strong,” Ibrahim says. “I learned how to live with these problems. Even now with all of the problems we have–crime, no gas, bad electricity and no jobs–all of this I’ve learned to accept. All of this is the price of freedom.
“And freedom is better than anything else. It’s better than Saddam’s men coming to arrest you in the middle of the night, dragging you out of your bed and beating you in front of your wife and children. It is a price we are willing to pay.”