Once a Tourist Mecca,
Iraq Still Gets Stream
of Visitors
In of the WSJ Monday Nov 4 and Ramzi Kysia quoted and Voices in there
as well. Congrats to all of you for your tireless efforts. You cracked
the military press enough to burst on their front page. As a
subscriber(yep!) of the Wall Street Journal, I'll thank Hugh Pope for
this. ( hugh.pope@wsj.com )
By Hugh Pope,
Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
November 4, 2002
BAGHDAD -- Bert Sacks of Seattle was having a tough day during this, his
ninth visit to Iraq.
Mr. Sacks's taped message of peace and love from American schoolchildren
didn't work on Iraqi VCRs. Iraqi officials had been keeping him guessing
about where he would be allowed to show it. His interpreter never turned
up. And now, politics was breaking out in a schoolyard full of children.
"Down, down, Bush!" the children screamed in English, waving schoolbooks
with color pictures of Saddam Hussein. The kids were urged on by a
gesticulating teacher. "Long live Saddam!"
Mr. Sacks, a 60-year-old retired software engineer, wasn't in Iraq on
official business. In fact, he was breaking a U.S. law that restricts
travel to Iraq. He was also violating a United Nations embargo by not
getting U.N. approval for his gifts of toys and medicine. Concerned
about reports of people dying because of sanctions, Mr. Sacks began
using his retirement money in 1996 to stage what he regards as mercy
missions to Iraq in protest of what he sees as U.S. cruelty toward
ordinary Iraqis.
In traveling to Iraq, Mr. Sacks is hardly alone. Despite U.S. threats to
invade the country and topple Saddam, Iraq continues to welcome as many
as 50,000 foreign visitors each month, according to Iraqi officials and
private travel agents. They are mostly Shia Muslim pilgrims from Iran
who take Iraqi state bus tours to worship at ancient sites and shrines.
But they include thousands of businessmen, a steady stream of Saddam
Hussein's supporters and dozens of self-appointed emissaries such as Mr.
Sacks.
In October, arrivals seen in Iraq included flocks of Arab commentators
and personalities chosen to join Ministry of Propaganda outings; radical
Serbs, here to commiserate about their common history of suffering under
U.S. bombs; members of Indonesia's Parliament; a famed professor from
Spain, who donated a 2,000-book library; three U.S. congressmen, an
80-year-old Iraqi-American expatriate and dignitaries from the African
republic of Chad.
Iraq is doing its best to woo foreign visitors, almost all of whom
arrive here by road or air through Jordan or Syria. Travel agencies can
now secure visas from Iraq for Westerners in 48 hours, and the Iraqi
Tourism Directorate now lets hotels keep foreign-currency earnings to
spruce themselves up. Baghdad's Ishtar Hotel, formerly a Sheraton, looks
nearly new. Numbers have picked up in recent years for 300 private Iraqi
tour agencies, which handle up to a fifth of the trade, although agency
owners say new talk of war is causing business to fall off again.
Those Westerners who visit do so against the recommendations of all of
their own governments. As in the case of Cuba, the U.S. threatens its
citizens with a fine or imprisonment if they travel to Iraq without
permission, even though such action is rarely taken. Last Thursday, the
State Department renewed its travel warning, saying it had received
"reports that foreigners may face the risk of kidnapping in Iraq." Only
news reporters or residents of Iraq since before the Gulf War in 1991
can travel here without permits. Permission is usually granted only for
humanitarian projects or family reunions.
Mr. Sacks's personal mission fits neither of those two categories. In
May, the U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions office ordered Mr. Sacks
to pay a $10,000 fine after he brought medicine valued at $40,000 into
Iraq in 1997. The Treasury alleged that he had admitted to breaking a
law on spending money on travel here. The information was based on
interviews he had with the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he
returned to the U.S. that year. He says he admitted no such thing and is
refusing to pay. Treasury officials says that they are persisting in
their demand that he pay the fine.
In the hot, bleached concrete courtyard of the Omar bin Mukhtar school,
the children's curiosity soon prevailed over the shouting. Mr. Sacks
spoke over a scratchy loudspeaker: "I come with a message from far away
... where the children are just like you." An impromptu translator
struggled with Mr. Sacks's speech about his wish to avert a U.S. war
with Iraq.
Three other Americans admired Mr. Sacks's efforts from the shade of a
nearby wall. All were volunteers rotating through Iraq with a group
called "Voices in the Wilderness," an American-British group based in
Chicago. A man and two women, they carried thread bracelets, pencils and
a video-player and monitor. These last were hastily rustled up from the
Baghdad office of London-based Associated Press Television News, so that
two classes of Iraqi school children could see a choir of Seattle
children singing "It's up to me, it's up to you."
Voices in the Wilderness has brought in 45 delegations in the past six
years, with volunteers ranging from rabbis to paramedics, according to
their Baghdad coordinator, Ramzi Kysia of Washington. "We hope to
generate some sort of debate" about U.S. sanctions and the embargo
imposed by the U.N. after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mr.
Kysia said. "We regard them as unjust and immoral."
Ordinary tourists from Europe, America and elsewhere come, too, though
not in the numbers they once did. A typical eight-day trip through
Baghdad's Samarra Travel and Tourism Co. can be had for $450 and up. It
includes visits to ancient cities such as Babylon, Ctesiphon and the
Ziggurat of Ur, tours of museums and medieval monuments in Baghdad. Days
typically end in restaurants by the Tigris river, which serve big carp
split in half and baked on open wood fires.
TELL ME A STORY
Read selected excerpts from the new anthology "Floating Off the Page:
The Best of The Wall Street Journal's 'Middle Column.' "
Politics can't be dodged on an Iraqi itinerary. Many tours take in a
charred bomb shelter in the Amariya district of Baghdad. Here, in
February 1991, a U.S. bomb punched a hole through six feet of reinforced
concrete and killed 391 people inside, mostly civilians. The Defense
Department says Iraq was using the bunker as a military command post,
and that it didn't know that civilians also slept there at night.
A stench still hangs in the close air of the bunker, where a party of
German journalists, a former foreign minister of India and a Chinese
businessman trooped through in quick succession one day recently. "I
never knew about this. I'm so shocked," said Peibin Tian, a businessman
from Beijing taking the day off from trying to sell circuit breakers.
Despite its post-Gulf War impoverishment, the Iraqi government is busy
building an elaborate visitors' center around the Amariya site. But
public relations can't win over all. In a visitors' book, a Dutch woman
chided Iraq for its chemical bombing of its own Kurds in 1988.
Phil Haines, who runs a tour agency from London called LIVE Travel, says
he always sends his groups to the Amiriya shelter. "I like to create
balanced itineraries," he says by telephone from London. "But I remind
them not to believe everything the guide says."
His tours, like all the others, are accompanied by his local agent and a
required government observer. But Mr. Haines, in business since 1997,
rejects the label that he organizes "axis of evil tours," as one British
newspaper called them. His last group in the spring of this year
included a London mailman, an airport worker, a retired banker and a
gynecologist. Three of them were Americans.
The Amiriya shelter was the first stop in Baghdad for Jean-François
Chevallier, a 55-year-old Frenchman from Brittany. He arrived in October
with his wife and a group of French tourists on a $2,000, 15-day package
holiday to travel all over Iraq. "We're not here because we agree with
this regime. We came here to see the other side of the story. There's
nothing about the real Iraq on television," Mr. Chevallier says.
A French travel agency had booked them into the Palestine Hotel, a
renamed former member of the French Meridien chain. The Iraqi Airlines
office in the lobby, a victim of U.N. sanctions, offers no international
flights, but a first-class ticket from Baghdad to Basra or Mosul costs
just $12.
Mr. Chevallier watched the impromptu Thursday evening show at the
reception desk: a procession of nervous brides and stiff bridegrooms
lined up at the reception desk in white robes and new haircuts. On this
first evening of the Muslim weekend, the Palestine Hotel management said
it would receive 83 such honeymoon couples. "I've been everywhere, but
this is really different," said Mr. Chevallier.
Even as it tries to win new friends, Iraq can't make itself into a
routine tourist destination. The French tour group struggled for five
hours just to clear customs formalities on the Iraqi-Syrian border, on
top of a 15-hour drive across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad. Iraq
orders any foreigner staying longer than 15 days to take an AIDS test,
administered in a local clinic. A Swedish reporter was injured in a
U.S.-British bombing raid just after he went sightseeing at Ur in 1999;
U.S. officials say the planes were aiming at antiaircraft installations.
Yet the visitors continue to come. Joe Quandt, a 52-year-old Albany,
N.Y., actor, musician and cab driver, paid his own way to Baghdad last
month in apparent violation of U.S. law because "ordinary Americans are
overwhelmingly against this war, and they are not getting the full
story."
One morning, Mr. Quandt joined a Voices in the Wilderness group to
deliver leukemia drugs to a Baghdad children's hospital. Iraqi doctors
say they get two or three such foreign delegations a day. Mr. Quandt
sobbed briefly after learning that the children to whom he had just
given cuddly toys and kaleidoscopes lack medicines and will likely die.
"Arriving here was like landing on the moon," said Mr. Quandt, who has
become a celebrity back home with reports and broadcasts about the
hardships of everyday life in Iraq. "But after a day I felt like I had
been here a year."
Write to Hugh Pope at hugh.pope@wsj.com
Updated November 4, 2002
