‘Why Mister? Why?’ The United States of America versus Iraq, the year of occupation.
Geert Van Kesteren
Focus / Cosmos
The Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren is based in Amsterdam. His book Mwendanjangula! Aids in Zambia, an inside report on the Aids pandemic in Africa, met with a critical reception and was banned from the 2000 World Aids Congress in South Africa, despite the fact that the photographs have won won several international awards and have been intensively published in leading magazines around the world. Van Kesteren is a frequent traveler to Africa and the Middle East. His first trip to Iraq was in 1998 during operation Desert Fox for the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland. On his second visit he met Uday Hussein, Saddam’s sadistic playboy son, for an exclusive interview with Stern magazine in 2000.
Preview
Just one week after the war ended, he traveled back to Baghdad. On assignment for Unicef, Newsweek and Der Stern, he reported from Iraq, with only a few interruptions, for almost seven months. The result is the book and exhibition, Why Mister? Why?, a body of work bearing witness to what went wrong in Iraq during the American occupation . It is an accusation in a clear photojournalistic way. The photographs are atrocious in their beauty, but still able to communicate. It is the Iraqi experience, as close as you can get, as if you were there. It takes the viewer to the moment and makes him stop, think and raise questions. In the book Geert van Kesteren refers to his diary notes of the period.
War is over. Saddam is gone. Villagers of Al Mahawil start digging for the truth. They cannot wait any longer. An orange excavator opens the haunted ground. Tens, no hundreds of skeletons are uncovered. As souls escape from the mass grave, a blanket of sadness falls over the bystanders. We all cry. “Saddam, Saddam, what have you done?”, 80-year old Teddah Hafed weeps. She returns home. On top of the mini-van, in a coffin are the remains of her sons Fasal and Naim. Fasal’s wife recognized her husband’s watch. She beats herself on the chest as she is yelling in pain. Her 13-year old son has never known his father. He will never know him. Three days before his fathers remains were found, the child was killed. By the American army. The new liberator and occupier.
This is one of the many emotional moments on my journey in Iraq. Hope and despair are so close. Is this the preposterousness of a war? The ultimate sacrifice for freedom? Or has nothing changed? Violence makes room for violence, the King is dead, long live the King…
…Was it narrow-minded and naive to think Iraq was willing to have a war, so America could establish their fairy-like democracy in the Middle-East? Most Iraqis wish Saddam and Bush had fought their duel in the desert with a gun on their hip, that much is clear. So why is it so hard for America to win hearts and minds? Do or do they not want to understand the Iraqi culture? The arrogant, macho Americans, with their spacey sun-glasses and hip-hop music, vis-a-vis the Arab, who has learned to mistrust, and with his constant tea, keffiya and Kalashnikov. The veiled women, completely different from the silicon babes at Miami Beach…
…I met young, feared American soldiers whose biggest wish was to go home. ‘The Iraqi will never like you’, they said, ‘So, they better fear us’. They traveled in Iraq without the knowledge of any Arabic word. Their superiors thought a translator was not necessary. All they knew by now was the language of mistrust, fear and hate. Graffiti on their lavatory door told it all:
“Why Mister? Why?”
