An expat and a refugee: The fellowship of dissent, exile and the defense of distant homelands

I first met Ahmad in March 2003 on a narrow street shining with rainwater in the deceptively unassuming castle district of Prague a few blocks from Saddam’s embassy.

He was wrapped in a gray raincoat and almost shockingly diminutive. I’d been told I was meeting the head of a local Iraqi dissident organization, and I expected someone a little more substantial. When he turned toward me, his face was one of those that stays handsome decades beyond youth, thin and well-angled, with wrinkles that enhance rather than detract. But I instantly felt his fear.

Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq, and a US invasion for the purpose of “regime change” was clearly imminent. Since Ahmad was willing to help antiwar Americans, I’d also kind of assumed he felt completely safe from Saddam’s regime here in Central Europe. It was another preconception I got wrong.

“I’ve lived here for 20 years, and I’ve never been this close to that embassy.” Ahmad’s first words to me were in flawless Czech with a slight Arabic accent that also enhanced rather than detracted from his words.

I instantly recalibrated my approach. This would take tact and empathy. Not that I’d been planning on not being empathetic. But I’d been expecting to get right into the plan and the politics. But Ahmad plunged into the personal and the stuff I would have been afraid to bring up across the cultural divide.

Image of a prague street at night, cobblestones underfoot and ancient stone arches above a small group of people walking through the light from an open doorway - Creative commons image by david seibold of flickr.com

He’d been a young anti-Saddam resistance fighter back in the 1980s at a time when the US was backing Saddam’s regime. He wasn’t Muslim, he pointed out, but rather part of a small Aramaic minority. He’d barely survived when the resistance was pulverized and sent scattering across heavily armed borders. He’d lain in a ditch just a few feet from guys with machine guns who knew he was out there and who would get a bounty if they killed him. They just didn’t happen to look down, so he lived.

Eventually, he’d made it to Turkey and was given the choice of several Soviet-bloc countries where he could get asylum and start his life over--alone, without family or anything more than his technical school education. He had to go to the Soviet bloc because an enemy of Saddam was, at the time, an enemy of the United States.

He told me he chose Czechoslovakia because his resistance cell used to meet in a brewery started by a Czech expat who lived in Iraq for a while. That was all he had to go on. The Czechs have good beer.

Now, it was 2003, the Soviet Union had fallen, Czechoslovakia was no more, the Czechs were in NATO and the United States had changed their tune about Saddam. I could tell Ahmad’s take on the politics of the situation was at best “complicated.” I didn’t blame him. On that first day, we could at least agree that his family was stuck in Iraq and facing the “shock and awe” tactics of the US military and that was not okay. We also both agreed that Saddam really sucked, but that a foreign invasion wasn’t going to help the local political situation.

With that rudimentary sense of common ground, we started an alliance between Czech, American and international antiwar groups and the Iraqi refugees in Prague. There were not many places where antiwar groups had that kind of friendship with the Iraqis. I don’t know if all the Iraqi dissident groups listened and gave the benefit of the doubt to antiwar westerners the way Ahmad did, but I know for a fact that a lot of ultra-focused antiwar activists didn’t dial right down to empathy. Maybe that was why we were different.

We held a protest in front of the Iraqi Embassy that day and then marched to the US Embassy to register our opposition to war plans. We were saying no to war and to authoritarianism by both the US and Iraqi regimes. We were making clear that opposition to the war did not mean support for Saddam’s tyranny.

Later, there were long evenings in Prague wine cellars, where I’d sit next to Ahmad while Czech activists yelled across the table and haggled about which political parties should be allowed to show their symbols at our antiwar rallies. They all wanted Ahmad there. He was a great symbol, but he rarely got a word in with his quiet voice and unassuming stature.

In one such cellar, he finally asked me. “Why are you doing this?”

We’d been over his reasons quite a few times. But I’d just assumed he understood mine. I must have gaped at him a moment too long because he clarified, “At the rally, you said you aren’t a pacifist.”

I had said that in a speech, explaining why Americans abroad were against the war. I’d said that even if one believes some wars are just, this one surely was not. We had plenty of evidence that the “weapons of mass destruction” thing was overblown propaganda. I’d gone on about civilian casualties and soldiers coming home in body bags. But apparently this hadn’t satisfied Ahmad’s curiosity.

Fair enough. Why did I care? I didn’t have any relatives in the military or in harm’s way? Why was I spending all of my spare time organizing protests against this war? He also knew I wasn’t in any political party, given my stance in the Czech inter-party debates. It was a fair question.

“I’m fighting for my country, for our democracy,” I told him. “The underlying issue is that this war and everything that’s happened since 9/11 has changed my country—America. It’s turned it into a hateful state, a surveillance state and largely a police state. Our democracy was never perfect, but this war and the Patriot Act and the rest of it is threatening what democracy we have. Sure, I care about people in Iraq. I don’t want your people to die. That’s just wrong, and I’d do what I can to stop it in any country. But yes, the reason I’m so committed, the reason I’m doing this every day, all day, sacrificing everything else to it, is because I’m afraid for my country too. We probably won’t lose militarily. But we may well lose our democracy and our freedom in this war.”

He listened but didn’t say whether he agreed with me.

Ahmad and I marched side by side at the head of a lot of antiwar demonstrations over the next two years. And he never questioned me again. There were times when we trusted each other with dangerous situations. We stood up for each other whenever there was need. If the Czech Communists came after me, he’d have my back and they would back down in the face of his moral authority. If the international activists criticized him for giving complex answers and being glad when Saddam fell a few months into the war, I defended his right to have complicated interests.

A few months into the occupation, Ahmad’s brother was driving his car in Iraq and was shot and killed by American soldiers. They later admitted it was a case of mistaken identity. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just one more civilian killed with impunity. Ahmad called me in tears. I couldn’t believe I was one of the first people he told about this.

I was shaken by my own complicated emotions. It was terrible. I felt guilty, complicit and as if he’d have every reason to hate me as an American. At the same time, I was honored that he called me, and I overwhelmingly admired his sense of fairness and forgiveness in the midst of grief.

We got through that moment. And eventually the protests died down though the endless war dragged on, and Americans and Iraqis continued to die in senseless, unnecessary and brutal ways. Once Ahmad brought his wife and daughter to my home for a potluck. But I could feel him pulling away. I worried that I reminded him of very painful things. I invited him to events, but he rarely accepted. Eventually, we drifted apart for 20 years.

The other day, a notification popped up on my Facebook, a request from an account with a non-Latin alphabet. I hit the “delete” button before I even had a chance to register it. Then, a second later, I realized the script hadn’t been Hindi or Chinese, like a lot of spam, but Arabic. And I can still sort of read Arabic, picking out letters like a first grader. So, I spent ten minutes struggling to undo my delete and get the notification back. Something, some intuition or the first letter, that tall straight Arabic letter A at the beginning of the name nagged at me.

And then, there he was, his full name and his photo--still the same ageless face, hardly seeming older at all, though by now he must be in his sixties. I sent him a friend request back and hoped against hope that he’d respond even though I’d deleted his request. We hadn’t had Facebook back in 2003-2005.

A few days later my phone rang with the weird electronic beeping that heralds an app call rather than a cell call. And there was Ahmad, my old friend. His voice was the same as always, comforting and kind with his lilting accent utterly unchanged. I’ve changed so much that I doubt he could conceive of my life now--half a world away in the US, going to graduate school and living by scavenging with two teenage kids and a broken marriage.

I was on deadline and didn’t really have the time, but we talked for over an hour anyway, sketching out twenty years for each other and mostly not talking politics.

I did ask him at one point, “Do you believe me now? This--what’s happening in the US—surely, you see it. This is what I was talking about. Some of us saw the warning signs back then. I’m still fighting the same war.”

He agreed, but seemed stumped for words of comfort, much the way I had been all those years ago when it was his family on the line.