Knoxvillians who have seen war in their homelands talk about what it is really like
by Joe Tarr
On January 17, 1991, Rita Oro wouldn't wake up. She's a heavy sleeper and this early morning was no exception for her. Her mother was yelling to Rita's older sister to bring Rita to the center of the house, where the family was huddling together. They thought the center would be the safest place, in case the house should collapse or the windows shatter from the bombs exploding through their city.
Her sister finally gave up shouting at and pushing the then 9-1/2-year-old Oro.
"She gave up on waking me and she just dragged me from my hair. For like two hours I didn't understand what was happening. I thought I was dreaming. The sound [of the bombs] is so overwhelming. All I can remember is my mom grabbed the Bible and started praying," remembers Oro, who now lives in Knoxville and attends UT.
Having lived in a residential section of Baghdad her whole life, Oro had seen the effects of the Iran-Iraq War, including a missile destroying a school near her home and neighborhood families mourning their dead sons. But this was something else.
"It's crazy. It's amazing how fast it happens. The night before we were enjoying clean water, electricity, air conditioning, we were watching TV, we were listening to music—normal life, everything is cool. And in less than an hour, we had nothing. We lost electricity. We thought, no big deal—we'll get it back. My mom went to the kitchen to get water and was like, 'Water's not coming through the kitchen sink.' Uh, oh. We had never lost water before. Then we lost the phone. And you just feel like you're on a different world. Your life just got turned upside down and now you're living the kind of life people lived 2,000 years ago.
"I remember how stupid I was. I was actually crying because I had homework.... We slept in the center of the house and I woke up and I said I have homework to do before I can go to school. My mom just said, 'What school, you stupid? Who is going to let you go to school? There's a war.'"
Oro wasn't in the midst of the fighting during the Persian Gulf War, but her experiences are alien to most of us. As our troops invade Iraq, most of us can only imagine what a war is really like, especially on our home turf.
Although they're not in the majority, there are quite a few Knoxvillians who have seen war as more than just television images. They came to the United States fleeing the bloodshed of their homeland or looking for a more stable life for their families. Some hope to return one day, others never want to go back.
Whether you support the current conflict or not, it might be worthwhile to consider just what it is like to experience such violence and how it can affect those caught in the middle.
Sudan
Bloodshed in Sudan has been on and off since 1955. After a decade of relative peace, fighting broke out again in 1983 between Arab Muslims in the north and Christian Africans in the south. In 1989, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir took power in a coup. His rule has been ruthless and the southern rebels fighting against him have also committed war atrocities. Some 2 million people have died in the fighting. Mark—a pseudonym, because he fear reprisals against family and friends still living in Sudan—grew up in the south.
Mark remembers Sudan as mostly peaceful until 1983. But things took a turn for the worse that year after a military coup and the establishment of militant Islamic law, which was imposed on the mostly Christian southerners.
"What they started to do was introduce an eye for an eye. If you steal 100 pounds, then you deserve to be cut," Mark says, motioning an arm being hacked off. "But if you steal something like 99 pounds, you don't. So people [reporting crimes] started to exaggerate."
The rebel group that formed to oppose the government—the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army—was at first unorganized and out of control. The young men who were recruited to fight were often poor and illiterate, Mark says. "They were raping women, raping girls, they were making ambushes, they were looting," he says.
Often civilians were caught between rebel and government forces, as shelling went on overhead. "Every morning at 10 o'clock [the shelling started]. It didn't stop until maybe 1 o'clock. Then around 4 o'clock another shelling round started," says Mark, who is now 34. "You can't go out. People dug holes [to hide in]. Some people, they just stayed under their beds."
Mark's father was wealthy, so he sent his son to school in the capital city of Khartoum, away from the fighting. There wasn't any fighting there until 1987, when the rebels attacked the city, seizing the army barracks temporarily.
"The shelling started at night. That was around dawn, 5 or 4:30 in the morning. It did not stop the whole day and almost the whole next day. You cannot imagine how many people lost their lives. When the special forces came to the army barracks, these [rebels] just slaughtered the people. Not a single bullet—their heads were cut off. After that, these Muslims, the Arabs, after they saw their people had been killed in the barracks, they made a retaliation. They were just shooting randomly. Sometimes they come and knock at your door and shoot you and your children. They killed a lot of people," he says.
The city was in chaos. People turned to those who were most like them for help. "People do not have telephones. It was very difficult to know who is alive and who is dead. People started to find each other after a week. Whoever you find without a gun, that was your friend. You find somebody older than you, that was your protector. War made everyone kind and humble. It did not matter what tribe you were from. Only the Arabs were different."
Things got worse for the southern Sudanese after Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir seized power in 1989. His rule was particularly ruthless, as he shut down the free press and imposed draconian laws. U.S. currency was outlawed at the penalty of death. Mark's cousin and later his father were executed. His mother soon also died, Mark says, her death brought on by depression.
A Stalinist-like terror set in, with secret police agents everywhere, and no one knowing whom to trust. People would disappear and never be seen again. "At that time, people started to shut their mouths and keep quiet.... So many people disappeared. A lot of people even within the army, they disappeared. And nobody can ask, 'Where is so and so?'"
Heavily involved with the church, Mark stayed out of most of the politics and fighting. But he became despondent. "I had lost total hope. Why should I bother to do anything in the future. Because tomorrow maybe I'll be killed too," he says.
But he was soon dragged into the heart of the conflict. His brother belonged to the army and was part of a coup plot. The government discovered the coup before it happened and killed most of those involved. However, Mark's brother managed to escape and joined the rebel fighters.
The government's secret police took Mark for interrogation. They tortured him for about two weeks. They knew he wasn't involved in the coup, but were trying to push him to name his brothers friends. Mark's wife did not know what had happened to him.
"I did not know that I would survive," he says. "Once you're taken to that place, nobody will ask after you and you know you will not come back."
He didn't know how many people were interrogating him. People stood behind him, some whom he might well have known. The torture involved electric shock, broken glass and gravel rubbed into his body, hot pepper rubbed into his face ("they say that one is a kind of warmup"). The worst was tying his hands and feet behind him and hanging him from the ceiling. "You can't say anything because you feel the pain in your chest. It seems the blood circulation stops. All you feel is your head getting very heavy," Mark says.
"They were trying to do all those kinds of things to get information. What I was thinking was even if you say anything, you will not get out of here. So for the safety of the others, you'd better not talk.... They were trying to push me for names.... I said, 'OK, that's all I will say. Do whatever you want to do.' Because I knew I was helpless by then. So if I'm helpless, there's no point in naming."
When they let him go, he found he was in a different city. One of his brother's friends—whom he could have named under torture—helped him get out of the country, to Egypt. There, others helped him raise money to bring his wife and family, after which he emigrated to the United States.
Hitler's Germany
Hedi Bak was born in Germany after World War I and grew up in the town of Pirmasens, which was across the Rhine from France. She was 13 when Hitler took power. No one in her family supported him or the war. Her father published the Free Press, a Social Democratic Party newspaper that opposed Hitler. He was jailed in a concentration camp in the 1930s and later in the war was sent to Dachau. Her father survived the war. Bak was forced into the service for a period. The work was mostly menial and she hated it. An autobiography of her childhood, Mazel, will soon be published. Her story is too lengthy to go into great detail here. But here is some of what happened to her. She was married to the late Charles Counts, a potter and Oak Ridge native. She currently has an art exhibit showing at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church.
Bak (or, Mueller, as she was known then) had drafting experience and early in the war was assigned to work with architects who were rebuilding a town destroyed by Allied bombs. One day, she was clearing the wreckage of a house. "The others were already a little used to it. But I dug out a body of a young girl, digging the rubble from the house. I broke down and I couldn't do much work."
In 1943, she was sent to work at a munitions dump where she and other young women spent time stacking supplies. "There was a young soldier from the Russian front. He was a boy. He didn't speak at all, but he had a mandolin with him always and he always sang songs in every language and was of course in love with every skirt that walked by."
At the time, Bak was recovering from a knee injury and malnutrition. One day she and the other young women were unloading boxes of machine gun parts from a railroad car. "There came an alarm, an air raid. The sergeant yelled, 'Everybody out, out out out.' I was still recovering and all of a sudden I passed out and fell on a pile of oily rags. There I was, the bombs were falling about. Suddenly, I felt something over my face. I looked up and there was that boy, grinning at me. He wanted me to get up in a hurry. He grabbed me around the waist and moved me through the hall. As we were stepping out I saw a line of bombs falling down. We couldn't get over to the shelter, but there was a ditch. That's where he threw me and I passed out again.
In and out of consciousness, she heard "somebody knocking on the steel door to get into the shelter. And then quiet. And then once in a while, I heard, 'cling, cling' from the mandolin.
"Finally, when I woke up I was in a hospital. He was sitting there, grinning at me and playing."
Bak spent much of the war trying to weave through the military bureaucracy, getting sent from place to place. The bombing and the fighting took its toll on everyone.
"One of the things that happens is you only think of 'now.' You're not thinking of what you do in the future, only now," she says.
Israel and Palestine
It is often difficult to get people who have been in a war to talk about the experience. A number of groups that deal with war refugees say most people would prefer not to speak about it.
Some immigrants here have had only a cursory experience with war, but it has disturbed them, nonetheless.
Mohamed Nofal grew up in Gaza, where protests, gunfire and clashes with the Israeli army were common. He remembers getting swept up in one marching protest that went by his home when he was a boy. But when protesters confronted the army, shots were fired and everyone started running. In the chaos, he got lost and wandered the streets for hours, crying, until someone walked him home. "I remember clearly getting afraid and running. I didn't know where to go," he says.
The sound of gunfire became common. "You develop some sort of, not carelessness, but you know it's there, but not here. It's always scary. I think it's just a constant reminder that something is wrong."
Nofal left Gaza in 1984, before the violence got really bad. He came to Knoxville to attend college.
However, his family has seen plenty. Nofal's aunt, who was a little younger than he, was trapped with her husband and four kids at Nofal's father's house during the first intifada.
"One day, they said, 'OK we'll open the streets from 2 to 6 in the afternoon. You've got four hours if you need to get somewhere, get somewhere.' So they got a car and were going to drive over from my dad's house to Rafa [where they lived]. On the way, somebody had thrown something at the Israeli army or something and they were so suspicious. Their way of retaliating was to open fire indiscriminately.
"I grew up with this girl [his aunt], who was my age. She had since gotten married and had four kids. Her oldest daughter was sitting on her lap to allow the other kids to sit in the back seat. When the army started shooting, a bullet went through the car and injured the dad and it came across and it shot the girl in the head. Of course, the description is very graphic. The mother is sitting there holding this girl, the brain of the girl came falling in her lap. The girl was 5 going on 6 years of age. The mother was about 30," Nofal says. "This is just one snapshot. This goes on on a daily basis."
Ayman Badawi lives in Ramallah, with his wife and 4-year-old son. Badawi attended the University of Tennessee and returned to Knoxville in February for two weeks of research. For him, the conflict meant living in fear for his family and a great deal of inconvenience. "The first six months [of the second intifada], it was very awful, not just for me, but everybody. When the shooting starts, you don't know where it's going to land."
Often Badawi and his wife couldn't get to work. Traveling takes longer, as people have to go through numerous checkpoints. And explaining the fighting to his son is difficult. "We put it in the picture that he's not really in danger, but you are to avoid things. Whenever you see a tank, try to come home. He always asks me to buy him a gun and tank. I always see the children playing with toy guns outside the apartment. I don't want to have my child growing up thinking of the war."
Sri Lanka
Ingrid Fernando grew up in Sri Lanka, which has been at civil war for two decades. The fighting is between the minority Tamils in the north and the Sinhalese-dominated government.
Fernando never saw any bloodshed herself, but her country's economy has been devastated. Friends have been injured or killed by suicide bombs, and a Buddhist temple at her university in Kandy was bombed.
Fernando admits a perverse desire common to many who have never seen war directly—the desire to know what it is like. "I had this feeling to witness something, not that I was wishing for any bad thing, I just wanted to be there when something happened," says Fernando, who came to Knoxville to attend UT. "We hear all this all the time [about bad things happening], in newspapers, television, radio, and the country is very small. How come I'm always saved when people I know get into the trouble? There had been bombs in buses, where I had taken the first bus or the last bus before that one. It's not that I wanted any bombs to happen. I do not know how I would react to a situation like that, a crisis."
Liberia
Founded by freed American slaves in 1822, Liberia was modeled after the United States. However, Liberian elite (descended from American slaves and often American educated) dominated the government and economy. Class resentment and other factors inspired a bloody coup in 1980 and later a devastating civil war erupted. The civil war ended in 1997 when Charles Taylor took power. About 10 percent of the population, mostly civilian, was killed during the war.
If not for their eldest son, the Pierres might all be dead now. Alexander and Rita Pierre and their three boys—aged 8, 4 and 1-1/2—were in the war-ravaged Liberian countryside, trying to make their way back into the capital city of Monrovia in the early '90s. The checkpoints were treacherous places where the soldiers, often on drugs and often as young as 10, would loot, rape, and kill on a whim. When they came upon this particular checkpoint, the family's chances looked bleak.
"There were these 12-, 13-year-old little kids standing there with these knives this long, with blood all on their knives and gowns," Rita says, holding her hands far apart. "They were boasting, 'Ah, we just killed 30 men and you all are going to be the next group.'"
Alexander Pierre was put in a group to be killed. The mother tried pleading with the head soldier to let him go. But he didn't want to deal with it and ordered his men to "take care of" the whole family.
But the Pierres' 8-year-old son, Francois, stepped up. "My son came up to the soldier and said, 'Soldier, what do you really want? We haven't done anything. Look how we look. Please don't kill us. It's not going to do you any good.'" Francois had money from his piggy bank in his back pocket and he gave it to the soldier.
"And I tell you, this soldier, who was really bad because his eyes were red and he had big knife with blood all over it, it was like something had washed over him," Rita says. "He put his gun down, he put his knife aside and he said, 'OK, you and your mom can go and your dad.' Then my son said, 'Well, all these people are my relatives. Those are my aunts, and my cousins.' I don't know where an 8-year-old boy came up with this. He didn't know any of them. They were just hiding with us."
The family's and the country's troubles began more than a decade earlier. Alexander Pierre remembers the exact date—April 12, 1980. "It was around midnight, 1 o'clock. We woke up to gunfire," he says.
Low-ranking members of the military, led by Samuel Doe and calling themselves the "People's Redemption Council" launched a coup in Monrovia, shooting their way into the executive mansion and killing the president.
Alexander's father, James A.A. Pierre, was the country's chief justice and quickly became a target. They family hid in the house of Rita's aunt, in Monrovia, the capital city. "At that time, the entire city was a war. Everybody was running from place to place, they didn't know what was happening," Rita says.
"It was like the wild west," Alexander says. "Can you imagine these soldiers, most of them had not fired any round of ammunition all those years, all of sudden they said, 'This is our time.' So they're wasting bullets shooting. And if they didn't like you that was it.... They were ruling by the barrel of the gun. There was nothing we could do because we didn't have any arms."
Soldiers would come to Rita's family's house every couple of days, looking for Alexander's father. They would steal things and shoot through the house. But the soldiers were uneducated and didn't necessarily know who they were looking for. Finally, James Pierre told the family he had to leave or risk getting all of them killed. Not long after he left the house, soldiers came and seized both Alexander and Rita. They were taken to the barracks and beaten up, as soldiers tried to find out where James Pierre was. The two said they didn't know. While they were in jail James Pierre was captured and later executed.
Following the coup, Doe established a tyrannical military rule. Anyone who had a position or job of power in the past couldn't find work. Alexander and Rita were married in 1981 and struggled to get by.
In December 1989, things got even worse. A civil war broke out when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, led by former Doe official Charles Taylor, invaded the country from the Ivory Coast, heading towards Monrovia. But a few months later, Taylor's group splintered. Both rebel groups were pushing their way toward Monrovia, killing people as they went.
"They just killed anybody that they saw," Rita says. "What made it bad, for each town they captured, they used the 11-, 12- and 13-year-old boys. They gave them drugs and guns and told them to just kill anybody. They'd kill their moms and dads in the village where they live before they'd move on."
Civilians fled toward to Monrovia. But there the panicked army turned on the civilians as well, and started killing them.
Rebel groups reached the city in July 1990 and Doe was killed in September. But the fighting continued with a number of different groups fighting for control of the country. During this period, the family hid in the basement of Alexander's father's house, along with a number of neighbors. Food was scarce and everyone was starving. Most of the water was contaminated by human waste.
If soldiers saw people looking out of a house, it could mean death. At various times, the family tried to flee. But traveling through the country was especially treacherous, because it meant having to pass through numerous checkpoints that the soldiers and warlords had set up. Often, speaking the wrong dialect would get people killed.
The Pierres saw people shot dead a number of times. "They would separate the women from the men," Alexander says. "If you were young enough, they will recruit you right away to join them. If you are old, you're just dead. They say, 'Let me finish your troubles.' They just shot them. Your legs start to shake because you don't know whether you're next."
As terrifying as it all was, the violence became a part of their lives. "After a certain point, you get used to hearing gunshots. At first it's just people shooting. But then it becomes a kind of communication. You can tell where it's coming from."
The family got a respite when a coalition of African nations sent peace-keeping troops into Monrovia to try to protect the civilians. They brought food. The family also made a several-day journey, crammed on a refugee ship—in which many people died of disease or starvation—to a camp in Ghana. But they weren't allowed to work in Ghana and returned home after about a year, when the country was more stable.
A nurse, Rita went to work in a hospital where a number of injured rebel boys were recuperating. Often, soldiers from rival factions were lying next to each other. They would call out to the nurses in the night, eager to confess what they had done.
"Some of them said they had to kill their own family first. Some of them raped their own moms. They made you turn on your own. Some said they regretted what they did, some didn't know what they were doing, some said they were just tired with their hard times in life."
"At first I was mad at them. We had to rehabilitate these boys. Some of them were just off, they didn't make any sense," she says. "Some of them just walk the streets now, shouting out what they did. 'I killed this person. I did this.'"
They family eventually moved to Knoxville, where they have relatives. The parents hope to return one day to Liberia.
Iraq
After the bombing started in Iraq in 1991, the Oros didn't venture outside. The bombs came every night. The family didn't want to go to a shelter. "We got closer to God, that's for sure, because you feel like you're going to die at any minute," Rita says, "but at the same time, it's such a spiritual experience."
"It was constant bombing. My mom was so scared to leave. She was like, 'If anything happens, I want to be with you guys.' Two weeks later, we forced my dad to go get food.
"[The bombing] became like a normal thing. The first two weeks you keep thinking, 'Oh it's going to stop, it's going to stop.' So nobody bothered to worry about anything. But after two weeks, people had to start practicing a normal life."
They started piling up water tanks, developed a shower schedule; they would build fires outside to cook on or heat water to bathe in. During the day, when the bombing stopped, Rita would play in the family's garden. At night, they would move back to the center of the house.
Her extended family moved in, her uncle and an older sister, who had a newborn baby, as well as some cousins. In that way, the war was almost a big vacation for the 9-year-old.
"I don't know how to say this, but it was nice. It brought us together. I had cousins [staying with us] who if I'm lucky I'll see once a week. So, everybody's jobless, there's no school, all we did is have fun and talk and socialize. Around 9 o'clock, the bombing starts. And we got used to it," she says. "When it stopped, we couldn't believe it did. A lot of people somewhat missed it. Because everybody was home and nobody had to go to work. I missed it because I had to go back to school."
Life during the sanctions was actually much worse in Baghdad than the war was, she says. There were no jobs and food was scarce. And the extreme poverty caused some Muslims to turn on Christians, like the Oros. A sister who lived in the United States helped Oro and her parents move to Knoxville in 1997.
As the first Gulf War was coming to an end, Oro saw that it was no vacation. A neighbor, who was in his late 20s, returned from the front.
"This particular person was the most positive person on earth. He was so happy, so bubbly. He was my buddy buddy. I was like the baby of the neighborhood or whatever. I was so ready to hug him and kiss him and I don't think he even recognized me. His face was so red. He said he was walking for like two straight days. He hasn't had any food for 48 hours. He barely had any water. He pretty much walked his way back home. He took a shower and ate and the entire neighborhood was at his house. He said, 'I don't know what to tell you. I don't know how I managed to make it. All my friends got killed. And right in front of me. They were just dying as they were walking.'
"It never made any sense to him. He says, 'At first, we were like it's OK, we're going to get through this just like the Iran-Iraq War. But it was so unbalanced. We were walking and these people were on top of us in helicopters, dropping bombs. There is no way out. I don't know what kind of regime would force its people to go through this. Nothing is worth what I went through—nothing. Not even your country.'
"I was so young to understand what he was saying but then it clicked to me. He's right. No, you shouldn't die for your country. It's not worth dying for. It's not why we're alive. That's not why people come into this world. What is a country anyway? It's just a region, just a land.
"Why do people fight and over what? Who's benefiting from it? Why do we send so many young people to fight and what are we getting out of it? Their country doesn't get anything out of it. There is no victory in a war.
"When we won the war with Iran everybody was celebrating. But what did we win? How many people did we lose, how many families got destroyed, how many children died? How is that a victory? How much money did we spend on weapons and bullets? It never made any sense to me."
March 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 13
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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