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A lady with real
attitude
By Paul Belden
BAGHDAD - On the first night of bombing in
Baghdad, I recall having written about a much-loved
young peace activist named Uzma Bashir who had gone to
Iraq to serve as a human shield, and whose many friends
had gathered in an Amman hotel to hear the latest news
from Iraq. They were all very frightened for her safety,
I wrote.
They needn't have bothered. As it
turned out, the bombing campaign didn't hurt Uzma one
bit. It did, however, really really piss her off.
When the first American tank column arrived in
Paradise Park, on the east bank of the Tigris River (the
park that later produced the now-famous images of Saddam
Hussein's statue being pulled down by an American tank)
on the morning of Wednesday, April 9, they met a young
woman who was still pulling on her shoes while running
out into the roadway holding up a huge hand-lettered
sign that read: "How many children did you kill today?"
Naturally, one of the tank operators lowered his
gun barrel so that it pointed directly at Uzma's face.
"Bring it on!" she screamed. "You bastards! Murderers!
Go ahead and kill me, you pricks!"
Some
liberation. And some Uzma, too.
In the time
since, as US forces have methodically consolidated their
hold on the city, the legend of Uzma has grown in the
telling, until she has become something of a force of
nature in her own right. Nothing seems to stop her, and
nothing shuts her up.
The US Marines who patrol
the east bank of the Tigris River still talk about the
candlelight vigil that Uzma organized around a tank. The
tank had parked itself outside the Palestine Hotel, and
Uzma persuaded about 30 fellow activists to surround it
in the dark while holding candles and singing
Kumbaya-type campfire songs.
"And now we'll
observe five minutes of silence for all the civilian
casualties," Uzma announced to the crowd, and when the
soldier in the tank spoke out of turn, she followed it
up with: "And now we'll observe another five
minutes of silence for all the civilian casualties of
this war." And this time the soldier kept quiet.
Seemingly every soldier has heard of her. On
hearing her name mentioned in passing, one US Marine
told me: "Yeah, we drove over to the the hospital in
Saddam City to provide security the other day, and she
was standing out front yelling, 'What, did you come to
finish them off'!?"
As this Marine - who was
just a young kid himself, no more than 19 - was telling
me this story, he didn't seem to know whether to grin,
curse or cry. So he just ended up shaking his head in
bewildered wonderment.
A fellow peace activist,
LaRita Smith, from Mississippi, recalled, "There was one
little captain who came out and told us, 'We've come to
liberate you', and he didn't know what hit him, you
know? Uzma just lit into him, calling him everything in
the book. And he just stood there and took it for a
while - he was really taking it on the chin - but
finally you could see it was getting to him. So finally
another soldier came over and very gently removed him
from her vicinity. Just guided him gently away. He
wasn't the only one, either. When she gets started, some
of them start getting mad, you know?"
They're
not the only ones. "Yeah, my parents saw me on the BBC,
and they called to tell me that they weren't impressed,"
Uzma said.
So the legend lives on, and grows in
the telling, until it's not likely that many soldiers in
this town who happened to cross her path will ever
forget the name Uzma. Some of them even have listened to
a word or two she has to say. "I managed to bring one
soldier to tears," she crowed.
(©2003 Asia Times
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