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Where Happiness Has Gone

Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*

BAQUBA, Mar 7 (IPS) - After losing sight of what they knew to be normal
life, residents across Baquba seem to have fallen into a depression.
Close to the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, March 19, Iraqis today
say they feel humiliated in their own country. "People have forgotten how to be
happy," says resident Bashar Ameen. "Each day, we have only more suffering."
On the two main Islamic festivals through a year, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, people
customarily buy new clothes and decorate their homes. It is meant to be a time of
happiness and reconciliation. Now it is on these days that depression is most
apparent.
"We did not prepare for the recent festival because we do not feel it is the joyous
occasion it used to be," Aiman Nory, an employee at the directorate-general of
education told IPS.
Children are forgetting the joy of what were the big days for them. "Before the
invasion, streets were full on festival days with children playing and families walking
about," Abdul-Kareem Faraj, a 44-year-old who once owned a sweets shop told IPS.
"This occupation has killed the happiness of children.
"We need to be happy for the sake of our children. Families used to buy large
amounts of sweets for the festivals, and we used to prepare the shop to receive a
large number of customers, but now I have closed my shop because people quit
buying sweets."
For a start, festivals are days people visit one another, and feast. Over the last three
years, it has become close to impossible to just move.
Feasting has always been a strong Iraqi tradition. Even during the economic
sanctions of the 1990s, when food was scarce, Iraqis kept up this tradition,
particularly on Fridays.
"Now, such traditions have been reduced to a minimum because of the bad security
situation, high living expenses, and curfews," Diya Imad, a 43-year-old resident of the
city told IPS. "We used to listen to each other, laugh, plan our days together, spend
good moments, and forget our grief by giving comfort to each other. But now we
have lost all this. This has deepened a feeling of depression in all of us."
"Not only people, but the streets and buildings are depressed," an engineer in the
local municipality told IPS. Like many others, he did not wish to give his name, in
view of the difficult security environment. "Streets are full of mud and dirt, and
desolate; trees have been cut and burnt, buildings are pulled down, gardens are
barren. Everything is grief-stricken and low-spirited."
Baquba has never much known the idea of psychotherapy. People have always relied
on family and social networks to find mental and emotional support during difficult
times.
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But now the stress is taking a physical toll. "The majority of diseases I am seeing
have moral and psychological causes," a pathologist at a local hospital told IPS. "For
over three years now we have had thousands of cases of sudden death; due often to
thrombus or angina pectoris, among young and old people alike. We never saw
anything like this until the Americans came."
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced in January that Iraqi
refuges in Syria are "suffering from extreme levels of trauma."
Its study, based on interviews with 754 refugees, and analysed by the U.S. Centre for
Disease Control using the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSC) and the Harvard Trauma
Questionnaire (HTQ), reveals that 89.5 percent refugees are suffering from
depression, 81.6 percent from anxiety and 67.6 percent from Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD).
"We are shocked by the statistics but not surprised because every hour of the day
there is somebody who reports torture, there is someone who reports the devastating
effects of the violence," said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the UNHCR in Syria.
It is assumed that such statistics apply also to Iraqis who remain in the country. For
more than two years now, Iraqi doctors have been reporting a dramatic increase in
substance abuse and prescription drug addition.
(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq's Diyala province, works in close collaboration
with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in
the region)