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Authors: Lawrence Anthony

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BOOK: Babylon's Ark
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I walked over to Husham and quizzed him about it, stressing that I only wanted loyal workers. He was adamant I had not given the money to any of our men, and we then realized what had happened. In the general chaos around the zoo I must have confused a looter with a staff member and given him the cash.
I bet he couldn't believe his luck. Husham and I laughed until our stomachs ached.
That afternoon I sent out another worker with more dollars—this time first checking that he was one of us!
A few hours later the man was back. Not only did he have two
donkeys in tow but also the zoo's “executioner.” His name was Kazim and he was the official ax man, able to kill a beast with one blow and quarter it as deftly as a master butcher. Kazim had slaughtered animals for fresh meat at the zoo for decades, and the Iraqis regarded him as one of the lowlier workers. But he was worth every cent I paid him. For obvious reasons, none of us wanted the grisly job of killing donkeys ourselves.
Before we closed for the evening, the carnivores feasted on fresh donkey meat, the bears on the last remaining vegetables and some MREs. The boars, badger, and other creatures got a mixture of both. We also left out food for the foraging animals, baboons and monkeys that I had spotted hiding around the zoo grounds.
As Husham placed some meat down in the open, little eyes were watching him. A starving desert fox had got the scent of the meat and come out of hiding, desperately waiting for Husham to move off so it could get to the food.
Above me an Amazon parrot screeched loudly, perched incongruously in an eucalyptus tree, an alien in a desert country so far from home. We would never catch it and could only hope that it would return to its cage of its own accord.
The next day the vegetables we had put out for the monkeys and baboon were gone. At least they had eaten.
That night at the Al-Rashid I bumped into Alistair as I trooped exhaustedly up the stairs and he invited me to his room. The other DOD photographers were there as well and we started swapping yarns by candlelight. The men were getting to know their way around bullet-strewn Baghdad like veterans. If there was a deal somewhere, a crate of cold beers going under the counter, some Iraqi rugs or Arabic silverwork on special offer, they would be the first to dodge the gunfire and track it down. Although they had strict orders only to travel in military convoys, they preferred to work on their own, watching one another's backs. It was too cumbersome to move with the military. They needed to be weaving in and out at the front lines of fighting wherever it was happening and as it happened. They even had their own car they had picked up at
the roadside for a few hundred dollars. The vehicle had been hired out to some journalists a few weeks before, but after an explosion hit the car and one of them had been killed, it had been abandoned. The one side of the car and the windshield were shattered, but it had a powerful engine that was still thumping and that was all Alistair and his fellow adrenaline junkies needed.
While we chatted, the city's nightly anarchy provided a spectacular pyrotechnic sideshow viewed from Alistair 's seventh-story room. It would normally kick off with a stutter of AK-47 or light-arms fire, followed by a searing white illumination flare shot high into the air, billowing down in a blazing parachute, blinding in its intensity. Then there would be the slightly deeper crack of American M-16s seeking out the AK gunmen in the instant brightness. Tracer bullets tore up the sky in pencil-thin fire beams followed by the surly bass
crump
and flash of a mortar bomb or the distinctive double bang of an RPG hitting its target.
Sometimes the flares would be of a different color and the military-trained DOD photographers would remark, “Uh-oh, that's trouble. They're calling for reinforcements.”
Sure enough there would then be a
boom-boom-boom
of a Bradley firing. Then silence. And darkness. Supreme darkness, as there was no electricity in Baghdad.
It would all start up a few minutes later somewhere else in the city. On some occasions firefights raged wherever you looked and the sky would flash madly as though some celestial wrench had maliciously sabotaged the heavenly power grid.
Just as an exercise, I attempted to time how many bullets were fired each minute during one of the contacts. It was too rapid even to begin. During some of these exchanges bullets hit the hotel and on two occasions struck windows in adjoining rooms.
I was always amazed how the tracer bullets would appear to float gently through the sky. Only when they were coming toward you did they crack past.
Apache, Black Hawk, and Kiowa choppers whirred incessantly above, blades thudding with astral rhythm. You couldn't see them
as they flew completely blacked out, their positions only betrayed by dark shapes obliterating starlight for an instant as they droned through the skies, pilots and gunners scanning the city with sophisticated thermal night vision.
I remembered books on the Vietnam War describing how the press corps would festively congregate on the roofs of their hotels in Saigon each night, whiskey glasses in hands as they watched firefights from the comfort of their five-star seats. The hotels provided a full rooftop bar service, and for many billing themselves as war correspondents this was their sole experience of combat.
It was vastly different in Baghdad. This was no jolly five-star expense account jaunt. The war here was right in your face, close, personal … everywhere. I still couldn't come to terms with the fact that I, a man on a humanitarian mission, was taking my life in my hands every time I walked out of the hotel. But that was the reality. It did not matter whether we were foraging for animal fodder downtown or fixing cages in the zoo's open, unprotected grounds; the gunfire never faltered.
Alistair looked at me for a long moment. “Not quite what you expected,
boet
?”
The cameramen were superb company, deprecatingly describing their hazardous exploits and laughing at narrow escapes with raucous black humor. They told me how that day they had surreally stumbled upon the “finest restaurant in Baghdad,” miraculously still open in a downtown back alley and even selling ice-cold beer. They promised to take me there soon.
“Is it air-conditioned” I asked.
“Absolutely. They have a generator.”
“Well then, don't take me,” I said, imagining the bliss of being cool. “Because I will never leave.”
From restaurants the topic turned to the zoo, and I mentioned my staff was starving. Alistair looked at his companions and raised an eyebrow. One nodded, then the others, and Alistair instructed me to follow him. We descended the seven floors and turned into a well-concealed narrow corridor leading into a basement. There, as
if by magic, sacks of flour, rice, tea, and sugar and hundreds of cans of food suddenly materialized … neatly stacked, abandoned by the fleeing hotel staff.
I was dumbstruck; this truly was a gift from the gods.
“Help yourself,” Alistair said.
For several moments, I was unable to reply. “You'll never know what this means,” I finally said. My voice was raspy.
Alistair punched me lightly on the arm. “Hey … you're doing good work. It's okay.”
The next morning, the tank commander at the Al-Rashid, Capt. Larry Burris, instructed a burly sergeant named Diehl and some soldiers to pack the sacks onto troop carriers and they ferried the load to the zoo.
The Iraqis hadn't seen so much grub in months. They watched suspiciously as it was off-loaded, unable to believe that it was for them. Then they fell upon the hoard, divvying it up as if it were gold bullion.
It was a defining moment. They now knew I was serious, that they, as well as the animals, would be cared for if I could help it. One came up and gave a little bow of thanks. Husham then said something in Arabic and the Iraqis looked at me, smiles grooved on their faces.
I'm not sure what Husham said, but I was aware that some shadow line had been crossed and it was a precious gain.
However, there was also bad news. Looters had struck during the night, seizing the donkey meat we'd bought the day before. And so we were back to square one. I again dug into my pocket and sent the workers on a foraging party into town, hustling among the gunfire and the looters for more donkeys.
Finding meat was a hit-or-miss affair. The Iraqis merely asked passing pedestrians if they knew of any donkeys for sale, as one would ask strangers for directions. Sometimes we would strike luck in the first hour; sometimes it took days. Indeed, on one occasion later on we had to travel fifty miles out of town. But no matter what, Kazim the executioner was always there with his swinging ax.
Much as I love the noble donkey, feeding them to the zoo's giant cats never worried me. Many conservationists have subsequently queried the ethics of killing one animal to keep another alive, but the Baghdad Zoo's carnivores had always feasted on donkey meat, under the simple premise that donkeys were plentiful and lions and tigers few. It was a straight mathematical equation. The Iraqis did not question it; the harsh reality of nature is that death nurtures life, and conservation politics sometimes must step aside in the face of circumstance.
At that stage there was no other option. Morality was fine in air-conditioned offices of the West, but here in anarchic Baghdad there was a sharp disparity between abstract theory and crisis reality. Even if more buffalo meat were available—which it wasn't—it would be way out of my dwindling-into-a-black-hole budget. Donkeys provided the only affordable protein. The solution to the problem, whether one liked it or not, was clear.
The next piece of equipment we desperately needed was a wheelbarrow to cart food. Each mealtime we had to lug bloody chunks of freshly hacked donkey flesh around by hand, not hygienic and not pleasant, as swarms of metallic black flies covered both carcass and carrier.
I solved the problem temporarily by hijacking a baggage cart from the Al-Rashid Hotel. It was impossible to believe what a difference such a simple tool made. Feeding the animals was now almost a pleasure.
A day later looters broke in and stole it.
That was it. Enough was enough. It was clear to me that something had to be done. Every bit of progress we made was reversed through brazen theft. Unless we confronted the rampant looting problem, the zoo would perish.
T
HE SEARING HEAT scalded my lungs, but I couldn't afford to let up for a second.
Perhaps somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind alarm bells did trigger that a fifty-three-year-old should not be sprinting through a park in a war zone after five people who could well be armed. But such was my anger.
While checking on the cages I had stumbled upon them, a family of looters pillaging at the zoo. Something snapped, and I gave chase.
They had a start on me and for a time it seemed they would escape. But adrenaline does strange things, and I began to close the gap. The family could only go as fast as their youngest child.
Eventually I caught up with them and grabbed the father firmly by the arm.
“Why are you doing this?” I wheezed, each breath knifing my chest.
They looked at me, eyes wide with fear. The mother clutched her youngest child close to her. They didn't understand what I had said.
I pointed to the cages. “Why? This is your zoo. Why do you steal?”
They stared at me vacantly. I then looked at what the man was holding, his booty from the zoo. It was a length of iron, probably wrenched off one of the fences.
My rage exhaled like a popped balloon. Scrap metal. There was a shortage of almost everything in Baghdad—except scrap metal. Just ask the Iraqi army. That was all their tank regiments now consisted of.
I put my hand in my pocket and found a crumpled five-dollar bill. I gave it to the man. He switched from blank resignation to utter incredulity. What was this crazy white foreigner doing?
I pointed at the little girl next to her mother and motioned my hand to my mouth. “Buy food for your children. But don't steal from your zoo.”
The words meant nothing, but the gesture was universal. The man bowed his thanks, and the starving family hurried off.
Before the invasion most Iraqis were on government-subsidized food aid. It was one of Saddam's deliberate strategies to keep the population indefinitely dependent on him. But when war erupted, food stocks ran dangerously low and the collapse of law and order into looting was inevitable.
Even so, few were prepared for the rabid barbarism that was to follow. Unlike the family I had chased, many looters were not merely the destitute scavenging for survival. It was not just about food; it was far more primitive. Overnight, ordinary people … bank clerks, bakers, students, businessmen … morphed into deranged mobs, hell-bent on ripping their city to shreds in a savage, greed-fueled spree.
Perhaps it started with the heady toppling of Saddam's towering statue with its avuncular outstretched arm in Firdos Square. Perhaps it was a first tentative stone thrown at a shop window. But like a wind gusting on sparks in a forest, it soon flared out of control.
They started ransacking the posh Al Mansur district, and those who got there first rampaged with feral intensity. Initially the targets
were government buildings and the Americans did not intervene, as they considered such action fair retribution against a hated dictatorship.
This was a crucial mistake, for when the word spread that the soldiers were just standing by, the looters swarmed and started sacking the entire city. There were thousands upon thousands of them rioting in the streets, smashing windows and grabbing TV sets, computers, hi-fis, and CD players. They took everything they could; from office desks, chairs, and filing cabinets to rubber bands and paper clips. If the booty was too large, they used shopping carts to ferry it. Or else they roamed in gangs, helping one another haul off beds and cupboards and freezers and stoves.
Images of the wild rampage were beamed across the world. For those sitting in comfortable living rooms it was a cautionary glimpse into the darkness sprung tight beneath the veneer of human restraint.
Eventually the long-delayed order from the military top command came through: stop the looting with maximum force if necessary. In the worst-hit areas dusk-to-dawn curfews were imposed, particularly in the ravaged eastern sector of the city. The Americans finally fired on some pillagers, and the word got around. The tidal wave of anarchy at last started to recede. In its wake was a city without electricity or running water. The power stations, electrical transformers, pump stations, and water reticulation plants everywhere had been ransacked and stripped bare.
I watched all of this with old, tired eyes. The symbolism was stark. This wasn't only about Baghdad; it wasn't about Iraq.
It was about all of us.
It's what we are doing to our planet. Looting it.
 
 
THE PILLAGING MAY HAVE EBBED elsewhere in the city, but not at Al Zawra Park and the Baghdad Zoo. As the park was out of the public gaze, shaded by giant eucalyptus trees, looters could continue their rampage unhindered. Also, the northeastern boundary
was wide open to the scavenging masses as gates and blown walls were crudely plugged with burnt-out truck frames and rubble that provided only cursory barricades. The mobs could enter unseen and at will.
It drove me crazy watching these anarchic hordes. I asked Husham if he could get an AK-47 to defend the zoo, something I thought reasonably simple in war-torn Baghdad. But obviously not. He said none of his contacts could source one.
So we judged each case on its merits. If there were only a couple of looters, we would grab iron bars and tell them to move on. If there was a large group we couldn't order off, we would adjourn to the office, where I would swear at the thugs in Zulu. It didn't deter them in the least, but it made me feel better.
I asked for military help, but Lieutenant Szydlik shook his head regretfully; his troops were still fighting a war and had a big patch of turf to control. They had no time to do specific patrols solely to protect the zoo.
However, whenever Szydlik did come across zoo looters he instructed his men to drive them off the premises at gunpoint. It didn't do much good, as they merely waited outside the gates until the Americans left and then came flooding back. The zoo de facto belonged to them.
This frustrated ordinary American soldiers no end. But their hands were tied; much as they wanted to solve the problem with necessary force, they were under orders not to. Their anger was aggravated when at the height of the problem a group of them arrived with some sheep, which they proudly handed over to me “for your starving lions and tigers.” While patrolling the perimeters of Baghdad they had met a shepherd, and when he said his animals were for sale the Americans—whom I had never met before—remembered the hungry giant cats at the zoo and reached for their wallets.
They said it was their way of saying thanks for what we were doing for the animals. A bargain, they believed: only forty dollars a ewe.
I didn't have the heart to tell them they had been hugely ripped off. The going rate for a sheep was, even considering the ludicrously inflationary exchange rate, only about five dollars.
Nevertheless, it was a tremendously generous gesture, and those sheep unwittingly played a significant role in upgrading security, because that night looters struck again and stole the entire flock. And that brazen theft, possibly more than anything else, made the American soldiers billeted near the zoo mad. Spitting mad. They had gone to a lot of trouble to get those animals.
“We have got to catch these bastards and lock them up once and for all,” I said to Szydlik. “It's got to be a case of ‘do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go straight to jail.' This whole thing is spinning out of control.”
Brian Szydlik at last agreed. As there were no police, courts, and jails operating in the city, he decided to build a makeshift jail outside the zoo grounds to teach the Ali Babas a lesson and at least make a token show of force. His soldiers strung coils of razor wire to form a large square jail around a tree, and guards kept watch. It was only, at best, a stopgap measure, but we somewhat grandiosely dubbed it the Baghdad Zoo Jail.
From then on if we managed to catch looters, they were chucked unceremoniously inside. Depending on the severity of their crimes, they were kept there for up to three days.
For some of the more destitute, the “Baghdad Zoo Jail” was a welcome respite from the rigors of survival in the war-gripped city. They were fed three MREs a day and given fresh water, something sorely lacking at home.
But perhaps more important, during their enforced stay at the zoo the looters saw firsthand that it was Iraqis themselves who were pivotal in the reconstruction of one of their city's prime assets. That perhaps the zoo was something they shouldn't wreck.
The mystery was what the looters actually found of resale value to scavenge at the zoo. After the initial rampage in which any animal without large teeth or claws was carted off and buildings stripped bare, one would have thought the looters would move on
to more lucrative pickings. Instead, they resorted to stealing stuff that was virtually worthless—chunks of scrap metal or anything that zoo staff left unattended for a few seconds. A bucket was worth a few meager cents to a looter, but to the lions or bears it was the difference of whether they drank that day or not. And any precious animal food not kept well out of sight was stolen on the spot. This was why it was absolutely essential the looting problem had to be hit on the head once and for all.
At the height of the anarchy I asked several American officers and soldiers for a gun, arguing that we were the only people on duty in the theater (as they called Baghdad) without a weapon. The request was always refused. They said they couldn't go around giving weapons to civilians.
But without a gun we would forever be victims, completely unable to defend ourselves or protect the animals. I kept pestering anyone I could to get me one.
Eventually a captain, who shall remain nameless, disgusted by what he saw happening and our being powerless to stop it, slipped me a 9mm pistol that had formerly belonged to an Iraqi officer killed in battle. The captain did it with no fuss and asked for no thanks, but we both knew he was putting his career on the line for the survival of the zoo.
The difference was immediate. Obviously there was nothing I could do about the larger heavily armed hordes that regularly rampaged through the park, but whenever I saw “manageable” groups of looters I didn't have to back off anymore. I would stride up to them, point the pistol, and gesture angrily at them to move on, and quickly.
They always did and I never had to fire even a warning shot, although I would have had no compunction shooting if any of our lives were at risk; such was the chaos in those dark days.
I like to think of myself as an easygoing guy, but something had to be done. We would lose the zoo if these thugs were not permanently routed. We had tried reasoning with them; we had tried everything. And there comes a time when words are no longer sufficient.
I know this too well, unfortunately. It was a lesson I had learned earlier in my life when I was shocked to discover that there was a price on my head in my native Zululand.
 
 
IT HAPPENED about seven years ago. I was at Thula Thula when my mother phoned, her voice scratchy with worry. She had just been given news that was enough to send any mother into a paroxysm of fear. There was a contract out on her son's life.
The South African security police had told her the news. Their informers had penetrated the homestead of a powerful local
induna
(headman) and had firsthand information that assassins were hunting me.
The reason for the killing contract was depressingly similar to most disputes in rural South Africa: land. I was busy establishing the Royal Zulu Widelife Sanctuary, a massive conservancy trust area for the benefit of the local people, and had earmarked bushveld that was too wild for cattle grazing to set the project up. Apartheid was over and at last blacks could legally participate in conservation and tourism. I knew it was absolutely vital to start involving disadvantaged communities in protecting and reaping benefits from wildlife; otherwise our wilderness heritage was doomed.
My reserve, Thula Thula, was the key to getting this project up and running. The bush is thick, and in summer it's a steaming kaleidoscope of different shades of green and gold. The river seldom runs dry even in arid years. The grasses that separate the woodlands are sweet and nutritious—and with that as a platform, I had no doubt the project would be a success.
But according to police information, some tribesmen had decided if I was bumped off, they would be able to seize the tribal trust land for themselves. Even though it legally belonged to five different clans and I was just the coordinator of the project, they believed that once it was consolidated and proclaimed as a game reserve,
without me they could stake their own claim. The scenario was reminiscent of the circumstances that lead to the murder of lion conservationist George Adamson of
Born Free
fame in Kenya many years ago.
The police even had the names of the assassins after me. They weren't, however, sure if the
induna
himself was involved.
I know Zulu culture well. I live with it daily. If one does not confront a problem instantly, it can balloon out of all proportion. Blood feuds today still flourish with fierce intensity for reasons no one remembers. There was no other way around it, so I decided I must pay the
induna
an early visit.
BOOK: Babylon's Ark
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