I was in a crowd of five thousand people marching, and only two prayers went through my mind, each one overtaking the other: 'Please God, if somebody has to die, let all these people die so I may live'; and 'Please God, if somebody has to die, let me die so all these people can live'.
I was petrified at the thought of Baghdad's suicide bombers finding the crowd an irresistible target, and so I prayed. My ambivalent prayers started hours before when I boarded the first protest bus, which was headed to the outskirts of the green zone where the protestors would congregate, pray, then march on the gates of the green zone. I had stupidly assumed that the bus would try to make its way to the protest inconspicuously. However, each bus was flying flags of protest and cloth signs that read "Stop state terror please" and other politely radical messages. The buses also traveled in a large convoy of flags and signs. Oh, and I'm sure that guy with the bullhorn chanting anti-occupation, anti-US, anti-Iran and anti-Iraqi government slogans wasn't making us less conspicuous either.
It happened that my seat's window was covered by the cloth banner proclaiming "No to state oppression!". I couldn't decide if being behind a banner made me more or less safe. In the end, I convinced myself that if gunmen came, they would see only my blurry silhouette against the banner, so I could jump away and pull a Matrix. In the back of my mind, I of course knew that if such a situation arose, I would simply be massacred unless I happened to be one of the unlucky ones who was protected by the bodies of others and had to pretend to be dead for minutes or hours or days to survive.
"We're sheep waiting for slaughter!" proclaimed the man sitting in front of me in a loud voice that overtook the bus. I broke my mental planning session and nodded frantically. So did everybody else. Even the guy with the bullhorn stopped chanting to also agree. But I was on a different page; maybe even in a different book. The man told us his family had dropped like flies as the occupation wore on; the ones that lived were plagued by prison and fear and conditions inhospitable to a dignified life. Now, the remainder were being targeted by the police, the Iraqi National Guard (ING) and the various other forces. In my book, those of us going to the march were the sheep waiting for slaughter. The march was the insanity. To the man, not being at the march was the insanity. Allowing others to control the future was the slaughter.
There was a very real possibility of an attack today. Many of us could have died. I wanted to ask the man if the march would have been worth it had people died. Though I never asked, I suspect his answer would have been the one given by many others: Better to die doing something in a march or in a battle than doing nothing sitting in a house or walking down the street.
tarek : )