After six months as a diplomat and translator, George Farag was tempted to stay and continue his work in Iraq’s Najaf province. But the going-away party had begun.

‘Quiet, everyone, quiet down,’ someone said, interrupting the gathering to celebrate Farag’s departure. ‘Do you hear that?’

Farag was in the city outside the military compound that served as his home, celebrating with Iraqis he’d befriended in the course of his work. The urgency of the question startled him, and he began to worry. The music and discussion halted.

‘What? What is it?’ people asked back, concerned. There was nothing but silence.

‘Now you’re listening,’ came the reply.

There were no sirens of Saddam Hussein’s Intelligence Forces coming to break up the party, nor the sounds of warfare in the distance. It was just a joke: Najaf was calm.

‘It’s not rosy at all – being in academia, we’re aware of all that,’ Farag said, explaining that the truth of Iraq lies between the extremes of CNN destruction and assertions of peace and control by the authorities.

Farag, a 2002 graduate of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in public administration and international relations, recently returned to the United States after serving as the deputy governate coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Farag spoke Monday at Maxwell to a small group of students and professors about the assignment.

Responsible for helping to rebuild crippled institutions such as the media and education, he worked directly with Iraqis to salvage and reconstruct the country.

But, he said, the challenges to progress have been great. Lack of funding and unease among the Iraqi people are gradually being overcome, though, and he is optimistic about the country’s future.

‘It’s not like they’re coming together against the coalition,’ he said. ‘They want to move forward.’

Progress after decades of repression, Farag said, is not easily accomplished.

When Farag visited a school in Iraq, the walls were not adorned with playful pictures of animals or cartoon characters. One mural showed hands cuffed in front of the Iraqi flag; another was a stylized picture of an AK-47 assault rifle.

He went to the school’s headmaster, offering to paint it over, but the man declined. Farag said the man was frightened.

‘This has been going on for generations, so it’s not easy to change that kind of thinking overnight,’ Farag said.

Fear of the Baath regime and reprisal from Hussein are still a fear, he said, despite all evidence of the dictator’s collapse. The Najaf people hesitate to act against their former leader.

‘I cannot go into a country and say, ‘you’ve been liberated, society is changing,” Farag said. ‘Not when they’ve grown up in it.’

Farag’s work focused on rebuilding the local media, which proved a difficult task, he said. Stalled funding and inadequate equipment kept one television station he focused on in shambles, while non-state competitors backed by international funding had few difficulties.

As the only Arabic speaker working with coalition forces, he also faced a daunting workload.

‘There are definitely challenges,’ he said.

About two hours south of Baghdad by car, Najaf is one of the calmer provinces in the wake of the war and occupation.

Its name is derived from words meaning ‘divine’ or ‘holy’ in Arabic, Farag said. The region played an important role in the 1991 uprising against Hussein; natives continue to define themselves by their participation today.

Constant reminders of violence – past and current – maintain a presence in the region, Farag said.

On an assignment to purchase police cars, Farag was speaking with a friend about the mass graves in Najaf, he said.

‘Why speak about it theoretically?’ his friend said. He took them to one of the sites.

Farag wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

‘What I was expecting to see was what you see on TV,’ he said, face and voice tense as he recalled the scene.

It wasn’t a pit of bodies, or stacks of bones. There wasn’t a hole at all, but level ground. Women in black clothes, sobbing, crawled and agonized over people lost and buried underneath in anonymity.

‘In the absence of security, there’s chaos, forget freedom,’ Farag said. ‘When there was a sense of anger, I wouldn’t go out. My life comes first.’

But the courtesy and charity of his hosts was often critical to his survival, Farag said. Some Iraqi diplomats even warned him of possible car-bombs and other threats to the coalition members.

‘The Shiites I was living with really kept me alive,’ he said.

Now, Farag plans to complete his doctoral dissertation in anthropology at Maxwell, focusing on the lives of people who were displaced from the Najaf province after the 1991 uprising against Hussein, and their return with his recent surrender.

His time at Maxwell, he said, contributed greatly to his work in Iraq, giving him the theoretical tools to analyze what was going on around him and place it into the larger picture of the situation in the country.

‘It helped me understand when I was there,’ he said. ‘You need to reach out for answers.’

Students and faculty who came out to hear Farag speak on Monday debated the credibility of how he presented, or remembered, his experiences.

‘In all fairness, surely his experiences on the ground have touched him,’ said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a professor of political science who taught Farag. ‘It’s a question of whether we’re seeing what we like to see.’

As a government representative, Boroujerdi said Farag was limited in the scope of what he could reveal about his experiences. He also noted that diplomats are often recognized for their careful choice of language.

Ultimately, Boroujerdi said, the public relations war with the Iraqi people – in which Farag was a frontline agent as the coalition’s deputy governate coordinator – is being lost, and the situation is very insecure.

‘History will be the judge,’ he said.

Jessica Harlan, a public administration and international relations graduate student, said that Farag was actually more credible because of his direct involvement with the Iraqi people and fluency in Arabic.

‘Your experience depends on who you are and where you come from,’ she said. ‘He gave us a different view of what our government is doing in Iraq.’

But Farag, regardless of how the reconstruction plays out, appreciates his experiences there.

As he left the going-away party in Iraq, he said, the host stopped him.

‘Tell them that we don’t like death and destruction,’ the man told Farag. ‘We want a better life for our children.’

In tears, the host hugged him.

‘That made it worthwhile for me to be there,’ Farag said. ‘I wanted to know my time there meant something.’

Published on November 16, 2004 at 12:00 pm