Free People Like Us by Joris Luyendijk Page B

farmers in check, and they all go out and cheer on the streets when the president or a minister comes to visit. At the same time, a ministry like this keeps thousands and thousands of Egyptians in the cities in work. The ministries here would function better if they sent eight civil servants home, and had two of them work for the salary of ten. Those two would
earn enough for their family’s keep. But then you’ve got eight people on the street. What are they going to do? That’s right, the system is corrupt. But it goes further than that—the system is corruption itself. You have ten people doing not very much for a much-too-low salary—so low that they can’t live on it, but too much for them to revolt. You keep them complicit and vulnerable that way, which means you’ve got them under control.”
    This story put me on the right track: A dictatorship is a fundamentally different system, but this is hidden from view because the Western media and specialists write about dictatorships as if they were writing about democracies. Egypt’s dictator is called “President,” even though he inherited his job from his predecessor who, in turn, used force to gain power. This particular dictator leads the “National Democratic Party,” which is neither democratic nor a party. Egyptians often go to vote, but can you call them elections if you’re not allowed to set up a party, can’t run an open campaign, have no access to the state press, and have to vote under surveillance—which is still heavily defrauded afterwards?
     
     
    T hanks to Saddam Hussein, it finally sunk in properly. In his country, I didn’t just see the dictatorship; I felt it. Compare it with sex: You can read all you want, but until you do it, you really haven’t got a clue what people keep going on about.
    Iraq under Saddam was not only the most hardcore of all the Arab dictatorships; it was almost entirely isolated on the international stage, for since 1990 the country had endured the heaviest trade sanctions in history. Saddam didn’t care about his image—tourists and investors weren’t allowed in—
and Western correspondents had no special status. The result was that Iraq was the only Arab country in which a Western journalist was treated just like the next man.
    It began with the visa. I’d faxed and telephoned Baghdad for months on end, and I’d stockpiled frequent-flyer points with futile flights between Cairo and Amman. The one time I did finally get through to Baghdad, they said, “We sent off the approval ages ago, mate. Get yourself to Amman.” There I was told, “Tomorrow. Maybe.” Finally, other journalists helped me hire a dodgy Egyptian with connections who could sort me out with a visa for a thousand crisp Volkskrant dollars. “Now we’re there,” he told me two weeks later. “The approval had been in the system for weeks—it just took me a while to find out who you have to bribe.”
    The visa was there. I just had to pay a bribe—another word that I’d never used in a sentence together with “I” before my time in the Middle East. Now I was getting a crash course: You put a bank note from the American Federal Reserve (in this case, one hundred dollars) into the envelope with your visa application. The functionary would nod that he’d seen the green note, and that’d be your receipt.
    There was something intimate about bribery, but I’d soon had enough of it. “AIDS test,” the customs officer on the Jordan-Iraqi border said—Iraq needed to protect itself against Western illnesses. For fifty dollars, though, they could do without it. “Wait here until we’ve finished the paperwork,” another customs officer, sitting beneath a board reading SADDAM HUSSEIN, A WONDERFUL LEADER FOR A WONDERFUL PEOPLE, told us. My driver nodded; this was the moment to give the official his twenty-five dollars so that he’d stamp things now and not in one and a half hours. “Satellite telephone,” said another official,