“If you show interest, and you’re not judgmental, you find that people just start to open up,” explains Bolton. “And then if you go back a second time and interview them again, you find that the second interview is usually much better than the first. We find in limited interviewing that if you ask a person, ‘What are your problems?’ they’ll just rattle off five or six to the last person who asked them or repeat what everyone else is saying. But if you ask somebody an open-ended question you’ll find that after the first five or six answers ,they actually start to think. And it’s the ones you get after the first five or six that are valuable.”
Ethnographic studies are usually very small but produce in-depth responses that allow researchers to better gauge what the salient issues are. Since most NGOs like Heartland Alliance have limited capacity and are unable to deal with all the issues, Bolton’s process has helped them to formulate which issues are not only most important, but most addressable. “We always get more problems than we can address, so Heartland Alliance has to choose. In this case, it’s a mental health program, so which mental health problems you can actually deal with is determined by this process.”
For the most part, Bolton’s research revealed the usual mental health problems of depression and anxiety normally associated with traumatic experiences. But there were some surprises. “In other countries, when you have people who have been tortured for something like a cause—like people who were tortured by Saddam, people who went through the Anfal from Saddam, or people who fought for the Kurdish forces—what we usually find is that those people would be respectable after the event,” he says. “What has happened here in Kurdistan is the opposite. People have said to us, ‘You know, we are the bottom of society. The people who did not fight, who did not suffer do not respect us. In fact, they look down on us as fools saying why did you suffer? You are a fool.’ Even our families say this.”
According to Bolton, the particular feeling of inferiority felt by survivors adds to their mental health problems. In all his years of research and work in this area, he has never come across this scenario. “[With] people who have suffered for some kind of cause,” he explains, “at the very least the people around them say this was a good thing and they feel some respect even if they don’t feel mentally well.”
The other issue Bolton’s research revealed was a sense of betrayal at the hands of the Kurdish government. “This was amazing,” he recalls. “Almost to a man and a woman, the interviewees said, ‘This Kurdish government has betrayed us. We feel betrayed. We, too, feel that we were foolish to fight for this government.’”
An example of how some feel betrayed was vividly expressed in March 2006 in what Iraqi journalist Mariwan Hama-Saeed, a resident of Halabja, reportedly called a “spontaneous act of rage” that saw thousands riot and torch the controversial Monument of Halabja Martyr, burning it to the ground on the annual day of commemoration organized by Kurdish political leaders. The modern, 100-foot-tall memorial was supposedly built to honor the reported 5,000 killed and 10,000 injured as a result of poisonous gasses dropped by Iraqi planes in what is considered the largest-scale chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history. However, located on the outskirts of Halabja, far from the rubble of the true site of the attack, townsfolk claim the memorial was simply built for use as a staging ground for corrupt politicians to capitalize on the attention, international visitors. “Every year, officials come and they promise to rebuild the town and to take care of the sick people,” Hama-Saeed reportedly said, “but they never keep their promises.” As reported by Slate in June of 2007, “The village has been particularly hard-hit by government corruption and is in desperate need of this money. The town’s residents—most of whom must pursue costly treatments to deal with the residual affects of the attack—navigate unpaved roads strewn with trash, have spotty access to water and electricity, and live in ramshackle hovels made of concrete and scrap metal.”
WHO GETS TREATED
The people being treated at the center can be divided into three groups, explains Dr. Afram Hassan, an Iraqi psychiatrist—he is one of three in all of the governorate of Sulaimania with its population of 1.7 million people. “First, there are the people who have been tortured by any source, either by an authority or some other group, for example, at the hands of a political group,” he says. “This group also includes those who are suffering from depression due to the witnessing of trauma, such as bombing and other events of war. The second group contains cases related to the Anfal genocide. We have many people, who in 1988 by way of a special project of the previous government of Iraq—the Baath regime—destroyed approximately 5,000 villages and removed 182,000 people and forced them to relocate to the mid and south of Iraq. Some of these people escaped later on and returned back to Kurdistan. But most died in the places where they were relocated.”
