Adventures inthe Middle East

From 1976 to 1977, I was an OFW in Iran (perhaps not exactly an OFW, but since I accepted the job only because of the money, I shared the main reason many of our OFWs have left our country). I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Literature at the Jundi Shapur University (since renamed Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz) in Ahwaz (now better known as Ahvaz), Iran, near the border of Iraq. (In 1980, Iraq attacked Ahwaz at the start of the 8-year Iran-Iraq War.)

In 2007, I was sent by a Netherlands consulting firm to the Sana’a University in Yemen, to help improve its graduate program. The university is now the hotbed of student demonstrations against Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

I write about these two separate moments in my life to help those that have never been to the Middle East understand the psychology of the Arab people.

Why are the Arab people now rising up against their long-time rulers? To say that they hunger for freedom is the American way of explaining the unrest. To say that they are merely plagiarizing People Power is the Filipino explanation. Neither is completely sufficient to explain the anger that we see exploding on our television screens.

In 1976, I was recruited by an Iranian professor who sat in my class at the University of Maryland. He offered me the moon, and of course, I accepted. I was given a huge house (five bedrooms!) in the American section of town. I was treated as an American expatriate and given all the comforts that the term implies. My wife and then one-year-old daughter, however, had to leave after three months, because they got sick from the unhygienic water and food in the desert.

I was going to stay on to finish my two-year contract, but near the end of my first year, the Shah of Iran instituted tremendously oppressive measures in Ahwaz.

Any group of three or more people conversing in public was dispersed or even arrested. Soldiers on foot or in tanks roamed the streets. Students (including some in my classes) were picked up, made to line up in the middle of the street, hosed down with water and beaten in plain sight of whoever still ventured out of their homes.

One American professor was picked up together with his students and subjected to the same public humiliation and suffering. Someone warned us that all the other foreign professors were next in line. A few of my American friends (and me, being classified as American) took refuge at the British Council office, sleeping on the floor since there was no provision for guestrooms. (The CIA was in touch with us, but had no safe house in Ahwaz.) With a couple of others, I was able to get on a flight to Tehran, where I got myself into the first plane that was leaving. Fortunately, it was going to Bangkok, nearer Manila.

Looking back, I should have known that the revolution was brewing. Every weekend, I played bridge (the card game) with some friends in a village built for employees of an American oil company. Walking to the house of our Iranian host, I saw poverty-stricken Iranians sitting on the sidewalk. At best, they threw dagger looks at me. At worst, they threw stones at me and ran away when I turned to confront them.

When I asked our Iranian host (who was one of the wealthiest in Ahwaz at that time) why I got that kind of treatment from people I had never met and was even trying to teach, he said that “locals” used to live in that area but were displaced by the oil company. I am ashamed to admit that, at that time, I thought like an expatriate; I found it wrong for them to resent me since, first, I was not with the oil company, and second, the oil company had done everything legally and paid them just compensation.

When the Iranians got emboldened by Khomeini’s exhortations from abroad, they stopped being hospitable and showed us foreigners their true feelings. What I think is happening now in the Middle East is a sudden outburst of anti-American feelings. For too long, the dictators and monarchs were kept in power by American money and military. The oil that should have made all Arabs rich is exploited only by the few in power, as well as by foreign capitalists. The few Iranians who threw stones at me on the street are now thousands of Arabs throwing their bodies at their local and foreign oppressors.

I was more prepared in Yemen. I did not suddenly impose my ideas on the Yemeni administrators, but instead used the politically correct way. I befriended them by joining their parties. When they discovered that I was not like the white Europeans that had come as consultants before me, they started to tell me why they resented the way foreigners kept telling them what was wrong with them. Soon, I was telling them what was indeed wrong with them, but in a nice, non-threatening, Filipino way.

Freedom is always freedom from something or someone. In the case of the Middle East countries now in turmoil, the cry is for freedom from tyranny and foreign exploitation.