Goodbye and good luck

once I asked my mom why some countries change their presidents, how these presidents accept this, how the people can live like this since Sadam was the one and the only at that time in Iraq the idea of elections was to say yes we wants Sadam for more years,my Mom smiled at me and said "this is democracy hun,you may not get it now but one day you will understand".

fifteen years later I understand that democracy have 2 meanings :

the first is creating change and give chances to everyone to represent the people which is lame idea, and the other is that having the same people leading the country to hell.

so here I am spent 13 years from my life in Sadam`s regime, 3 years in war, and 8 years and the next 4 years under Maliki`s regime.

Democracy means there is no such a thing called change, this will be my last words talking about a dream called IRAQ, this was a page in my life and I'm now looking forward to remove it from my life.

goodbye and good luck 

Noof 

from a strange place called Baghdad 

    

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Sitting in the taxi with my sister ... passing by a picture of Saddam, defaced ('Saddam you son of a bitch you will never come back') ... me laughing and then turn my head to the taxi driver, my laughter subsiding ... ten years later sitting in a bus passing by a picture of an Islamic leader, me laughing with all my heart ... someone turning to me: 'are you laughing at our great leader?'

I was born in 1989. My generation was raised on the idea of loving the great leader, raised to be the great soldiers needed to kill the enemy; not that we needed to know who the enemy was - the great leader would handle that. The same goes for any ideas or opinions we might have. After 2003 this idea is over - it's up to my own decisions from now on. Ten years later, nothing has changed here, except for seeing every day numbers of people killed, by different methods, such that it makes no difference to me if ten or a hundred are slain. They are numbers, and I need not think of them. At this point I start to realize that I am losing my humanity. I should be affected by these numbers. They are real people, with real families, just like me. From this moment I started to think that if I remained silent, I would be the next to be killed, another number to be added to all the others.

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