Ramy Sghayer left work as a ‘team leader’ at a French call centre on 20 December and does not intend to go back. As a known activist – including time with the students’ union UGET – many jobs were closed to him. He has nearly died twice this year. At the height of the uprising in January he was clubbed on the head by two policemen working in tandem. During the first sit-in at Tunisia’s seat of government the Kasbah, ousting the first ‘interim government’ with its ministers from the old regime, Ramy was seriously injured again.

Yet he was on the nine-strong organising committee of the second Kasbah sit-in, a huge self-organising moment with thousands camping in the square from 19 February till 4 March. There were structured committees for safety, the media, food, health, and meals for all with non-stop political discussion and radical music.

‘During the first ten days of the revolution, while protests moved across the country I wrote on Facebook: “Our second republic has started in the streets”. For me our revolution for dignity and freedom goes far beyond the borders of Tunisia, and affects everybody. We flew the Egyptian flag for Tahrir, and danced in the streets when Mubarak fell. We’re waiting for Libya, watching Yemen and Syria.

This is the struggle of the whole south under colonialism. Americans say they’re impressed by us, but I say “Excuse me, you said Ben Ali was a model for the Arab countries while I saw my friends shot dead”. The French foreign minister knew we were being killed when she offered Ben Ali’s government closer collaboration on crowd control. Every moment of this revolution has been full of emotions. Sometimes glorious, other times complicated, sometimes full of sadness because you’ve lost someone shot in front of your eyes. When the police fired the people did not stand down.

We called the second Kasbah sit-in because we felt the revolution had been stalled. Why were we not speaking about politics any more? We are now campaigning for a revolution based on our imaginations and our dreams. We’re also rooting out all the hidden names of the RCD, the old dictator’s party, and its new front parties standing for the elections on 24 July. We’re showing the government that we still have our eyes open and we can put them under pressure.

All the police are still in their posts, and so unfortunately are the political / security police. Our best Interior Minister, Farhat Rajhi, who became known as ‘the people’s minister’, started implementing human rights until he was sacked by the prime minister on 29 March. ‘ [During Rajhi's two months in office he fired 45 corrupt high-level officials. He also responded to two key popular demands - the dissolution of the RCD, the former ruling party associated with repression and corruption, and the Secret Police.] ‘Rajhi really tried to dissolve the secret police; but now they’re back, and no-one knows their names. They were the right hand of the dictatorship, the iron fist.’

Wical Jaidi is a feminist and a  ‘militante’ in the teachers’ section of  UGTT, the Tunisian General Workers’ Union, which – after some hesitation by its leadership – opened its doors to become a haven for demonstrators in the uprising that downed  the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali on January 14.

‘My activism is from the heart.  Other women say you must restrain yourself, act strategically – but I am always on the march! I was brought up to help people, not calculate rewards.

In the last four days of the uprising we were scared shitless. On 11 January I was in a confrontation with the police, part of a long row of women pushing backwards and forwards against the police line, shaming them continuously: ‘You scumbags! You do Ben Ali’s dirty work!’ They called us gross names and shoved at us, but for an hour they had no orders to move. Then the order was given and they let rip with tear-gas, batons and fists. The first thing I knew was a fist in my face; normally I could have stayed on my feet but it was raining and the street was muddy so I slipped and fell. The police were so furious at me for insulting them that they all piled in, hitting and kicking without a pause. Next day I was blue all over.

They took photos of us whenever we went on the streets. And whenever my friend and I went into town for a coffee, it seemed there was always a confrontation going on, and of course we couldn’t hang back. It became a joke between us, that we couldn’t go anywhere without something happening.

On the last night I was caught with my friend Saida between two rows of police. The worst of it was, our bags were full of leaflets supporting a general strike! I asked my friend through frozen lips what was in her bag, and it was the same for her. For the first time I was terrified. It was such a fear that it has never really left me, I can’t unclench. The security police singled us out and started steering us into the Ministry of the Interior building. If we entered that door, we knew we would be raped and killed, and no one would ever hear what happened to us. A regular police commander said, ‘I know these two, they’re “UGTT girls”, and we don’t want to make trouble with the unions’. The security police insisted they had photos of us demonstrating in front of the Interior MInistry and ‘Monsieur X wants these two arrested’.

The policeman who knew us stood the others down. Then he got some of his people to accompany us away from the demo; the security police went on trailing us through the crowd. The police made a gap for us in the cordon and let us through, and luckily my battered little car was there and we drove off. My friend’s car was miles away, and when she went to get it next day its windscreen had been smashed and there were bullet holes through the windows. Only her car had been wrecked, the rest of the car-park was untouched.

During our intifada women came out on the streets and were praised. We are allowed to be active and militant alongside the men, but not to voice our opinions on the political future. Many women of my generation are being pushed back home.’

Halima, Tunisian League of Women Democrats:

‘Our organisation was persecuted for “attempting the feminisation of politics”, many times when we tried to form meetings for young women. Our president was arrested and interrogated for talking to the World Social Forum!  Whether women rose in the textile factories or in student sit-ins, our association was always there in solidarity.

Equality is under threat in the absence of social and political change. Women are being excluded from development programmes and government meetings, so we are fighting for our rights. From experience we know women victims of violence, thrown on the streets, and women students having to drop out of university because of poverty. “Poverty has the face of a woman”, and we are going to fight it starting from today. ‘

femmesdemocrates.org

Aya Khiary is a young woman student of civil engineering in Tunis:

‘I was in the revolution – when I saw my friends falling I just went out in the streets. The July elections are crucial to consolidation or failure. We must prepare youth for this “D-Day’”, because some parties are in it for themselves. We will never let any party exclude or marginalise us’.

Yousef Tlili, student organiser, Tunis:

‘Many of us have been jailed, tortured, harassed in the streets, expelled from our universities. There are still pockets of dictatorship; we want Tunisia to be a progressive country and return to its history. We’ve affiliated ourselves to a group of progressive African students because we want to restore links to other people which were severed by the dictatorship – to end colonialism, gender inequality and savage capitalism. We want students who graduate to be able to trust that they can get a job and have a position in society, be represented. Our programme stands for equality between men and women. Whatever government, whatever religious ideology – we stand to combat all despotism.’

Unemployed Graduates of Kasserine

Kasserine, ‘capital of martyrs’, is where 52 people were shot and an out-of-town pro-government mob sacked the town at the height of the uprising. A week after our visit the government announced that 80% of this year’s development funds would go to Kasserine and the regions where the revolution began. No results have been seen from 14 January – when the dictator fled – until today.

Backed by a row of bereaved families holding pictures of  young people gunned down in the uprising, on 2 April Nizar Ferchichi read out his Manifesto for the unemployed graduates who have been the backbone of the Tunisian revolution. Many were on hunger strike in the town square, calling for work and the arrest of those who had shot their unarmed friends.

‘…We people of Kasserine, are citizens of a town which was marginalised and vilified under the rule of the former president . We now live the same way, or even worse, after the revolution. We also have more than 20,000 migrants fleeing the war in Libya. There is no economic activity; more than 98 workplaces were burned by men whom no one in the town had ever seen before.

The image of Kasserine is always blurred, grey, unclear. The voices of the families of those killed here, who made immeasurable sacrifices, go unheard. The families want justice against the snipers who shot their children, the police force and the former security chief. The governor’s sole response was: “I have nothing I can do for you”. We want to live in hope and dignity. Our symbol is solidarity. The revolution will continue right to the end.’

The new Elkarama association was set up by young unemployed graduates in Kasserine to make an organised search for work in different sectors. Its media officer is Nasri Charfeddine, who also wants to set up a community radio so that Kasserine can speak for itself.  Facebook: Nasricharfi@live.Fr Tel 0021624294282. Email for Nizar: KnigAmin@love.Fr

Munira Thibia came from the poorest quarter of Kasserine and was virtually homeless before she became famed for her bravery during the uprising:

‘The old governor tried to give us money to go away, but corruption has vanished here now. Please just take our stories and make them be seen all over the world’.

Wael Karaffi , demonstrator aged 19, is now an amputee:

‘Those who killed, one wants to see judged not killed. We sacrificed ourselves for this nation so we want our voices to be heard. If not, we will go back on the streets to remake the revolution. We don’t want money, we want to be seen and heard. I’ve made a big sacrifice – I hope you won’t forget my message.’

Fethi Ben Ali Dbek – ‘Dabakou’ – is co-ordinator of the UGTT’s International Department and co-hosted the solidarity tour. Although some of the union leadership had been identified with the regime, Fethi had been in demonstrations all over the country and gave a word-map of places the uprising had spread. He has been many times to the interior to support  Kasserine, ‘the capital of martyrs’ and Sidi Bou Zid where the revolution began; and south to Gabes and Medennine, where there was a big hotel strike.

‘At Sfax , the chief industrial city, we have lots of problems with the integristes ‘. This is what Tunisians call their fundamentalists: people who refuse the separation of faith and state. ‘They have lots of money from abroad to give to the poor and unemployed. We need to watch out, this could be dangerous.’ But there were solid anti-government demonstrations in the holy city of Kairouan, where people are ‘simply religious’, not fundamentalist. ‘Mosques in our tradition are for worship and not to impose dictatorship. Religion is for god, politics is for everyone.’

‘The transition to democracy, as you know, is always difficult. Is it true that, as people say, “there is no freedom without blood”? Tunisia is in urgent need of honest supporters all over the world. The revolution is going through some difficult times, so your visit is very valuable. The biggest practical solidarity you can give is to get your government to support and invest in the Tunisian economy’.

www.ugtt.org.tn/en/presentation4.php

Corinne Kumar runs El Taller, a Tunis-based international centre for social movements which was often attacked by the dictatorship. She hosted the tour’s first lunch, with speakers and performers of all generations.

‘The central issue of justice must be addressed in this time of interim waiting for the election – we must end impunity now. The people in Kasserine know who the snipers were. We should find a way to set up public hearings within civil society; the need is to bring private testimony into public space. Naming the crimes validates the memories of those who suffered, and starts to write the real history of the revolution.  I’ve seen the Courts of Women in India over 30 years, and their ability to bring crimes into the open air. We should think not only of arrests and the laws, but also of new ways of doing justice.’

www.eltaller.org

Taoufik Ben Abdallah of the Tunisian Human Rights League co-organised the solidarity tour and spoke here to Rita Freire of Ciranda, an ‘International of Shared Communication’ based in Sao Paulo. Taoufik is a Tunisian who has lived and worked in Senegal for the past seven years.

‘I was in charge of the World Social Forum in Dakar this February, and longing to be back in Tunisia. I came as soon as possible. The real events are happening now, not on 14 January when the dictator fell. I want to be part of the fight for solutions. For this election, I’ve been in talks to set up a new political party combining the unions, intellectuals and new social movements.

We take inspiration from the Brazilian experience. We want to learn from them how to survive economically in a moment of financial crisis; how did they keep their social goals? Brazil also had the experience of transition from a dictatorship.

Our revolution is still at risk. The old regime is still around in the system and in government structures. And if you don’t give the young a future, they may turn to fundamentalism. Tunisia has not been interfered with till now, so its revolution has continued to develop as an internal process, not through outside intervention. But the West is implicated not only in Libya but in Algeria. Under Western influence both countries might pressurise Tunisia.

The people who made the revolution are waiting for an answer and getting none. There is a vital  need for justice for the killed and injured; for work, salaries, enterprises; there are so many social injustices and such a lack of security, with the people confronted by vengeful police. We need to bring this message back forcefully to Tunis. The Tunisian human rights associations must accompany the young on this social and political journey. Intellectuals must do this for the revolution to be fulfilled.’

The revolution in Tunisia is seen as bloodless, but not when you reach the places where it began. Almost everyone knows someone who died, or was injured, or mentally traumatised. This was a warzone which remains largely unrecognised. While British soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, Iraq or now Libya will get prosthetics, physio and counselling, these unarmed ‘fighters for humanity’ are being left to survive with barely the basics.

———-

To join the appeal to bring specialist medical and legal help to the survivors and activists, contact: med.saha@gmail.com or amseb@blueyonder.co.uk

A new Tunisian Party of Labour has been launched bringing together unions, human rights associations and the new social movements in Tunisia.

On 23-24 May the European Social Forum will be meeting in Paris with Tunisian speakers: www.fse-esf.org/spip.php?article698

An African-Arab Social Forum will  be held in Tunisia later in 2011 or on the new national holiday ,14 January 2012: www.forumsocialmundial.org.br

World Social Forum in Dakar: http://fsm2011.org/en

Maghreb Forum: http://openfsm.net/projects/maghreb-mashrek/tunis-avril-2011

In May the old regime started to strike back. A popular minister Farhat Rajhi, sacked from the Interior Ministry for refusing to shut down Facebook campaigners, raised the prospect of a coup plot by the old dictator’s party to take over the country after July’s elections. In the demonstrations that have followed, protestors have been fiercely beaten and journalists – male and female -  singled out for particularly disabling attacks. It emerged that a censorship law had been secretly rushed through by the interim government; unbelievably, sites have started to be shut down in the birthplace of revolutions which use the internet to such stunning effect.

But once people have started to take control of their lives they are not going to lose that vision. Not all are involved in street confrontations any more: they see a range of strategies for going forwards. Below are some of the voices of the Tunisian revolution. Independent, skilful, courageous, well-organised, far-sighted, generous voices which are recognisably voices of the new social movements worldwide.

A solidarity trip to ‘the land of free people’

We stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere. High on a hill was a message in Arabic spelled out in white stones: ‘Welcome to Regueb, the land of free people’. Around the next corner we came to Regueb itself, a town of only 8,000 and the most fully mobilised, creative political space I have ever experienced.

Its tiny hall was filled with the spirit of early trade unionism. You could imagine Chartists and Jacobins speaking like this, as the speakers launched poetic internationalist visions under the linked-hands red-crescent logo of the UGTT, the General Union of Tunisian workers which had brought us here. Two young women and three young men were killed by police bullets in these streets.

‘The tragic force of this uprising belongs to all humanity. That’s why we gave our kids. Your visit shows that the revolution continues, it isn’t just for Regueb and it doesn’t stop there. In this little hall you see pictures of martyrs of 1952, people from here who died in the anti-colonial struggle; then you see our hand-painted Palestinian banner. This little hall is part of our daily life, home for our activists whether from Palestine or Regueb.’ The syndicalistes spoke from a stage carrying hand-painted portraits of past labour heroes, while all over the ceiling and side walls were dotted far more recent images, CGI collages inspired by the Palestinian intifada and increasingly the Tunisians’ own.

Because Regueb is so small and the moment so intense, there didn’t seem to be the usual gap between generations or classes. When young people left the meeting it was to go outside and sing ‘songs of the revolution’. We came out to find them under a magnificent photocollage of their lost friends. As we walked out through Regueb an elderly woman in traditional dress came up to me, embraced me personally and asked me to stay. She was speaking Arabic but we understood each other. It is my final memory of the unique political space in Regueb, ‘the land of free people’ where every single person seems to be finding a new voice.

It came as no surprise to hear that one week later Regueb’s citizens came together and created a new town council to represent them in this dangerous gap between the fall of the old dictatorship in January and the new elections in July. Nor to see pictures on Youtube of  Regueb women from all ages and backgrounds filling their streets at the start of the Arab Spring, under banners spelling ‘Je suis Femme, ne touche pas ma Liberte’. All sorts of ideas for solidarity actions have already started and can be seen and joined through the links below. It took another guest from Dakar, Demba Moussa Dembele, to add ‘We witnessed’.

This is what the people we met are expecting from us: ‘a proof that you care about the Tunisian revolution and the weaponless people who faced a criminal dictatorship, and sacrificed their lives and were injured, so that we can raise our voices today and say what we think should be said.’ These are the  words of Mohamed Salah Abidi, whose son Shady Abidi was at the heart of the ‘internet revolution’ in Regueb and was disabled by bullets from a police sniper.

Those of us who visited from Europe have another obligation, to keep the gates of the fortress open. Leading trade unionist Alessandra Mecozzi from the radical Italian union, FIOM told our hosts in Regueb: ‘We’re here to thank you for this revolution, we have great, great trust in you. We’ll push our governments to freeze bank accounts and repatriate the money stolen from you. We are with you; we don’t want a closed Europe. We are ashamed of our government saying it wants to deport young Tunisians. Europe must welcome all these people. ‘ We must keep our ears open as well as our borders.

So when she finds that mainstream feminism has become managerial feminism and now imperial feminism, we need to take notice. ‘Red alert! The globalisers are using our ideas to further their goals and to frustrate ours,’ she writes.

Eisenstein tracks a US women’s movement overtaken by corporate counter-revolution against unions and the poor, leading to a rock-bottom ‘feminisation of labour’ that campaigners never envisaged. Worse, warmongers of the right – who always opposed women’s equality – now smoothly use feminist voices to claim they are liberating women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

None of this is uncontested. Many thousands of women have joined ‘new social movement unionism’ in the US, and ideas of women’s freedom have penetrated deeply into every plan of international development and resistance. But Eisenstein avoids the usual celebratory tone of insider histories, taking a sharp look at where real power lies.

I disagree with her more as she draws towards the present, when her analysis sometimes moves backwards to praise more traditional forms of state-socialist ‘experiment’. Living in a world where corporations and even entertainers have greater net worth than whole state economies, I can never see ‘civil society’ simply as a global con or a substitute for economic sovereignty. To me the term carries heroic dissident connotations, as does the heritage of radical-feminist stroppy individualism.

But by keeping the personal and political together, this book opens up an exemplary conversation – and we can always talk back.

Amanda Sebestyen

My work with Abako began in 1993. My father had told me about political issues, particularly about the Bakongo people, and I was always very interested. After joining the party I was nominated youth president for my borough, and I taught youngsters about Abako’s politics and campaigning.

What were conditions like for political activity at that time?

Mobutu was in power. He was a dictator and we struggled against his government.

In 1995 the government sent the military to a Bakongo meeting I attended. They killed many people, and the security services were searching for the participants. So my wife and I left the capital, Kinshasa, for my province, Bakongo.

I stayed there until 1997. When Mobutu fled the country I returned to Kinshasa to see the political situation. Laurent Kabila took power and banned political parties. When he died in 2001, his son replaced him. This was bad for political men like me because the country was now governed as a monarchy.

How did you react to this?

I again campaigned against the government, speaking to young people and giving them courage, but our meetings were infiltrated. On 31 December 2001 I was abducted by the military.

After three days in a subterranean prison – where many people had been for years – they put me in a cell, and I was interrogated, beaten and tortured.

How did you get from there to the UK?

Surprisingly, one day soldiers took me away to the house of the officer who had interrogated me. They spoke in my dialect, and said they had spoken with my father and wanted to help. The officer took me to a businessman, who took me to Angola in June 2002. I was given a French passport, and we travelled to London.

What happened when you arrived?

I didn’t know where I was supposed to be going. I passed immigration and the businessman gave me clothes and money.

I went to the immigration centre in Croydon, and sought asylum. After one week in London they sent me to Stoke-on-Trent.

What has been your experience of the asylum process?

My asylum claim was rejected. They said I lacked information about my party, and didn’t believe my escape from prison. It was difficult giving evidence because I was traumatised, and my eyes were damaged from torture. I then had no living support, and had to stay with friends.

My new solicitor in 2003 was also very bad. She said she’d make a new claim, but didn’t use the new evidence I gave her. In 2005 I met a French solicitor at a Congolese meeting. After seeing my file she made a proper fresh claim. The Home Office still have not given me an answer.

What contact have you had with your family since you arrived here?

My wife escaped the DRC in 2005. Earlier that year she had been arrested and our two children were lost. In prison she was raped and badly beaten. She went to Paris and by chance saw one lady from our borough, who told her I was in London. She tried to join me, but at Calais the English border police arrested her and tried to deport her to Congo. She spent 14 days in Sangatte detention centre and was very traumatised, but was eventually accepted in France as a refugee.

I’m hoping to rejoin my wife in Paris, but I’ve had six years here, and have made friends, studied and had political activities here. My case is good, and we want to take the Home Office to the High Court and get a judicial review. If we go to the tribunal, I’m sure we’ll win – if my case wasn’t strong the Home Office would have refused me already.

And in the UK you have continued your work with Abako?

Yes. I can’t stop the work I started in my country. We support a federalist system with autonomy for different regions, but those in power want centralisation. They take our resources and call us separatists that will cause ‘Balkanisation’.

I’m now general secretary of Abako until the next elections. I feel intimidated because we hear the Congolese government is sending agents here to kill activists. But I’m happy to continue – I like this work. One day our generation may pass, but another will come to solve this problem. We can win one day, this is my faith! For the moment I’ll continue.

n Joaquin Nzuzi Mbambi spoke to Andy Bowman and Amanda Sebestyen. The Home Office has now accepted his fresh asylum claim and asked his solicitor to withdraw the judicial review in the High Court. He is currently awaiting the Home Office decision, and if refused again will have the right to go to the immigration court

Mohammad Hussain was one of the best-known and loved members of the Kurdish community in the north of England, ‘a big man with a big heart’. Originally from Erbil, he had been a political campaigner all his life. He was forced to seek refuge in the UK in 2000 after threats from members of the governing Kurdish Democratic Party.

For the eight years Mohammad lived in Doncaster, struggling to gain refugee status, he was a fierce defender of refugee and human rights. An active member of the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group and treasurer of the Doncaster Focus Group of refugee and migrant volunteers, in October 2007 he marched 40 miles from Sheffield to Lindholme detention centre to protest at conditions there.

This year, he got to see Lindholme from the inside, along with a string of other detention centres. The Home Office tried to deport him on 14 May; his solicitor and defence campaign managed to halt his deportation just 40 minutes before the plane was due to fly.

At Lindholme he was already in a lot of pain. But when Mohammad explained that he had a lump in his stomach and it was getting bigger and harder, he was given a mild painkiller, then sold a headache tablet. He died of cancer on 3 August, his bedside crowded with friends and well-wishers.

The government, insisting that Iraqi Kurdistan is safe to return to, has deported more than 500 Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers over the past three years. Many have since died, and others still in the UK are desperate to avoid the same fate.

‘Iraqi Kurdistan is neither an independent state, nor part of a stable state,’ says Dashty Jamal of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR). ‘Kurdish people are in limbo. Their lives hang on an ever-changing US agenda and two ruling parties that are authoritarian, undemocratic and corrupt. Persecution of campaigners and journalists by the authorities, combined with intimidation on a daily basis by terrorist groups and Islamic parties, is causing people to flood out of the country in fear of their lives.

‘Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even US State Department reports all show the violations of human rights in Iraqi Kurdistan.’

Yet the countries that support the occupation will not admit that Iraq still isn’t safe, and so they go on deporting Kurds and others back there. IFIR, which works to help those held in detention centres in the UK and track them if they are sent back to Iraq, sees the human stories behind the geopolitics – the kind that never reach the newspapers.

Sadullah was 16 when he first arrived in the UK; he lived in Peterborough for four years. His asylum application was refused, and the Home Office told him that if he did not go home he would be forcibly deported. After four years living off the charity of friends, he gave up and went back. He was killed by a car bomb in Kirkuk in January 2007.

Sirwa Nouri was seven months pregnant when her husband was forcibly deported in April. She gave birth in June, but she has heard no word of her husband in all the months since his deportation.

Hussein Ali arrived in the UK six years ago. A fellow detainee, Muhammad, told IFIR that he wrote many letters to the Home Office while he was detained asking to remain in the UK but was still deported. He shot himself on 10 August.

Kadir Salih Abdullah arrived here in 2000, after being forced to leave a family of six children in Kurdistan. After five years fighting for asylum, not being able to work and being forced to rely on the support of friends, Kadir gave up the fight and signed ‘voluntary return’ papers in March 2005. Shortly after arriving in Kurdistan, he was kidnapped in front of his home by a militia linked to the governing PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) party. His daughter committed suicide, and his five remaining boys and family have contacted IFIR to report his disappearance and ask for help.

‘The problems which have forced refugees and asylum seekers to leave their homes have been caused by the emergence of brutal, nationalistic and ethnocentric, political and religious wars,’ says Dashty Jamal. ‘All people who believe in human rights and have a desire to establish a free and equal society should challenge this barbarism, and help us in calling for an end to the criminalising and persecution of refugees and asylum seekers.’

IFIR is part of the Coalition Against Deportations to Iraq, and publishes a newsletter, Echoes, at www.csdiraq.com. Requests for more information, and donations, are welcome to IFIR, PO Box 1575, Ilford, IG1 3BZ, tel 020 8809 0633

The artist is Osman Ahmed, born in 1962 in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. Refusing to join the 1980-1988 war between Iraq and Iran, he ran off to join the Kurdish partisans in the mountains – the peshmerga militia of the left-wing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

‘I was a peshmerga but never held a gun, just a pen, and did the cooking and teaching children. I told the fighters “I cannot kill” and the PUK accepted it,’ he says. ‘While I was in the mountains I saw Goya’s drawings, The Disasters of War, and determined to travel to Poland to study graphics.’

Crossing the Iranian border, Osman managed two days in Tehran, where he caught his first dazzling sight of modernism – Picasso and Chagall on view in the Shah’s old palace – before being arrested and sent to jail. Iran’s prison authorities wanted propaganda paintings of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The artist disguised his abilities to cover his refusal: ‘I let them think I was mad; they let me carve in soap, and paint over religious postcards.’

Among the surviving pieces from that time are traumatic faces, the bright paint scratched so that parts of the underlying card shows through. In the middle of one of those howling heads, like a window onto another world, a blue square remains from the original photo of a pious Shia boy, binding a text to his forehead.

Drawing the Anfal

‘I went back to the peshmerga for two years, then crossed the Turkish border from Iran with a false passport, was arrested again and spent time in two Turkish prison camps,’ says Ahmed. ‘As I came back to Kurdistan through the mountains, I saw a Hunter helicopter dropping something that made a different noise from a bomb. We went to help a shepherd, and found it was nerve gas. For several days I was blind, and my legs swelled up so I could not walk.’

The Anfal had started – Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack against the rebellious Kurds. Tens of thousands of people were displaced. Amnesty International estimates the ‘disappeared’ at more than 100,000. The experience is traced by Ahmed’s curling lines on paper.

Here are people so thickly crowded and so distantly seen that their forced march resembles a cloud of smoke, their compressed mass becomes the mouth of a giant grave. These pictures slide between portrait and abstract, sometimes directly recording horror and sometimes literally drawing back from something too traumatic to tell. The latest images remind me of Mark Rothko, who found during the Holocaust that one repeated, varying shape – based on a mass grave he had seen in his Latvian childhood after a pogrom – was the way he could best commemorate the countless dead.

Under the Anfal, Osman was again displaced into Iran. He spent two years in a refugee camp, where he was allowed to paint and teach and married a fellow artist. This time the Iranian authorities called him to do what he most wanted: to set up an international exhibition to prove to the world the crime that had destroyed Halabja. At the time Iraq, supported by the west, was claiming that the poison gas atrocity and razing of the rebel Kurdish town had been perpetrated by Iran.

First negotiating through his party to ensure that the exhibition would be independent – and in no way branded by Iran’s pasdaran (revolutionary guards) – Ahmed created cards, which travelled all over the world. He and his fellow artists remained unable to get visas, and once the war was over Iran again put pressure on the Kurds.

Free for the first time

He travelled into Syria and exhibited his work in Damascus at just the moment Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. PUK leader Jalal Talabani enabled Osman to leave at last to study his art, this time in Russia. But Iraqi agents and assassins were all over Moscow. He travelled once more – to London.

‘For the first time in my life I could say I was Kurdish,’ he says. ‘I had no money – £27 a week – but I felt free. Free from worries about my family, the PUK, my country . . .

‘I’ve worked as a bus driver, a waiter, on a market stall. I keep art apart from money. Art is life, my art is a document, not just something nice on a wall.’

‘I still have a trauma; for long years it’s stayed with me,’ Ahmed continues. ‘Watching the army come for the villagers, watching them driven out and knowing our forces were too few and weak to do anything to stop it.

‘I keep working, keep looking – my work is what makes me human.’

One compelling pencil drawing shows a figure on fire, trailing clouds of graphite hair and smoke, emerging from a forest. The lines began with the exiled artist sketching the vertical punk-afro haircut on a fellow traveller on a London bus.

‘I love line, and drawing. Line is a hero to me, to take out the emotions inside me.’ Now this small, gently mannered and normally quiet man is speaking with the force and speed of red-hot lava. My pen skitters on the page trying to keep up, to do justice to his words.

‘The Imperial War Museum is my first chance to be shown alongside the international riches of art, beside Sargent’s picture of gas and what it does,’ he goes on. ‘We Kurds have always been in the shadow – we are friendly to others, to the problems of humanity, but they don’t know about us.

‘In the mountains we heard Radio London, Monte Carlo, radio stations everywhere. But there was no voice about us, as the army was coming to clean up the villages. That stays, that pain; all the countries around us knew and said nothing. We had to see people being taken away, we were too few to do anything. I could only record.

‘My dream was to have the chance to tell our story in a very high place, to put it in a museum among the greatest artists. Ever since I was fascinated by Goya when I was in the mountains, I wanted to show genocide, to stop crimes against humanity everywhere in war. I try to add my voice on Darfur, Cambodia, Brazil [the extermination of indigenous people].

‘When I was asked to draw in Tate Britain’s After Turner show, one of his drawings of a Scottish mountain took me back to Kurdistan. It was great to be there – next to Turner! It was like being a survivor as a peshmerga, a victory as an artist recording genocide.’

Osman Ahmed: Displaced is at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 7 September. More of his work can be seen on his website at www.osmankader.com. His drawing after Turner’s Mountain near Dunkeld can be seen at: http://tinyurl.com/6jkb73
Amanda Sebestyen curated Osman Ahmed in the group show
Strains of War at Greenwich Citizens’ Gallery in 1992