Dabashan checkpoint, shame on you!

By: Rebar Jaff

Rebarjaff@hotmail.com

I was on my way back to Hewler from Suleymani just a few days ago. When I reached the Dabashan checkpoint, the police officer stopped my Jeep and asked for my driver’s license and my vehicle registration papers. I handed my registration papers to him and told him that my driver’s license was Canadian. He looked at my license like a completely illiterate person; he was holding it upside down, which clearly indicated that he did not understand what it was. You would think that the police officers controlling traffic would know a little more to actually be able to read other international licenses and understand them, especially since there are tens of foreigners crossing the checkpoints daily.

The officer looked at my licence with a ridiculous glance and said, “Why would you carry a Canadian licence here? Don’t you know it is illegal?” I explained that I had just arrived in Kurdistan with my car and I am the only person who can actually drive it. He told me to get off the car and go to see the main officer inside. I did without hesitation. The guy inside was one of the most impertinent officers I had ever gotten the unlucky opportunity to meet. The way he asked me for my name and some other pieces of personal information made me feel as if I was a criminal or something. He told me that they were going to confiscate my car and that I would have to take a taxi home. That is when I started to go hysterical. I said to him that there was absolutely no way I would take a taxi from Suleymani to Hewler, a three-hour ride, even if I had to sleep in my car that night right there on the road. It was not just me in the Jeep, but my family including a 20-day-young baby, an elderly and two young teenagers were with me as well. The uneducated officer’s reply to me was, “Whether you choose to take a cab or not is your problem, not mine.” I said to him that I cross the border to the United States all the time with my Canadian licence, and can drive there with no problems, so why would it be a problem here?” I was very upset, I said, “If you are telling me that you have better drivers here than we do in Canada, then you are wrong.”

After intense arguments, I was getting angrier and angrier with him by the moment. He told me to take my car and park it on a side. When I came to the conclusion that this guy was really absurd I started making phone calls to friends and relatives to see if someone could come to pick my family and me up since that imbecile was not being of any help. While I was trying to get a hold of someone, another main officer came on duty. He was much politer than the previous one. He tried to understand what the problem was as soon as he arrived. When he realized I had family and small children with me, he said that instead of confiscating my car, he could just make me pay 75,000 Iraqi Dinars. I agreed, because money was the last thing I was thinking about when the baby was sobbing in the heat of the sun, and everyone else getting frustrated for being in the middle of the highway with onlookers driving by watching us like an action movie or something. I asked him why the previous officer couldn’t just make me pay instead of making me wait so long in this heat. He said nothing!

While I was paying the main officer the 75,000 ID, one of my female relatives who was also in the car with us, had noticed that one of the other ill-bred officers was trying to take pictures of her with his cell phone secretly. She came to tell me of the officer’s abominable behaviour. The main officer that I was paying the money to knew of the problem too, and went to take away the cell phone from the sick-minded officer. We searched his cell phone and did in fact find two pictures of her on it, and that is when she started to fume. The main officer arrested him and told us to follow him to the police station to file a claim against him, and so we did. All this adventure happened at a checkpoint, where I was stopped for breaking the law, when I really wasn’t. Instead, the checkpoint’s own officer turned out to be not just the real law-breaker but also one who lost his dignity with his law-breaking, both at once. He was sentenced to a few months in jail, and lost his job permanently, which we will follow up on as per the main officer’s advice to assure us that he will not, under any circumstances, be returning to work.