THE HANDSTAND


THE HANDSTAND	JULY 2003
Observations from Baghdad By Nic Rosen June 10, 2003. I made a grown man cry last week. He picked me up in his taxi on a busy Baghdad street. In Iraqi you never know who will stop for you when you hail a cab here. Anybody with a rickety, ramshackle and patchwork car is qualified to be a taxi driver. Each driver charges according to his whim, subject to negotiation, always higher for an "ajnabi, " or foreigner, than for an Iraqi. When you ask them what the fare is they will disingenuously insist "no, its on me. " When you insist on paying and ask for a price they will say "as you wish" knowing you will be too uncomfortable to pay them what you really wish, and in case you do, they will say, "no, that 's too little. " Taxi drivers are my oracles in Iraq, they know all the rumours, more often false than true, they are my spies, my "man on the street, " and like their colleagues throughout the world, they are always eager to talk. My driver was a thin middle aged man, olive toned, wiry, bony and angular. The thick hair on his arms was grey, as were his grizzled cheeks and bushy moustache. He had large eyes, sunken in and hidden beneath the shadow of his brows. "How are things in Baghdad?", I asked. Driving, he hung his arm straight out the window and gazed at it silently as I waited for an answer. Without uttering a word or demonstrating that he had even heard my question, he stared ahead expressionless. Worried, I realized his jaws were tightly clenched and his eyes were glazing. Anxiously I watched a tear swell and burst off his eyelashes, slowly making its way down his cheek. I resisted the urge to reach over and wipe it for him. "I'm sorry," I said, "did somebody from your family die? " He struggled to answer me and in a controlled whisper he said, "we all died. " I will never know what he meant, what he had seen or lived through that made him break down from an innocuous quotidian inquiry. To understand Iraq it is necessary to see it through his lachrymose eyes. This war is seen through our eyes or those of our soldiers and in the context of our interests. Our eyes during the war were the embedded journalists who were a voice (often enthusiastic) for their military units. Our eyes were ORHA officials who reconstructed nothing and proffered no humanitarian assistance. Our focus was on the sensational intrigues that led to the replacement of the bucolic Garner with the urbane Bremmer (Iraqis have had three dictators in two months) and the new acronym he forced us to learn, OCPA, the office of the coalition provisional authority. Our eyes were diverted from the belated and begrudging admissions that the pretext for war, weapons of mass destruction, did not exist in the first place. Did we stop and think what life is like for the Iraqis who did not choose Saddam or have a voice in his follies and the violent consequences they provoked, just as they did not invite America to liberate them? What personal stories do emerge concentrate on the atrocities committed by Saddam and his sons, an obsession that provides us with an alternative retroactive justification for the war, and makes us feel good about ourselves, since our leaders have misplaced all the detailed information they had about just where Saddam hid all those WMD he was going to use to wipe us all out. Journalists here compete for the most gruesome torture and execution stories when they return to their hotel pools in the evening, satisfying obscene voyeuristic appetites back home with rapes, mass graves, torn out tongues, amputated ears, searching for what they call "great theatre, " and a "good story. " Iraqis to them are torturers or freaks. Five protesting Iraqis attract fifty journalists eager to get a shot of dark angry faces and confirm the stereotypes of their readers. What about the lives and futures of Iraqis? We assume with egotistical condescension that Iraqis are "used to "the ubiquitous hardship that has been their unearned fate, as if they were different from us, suffered less than we did, and did not have the same hopes for a prosperous peaceful life that we do. Imagine: bombs raining on your city, the ground shaking, the walls reverberating ; imagine your city losing its power, its water, its communications and its government. Law and order disappear, weapons abound, machine guns rattle and bullets fly, mountains of garbage grow higher on the streets as goats, donkeys and children sift through them, dispersing the waste everywhere, rivers of sewage cut through neighbourhoods and roads as people wade through them, food supply dwindles, dead dogs litter the streets, their legs frozen in mid air with rigor mortis, and a modern city becomes a jungle. Hundreds of thousands of foreign occupiers are ensconced in the bedrooms and barracks of the former dictator, their leviathan tanks dominating traffic, but the newcomers do not replace the entire system they destroyed. Armed gangs roam freely and dogmatic religious organizations attempt to fill the power vacuum, though they too have no experience in governance and espouse an intolerant and regressive political ideology. This is Baghdad 2003. It is a city of six million, with complex highways, wide boulevards, narrow alleys, posh neighbourhoods, foul smelling slums, tall modern buildings, neon signs, pizza places, and infernal "izdiham. " Izdiham can alternately mean crowds of people, or crowds of cars, but it always mean that movement is impossible. It means that at every intersection or roundabout, cars are ensnared in a Gordian knot that is painstakingly unravelled by volunteers, who epitomize one of the defining paradoxes of Iraqi society, the conflict between "faudha, " or chaos, and "nidham, " or order. With the second largest oil reserves in the world Iraq should never have sunk to such a nadir. Since the first Gulf War of 1991 Iraqis have watched their heavily developed, educated and industrialized s ociety deteriorate and rot into a pre-industrial era. A UN representative here told me, "Iraq has gone back to the stone age". It is a stone age lived in the midst of a modern state. Sheep are herded through traffic jams, predators stalk with automatic weapons, unexploded bombs hide like snakes, diarrhoea kills children minutes away from immense hospitals and tantalizing glimpses of a different possibility beckon on satellite television. It is not an impossible or unfamiliar dream but a return to the future Iraqis took for granted only a decade or two ago. The pride and sophistication of Baghdadis created a word in Arabic, "titbaghdada", to be Baghdadi, and other Arabs would say, "don 't go Baghdadi on me " to imply that someone was a snob. Now Baghdad is a neglected city, broken like the spirit of its people who seem ashamed that they did not put up more of a fight against the occupiers as was expected of them by the rest of the world. Without sanitation or garbage cans on the street, waste is tossed generously throughout. It took me a few weeks to overcome the psychological resistance to throwing my garbage on the street and every time I dropped a bottle or wrapper I would look around shamefully to see if anyone had seen me. Baghdad is entirely coated with a sandy yellowish film deposited by dust storms and left unwashed. Cleaning the dust in Baghdad is a task for Sisyphus. In the land of Gilgamesh and the mythical flood, Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, a new deluge has descended upon the hapless people. Green brown rivers of sewage run through streets in Baghdad. Lakes of pungent human waste cover streets from one side to the other. Barefoot children skip through them and cars leave a repugnant wake as they cautiously roll through. Stepping stones lead from gates to clean streets, but the waters only rise, in some areas up to people's knees, and people have fled to their rooftops. Even there they cannot find refuge. Bullets rain down from the sky, killing those who sleep outside to avoid the sewage, or to escape the heat of homes that cannot be cooled because there is no electricity. The plethora of heavy weaponry in Baghdad, hidden during the day, emerges at night in celebratory gunfire or street violence, and what goes up must come down. There is no safety, and some of my taxi drivers tell me that life was better under Saddam. On a field in Baghdad's Jihad neighbourhood is every little boy's fantasy. Several dozen abandoned Iraqi tanks lie beside bushes and palm trees. Their treads do not work, so they are immobile, but they have plenty of ammunition. Fifty feet away are mud houses, with cows lying beneath the shade of a tree. A troop of local boys, ages five to twelve, deftly avoid the cluster bombs on the ground and climb on top and inside the tanks. The day before somebody blew up a tank and the turret shot a few dozen meters in the air embedding itself in the ground by a house. Eleven year old Ali and his friends are timid at first, afraid they will incur punishment if they admit to having frolicked amidst the tanks. A dollar encourages them to proudly demonstrate their familiarity with the field and the location of the many cluster bombs hiding among the bushes. Parts of the tanks have been stripped by looters. The barefoot boys in ragged clothes go inside the tanks, pointing to the rows of shells, the n they climb up on the turret. Across town in Shaab City,a child Fahad gleefully holds a propellant rod removed from Iraqi explosives and lights one end, watching as a ball of fire races down the rod to his hand and tossing the flaming rod on to the ground where it shoots around in circles. His small sister holds a rod in her mouth. Their uncle displays the many large caliber rounds he has found in an abandoned Iraqi ammunition dump that was looted. Salam Muhamad, a thirty year old shepherd, is rushed into a Baghdad emergency Room of the Nur General Hospital. He lies half naked, an arm hanging down to the floor, a pool of blood below him, his breathing slow, forced and failing. His female relatives sit on the floor outside, wailing, crying and beating themselves as they praise him and lament the loss of their sole provider. An American cluster bomb exploded in his face. Doctors have no tools to save him and stare, the cries of his relatives echoing through the halls. His breathing ceases, his head lolls to the side, and he dies. The American and British occupation forces estimate that in Baghdad alone there are 700 sites containing UXOs, abandoned missiles, armored vehicles and tanks. Removing them requires a delicate expertise that means some locations may take several days to clear. Baghdadis will have to wait years before their city is free from the dangerous detritus of war that Americans dropped and the Iraqi military abandoned when it ceased to exist, leaving all its weapons behind. On streets throughout Baghdad people lay their wares hoping that buyers will be interested in the screws, pipes, sneakers, computers, soccer balls, AK47s and grenade launchers they have likely stolen. Every neighbourhood has its own weapons bazaar, an unofficial collection of a few dozen men, who display heavy weaponry of every variety and eagerly demonstrate their use by firing them repeatedly into the air. Right next to you. A Russian made rocket propelled grenade launcher can be found for fifty thousand dinars, or fifty to forty dollars. When an American patrol drives by they hide their goods under boxes or in the trunks of their cars, and then take them out again as soon as the patrol moves on. The chatter of Kalashnikov shots and exchanges of fire puncture the empty silence of Baghdad nights. Iraqis evince no perceptible reaction to these new sounds, they are normal, and no thought is given to the unknown circumstances and actors responsible for the nearby violence, or to their many victims. The victims usually end up in Baghdad's criminal medicine department which squats on a muddy congested road next to the Ministry of Health. A bus full of sobbing women sits before the entrance. An old man vomits on a wall to the side while several other men sit glumly on the floor. An empty coffin made of wooden planks lies abandoned by the entrance, a large blood stain in its centre. The sour stench of death wafts out into the halls. 90% of Baghdad's violently killed pass through here prior to burial. It opens at 8 AM and by 11 AM on a late May morning, Dr. Hassan Faisal Lazim has already seen 15 bodies. Since Baghdad fell into allied hands on the 9th of April, Dr. Lazim has been seeing an average of 15 to 25 corpses a day, all murdered. More than a thousand people have been murdered since then, he says, pointing to a large stack of files on a shelf and opening a drawer to show another stack. Before the war he would see about five such cases a month. The state had a monopoly on violence, but victims of the regime were taken elsewhere. It was also possible to accommodate oneself to life under Saddam, and to live without arousing the state's ire and incurring its wrath. The present violence is random, collaboration with it is impossible. Dr. Lazim attributes the violence to the lack of security, "weapons are easy to find and Iraqis are full of anxiety from three wars and the economic circumstances after 1991. " Since it is so easy to obtain a weapon, and there are no legal consequences, disputes can be settled violently with impunity. "I am afraid to argue with any person on the street", he says, "there is no regime, no order. It is the duty of the international forces to create security" Dr. Lazim recently saw female victims for the first time. One was a teenager found by American soldiers with her throat slit. The other two had been raped and then murdered. The occupying forces have banned weapons greater than 7.62 calliber. Kalashnikovs are considered light weapons. They can tear a hole the size of a grapefruit in your body. At the central police station in Baghdad a rusted desk sits in the shadows, taped on it is a wrinkled paper that says "Amnesty Point and Weapons Registration Desk. " Three days after this quixotic program was initiated officer Rabi sheepishly admits that "not one weapon has been handed in." He is clearly not surprised, Baghdad is a dangerous city and policemen are afraid to patrol its streets without military escort. Police are armed with pistols and everybody else has automatic weapons. My taxi drivers tell me they are afraid to pick me up and never stop for more than two passengers. They often have their own guns in the glove compartment. For those wounded in Baghdad's gun battles, there is little hope of finding help. Yakub al Jabari, a microbiologist at the National blood transfusion centre for Iraq, located in the complex of buildings known as Medical City, summarizes the situation when asked if there is a shortage of blood. "There is a shortage of everything, " he says, "blood, equipment, staff. " He has not received his salary for three months. The labs look like a dusty basement where a hospital might store its obsolete machines. They use food refrigerators to store blood. The generators suddenly switch on after a temporary blackout from a cut in the main power supply. "Out of order, out of order, out of order! " he says, hitting one centrifuge after another. He opens a dirty refrigerator and points inside, "it contaminates", he scoffs, "we kill people here we don't save them, " he smiles bitterly. Iraqis in need of blood must bring their own, which means bring a friend or relative with them to donate for them. Baghdad's hospitals have collapsed at a time when improved health care is needed more than ever. Hospital directors and doctors complain that they have received no assistance from the coalition forces, only promises. They rely on generators, because they only get a few hours of electricity a day. Some times they are forced to operate by candle light. Most hospitals and clinics receive contaminated water, or no water at all. Contamination results in outbreaks of typhoid, gastrointitis, diarrhoea. They have no air conditioning, medicine, oxygen, or anaesthesia, floors are dirty, blood not cleaned. The poor sewage system and mounds of garbage outside attract insects that carry diseases. Chaos reigns as staff are overwhelmed. They have no computers and they recycle carbon paper. Ambulance crews have no gas, no safety and Americans stop them at night for violating curfews when they transport patients. There is not enough gas to bring doctors to hospitals. They are embarrassed to tell patients that they do not have the medicine to treat them. Security concerns mean staff leave work early so they can get home safely. When hospitals do receive supplies they worry about attracting looters. Looting affects water and hospitals have no cooling systems because of electricity shortages so medicines and vaccines are destroyed. Staff are poorly motivated, they have not been paid, they have no leadership, no communication with other hospitals, nobody is empowered in positions to make decisions. A random visit to a hospital coincides with a car screeching to a halt in front of a hospital. A shrieking black clad woman is thrown onto a broken wheelchair and relatives have to hold it together as she is slowly wheeled in, blood pouring from her womb after a midwife botched her labor. A thick trail of blood leads from the hospital driveway, to the reception, down the hall to the emergency room. There is nobody to clean up the drying blood. It is a typical hospital, empty and dirty. The Al Nur Hospital was protected from looters by armed religious activists. They have not yet left. The night before doctors saw two women and a man brought in for gun shot wounds. Doctors complain that all people have weapons now. There were very few bullet injuries before the war. Now they even see grenade injuries. There is a weapons market near the hospital, and gun shots can be heard outside, beginning an evenings cycle of violence. There is no end in sight for the plight of Iraqis. They are already growing nostalgic for the previous regime. At least there was a regime, they say. "Maku" or Iraqi for "there is no" is the expression I hear the most now from my taxi drivers. Maku safety, government, power, water, gas, food, medicine, money, jobs. Maku, maku, maku. http://www.IWPR.net Nic Rosen©2003 .