[The New York Times]
April 27, 2003
Glimpses of Lives in a Changed Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS
[B] AGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 ? Not yet three weeks after American troops seized the heart of Baghdad and toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a country poised agonizingly between its past and its future.
There is widespread gratitude to the United States for ending the brutal dictatorship of Mr. Hussein, though it is not always easy to hear it through the cacophony of voices. For the moment, the stage is held mainly by militant Shiite clerics demanding an Islamic republic; by ambitious carpetbaggers returning from long exile abroad to seek an instant ride to power; by supporters of the old government hoping to align themselves with the new power brokers; and most persuasively, by ordinary Iraqis whose daily lives were upended when the old system collapsed.
Many of these Iraqis have no wider ambitions for the moment than to get back, at least, to some semblance of the order they had under Mr. Hussein. They want to return to their jobs. They want their neighborhood schools and banks and groceries and cafes reopened. They want hospitals and clinics to operate normally again. They want effective police patrols back on their streets, and gunmen disarmed or behind bars. They want electrical power running to their wall plugs again, and water flowing from their taps.
Ask them their priorities, and the answer is invariably: order, order, order.
There are people, especially at moments of frustration and anger, who say that things were better under Mr. Hussein, that his straitjacket of fear was better than the chaos that followed the arrival of American troops. But catch the same people at less stressful moments, in the quiet of their homes, and they will say that they waited long years for the end of the old dictatorship, that only America had the power to bring that about, and that what they want now is what they expected from America: a civil society based on Western-style freedoms, but also Western-style security for the individual and the family.
After nearly 24 years of misery under Mr. Hussein, Iraqis have had only 18 days to taste life without him. There have been days of exhilaration and hope, but also of disappointment and despair.
Day by day, the country stumbles forward, the trust in America and its promises still alive, but eroding.
What follows are glimpses of the lives of just a handful of ordinary Iraqis, captured at random today, each suggesting something of the frustrations, but also the yearnings, of a people whose lives America has turned upside down.
April 27, 2003
Empty Echo Is the Answer to a Knock at the Vault
By IAN FISHER
[B] AGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 ? An 80-year-old man, armed only with his cane and a question, tried to penetrate the new chained and locked security gate that now protects his local bank. He did not have much luck.
"I want to know: Is my money safe?" asked the man, Aziz Amin, a retired chemist.
"I told you," said the guard behind the new gate at a branch of the Rasheed Bank in the middle-class Karrada section of Baghdad. "Everything is fine."
Mr. Amin calmly walked away. He had apparently learned long ago not to get worked up over what he could not change. But, he said, "I have no idea whether he is telling the truth."
There is little reliable information here, including the rumors that Iraq's banks, hit hard by looting after the American soldiers arrived, would finally open today, the start of the workweek in the Islamic world. They did not.
With so much cash stolen from banks in the first days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqis are wondering if their money is still there, especially when there are not enough American soldiers or new Iraqi police officers to protect every bank (thus the chained gate).
At this bank, the money is in fact gone, though it was not stolen but later transferred for safekeeping to the bank's headquarters.
But that did not help Abdullah Muhammad, 49, who went to the bank today because he was running out of cash. He said he had withdrawn two million dinars, or about $1,300, before the war. That is nearly gone. He, too, argued with the guard.
"What am I supposed to do?" the guard asked him. "I don't have any instructions to open the bank and give people money."
Mr. Muhammad was angry. "Chaos is everywhere," he said. "There are no jobs. There is no money. Prices have increased. Buses used to cost 25 dinars. Now they are 100. The minivans used to cost 100. Now it is 250. We don't have work. How are we supposed to afford those things?"
Ibrahim Qreishi, 52, had a different problem: he has too much money, which is oddly common here. He was carrying a plastic bag with one million dinars in the new red 10,000 dinar notes, issued right before the end of Mr. Hussein's rule. Few shopkeepers will accept the notes, worth about $6.70 each. Some say they do not have change. Others say they are counterfeit.
"People say, `O.K., they are worth only 7,000,' " Mr. Qreishi said. "Why? I paid 10,000 for it. Why is it now worth only 7,000?" There were no answers at the bank.
"We're not going to open the bank until there is protection," said the new manager, Fayek Hussein al-Obeidi. "We are waiting for instructions from the general manager."
Around him, the bank's employees worked by lantern light and a few streaks of sunlight to tidy up: looters had taken everything but the money and the desks.
Another worker, Suad Sadoun Ahmad, who has worked 22 of her 41 years at this branch, bristled at the idea.
"We don't want humanitarian aid," she said. "We want our salaries."
Which turned out to be a sensitive subject, despite the changes here in the last two weeks. When she noted that she only made 3,000 dinars a month, about $2, Mr. Obeidi moved to end the conversation, a habit ingrained from 30 years of authoritarian rule.
"This has nothing to do with anything," he snapped. "Please end this topic. These questions should be addressed to someone higher up. Ask questions about the bank."
The cleanup operation did not last long. Glass, cigarette packets and a torn poster of Mr. Hussein still littered the floor when everyone but the guard apparently decided there was no point in staying.
With the manager gone too, Ms. Ahmad felt free to talk about her salary, which she said was not nearly enough, despite an incentive program that could earn her an extra $7 or so a month.
"It buys a pound of meat," she said of her monthly wage. "That is not enough to feed a family."
Now, she said, her expectations for a fair wage, and to right the mess of Iraq's past, were beamed squarely at the Americans.
"Do they only want to take the oil and not give us anything in return?" she asked. "Isn't the main reason they came to provide us with civility and prosperity?"
April 27, 2003
In a Functioning Hospital, Scenes of Chaos and Horror
By DEXTER FILKINS
[B] AGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 ? There is little time for elbow sprains at the Wasiti Orthopedic Hospital. With most of Baghdad's hospitals wrecked or looted, this small clinic in the center of the capital has become a trauma ward, encapsulating a city's despair.
At 1 p.m. today, a man was carried inside, bleeding from his neck and shoulder, one of the latest victims of the violence that has swept this city since the end of the war.
The orthopedists and plastic surgeons, reaching back to their medical school days, sprang toward their newest patient. With no emergency room, they began working on the man in middle of the lobby, amid the wailing patients who have filled the place to overflowing.
Under different circumstances, the victim, identified later as Kamal Sultan, might have had a chance. Here, the doctors flailed about with outdated equipment plugged in to dead sockets. They massaged Mr. Sultan's chest, and his heart murmured and skipped. They soaked up his blood with bandages and napkins, but it kept spilling onto the floor.
"Electricity!" one of the doctors shouted, his eyes darting, his hands and forearms soaked in Mr. Sultan's blood. "Where is the electricity?"
There was none. In the chaos, one of the orderlies had wheeled a suction machine to the foot of Mr. Sultan's stretcher, hoping to clear his lungs of water and blood. But the old plastic machine refused to start. The electricity had gone out again, someone said, but what about the generator? Sometimes the generator quit as well, but no one seemed to know.
Mr. Sultan, with one shoe on and the other on the floor, clung to the last bits of his life. The orderly wheeled up another suction device, trailing a tangle of extension cords and plugs and exposed wires. He knelt down to find a connection.
"Where is the electricity?" the doctor yelled again, as the nurses beat and worked Mr. Sultan's chest.
Wasiti Hospital is a filthy, clattering thing, but it is the best Baghdad can offer. The patients come from everywhere, gunshot, broken and sick, led there mainly by nurses and doctors from the city's other hospitals, many of which have all but ceased to function after the looting and the fighting.
Most patients have conditions unrelated to orthopedic medicine. On one side today, for instance, was Amran Adnan, 19, shot through the head while he sat on his front porch. No one seemed to know what had happened; perhaps, the parents said, it was neighborhood men celebrating the return of electricity to their area by firing their guns.
The doctors at Wasiti have been able to do little more than clean his wounds. He lay in bed, blinded, his head and face bandaged, while his 13-year-old brother, Muhammad, waved away the flies.
"His eyes burst," Dr. Nuis Hassab said.
On the other side sat Abdul Wali, 15, whose intestines and stomach were shredded by a cluster bomb. Doctors said he would recover: rebuilding an abdominal wall is something the personnel at Wasiti know how to do well.
In a fairy tale, the hospital staff members would be indomitable, their spirits always high. That is at least half true; there are doctors and nurses like that here. Dr. Hassab, age 31, is one.
But the shortages and the chaos have eaten into morale; no one here has been paid in over two months.
"There are some nurses here who will only treat the patients with relatives," Dr. Hassab said, "because the relatives can pay."
Dr. Ahmed Abdullah, who works day and night here, has long since lost the finer sheen of his idealism.
"We are using medicines here that are of only historical interest in the West," Dr. Abdullah said. "And without electricity we have no water, we cannot sterilize our instruments. The nurses, they hand them to me and tell me they are clean, but I don't believe them. I don't believe anything. I don't believe anything."
In 20 minutes, Mr. Sultan was dead. The suction machine had started, but it had sucked barely a pint of blood from his lungs.
"Finished," one of doctors said.
Little is known about the attack that wounded Mr. Sultan. He had been sitting in his car at an intersection when a man with a gun approached and fired. In Mr. Sultan's pockets, the doctors found $4,500 in American bills, a nearly impossible sum for an ordinary Iraqi.
A sister entered the hospital, spotted his body and began to wail.
Amid the chaos at the hospital, there were still some patients with ordinary problems. Halla Ibrahim, 6, had fallen down while playing in her yard, and came to Al Wasiti to have a splint put on her tiny arm.
As Mr. Sultan bled to death on the stretcher a few feet away, she clung silently to her father's legs.
"I've been trying to calm her down," said Hamad Ibrahim. "She is terrified of the dying. She is terrified of the soldiers and their guns. She is afraid of the bombs."
He ran his hand through his daughter's hair.
"She is a quiet girl," said Mr. Ibrahim, 35. "I'm an old man, and these things I can't bear."
Dressed Up Amid Disorder, Unarmed Officers Stand Idle
By CRAIG S. SMITH
[B] AGHDAD, Iraq, April 26 ? Warrant Officer Muhammad Shaqeer Abdul Razzaq, his black police beret in one hand and an ornately carved walking stick in the other, did not flinch at the crack of a dozen gunshots half a block away from the Althamiya Police Station, where he has worked for 30 years.
At an intersection up the road, a man wearing a red head scarf and belt cinched around a long white shirt waved a Kalashnikov rifle in the air, firing aimlessly to force cars to clear a path for the large orange truck he was trying to maneuver through a knot of afternoon traffic.
"We have no radios, no telephones, no guns," Mr. Razzaq said today with a shrug. "How can we face armed people if we don't have weapons ourselves?"
Outside the partly burned-out police station, a man holding a piece of gauze to his bloodied nose and mouth got out of a car to report to some of Mr. Razzaq's colleagues that he had just been shot at and assaulted. The police officers, dressed in olive-green uniforms and lounging in the shade, explained that there was nothing they could do.
"Where is the security that the Americans promised to provide the Iraqis?" the man said angrily before storming back to his car.
Baghdad's police force is being slowly reorganized after it disbanded earlier this month in the face of the American military advance. A small fleet of white police cars gathers each morning at the National Police College near the center of the capital, where the new "emergency police" get their orders before embarking on patrols across the city.
But the city's neighborhood police stations, which once provided residents with a reliable local presence, are still mostly unarmed and waiting for their orders.
Mr. Razzaq walked a visitor through the station's empty jail cell behind a white, steel-barred door. The half-dozen prisoners who had been locked up there were sent to a prison a few miles away as the sound of American gunfire drew near, and there are no plans to fill up the cell again anytime soon.
"We don't have the authority to arrest anybody," Mr. Razzaq said, limping from a shrapnel wound in his thigh, which he said came from an American missile that hit his home. "The Americans first have to establish a judicial system before we can start enforcing the law."
Mr. Razzaq said the police station operated normally until April 8, when American troops began moving through the city. When he came to work on April 9, he said he found the station empty, and he threw away his gun on the way home for fear of being shot by American soldiers.
Looters took the rest of the weapons left locked up in the station house, he said, showing a visitor where the armory door had been torn away. The room is now empty except for scorch marks from the fire that subsequently swept through part of the building.
Mr. Razzaq and his fellow officers returned to work last Tuesday after being told that the police force was being restored. So far, though, there hasn't been anything for them to do but dress up and wait. An American military patrol came by on Friday, Mr. Razzaq said, and told them to take off their uniforms, but only a few complied.
So they pass their day drinking tea and watching the traffic jams that form on the street outside, turning away those few who come by to make a complaint. They follow the news on a small radio and wait for the occasional notes that arrive by courier from the police college, where the force is based.
The neighborhood officers say their main concern is not security so much as salaries. Before the war, Mr. Razzaq earned about 60,000 dinars a month, or about $30 at the current exchange rate, and he was paid in advance for April.
But like most police officers in the city, he said, he rents his home. "If we don't get paid, we'll be out on the street," he said. |
