The seeds of freedom start to bloom - U.S. teams helping neighbors to create municipal councils
Friday, June 20, 2003
BY DAVID WOOD
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
You have to dig to find these stories. The major media spikes them, and the left does not want to hear them.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Just a few months ago, Ali Hammid Abdullah thought his life, at 42 years, was over. A lieutenant colonel in Saddam Hussein's army, he offended the regime and was slammed into prison, his family terrified, his own future narrowing to torture and a painful death.
Today, Ali is helping invent a new government, self-rule at the very grass roots as part of a largely spontaneous movement with the potential to transform Iraq.
Freed from prison by U.S. combat troops, he returned to his squalid neighborhood of al-Obaidi, in eastern Baghdad, to find a disaster: Government food deliveries had stopped, power and water were off, sewage was backing up and schools and vacant lots -- used as gun sites by the regime -- were littered with live ammunition.
With no government to turn to, Ali and his neighbors decided to make their own, forming a neighborhood council and taking responsibility for getting power and water up and running, cleaning up the sewage, arranging delivery of cooking gas canisters, clearing the schoolyards and every other detail of municipal life.
And the headache of it all -- the nitty-gritty, unsolvable, hair-tearing frustration of trying to run a city neighborhood with no money, office, phone or car -- fills Ali with pure elation.
"We are appreciating this opportunity," Ali, a slight, carefully dressed man with neat salt-and-pepper hair, said on a recent sweltering evening as the council gathered in the courtyard of the al-Ahud primary school. "We have suffered for a long period. This is the first time we are taking responsibility for ourselves."
Today, representatives of neighborhood councils all over Baghdad will gather for the first time. The plan is to have them elect members to a district council, which in turn will choose representatives to serve on a Baghdad city council scheduled to be operational by the end of June.
The United States is taking a supporting role in the process. In eastern Baghdad, with some 800,000 people, this falls to the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's 1st Squadron and its attached six-man civil affairs team.
But the blossoming of new political powers has aroused opposition ranging from former Ba'ath Party leaders to Shi'a clergy, aspiring politicians and local criminal bosses, U.S. officials say. In eastern Baghdad, for instance, Tuesday's meeting of the Narahwan neighborhood council -- which had sprung up spontaneously and then asked for American help -- was disrupted by about 100 demonstrators shouting "Down with America!"
"There's some feeling in the community that the council's not representative," said Capt. Sam Rogers, who is responsible for the neighborhood. "Council members say the opposition are all Ba'athists. It's hard to sort it all out."
As the demonstration intensified, Rogers said, about 40 shots were fired in the street. Rogers and his men ended the meeting and withdrew in a hail of rocks.
No such violence disrupted the council session in al-Obaidi, a dozen miles or so from Narahwan. These men -- who include engineers, businessmen and a teacher -- also had come to the Army for assistance, literally showing up at the front gates of the squadron's compound. They have been working with the civil affairs chief, Maj. Bob Caffrey, for about a month.
Caffrey, a Hartford, Conn., lawyer and veteran civil affairs specialist serving as a reservist, finds the councils' emergence miraculous.
Under Saddam, he said, "anyone who displayed any initiative, anyone who stood up or stood out, was either killed or neutralized. These people have lived in fear for years, and the fact that they are standing up now is just astounding.
"It gives you an idea of how deeply these people want to be free."
Surprisingly, given the U.S. commitment to rebuilding Iraq, money to help neighborhoods like al-Obaidi is extremely scarce. Caffrey said he has been unable to get any funding through the U.S. civilian agency, the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or OCPA.
"I've tried and tried," he said. "Zilch."
Efforts to reach OCPA officials for comment were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Caffrey's difficulties were apparent at the meeting.
Item: The council had finally won permission from the oil ministry to set up a propane distribution center where the government would drop off full containers, which Iraqis use for cooking, and pick up empties. Women now walk miles to the nearest center and return home with the heavy tanks balanced on their heads. Al-Obaidi wasn't allowed its own distribution center under Saddam, presumably because it has a predominantly Shi'a population that was severely repressed by the Sunni-dominated regime.
They had picked the site, the councilmen told Caffrey. They could even build it themselves.
"Are you telling me there is nothing I can do to help?" Caffrey responded, grinning. The councilmen chortled. Under U.S. military guidelines, they knew, Caffrey could pay for labor and rent a truck if the council would get the materials and find the workmen.
Suddenly a scattering of shots erupted outside, and Caffrey and two other soldiers grabbed their helmets and sprinted for the door. Two minutes later they were back. Someone had fired into the air and disappeared into the night. The deliberations resumed.
When can we start on the propane yard? the council wanted to know.
"I haven't got the money," Caffrey said. "I might be able to get it."
How long will it take to find out?
About two weeks.
Into the silence, Caffrey said: "Your credibility with the neighborhood is very important, and if you promise something will happen, relying on me, then it has to happen. So when I hesitate, it is not because I don't want it to happen.
"But until we actually have the money..."
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