Baghdad - Thaura will blow?
I went back to Thaura, formerly Saddam City, the place where millions of poor Shi’ites live in Baghdad, where all the looted stuff gets sold. I wanted to see where the poorest people live and we went out in search of Haya Tinik, metal plate neighborhood. To just say that the roads there are unpaved is misleading. It’s more like the neighborhood was built on an enormous pile of dirt, garbage and sand. There are dunes or hills of the garbage/sand. Not graceful, sweeping dunes, but irregular mounds jutting out of the ground. My driver, Thamar, who is always very careful about his very beat-up 10-year-old Mazda drove so slowly and tried to wend his way between these mounds. He didn’t like going there because of the roads. Amjad, the translator, didn’t like going there because he was scared to death. He had never been in this neighborhood but heard it was the worst place in Iraq, the most dangerous, lawless crazy place to go. He was really scared, but I said I wanted to just see what it was like, so we went. The houses are made of crappy bricks that don’t seem to have any mortar or maybe just so little mortar you can’t see it between the bricks. So, they all look like these small little forts made out of sloppily piled up bricks with metal plate as roofs. It must be so miserably hot in them. The people didn’t seem dangerous to me, just miserably poor, horribly dirty. There weren’t too many people out. It was the hottest time of day. I saw one guy fixing the bricks in his house. Other people just standing and staring at us. Amjad asked if anyone is this poor in America. I said no. We have very poor people. But nothing like this. There’s no sewage, no power lines, nobody had cars, as far as I could see. Just a bunch of these crappy brick houses built on this pile of garbage and sand. As we were leaving, we passed a dump. I saw two kids, young, maybe 5 and 7, looking through the garbage for stuff. Amjad said that under Saddam no journalist was allowed in this area. He didn’t want the people to know how badly off some Iraqis are. Amjad said, ‘Now you can see how bad Saddam is. Fucking Shit.’ I told Amjad that he seems to have changed. When we first met, right after Baghdad fell, he was really mixed on Saddam. He would say he misses the guy. That the country at least ran well under him. His mother is unapologetically pro-Saddam to this day. He’s from a comfortable middle-class (for Iraq) family and they did fine under the regime. He has two cousins who were killed in 1980, but other than that nobody close to him was imprisoned or tortured or directly harassed by the regime. Of course, he says, they lived with the fear all the time. But overall their lives were so much better under Saddam than they are now that he can’t just say he doesn’t like the guy. But now he is so angry about Saddam. He despises Saddam. He said that going around with me, talking to people affected by the regime, seeing the shitholes like this that he never visited before. Going to the mass graves. He’s seeing with his own eyes how bad Saddam is and now he’s very glad the man is gone. He’s still pretty convinced that Saddam and America had a deal and that Saddam lives in the US now in some mansion somewhere. I told him that if that were true it would be the biggest political scandal in the history of the country. That Bush would be impeached immediately. Maybe go to jail. He said Americans are very good at hiding things. I said they’re good, but not that good. It’s too big a risk. I never convince him of these kinds of things.
I’ve become fascinated by Thaura. It might be the most dangerous place in Iraq. Not because of daily crime–which happens there all the time–but because these are the angriest, poorest, best-armed people in the country and they are pissed off. They were pissed off at Saddam and they’re pissed off at America. Amjad said: for them, two things ruined their lives, Saddam and Sanctions. And Sanctions means America. So, they hate Saddam and America equally. Saddam’s gone, so we get it now. The other thing is how organized the Shiites are becoming. We went to the most popular mosque in Thaura for a second visit. This is the one where the Imam says he is willing to fight and die to get rid of the American occupiers. We went to the Imam’s entrance, which is down this dirty alley and you have to duck your head as you wait there because a cement staircase goes overhead. We knocked on the door and a young imam-in-training in all black with that round black headdress that Shiite imams wear came out. Amjad explained who we were and the guy went back inside and shut the door on us. Amjad stood there saying, shameful. This is shameful. I said: this is not the Arab way. Amjad said no, it’s not. He should invite us in. Shake our hands. Bring us tea. Amjad kept saying, I hate these fucking assholes. After a long time, the guy opened the door again and we sort of stood in the entrance. The all-black imam-to-be was arguing with a tiny man who was showing him some documents. Amjad told me that the guy’s house was taken by the Ba’ath party and he wants help getting it back. The all-black guy waved him off, told him to leave, and finally pushed him away. Then he invited us in and we took of our shoes (I had a momentary pang because I really love my New Balance sneakers and didn’t want someone taking them) and we went in and sat down. He actually smiled and said, Asalamu Alaikum. As we were waiting, some other reporters came in, a British writer and photographer. The photographer was dressed in a full abaya’a black cloak that covers the hair, much of the face, and the whole body in a shapeless mass. It was obvious she needed to wear all that to be admitted. People from this mosque are already driving around Thaura and telling liquor stores they have to close by the end of the week. They’re shutting down the Turkish soft-core porn movie theatres. They’re trying to make it so all women in Thaura have to wear the abaya. They are, of course, strongly advocating an Islamic state in Iraq. And they are pissed off at the Americans for not being included in the process at all. It’s very hard to see where all this goes. Will there be pockets of Shiite fundamentalism in Iraq and pockets of freedom? Will they get seriously violent? Thaura is filled with young men with no work, nothing to do, who have big guns. Scary.
There’s something charming about Thaura. It’s not quite fully urbanized. Driving down a busy street with lots of stores on either side, it’s common to see a sheepherder tending a flock or to see some kid riding a donkey. You see animals all over Baghdad, actually. Sheep and goats and horses and donkeys. Even wild boar (we ate some delicious pork the other night. Christians hunt the wild boar and sell the meat). But Thaura has the most animals and it seems the most rural in a way. I get the feeling many of these people have only recently come up from the less developed south.
Amjad starting asking me about the weekend. He said that he heard that in America, people get two days for the weekend and they only do things they enjoy during that time. That they guard their time very preciously on the weekend and won’t let work or anything get in the way of having fun. I said that’s pretty true. He explained that in Iraq, the weekend is only Friday. And that’s the one day to take care of all the errands and things that piled up during the week because everyone who works has two or three jobs and no time. Even if they had the time, nobody has any money to do anything. I said my friends and I like to go out to dinner a few nights a week. Amjad said nobody in Iraq goes out to dinner. This isn’t entirely true. There are a couple nice restaurants. But most of the places are just quick kebab restaurants. Obviously only the quite wealthy go to the nice places.
We went to this supermarket in the wealthy Mansour neighborhood, a small but packed place. There’s a supermarket a lot of reporters go to because the guy imports western products from Amman. I don’t trust a lot of the Iraqi products. The bottled water definitely makes you sick. I got really sick on the yogurt. And in a regular Iraqi supermarket, a lot of the canned goods are expired. So, I go to this guy for things I don’t want to or can’t get elsewhere. He has all the American candy bars and cookies and cereal. He has decent cheese. Nice canned vegetables. But he’s shockingly expensive. He takes such a big mark-up because he’s the only guy selling this stuff. I bought some stuff and it came to $82. I was surprised. I expected it to be around $40 (the prices are market in what I thought were Iraqi dinars, but they’re in Jordanian dinars, a much higher cost currency). As we were leaving, Amjad said, with shock, you spent $100 on groceries today. (I also bought a lot of water for $20. We’re drinking six 1.5 liter bottles a day between me and Jen. It’s so hot. We’re constantly running out of water). I told Amjad it was expensive, but I probably spend more than $100 a week on groceries back in the States. He and Thamar were shaking their heads and laughing. They said that $100 would last them at least three months to feed their entire families. Amjad said his whole family–mother, father, brother’spend about $120 a month on everything: rent, transportation, food. Amjad, himself, spends about $25 a month. He asked me what I make for a living. I felt like I had to be honest. I told him around $70,000 a year. He asked me what my rent is, what my expenses are. I told him one of the biggest expenses is going out to dinner and having drinks with friends. It’s something he never does. He said: you spend $6,000 a month. (That’s a bit high, I think, but for the discussion I let it go.) The whole thing felt less awkward than I would think it might. They knew things were dramatically different. But trading numbers made it all seem quite stark. Things were a bit more awkward a few days ago when Amjad was telling me how he and his friends want to start up an ISP (that’s Internet Service Provider, mom). He’s been talking about it for a while. The other day, he said that a friend of his was saying that if I want to give them $100,000 I could be a co-owner of the company and make a lot of money. I explained that even to me, this seemingly rich American, 100 grand is a lot more than I can come up with.
We had this great talk with Amjad’s mentor. He was the head of IT for the ministry of trade and explained how he set up the computer system to handle the oil-for-food distribution during the sanctions years. He was so proud, rightly, of setting up this enormous database of every single Iraqi citizen and foreign national. The distribution system was incredible. They were able to get the right amount of food to the right people every month. Nobody could cheat the system. Nobody was left out. This is particularly remarkable since so much of the Iraqi government was corrupt and inefficient. (It took months and massive bribes to get a drivers license or renew your car registration or any other bureaucratic errand.) They were using old computers with an outdated database program (FoxPro) on DOS. They were able to dispatch trucks all over the country perfectly efficiently. He said it worked so well because the Minister of Trade was a really good, committed guy who wanted to get the job done. People praised Saddam, but Saddam had nothing to do with it. It’s another reminder of how well-functioning certain parts of the state were. These very well-educated, professional technocrats are in the Ministries of Trade, Finance, Oil. Apparently the Mukhabarat secret police did a good job, too, but that’s depressing not praise-worthy. I asked this guy what it was like working so hard for a regime he despised. He said that he never worked one day for the regime. He never worked for Saddam Hussein. He worked for the people of Iraq. All the technocrats worked for the people of Iraq. He’s working now with the Americans and the UN World Food Program to get the operation up and running again. But now they’re fucked. All their computers were looted. Most of their trucks were looted. Their buildings were destroyed. The entire network that allowed 24 million people to be fed efficiently and properly every month was destroyed by a week of looting. This is the case everywhere, by the way. There’s no reliable electricity in Baghdad–as everyone complains–not because of the bombing (the Americans left the power plants intact) but because people have been looting the wires and cables that bring electricity. They’re looting the cars and trucks and equipment that linemen use to fix the wires. This semi well functioning state has all but collapsed in all of these areas. It makes me mad. Makes everyone mad. People say it’s a protest against Saddam and his government, but there were many pieces of the government that functioned well and served the people well. Why destroy a library? The IT guy said that he’s been extremely unimpressed by the Americans he’s been working with. They know nothing about Iraq, nothing about the ministries and how they functioned. And that stuff wasn’t secret. I knew a lot about it. And I know a lot of people who know a lot more. He said the questions the Americans are asking are so basic, embarrassingly so. He says he sees a big change between Garner and Bremer. He calls him Bremer Hussein, because he makes such strong decisions without caring what others will think. He’s not sure if it’s good or bad yet. He said–and I agree very strongly’that Bremer’s decision to disband the army was so stupid. Suddenly there are 400,000 angry men with big guns who know how to use them and now have no money and nothing to do but seethe with rage against the Americans. There was a protest the other day in which some of these now-ex-soldiers said that they would march peacefully that day and again in a week. After that, they’re going for blood. They’ll blow up the Sheraton, the big hotel where many journalists stay. They’ll start suicide attacks on Americans. There have been attacks on American soldiers today and yesterday. Everyone expects many more. Iraq feels like it could go in a very good direction: peaceful, wealthy. And it could explode and soon.
I got some emails complaining that I’m writing too much about the other reporters, that I’m writing too much about the newfound comforts here in Iraq or the blissful escape to Amman. One guy was particularly brutal. I guess these people just want reports on Iraq and the suffering and all that. Which I am eager to provide. But this is a diary. This is not a newscast. This is my experience. And a huge part of this experience, for me, is the amazing fun of being with all these great reporters. This has been overall probably the best experience of my life. Much of that is watching history unfold, etc. All that stuff. But a lot of it is the chance to be with these great, smart, cool people. Work hard all day and then have great dinners and laugh over drinks. I guess it’s upsetting to some people to hear that we take time to indulge in fun in Baghdad. Well, fuck you. The Iraqis have fun when they can. I’m constantly laughing with Iraqis out on the street or in restaurants. Everyone should have fun when they can. I remember when I first met up with reporters on my first night in Amman in November. I remember feeling kind of outraged that they spend their evenings in bars with each other rather than out on the street getting to know the people. But now I understand. This job is so fucking hard. It’s so much work. It’s so mentally exhausting, emotionally overwhelming. And it seems, to me, at least, absolutely necessary to enjoy the evenings. This one emailer said I have “a self-centered, colonial-governor mentality.” Fuck that. What bullshit. It makes me feel so snotty. Like: It must be tough living in Park Slope and feeling the pain of Iraq. Why don’t you come to Baghdad and write your own diary about how you live in the slums of Thaura.
That brings something else up. I hear from many friends that Iraq is just not a topic of discussion anymore. Nobody is following the post-war reconstruction. The story is over. This really pisses me off. Although I completely understand it and know that if I were back in the states I’d be in the same boat. But now is the time to protest. Now is the time to call the government to task. The post-war looting (which the Americans should have predicted and prevented) did a lot more damage than the war. The current botched reconstruction effort is also horribly damaging Iraq. Our country is fucking up in a big way and it’s hurting 24 million people and it will bite us so hard in the ass down the road. It’ll be like September 11th or something’something big will happen and we’ll all say oh, we forgot about Afghanistan, we forgot about Iraq. I guess you can’t get a half-million person protest in Manhattan over subtle issues of reconstructing a faraway country. But I do feel quite disappointed in all the people who were so involved in protesting the war and now have moved on. The Iraqis will tell you, again and again, that right now, today, is the worst time of their lives. Worse than the war. Worse than Saddam. It’s all I hear all day. And it’s because of our government. (I don’t actually agree that now is worse than Saddam. There’s more looting and crime and less services, but there is hope and freedom.) A lot of the human shields are still around here. But they don’t do anything. They hang out in the hotels or go on tourist jaunts around Iraq. The hospitals are desperate for any kind of volunteer. You could do just about anything and it would help. But they weren’t here to help Iraq, they were here to protest the war. That’s over, so they’re now on vacation. I feel like Rumsfeld and Bush and Bremer all know this. They know that nobody gives a shit anymore. So, they know they can do whatever they want here. It’s certainly not going to affect any election.
