Flying into Baghdad at dawn after a seven-year
absence reveals many changes, at least at first light.
Gone is the surveillance balloon that hung over the
airport like a giant eye.
The pilot executes a smooth landing. In the years
after the Iraq War he would have brought the plane to ground in an adrenalin-pumping
corkscrew pattern.
With the aircraft's wings banked sharply toward the
ground, he would have circled over the airfield bringing the plane down 3,000
meters in less than three minutes while passengers' ears popped from the rising
air pressure.
That was to evade missiles fired by insurgents from
the fields around the airport. The procedure is no longer necessary.
The airport appears about the same, mostly deserted.
Taxis and most private cars still are not allowed to approach the building. A
bus shuttles passengers to a dusty parking lot some five kilometers away.
The six-lane highway into town, once the deadliest
road in Iraq, is clean and clear of debris. Instead of the carcasses of
burnt-out cars, sprinklers water the lush grass alongside the road.
Recollections
of Saddam’s Iraq
I first visited Iraq some 14 years ago when the
country was still under the grip of Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party. An
ordered society seemed to flourish on the surface despite years of sanctions
and a no-fly zone that had crippled the economy and virtually eliminated the
middle class.
It had taken
me two years to obtain a visa, which I did by joining a journalists' tour from
Cairo. VOA had been blacklisted for years, I presumed, because of its
broadcasts to Iraq in Arabic and English.
We had raced overnight across the desert from Amman,
Jordan, to reach the Iraqi border post at dawn where our passports were stamped
and our radios, cell phones and other communication devices were confiscated
until we left the country.
After a few more hours' drive through the
Mesopotamian desert my group checked into the Rasheed Hotel. The threshold of
the hotel was inlaid with a mosaic of former U.S. President George Bush the
father. When entering the hotel, it was difficult to avoid stepping on the face
of the architect of the 1991 war that ended Saddam's occupation of Kuwait.
At the reception desk I was taken aback when the
attendant asked for me by name. Was he a fan or someone designated to keep an eye
on me? I never found out.
Riding then in the upscale Mansour district, scions
of the political elite chatted from their sleek cars idling in the middle of
the street while traffic backed up around them.
Neighborhood markets sold at discount prices the
silver plates and candelabras pawned by middle class families that could no
longer make ends meet.
Iraq
post-Saddam
Driving through Baghdad today brought back memories
of the Iraq War organized by George Bush-the-son.
I covered the war in early 2003 from Qatar where the
U.S. military's forward command was headquartered. Several hundred reporters
would gather at the end of the day in the media hanger on a Qatari military
base outside Doha.
As the TV anchors in the audience finished their
live-shots, a senior U.S. commander would appear on the battleship-grey set and
brief us on the day's accomplishments.
We assembled in the middle of the night on March
19th to watch the beginning of the war and the wave of nighttime bombings
called “Shock and Awe.
The relatively new practice of “embedding” reporters
with the troops quickly shifted the focus of media coverage to the frontlines.
My job soon included checking out tips from my colleagues advancing in the
desert.
After Saddam's statue was toppled on Firdos Square
and Baghdad was deemed “freed,” we moved the bureau from Doha to a hotel in
Karada, a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood lying across the Tigris River from
the fortified Green Zone.
I was sent in August to report on the efforts to
raise a new democracy from the cinders of war. When I arrived, the foreign
troops were still heroes and there was a fresh, almost giddy ambiance of
freedom.
I arrived one day after a cement truck crashed into
the United Nations compound and exploded under the main office building. The
attack killed U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and at least 16
others.
He died slowly under the collapsed ceiling of his
office talking to rescue workers while they tried feverishly to reach him. Some
believe his death ended any chance of a peaceful transition to democratic rule
in Iraq. In any case, it signaled much more violence to come. More than 100,000
people including 4,400 U.S. soldiers eventually would die.
I returned to Iraq several more times: After
Saddam's capture, during his trial and eventual execution, and as the country
prepared for its first multiparty elections.
I watched as the power vacuum left by his demise
sucked in a vortex of anti-occupation resistance and sectarian-based fighting
that eventually escalated into a low-grade civil war.
Iraq today
Today, the main streets in Baghdad seem cleaner and
in better repair. A mechanized street cleaner sweeps the dust along the road.
Sidewalks are being re-paved. Buildings are being
repaired. New cars imported from Korea and Iran snarl the traffic circles.
But conversations with Iraqis from all walks of life
unveil deep worries and a general unhappiness with conditions a decade later.
The biggest concern is security.
An unemployed construction worker, Mahdi
al-Moussawi, says the pace of the bombings and ambushes has gone down since the
peak of the sectarian conflict five or six years ago. “In general the
security situation has improved a little bit, but there are still security
problems,” he said. Bombings continue to kill and injure hundreds of people a
month and they touch everybody.
A lifelong resident thanks God after his
college-aged daughter is only slightly wounded in a car bomb attack that kills
more than a dozen people on the 10th anniversary of the start of the war.
His son was wounded in a car bombing nine months before.
The windows of an office of a women's rights
activist have yet to be replaced two months after a bomb exploded on the street
below. She explains the target was not her group but a VIP driving down the
street.
Sectarian tensions affect much of life and have
eliminated the mixed-ethnic nature of many neighborhoods. Residents blame these
mostly on politicians pursuing their partisan agendas.
The majority Shi'ite group, which now dominates
political life, lives in fear of terrorist attacks by its rivals. These range
from former Saddam supporters to radical Islamist “jihadis.” Kidnappings,
whether for political or financial gain, are common.
Minority Sunnis, who controlled politics under
Saddam Hussein, feel marginalized and discriminated against by the government.
Kurds, who were harshly repressed under the Saddam
regime, continue to build their autonomous region in the north and spar with
the central government over oil revenues from their region. Other
minorities, such as Christians, Assyrians and Turkmen, live in fear. Many
seek to leave.
Civil war
fears
Many Iraqis say they fear another civil war.
Analyst Taha Jallo says, “Iraq will never be one
country again. The Shia will go their way and make their country and so will
the Sunni and the Kurds.”
The framework of a democratic government has been
set up. Iraq has successfully held four multiparty elections -- two national,
two local -- and is to hold a fifth this month. But voting has been postponed
in two Sunni-dominated provinces because of anti-government demonstrations
there.
But Iraqis say the civic institutions needed to
support democracy are not there yet. Dissidents are harassed. Some 6,000
activists are in prison. And politicians, they say, continue to play the ethnic
card.
Patronage in the form of jobs, government contracts
and other privileges promotes under-qualified individuals to important
positions. It allows corruption to run unpunished and creates a sense of
entitlement to an elite few.
Twenty-five year-old business student Samer Adnan
says, “We are suffering because there are no jobs, especially for young people
who have just graduated from college. The government promises to create jobs
for everyone but it's just posing.”
Iraqis complain that despite billions of dollars a
year in government revenues from the largely restored petroleum sector, they
continue to live with a debilitating lack of public services.
All four smokestacks of the electrical power plant
at the edge of town now billow smoke, up from the one-or-two that worked
before. Electricity black-outs are shorter. But the hum of private generators
still provides a soundtrack to daily life.
Most Baghdadis say they have electrical power for
only six to 12 hours a day. Clean water is scarce. Public schools and health
care facilities are under-equipped and under-staffed.
Some residents say they would leave if they could
but there is nowhere to go. Political unrest in neighboring countries and a
lack of jobs everywhere make emigration risky.
Iraqis are angry at their political leaders. They
see them as corrupt barons living behind the blast walls of the Green Zone
while ordinary citizens suffer in the dangerous and under-serviced
neighborhoods outside.
Unbridled
traffic
Iraqis remain deeply conservative, in part due to
the decades of war and isolation under Saddam, and in part due to their own
social heritage. This, too, hinders progress.
New traffic lights have been erected at the city's
main intersections. But no one pays much attention to them
Instead, motorists prefer their more customary
unwritten rules of the road. They jockey through the traffic at intersections
and miraculously dovetail intact out onto the desired street.
Traffic policemen stand on the curb chatting and
smoking. They only interfere when gridlock occurs. Most motorists seem to
prefer it that way.
The financial sector shows a similar aversion to
change. More than a decade into the 21st century, the Iraqi economy remains primarily
cash-based.
There are only a few automatic teller machines, or
ATMs, and no credit cards.
The head of the stock exchange laments that fund transfers
between banks take up to 10 days to process unlike the rest of the world where
they take a few minutes.
Consumers grumble that prices are high, especially
gasoline which costs the equivalent of 50 U.S. cents a liter. This is 10 times
the heavily subsidized price under Saddam Hussein, but it’s only a fourth of
the cost in neighboring countries and one-tenth the price in Europe.
“We just live day by day. We do the best we can,”
said Intassar Fadl, a mother of five shopping in the central market.
Iraqi
optimism
Yet, Iraqis try to remain upbeat, shrugging off the
daily dangers with the fatalistic expression, “It's God's will.”
They like to stroll the shopping streets and flood
the swank new malls that have sprung up across the city.
Or they go to Zawra Park, in the heart of the city,
to picnic on its broad lawns and watch the paddle boats glide across the lake.
Parents take their children to the zoo, which is
slowly recovering, or to the refurbished amusement park which, they boast, now
has the second largest Ferris wheel in the Middle East.
And they remain one of the most hospitable people
around, obsessively over-feeding their guests and feigning anger when they can
eat no more.
They like to laugh, making jokes about their living
conditions and the foibles of their politicians. Asked about elections and
democracy, they become irritated, saying these have produced nothing good.
Some say the country is changing, but it will take
more time to see the results. Others say it is sliding back toward
authoritarianism.
If they express any hope for the future, it is that
their children will develop a better system when eventually they take over.
As a visitor prepares to leave, his friends bid
farewell saying, “We don't know if we'll be here when you return.” No one
commemorates the war that, depending on one's opinion, changed so much, or so
little.
Sources :
http://www.voanews.com/content/iraq-perspective/1648025.html
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