Waiting for better times in Basra

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS

August 24, 2005

BASRA, Iraq - It was called the Venice of the Middle East for its beautiful canals, an ancient port romanticized as home to Sinbad the Sailor in "Arabian Nights." Nine million stately date palms lined its riverfront and graced its fields. One of the world's largest pools of oil lies beneath its sands.

Today, Basra's canals are open rivers of sewage. Most of the date palms are mere stubs in the ground, chopped down by Saddam Hussein to clear the field for battle. Despite the city's location on the shores of two mighty rivers that join upstream, its water is too contaminated for its citizens to drink. Mangy wild dogs and straggly goats pick at heaps of uncollected garbage. The people here say that gangs of kidnappers and hijackers roam the streets, stealing children from their mothers' arms and holding them for ransom. No one keeps records of how often this happens.

Electricity comes and goes, leaving 2 million people without air conditioning and at the mercy of temperatures that reach 130 degrees in the shade.

There are signs of new prosperity for some, as shops do a rapid business in imported appliances, new cars begin to clog the streets and lavish houses rise from empty lots all over town. Salaries of some government employees, like police and teachers, have risen dramatically. One elementary school principal said his monthly wage had jumped from $12 to $380.

But the new wealth is limited mostly to civil servants and professionals, and most of all to gasoline smugglers who ship the city's natural wealth south under cover of darkness to higher prices in the Persian Gulf.

Waiting for the recovery

More than two years after Basra celebrated its liberation from Hussein, its citizens are grateful that he is gone but bitter that the services and security critical to their everyday lives have not only not recovered from two decades of wars and sanctions, but in some ways - particularly security - have gotten sharply worse.

"Where in all the world do you see sewage in the street?" asked an exasperated Hamid el-Musawi, 37, an unemployed welder who sat sweltering with his visitors because a power failure had cut off his air conditioning. "We have two rivers but we don't have [clean] water!" he exclaimed. "We demand from the American people to begin the rebuilding of Basra!"

Up to now, the anti-U.S. Sunni insurgency prevalent in the rest of Iraq has not been a large presence in largely Shia Basra. The growing resentment here against coalition forces over lack of improvement in daily life, though, is having serious political repercussions, some U.S administration officials say.

"The belief is that people aren't thinking [about the U.S. as a solution]; they are starting to think about extreme Islamic ideologies," one official said. "It goes back to security. For two years in Basra little was done ... . It has created a vacuum for Islamic ideology."

The rebuilding of Basra and the rest of southern Iraq was meant to have begun on a large scale after the U.S. invasion in the hopes that a rebuilt south would provide a shining example of a future for all Iraqis.

But a violent Shia militia led by powerful cleric Muqtada al-Sadr rose up against U.S. and British forces here last year, attacking not only soldiers but compounds housing diplomats, aid workers and contractors. At the same time, Basra was descending deeper into general lawlessness due to brazen criminals and ineffective police, in contrast with the brutal but effective police force under Hussein that made major crimes unusual.

Now the rebellion has ebbed, but British and U.S. aid workers go nowhere in the area without a phalanx of eight or 10 heavily armed and extremely expensive bodyguards from their home countries. The deaths of two British security men from a roadside bomb last month, and of American journalist Steven Vincent early this month, are indications the Shia militias, including al-Sadr's, are still at least an occasional threat to foreigners here.

Contractors unprotected

Bush administration sources concerned about the slow pace of rebuilding say the Pentagon, its troops in Iraq already stretched, has refused to allocate troops to guard civilian contractors in the South, even though the situation is better than the all-out attacks of last year. Without such protection, many contractors refuse to work in the South.

A handful of U.S. officials from the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other Pentagon offices are working day and night here in the South to try to get some projects completed - including water, sewage and electricity, the very things Iraqis want most. But they are often frustrated.

As more electric generating capacity comes on line, for example, it is eaten up by new air conditioners and other appliances purchased by Iraqis, so electricity is less available now than before the war. In some cases, the local infrastructure has proved too antiquated to take advantage of other projects. The U.S. realized several months ago that a huge, 1,800-megawatt addition to Iraq's power generation capacity had to be postponed because the distribution network could not handle it. Now, the money is being diverted into rebuilding the network. Water projects in Basra by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have failed to have a major impact because electricity is often unavailable to pump water into people's homes and the water pipes themselves are in desperate need of repair. Some new sewage pumping stations already have failed for want of maintenance by the Iraqis and the rest of the sewage system is broken or nonexistent.

Iraqis concede that the standard of living for many of them is higher, and sometimes much higher, than under Hussein. Like the rest of Iraq, people in Basra lived through more than a decade of economic sanctions in the period between the two wars with the United States, with basic foods and medicines unavailable or too expensive.

More expected than received

After the invasion in March 2003, "suddenly everything was in the markets," said Julian Yousef, a university professor with a doctorate in English. "All the simple things in life that we were longing for, like a Pepsi."

But the people of Basra, well aware of their city's former prominence as one of the foremost metropolises in the Middle East, expect much more, and don't see militia attacks as a valid excuse. "We have completed two years since the invasion, but we don't have something that is touchable, like a big supermarket," Yousef said.

Policemen, school teachers, professors, journalists - the top rank of Basra society, which includes civil servants - are prosperous today compared with the days under Hussein, who cared so little for Basra's economic welfare that he cut down its palm trees in the 1980s in part to attack invading Iranians.But a large segment has not been touched by this new prosperity, creating new resentment.

"Before the war, all the people were in need, but now there are two groups of people," said Abu Hadi al-Meriany, 39, a candy vendor at a street kiosk. "The people who work for the state - they have good salaries. But the rest ... stay poor." Unemployment is rampant, particularly among young men. Food prices have risen sharply. Under Hussein, every family received monthly food rations sufficient at least for survival. Now such deliveries are sporadic.

Still, al-Meriany said, the situation overall is better now than before the war. "The change we witnessed is freedom," he said.

While the vast majority of Iraqis interviewed during a reporter's 3-week stay in Basra complained angrily about the situation now, a few said their fellow citizens should be more grateful.

"The situation now is one thousand times better than before the war," said Abu Ali al-Hamdani, a 30-year-old school teacher. "I cannot say the service is good, but nothing comes easy or in one day and a night, because Saddam left nothing. But I have hope in the future."