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Iraqis complain about US { April 16 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/international/worldspecial/16BAGH.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/international/worldspecial/16BAGH.html
April 16, 2003
Free to Protest, Iraqis Complain About the U.S.
By IAN FISHER
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 15 — Protests against the American forces here are rising by the day as Iraqis exercise their new right to complain — something that often landed them in prison or worse during President Saddam Hussein's rule.
But no one here is in the mood to note that paradox, as Iraqis confront with greater clarity their complicated reactions to the week-old American military presence here: anger at the looting; frustration at the ongoing lack of everything from electricity to a firm sense of order; fear of long-term United States military occupation.
"Down, down U.S.A. — don't stay, go away!" chanted Ahmed Osman, 30, a teacher among the several hundred Iraqis protesting today in front of the Palestine Hotel downtown, which the marines are both guarding and using as their headquarters to recruit civil servants to reconstruct Iraq's central authority. "Bush is the same as Saddam," he said.
The protest was small compared with the 20,000 who marched today in Nasiriya against the American presence in Iraq, but it was the largest such demonstration in Baghdad yet, prompting the marines to seal off the hotel, and the Sheraton next door, for several hours and to beef up security.
There is no sense that these complaints — in which ordinary Iraqis have begun insistently buttonholing any Westerner who wanders by — are degenerating into violence or an unwillingness to cooperate with the Americans.
But individual protest has almost reached a fever pitch, as scores of Iraqis around the city asked reporters if it was true that Mr. Hussein was now in the United States (the evidence: that Baghdad fell so quickly, a deal must have been struck). They are also, in greater numbers, beginning to blame American soldiers for the looting that has stripped the nation's property bare, from desk chairs to ancient Sumerian artifacts.
"The Americans are the ones who have been looting and taking things out of the stores and giving them to families," said Amer Karim, 30, who was himself selling two industrial ceiling fans and a new telephone in a street market in the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad. "So anyone who is selling these things didn't really loot it."
Iraq's impatience for normalcy is testing the American troops here, who are eager to show that they are trying to meet Iraqis' needs now that the main combat operations are over.
Today, marines and Iraqi soldiers continued the joint patrols against looting that began on Monday, tramping late this afternoon over twisted metal and blasted concrete in front of a bombed government building downtown. Several shots rang out, and marines and Iraqis ran together down the building's side, finding nothing.
"It seems like people are pretty happy to see police on the streets again," said Sgt. Lee Buttrill, 29. "And they are always happy to see us," he added, whether in earnestness or a perfect deadpan, it was hard to tell.
The military said today that it was also close to solving one of the main sources of complaint: the lack of electricity since April 4, which has kept shops and schools closed and thus delayed a return to normal life. The military said it expected power in parts of the city to be restored in the next 48 to 72 hours.
At the same time today, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it expected water service in eastern Baghdad to be restored Wednesday.
In all, order seemed to spread more fully throughout the city today, even amid continuing explosions, gunfire and looting. Traffic jams returned, in some cases worse than before the war because of the military checkpoints and streets still blocked off by local gunmen. Along Jumhuriya Steet, one of the main thoroughfares, more shops were open, with people selling gasoline on the streets and changing money.
But even as the chaos receded, the deep damage is also becoming clearer — as are the complications that Iraq will face in stitching this nation, divided among Shiite, Sunni and Kurd, back together under American administration.
This morning, the ashes were still smoldering at the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several a thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell. It was another severe blow to Iraq's 10,000 years of cultural history, along with the looting of the National Museum and the burning of the National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost.
"When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived," said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, 42, the ministry's general manager for administration. "And now they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss.
"If you talk to any intellectual Muslims in the world, they are crying right now over this," he added.
As Mr. Obeid spoke, gunfire rang out a block away, as looters sought to empty a bank. Mr. Obeid said he had just passed the looters and saw an American patrol pass by and, in a common complaint here, do nothing.
The right to complain has been accompanied by other rights long suppressed under Mr. Hussein, particularly the rights of Shiites, who make up 60 percent of population. Since last week, they have been increasingly active, with some in the Shiite slum of Saddam City, now renamed Sadr City, demanding an Islamic state and providing civilian militias to keep order.
Today in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood, religious officials who had been calling for people to return looted goods said that they had retrieved several dump trucks and public buses, and that they were now administering those public services with the help of volunteers.
"Once there is stability and a government returns, everything will be given back to the government," said Muhammad Hassan, 36, a chemical engineer who is volunteering at the mosque. "It won't be just to give them back. It will be to provide services to the Iraqi people."
As he was speaking, Shiite worshipers held a procession of drums and trumpets and green Shiite flags, re-enacting the funeral of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the sect's principal saints. Such processions were banned by Mr. Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government in the early 1970's as part of the wider effort to suppress the power of the majority Shiites.
"They would execute you if you did this," Mr. Hassan said. But then he turned his attention to the allied presence here.
"As an educated man, I see that the future will be worse than the past," he said. "The British and the United States are here for the oil, and even Israel is getting its cut. They all want to destroy Islam."
At the procession was a former cook at a presidential palace, Mehedi Jebel Abed, 42, who was released after nearly five years in prison during an amnesty Mr. Hussein declared last month. He said he was jailed in an underground prison for a comment he made one night while cooking lamb for Mr. Hussein's bodyguards.
"Basically what I said was, `Why do these people get to eat this good food and we eat trash?' " Mr. Abed said.
He was taken away that night. He is now free to say whatever he likes, though he is not sure what that freedom has won him.
"I'm happy that Saddam Hussein is gone," he said. "I don't care if the Americans are here or not. But nothing has changed for me. I am out of jail, but I have no job, nowhere to live. These are not good times for me."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
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