Iraq

Everyday Worries

There's an odd comfort in Iraqis' acute concerns today: jobs, roads, economic security. How to pay rent, not just avoid bombs.

BAGHDAD - The black smoke of Baghdad, the burning Baghdad of May, has drifted away. City traffic is back, crawling along on cheap gasoline. Schools reopen this week, Iraqi couples are marrying again, and painters over at the Victory Theater are freshening up the lobby for opening night - whenever that may be.

Night these days, for the people of Baghdad, is a time to hurry home: to rooms darkened by blackouts, to the crackling of gunfire somewhere, staying out of the way of criminals, out of the gunsights of nervous American soldiers.

To a visitor returning after four months, Baghdad is a different place, a city of day-and-night contrasts and of people of many minds, all uncertain.

One day last week off Yafa Street, a gray-haired man named Taha Faraj Obeid stood in dusty shoes and sweat-stained shirt at an outdoor table where Iraqi organizers were collecting names of jobless workers. Are things getting better? a reporter asked.

Other men, crowding around in the heavy midday heat, shook their heads. But Obeid hesitated.

"Yes," the out-of-work laborer finally said, "because the Americans are here. I hope they'll help us."

Searching for words, he paused again, then added:

"This is our country. Our homeland. We're the people of Iraq. We need more jobs."

As the U.S. postwar occupation stretches on, the people of Iraq are plainly torn by both hope and fear, relieved at a dictator's fall, humiliated and resentful of an alien army mutely pointing its guns at them. They see rebuilding going on, but for them their Iraq cannot be rebuilt fast enough.

Such complex feelings don't make the headlines in distant places.

A mile up Yafa Street from the open-air "jobless center," in a fortresslike American compound, a U.S. Army spokesman complained to international journalists that they were focusing too heavily on negative Iraq news: bombings and anti-U.S. guerrilla attacks.

"All kinds of things are occurring all over the country, the positive things that just aren't getting out there," Lt. Col. George Krivo said.

Iraq's American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, reinforced the point to a TV interviewer during a U.S. visit: "When I arrived in early May, Baghdad was a city literally on fire. There were no shops open.... The economy was at a standstill. There was not a policeman on duty."

Bremer's own reconstruction plan says truly dramatic change is a long-term proposition, however, for an Iraq whose economy under Saddam Hussein was stunted by 13 years of U.N. sanctions, then shattered by last March's U.S.-British invasion and the arson and looting that followed. Its vital oil industry remains crippled, its electric power supply limited.

"Full economic recovery will take years," the Bremer plan says.

However long it takes, the show - and life - must go on, says Chato Mohammed, 60, the Victory Theater manager whose own show is a long-running comedy he hopes to revive by November, a farce about Martians helping Iraqis face down Earth's "planetary superpower."

That theme may seem outdated five months after a U.S.-British invasion, but the bald, chain-smoking Mohammed, like other Iraqis, is adjusting.

"Things are getting better day by day," he said of the U.S. occupation, and quickly added, "Inshallah" - God willing.

Beyond the Victory's marquee on Saadoun Street, the debris of that war and its aftermath litters the city: gutted government ministries and charred high-rise offices, hulks of destroyed vehicles, mangled highway dividers, mounds of rubble.

Reconstruction, with U.S. money and oversight, is visible as well: of hundreds of Iraqi schools and health clinics, many looted down to their electric wiring; of a decrepit sewer system spewing filth through one Baghdad neighborhood; of damaged street lights in another; of the streets themselves in a third, streets that went without repair for a quarter-century.

Change is everywhere. Where squatters hung laundry from courthouse windows after the war, judges are hearing cases again. May's curbside markets in assault rifles have vanished. American dollars circulate widely, flown in by the planeload to pay stipends and salaries to Iraqi retirees, ex-soldiers and bureaucrats. Restaurants have reopened, and even some cinemas. Motorists still line up at gas stations as in May, but instead of arriving at dawn to wait for hours, they fill up within 20 minutes, at the same remarkably low prewar price of 4 U.S. cents a gallon.

In one critical area, change has been far from dramatic.

Bremer once projected Iraq's electricity supplies, a victim of American bombing, would recover prewar levels by August. But Baghdad still receives barely half that amount and endures alternating blackouts all day, as Iraqi and American engineers struggle to rehabilitate outdated equipment and repair damage from continuing sabotage and looting.

The city, as a result, has returned to an earlier "ice age," as men in the streets saw off blocks of ice to sell to householders trying to preserve food in unreliable refrigerators.

At al-Doura power station, the city's biggest, engineer Abdul Hasan Aun Hasan said with a laugh: "This old plant is working by the will of God! For the sake of good people."

Many of the "good people" of Baghdad are desperate, and not only because of blackouts.

"I'd like to meet Bremer and tell him about our poverty, our standard of living," Yusra Abd al-Rahim, 36, a mother of three, told a reporter who found her resting on her way to visit relatives in eastern Baghdad.

Her husband earns $110 a month in two jobs, but they need much more, said the yellow-scarfed al-Rahim.

"I can't even afford shoes to send my children to school in." And the family owes the landlords two months' rent. "They came pounding on the door and warned me they'd kick us out."

The underpaid are luckier than the estimated one-half of Iraqi workers who have no job at all - set adrift when the government in this state-dominated economy collapsed with the toppling Hussein statues in April.

Practically no private-sector jobs are available, said Lateef Jaber Mutar al-Shumari, in charge of the volunteer job-placement desk on Yafa Street.

"But we've heard from ministries that next month there'll be more hiring," he said.

Those jobs, too, can be hard to come by.

"I went to the Health Ministry and the man at the door demanded $100 from me for a job," recounted Obeid, the jobless laborer. "If I had $100, I'd spend it on my family."

Afra Abdel al-Wahab, 44, who lost her own government job, had brought her daughter and son to the makeshift employment table for help. But she was pessimistic.

"The jobs seem to go to certain privileged people, just like before," she said.

Every Baghdad resident has a story, and this black-veiled woman's was particularly sad: A U.S. military medical team that came to her old workplace determined that her ailing 6-month-old boy had two holes in his heart. They promised to find treatment. That was three months ago and she's heard nothing.

"Have the Americans brought mostly good or bad? We'll learn that in the future," she said. "For now what we want is jobs."

But not at any cost, some say. Nouria Hussein, 48, encountered on east Baghdad's Karada market street, said she doesn't allow her 24- and 27-year-old daughters out of the house to look for work, "because there's no security."

For women in particular, the streets are dangerous, as Baghdad suffers through kidnappings and carjackings, armed robberies and murders.

Two or three cars are stolen at gunpoint each day in southern Baghdad's al-Doura district, reports the area's assistant police chief.

"As far as the amount of crime, I'd say things are 50 percent better than right after the war, but still twice as bad as before the war," said Lt. Col. Mohammed Jassim, 40.

Recalling Iraqi police to duty, 40,000 so far nationwide, has been a major, and slow, undertaking by the Americans. Baghdad's police are still short of good sidearms and patrol vehicles. Even their blue uniforms are unevenly distributed.

"Look at me: This shirt's too tight!" said the trim Jassim.

It's not only armed Iraqis whom people fear. American troops staffing Baghdad strongpoints and patrolling Iraq's roads are too often quick to open fire or otherwise mistreat ordinary Iraqis, many say.

"They came at us like monsters," taxi driver Ali Mohammed, 32, recounted of one streetside search by U.S. troops. "They threw my things away - food, tomatoes - as though they were worthless."

For all their deficiencies, Baghdad police are making arrests. Jassim's little jail was packed with two dozen suspects one day last week, including an 11-year-old boy hauled in with an older brother as a "two-man gang."

Up Baghdad's slow, winding Tigris River, in the Azamiyah district, other boys are awaiting today's reopening of a secondary school that the looters of April had stripped of everything from lights to doors to pavement tiles. A $20,000 U.S. contract, and 70 Iraqi ex-soldiers working for a local builder, have restored it to pink-and-white readiness for classes.

"The future, I think, is brighter," said English teacher Jaber Bustan, 49, who as caretaker lives with his wife and nine children in crowded back rooms at the school.

For Bustan, as for some other fortunate Iraqis, the future has arrived. Those planeloads of U.S. dollars have boosted his salary to $180 a month, from the equivalent of $13.

"I plan to buy some furniture." He smiled. "And maybe I'll add some rooms to our place."

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