"Kull ishi maaku" is an Iraqi expression which literally translates as "everything is not available" - we have nothing.
Since about 1997, Kimadia, the state-run medical supplies company, like a lot of state enterprises, has been run essentially as follows: the government gave a subsidy to the company. Workers received a small monthly salary which was deemed to be an "advance" on their annual payment. It's between 45-60 thousand Dinar a month, the latter equivalent to $30 a month. The rest of the money was kept back for the running of the company and distributed at the end of the financial year. It wasn't ideal because it meant the workers had to incur debts for several months against the promise of the end-of-year payment but that promise did at least enable them to borrow enough to live on.
The money for 2002 was to be distributed a short while after the invasion. It was brought in sacks to the warehouse with lists stating how much each worker was to receive. We saw with our eyes, they say, how much money we were owed, but we never quite held it in our hands.
According to the old system, shares were determined by rank not only within the company but also within the Ba'ath Party. The same managing directors remained in place and, though the party was ostensibly gone, the same distribution policy had been followed. When the workers started demanding a fairer division of the funds, the son of the accountant who was holding the money got out a gun and started shooting. US soldiers arrived and seized the money. That was the last the workers saw of it.
At the warehouse this morning a pick up sat idle, with a red crescent stenciled on the side beside the words "Medical Supplies." The company management has hired freelance drivers to take supplies around the country, so the drivers have no work. Warehouse workers crowded to tell us their stories and vent their anger at Mr. Jim Haveman, the military officer and senior advisor at the Ministry of Health who is responsible for the matter.
One man with six children and a wife to support couldn't pay his rent any more, so had to move into one of the many squatted former government buildings. Another said he owed a co-worker 20,000 Dinar. She nodded. He did. Most had borrowed money for basic essentials on the basis of the annual payment and are now unable to repay the loans. Rent and food are more expensive now than before the war and the sunken cheeks, creased eyes and crumpled foreheads of many of the workers testified that the wages had been painfully meagre for a while before that. The two men who brought us there were 31, only two years older than me, but looked easily 15 years my senior. “Kull ishi maaku”, they told us. We have nothing.
A letter from Jim Haveman stated that the matter had been "dealt with" in the spring. Kimadia was a corrupt organization. There could be no profits for distribution because it was a state subsidised company. The intention had been to give the money to the managers and a selected few and the billions of Dinars now formed part of "the general funds of Iraq."
90% of the workers have signed a petition calling on Haveman to release the funds. Khalida, the secretary to the managing director of the company, originally said she wanted to be the first signatory. When it was brought for her to sign she advised them to drop it or they might lose their jobs altogether. She refused to give any statement, saying she wasn't authorized to do so.
Workers have been told they should forget the whole matter: that Haveman is "worse than Saddam". According to many of them, the heads of the Profit Boards, Abu Assen and Ahmed, who work for Haveman, passed on a threat that those making a fuss would be viewed as working against the coalition forces and arrested, which is why none of them are named here. They might arrest a couple of representatives, someone said, but could they arrest all 4000 workers if they all stood together? Haveman, they were told, would "scatter you to the stars". They would never see each other again.
We went to the Ministry and handed in our passports in exchange for visitors' passes. In a saga reminiscent of the old Iraq we tramped up and down between levels 1,2 and 5 chasing pieces of paper from one person which would permit us to ask another for an appointment to ask a third for a piece of paper to grant us passage into the office of the secretary of the assistant of the person we wanted to see, to ask a single, simple question. The upshot is that we're still looking for Mr Jim Haveman who takes his weekends on a Sunday, unlike the rest of the country which has Friday off and is mid-week by Sunday.
In the new Iraq, people are still threatened by and scared of the political leadership. It's telling that they still need advocates from other countries to assert their rights to the authorities, not that there's any guarantee we'll be able to sort things out for them, but we're going to give it a try.
The women who clustered into one office said they were ready for strikes and demonstrations and we promised to support them in whatever they decide to do. There may come a time for international pressure, so keep reading and I'll let you know what help they need.
On a similar theme, having given up on the inextricably stuck taxi and walked the last of the way back, we found ourselves in the unusual position of standing on the same side of the barricades as the police. There was a demonstration blocking Sadoon Street, police and security staff besieging the building where the young boys and old men used to queue with their call up papers. They haven't been paid for three months. “Kull ishi maaku”, they all said, brushing one hand against the other repeatedly, as if dusting them off. We have nothing.
"Amreeki," people started calling: Americans. Two tanks had pulled up to the far end of the demonstration and the police and security guards, some still wearing their IP [Iraqi Police] armbands, many with their ID cards hanging around their necks, ran to face the soldiers, whose response was to shout and swear and issue orders in English. One, who said he was a lieutenant, ordered an underling to push people, which he obligingly did, with his gun.
They don't have the right to block the street, according to one soldier. Blocking the streets is somehow an act of violence in the confused mind of the soldier who went on to tell us that this could not, therefore, be called a peaceful protest. The soldiers threatened to arrest the police if they didn't go away. What were they doing there ?, we asked. “Supporting the Iraqi Police”, one said. But, we pointed out, the IPs are this side of the razor wire. “No comment”, said the lieutenant on his behalf.
One security guard burnt his badge. An IP took off his armband and wrapped it round his head like a pirate's hat. Rubble was thrown into the road, razor wire coils pulled across from the central reservation and the pavement and rusting junk from the roadside piles turned into a barricade. Cars were surrounded and made to turn back and a man who tried to escape the siege with armfuls of files was sent scurrying back into the building. A loyalist police van attempting to get to the building was set upon and screeched off.
Eventually, a representative of the Minister of the Interior turned up. He was allowed to cross the razor wire. The men crouched and sat in a crowd so that everyone could see and hear and he promised to meet them at 10am tomorrow. Always they promise to pay us in 3 days' time, then 3 more days, some muttered, but they felt they'd upped the stakes enough, made their intentions clear.
The representative was reluctant to talk to us at all but finally explained that the problem was that men had been hired before the authority had been given. No, he couldn't guarantee that they would be paid. It was some while before he accepted that, having worked for three months as employees, it was their right to be paid. But no, he still couldn't guarantee that they would be paid.
I learnt a new word - zbala - scum. A boy of maybe 12 announced, "Amreeki, Baathi, Bush, zbala." Police officers said they'd had enough of the Americans. Some say that an American company is being paid $50,000 per school for repainting buildings. “I'll do it for a thousand”, an Iraqi friend said. “I'll get a load of paint and a load of cake and juice and we'll get everyone to come and do it together. It would make people feel involved and then they could save the money for paying the workers.”
Anyone listening?
Jo Wilding
November 16th
Talking Politics in Baghdad
It's truly a joy to walk down the street talking openly about politics with an Iraqi person in Baghdad. Less joyous, of course, are the "Please mind the bomb" posters pasted to bus stops and walls, depicting an alarmed man, hands raised in horror like a pantomime dame, and a catalogue of unexploded bomb types of which the passer-by should beware. Lest anyone should miss the point, the different shaped bomblets are each accompanied by a puce skull and crossbones.
It seems there are two things all Iraqi people are unanimous about: that "security is very bad" and that, whatever their own opinion is, "Every Iraqi person will tell you this." If you mention that another Iraqi person has told you something else entirely different, they will shake their heads and tell you this other person is only telling you that because they just want to blame everything on the US or because they always grumble, or because they are too scared of the Americans to tell you what they really think or because they have lived their entire lives saying what they think they're supposed to say, but really they feel exactly the same as your current informant.
Saif came round yesterday, having heard I was back in town. He declared that things were better when Saddam was here. I reminded him of how, when we first met, he used to clean shoes on the street and he and his friend Ahmed were scared to have their photos taken outside in case they got arrested. They used to invite us to their houses but if we'd gone their families would have been in trouble.
"Yes", he agreed, "we were scared of Saddam." It was like he lived in your house, because he was always there, listening, watching, and it wasn't that he wanted Saddam back, but now people are scared of everything. They're scared at home, scared in the street; nothing functions and the Americans are taking everything, selling everything the country ever had. He looked at the clock. "Before. 8 o'clock you will hear the guns." Sure enough, before he left, there was gunfire. He's not fond of the soldiers - they once wanted to beat up his friend for having an obviously plastic gun and only let him go after Saif intervened and made them laugh in his broken English.
At the beginning of the war, soldiers came to his house just outside Thawra [formerly Saddam City] and demanded to know where he was. They left a message with his mum that he was to report to the Baath party HQ. They came back later. His papers which prove that he's sick, they said, he could put in water, drink it and then shut up and go with them. He was shown how to use a gun, before he ran away. The war ended before they could catch him. Surely then, I suggested, he must be glad the Americans had arrived just in time. Still he was adamant that the war and occupation have made things worse.
Muayad has lived 21 years in England. He owns a hotel and used to come back periodically, spend a year in Iraq, a year in the UK. Political discussion was impossible under Saddam, he said. If he and I had sat like this drinking tea and talking there would be government agents at the next table listening. I remember it all too well. There were always secret police in his hotel, he told me, keeping an eye on the guests. They hid cameras in the rooms, he explained. There was no privacy even for the ladies - there would be men in the next room observing.
Saddam, he says, is physically gone now but is still there in people's heads. I think he must be. I remember how the feeling of being watched lingered after I got home from spending a few weeks here. An entire lifetime under scrutiny must take a long time to shed. Muayad didn't think elections would be feasible here yet. People need to learn to live as a civil society. Anyone could come and set up a party and, if they had the money, buy a few votes.
The US-installed Governing Council he calls corrupt. The benefits go only to their cronies. For the most part, they came back from abroad for the prizes, not for the good of the Iraqi people. He acknowledged the role the UK, US and other countries played in installing and maintaining Saddam but shrugged it off as inevitable. There has always been empire. There have always been countries with the power to control others. That power has rarely taken account of the welfare of the people living in the places seized.
Sura, a secretary, was less adamant than most. She was really glad to be rid of Saddam but was finding things very difficult now. You make your plans, then someone changes everything and you have to plan all over again. You just have to cope, you can't give up. She talked about a constant fear of troops and violent crime. Everywhere is unsafe, jobs are hard to come by and the salary isn't worth much. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, struggled to find a coherent feeling to express - everything is still too uncertain to form a sense of what's going on.
Opinion is divergent, and that's a start. There's no way to summarise or quantify, even for the few people I have met, let alone the millions I haven't, except for this: everyone says security is very bad, the internet says it's been "the bloodiest week yet" for the US in Iraq and some American civilians here say the taxi drivers don't speak to them any more.
Jo Wilding
November 15th
Please also see: Eyewitness Iraq: Arab-American Activist to Speak across U.K. after Two Years in Baghdad;
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1178&blz=1
Since about 1997, Kimadia, the state-run medical supplies company, like a lot of state enterprises, has been run essentially as follows: the government gave a subsidy to the company. Workers received a small monthly salary which was deemed to be an "advance" on their annual payment. It's between 45-60 thousand Dinar a month, the latter equivalent to $30 a month. The rest of the money was kept back for the running of the company and distributed at the end of the financial year. It wasn't ideal because it meant the workers had to incur debts for several months against the promise of the end-of-year payment but that promise did at least enable them to borrow enough to live on.
The money for 2002 was to be distributed a short while after the invasion. It was brought in sacks to the warehouse with lists stating how much each worker was to receive. We saw with our eyes, they say, how much money we were owed, but we never quite held it in our hands.
According to the old system, shares were determined by rank not only within the company but also within the Ba'ath Party. The same managing directors remained in place and, though the party was ostensibly gone, the same distribution policy had been followed. When the workers started demanding a fairer division of the funds, the son of the accountant who was holding the money got out a gun and started shooting. US soldiers arrived and seized the money. That was the last the workers saw of it.
At the warehouse this morning a pick up sat idle, with a red crescent stenciled on the side beside the words "Medical Supplies." The company management has hired freelance drivers to take supplies around the country, so the drivers have no work. Warehouse workers crowded to tell us their stories and vent their anger at Mr. Jim Haveman, the military officer and senior advisor at the Ministry of Health who is responsible for the matter.
One man with six children and a wife to support couldn't pay his rent any more, so had to move into one of the many squatted former government buildings. Another said he owed a co-worker 20,000 Dinar. She nodded. He did. Most had borrowed money for basic essentials on the basis of the annual payment and are now unable to repay the loans. Rent and food are more expensive now than before the war and the sunken cheeks, creased eyes and crumpled foreheads of many of the workers testified that the wages had been painfully meagre for a while before that. The two men who brought us there were 31, only two years older than me, but looked easily 15 years my senior. “Kull ishi maaku”, they told us. We have nothing.
A letter from Jim Haveman stated that the matter had been "dealt with" in the spring. Kimadia was a corrupt organization. There could be no profits for distribution because it was a state subsidised company. The intention had been to give the money to the managers and a selected few and the billions of Dinars now formed part of "the general funds of Iraq."
90% of the workers have signed a petition calling on Haveman to release the funds. Khalida, the secretary to the managing director of the company, originally said she wanted to be the first signatory. When it was brought for her to sign she advised them to drop it or they might lose their jobs altogether. She refused to give any statement, saying she wasn't authorized to do so.
Workers have been told they should forget the whole matter: that Haveman is "worse than Saddam". According to many of them, the heads of the Profit Boards, Abu Assen and Ahmed, who work for Haveman, passed on a threat that those making a fuss would be viewed as working against the coalition forces and arrested, which is why none of them are named here. They might arrest a couple of representatives, someone said, but could they arrest all 4000 workers if they all stood together? Haveman, they were told, would "scatter you to the stars". They would never see each other again.
We went to the Ministry and handed in our passports in exchange for visitors' passes. In a saga reminiscent of the old Iraq we tramped up and down between levels 1,2 and 5 chasing pieces of paper from one person which would permit us to ask another for an appointment to ask a third for a piece of paper to grant us passage into the office of the secretary of the assistant of the person we wanted to see, to ask a single, simple question. The upshot is that we're still looking for Mr Jim Haveman who takes his weekends on a Sunday, unlike the rest of the country which has Friday off and is mid-week by Sunday.
In the new Iraq, people are still threatened by and scared of the political leadership. It's telling that they still need advocates from other countries to assert their rights to the authorities, not that there's any guarantee we'll be able to sort things out for them, but we're going to give it a try.
The women who clustered into one office said they were ready for strikes and demonstrations and we promised to support them in whatever they decide to do. There may come a time for international pressure, so keep reading and I'll let you know what help they need.
On a similar theme, having given up on the inextricably stuck taxi and walked the last of the way back, we found ourselves in the unusual position of standing on the same side of the barricades as the police. There was a demonstration blocking Sadoon Street, police and security staff besieging the building where the young boys and old men used to queue with their call up papers. They haven't been paid for three months. “Kull ishi maaku”, they all said, brushing one hand against the other repeatedly, as if dusting them off. We have nothing.
"Amreeki," people started calling: Americans. Two tanks had pulled up to the far end of the demonstration and the police and security guards, some still wearing their IP [Iraqi Police] armbands, many with their ID cards hanging around their necks, ran to face the soldiers, whose response was to shout and swear and issue orders in English. One, who said he was a lieutenant, ordered an underling to push people, which he obligingly did, with his gun.
They don't have the right to block the street, according to one soldier. Blocking the streets is somehow an act of violence in the confused mind of the soldier who went on to tell us that this could not, therefore, be called a peaceful protest. The soldiers threatened to arrest the police if they didn't go away. What were they doing there ?, we asked. “Supporting the Iraqi Police”, one said. But, we pointed out, the IPs are this side of the razor wire. “No comment”, said the lieutenant on his behalf.
One security guard burnt his badge. An IP took off his armband and wrapped it round his head like a pirate's hat. Rubble was thrown into the road, razor wire coils pulled across from the central reservation and the pavement and rusting junk from the roadside piles turned into a barricade. Cars were surrounded and made to turn back and a man who tried to escape the siege with armfuls of files was sent scurrying back into the building. A loyalist police van attempting to get to the building was set upon and screeched off.
Eventually, a representative of the Minister of the Interior turned up. He was allowed to cross the razor wire. The men crouched and sat in a crowd so that everyone could see and hear and he promised to meet them at 10am tomorrow. Always they promise to pay us in 3 days' time, then 3 more days, some muttered, but they felt they'd upped the stakes enough, made their intentions clear.
The representative was reluctant to talk to us at all but finally explained that the problem was that men had been hired before the authority had been given. No, he couldn't guarantee that they would be paid. It was some while before he accepted that, having worked for three months as employees, it was their right to be paid. But no, he still couldn't guarantee that they would be paid.
I learnt a new word - zbala - scum. A boy of maybe 12 announced, "Amreeki, Baathi, Bush, zbala." Police officers said they'd had enough of the Americans. Some say that an American company is being paid $50,000 per school for repainting buildings. “I'll do it for a thousand”, an Iraqi friend said. “I'll get a load of paint and a load of cake and juice and we'll get everyone to come and do it together. It would make people feel involved and then they could save the money for paying the workers.”
Anyone listening?
Jo Wilding
November 16th
Talking Politics in Baghdad
It's truly a joy to walk down the street talking openly about politics with an Iraqi person in Baghdad. Less joyous, of course, are the "Please mind the bomb" posters pasted to bus stops and walls, depicting an alarmed man, hands raised in horror like a pantomime dame, and a catalogue of unexploded bomb types of which the passer-by should beware. Lest anyone should miss the point, the different shaped bomblets are each accompanied by a puce skull and crossbones.
It seems there are two things all Iraqi people are unanimous about: that "security is very bad" and that, whatever their own opinion is, "Every Iraqi person will tell you this." If you mention that another Iraqi person has told you something else entirely different, they will shake their heads and tell you this other person is only telling you that because they just want to blame everything on the US or because they always grumble, or because they are too scared of the Americans to tell you what they really think or because they have lived their entire lives saying what they think they're supposed to say, but really they feel exactly the same as your current informant.
Saif came round yesterday, having heard I was back in town. He declared that things were better when Saddam was here. I reminded him of how, when we first met, he used to clean shoes on the street and he and his friend Ahmed were scared to have their photos taken outside in case they got arrested. They used to invite us to their houses but if we'd gone their families would have been in trouble.
"Yes", he agreed, "we were scared of Saddam." It was like he lived in your house, because he was always there, listening, watching, and it wasn't that he wanted Saddam back, but now people are scared of everything. They're scared at home, scared in the street; nothing functions and the Americans are taking everything, selling everything the country ever had. He looked at the clock. "Before. 8 o'clock you will hear the guns." Sure enough, before he left, there was gunfire. He's not fond of the soldiers - they once wanted to beat up his friend for having an obviously plastic gun and only let him go after Saif intervened and made them laugh in his broken English.
At the beginning of the war, soldiers came to his house just outside Thawra [formerly Saddam City] and demanded to know where he was. They left a message with his mum that he was to report to the Baath party HQ. They came back later. His papers which prove that he's sick, they said, he could put in water, drink it and then shut up and go with them. He was shown how to use a gun, before he ran away. The war ended before they could catch him. Surely then, I suggested, he must be glad the Americans had arrived just in time. Still he was adamant that the war and occupation have made things worse.
Muayad has lived 21 years in England. He owns a hotel and used to come back periodically, spend a year in Iraq, a year in the UK. Political discussion was impossible under Saddam, he said. If he and I had sat like this drinking tea and talking there would be government agents at the next table listening. I remember it all too well. There were always secret police in his hotel, he told me, keeping an eye on the guests. They hid cameras in the rooms, he explained. There was no privacy even for the ladies - there would be men in the next room observing.
Saddam, he says, is physically gone now but is still there in people's heads. I think he must be. I remember how the feeling of being watched lingered after I got home from spending a few weeks here. An entire lifetime under scrutiny must take a long time to shed. Muayad didn't think elections would be feasible here yet. People need to learn to live as a civil society. Anyone could come and set up a party and, if they had the money, buy a few votes.
The US-installed Governing Council he calls corrupt. The benefits go only to their cronies. For the most part, they came back from abroad for the prizes, not for the good of the Iraqi people. He acknowledged the role the UK, US and other countries played in installing and maintaining Saddam but shrugged it off as inevitable. There has always been empire. There have always been countries with the power to control others. That power has rarely taken account of the welfare of the people living in the places seized.
Sura, a secretary, was less adamant than most. She was really glad to be rid of Saddam but was finding things very difficult now. You make your plans, then someone changes everything and you have to plan all over again. You just have to cope, you can't give up. She talked about a constant fear of troops and violent crime. Everywhere is unsafe, jobs are hard to come by and the salary isn't worth much. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, struggled to find a coherent feeling to express - everything is still too uncertain to form a sense of what's going on.
Opinion is divergent, and that's a start. There's no way to summarise or quantify, even for the few people I have met, let alone the millions I haven't, except for this: everyone says security is very bad, the internet says it's been "the bloodiest week yet" for the US in Iraq and some American civilians here say the taxi drivers don't speak to them any more.
Jo Wilding
November 15th
Please also see: Eyewitness Iraq: Arab-American Activist to Speak across U.K. after Two Years in Baghdad;
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1178&blz=1