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I am afraid that what I am talking about today or at least a fraction of it would be construed by some of our blog's visitors as an overstatement and unbelievable. This is acceptable, for the very simple reason is that a lot of what is happening in this country at present is stemming from the detrimental interferences in its affairs by invisible and very often not very invisible players who are interested in their greedy secret agendas only. What is happening to this land and its people is not of a great concern to them.
Our life at present under the American occupation is very difficult, dangerous and unpredictable; they are times that try Men’s souls. Security, the services and the provision of the essentials are at a bottom low and in some parts of the country are non-existent which has made the lives of the average Iraqi unusually difficult and frustrating. When you are talking about people like me who have been traumatized by very painful tragedies like that of our unfortunate son, you are simply looking into the eyes of a hurricane. Iraq’s social texture was very strong and coherent, the social bonds used to cut across sectarian ethnic and religious affiliations, now it is a totally different picture. What is happening at present is diametrical opposite. The non-ending suffering of the people is causing a lot of disenchantment, frustration and resentment against the occupation and creating a very sick environment of fanaticism, hatred and vengeance.
Security or rather the lack of it is the number one concern of everybody. Nobody is secure, not even in his own house. One can find himself in the midst of a huge explosion which has resulted from a bombed car or in the middle of a group of poor jobless people who were gathering outside a small health office waiting for a certificate which is needed in their application for some minor job when a suicidal bomber will detonate the high explosives which he has wrapped around his belly causing dozens of deaths with the parts of the bodies of the victims flying in the air making it practically impossible to identifying them. When a house falls over the heads of its occupants after it has been hit by a rocket or a grenade or some other similarly lethal device, these things are happening every day with an average toll of 20 deaths and a much larger number of injuries with a great deal of damage to property and the loss of more money. On rare occasions some really atrocious incidents might take place, which results in much larger numbers of fatalities like the one which happened recently in Hilla when a blast killed at least a hundred innocent individuals. The Americans themselves are paying a very high price for this lawlessness with an average of 2-3 soldiers from their own military killed every day.
The other aspect of this lawlessness is the kidnapping of local and foreign which has some times reached truly epidemic proportions, people were taken from their houses their workplace or from the streets, those who were fortunate were released a short while later after paying a ransom which would be proportional to their wealth, others less fortunate ones were released after a lot of beating and sometimes very serious injuries. At one time doctors were specifically targeted which resulted in massive fleeing of some highly trained and experienced physicians a situation which contributed to the terrible decline in the health services a subject that I will be talking about sometime later. Robberies, all kinds of them are very common, my own old car was stolen two weeks ago in the middle of the day when I have left it for about fifteen minutes in an extremely busy street in a very crowded district of Baghdad. Premeditated murders are becoming very common, in recent weeks this activity has been directed specifically against some of the high officials of the government.
The other major contributors to this messiness and misery are aplenty, but I am going to start with the problems, that are resulting from the failure of the authorities to provide the food and the other essentials on which more than 90% of the population rely upon. During the last years of Saddam, a program was initiated by which eight basic requirements like flour, rice sugar and few others were provided to the people on a monthly basis, a ration which supplied only two thirds of the nutritional requirements of an average individual in an attempt to lessen the deadly effects on the people of the United Nations sanctions to punish Saddam and his regime after his Kuwaiti adventure, the dictator and his regime did not suffer from the sanctions in fact it bolstered his position, the real victims were the helpless people of Iraq, it was never ideal but it was better than nothing and much better than what we are receiving now, the monthly ration the people are receiving now is much worse than it has ever been under the dictatorship, it is meager, of an extremely low quality and very often not good enough for human consumption. The other major contributors to the Iraqis’ ongoing dilemma are the state of the services and especially the electricity and the health system.
Talking about the electricity supply is becoming as I have often said on this web site is a heartbreaking and a very frustrating exercise, what is happening in this sector is absolutely unbelievable and very hard to describe, the electricity supply is still inadequate, erratic and totally unreliable. Admittedly this sector has deteriorated during the last years of the dictatorship as result of the harsh United Nations sanctions which I have already described when those who were mostly affected by it were the people, the ruler and his clique had a sacred priority to whatever electricity was generated, the people’s needs were never a concern to the ba’athist authorities. Under the occupation this sector has deteriorated even further in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent on its restoration and repair without any visible improvement, which is raising a lot of questions about the transparency and openness in the management of this problem.
There are still a lot that I should have mentioned, the telephone service, the sewage system, the water supply and the state of the health system, but I think I have said enough for the time being. In the end, I would like to emphasize that the miserable mess the people of Iraq are languishing under is to a very great extent the result of the blunders and mistakes and the naïve policies they practiced in this country after the successful end of their military campaign. This seems to have blinded the occupiers to the history and the great religious-ethnic and geographic diversity of Iraq, which has always made ruling it a very difficult and almost an impossible job.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, June 11, 2005
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