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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
For Iraqis living in the surreal city within a city from which the U.S. runs Iraq, the invasion is already ancient history. What they want is electricity, water and a social life.
Feb 6, 2004 | About a mile and half from the house I live in, past a high-walled compound occupied by the Constitutional Monarchy Movement party, past the home of a member of the Iraqi Governing Council where a loitering American tank often indicates the presence of high-level visitors, past a row of convenience-store-type shops where I often stock up on the Nestle brand bottled water that I drink by the gallon each day, past the intersection where my driver swears that the women we see lingering in long skirts and hijabs are prostitutes, past the massive skewed ziggurat Babylon Hotel building where wedding parties daily wreak havoc with the traffic by double-parking cars and buses, past a long mercantile block with a bakery, butcher, furniture-maker, and several competing vegetable stands, sits the entrance to the 14th of July Bridge -- one of several bridges that spans the muddy Tigris River which meanderingly bisects the city of Baghdad.
The bridge, named for the day of the 1958 military coup in Iraq that ousted the monarchy of King Faisal II, is one entry point into Baghdad's now infamous "Green Zone," the place where the Coalition Provisional Authority, hunkered down behind a multimile diameter of concrete barriers and military checkpoints, runs this country. Inside this city within a city is one of the strangest Oz-type landscapes I've ever seen. Titanic palaces sit half-chewed and slumping from the war's bombing campaign. There are empty lots where crows watch over ruined military vehicle parts and peck around on the winter-wet ground. Subdivisions (called "camps") of prefab trailers act as home to American subcontractors doing big business here -- Bechtel, Bearing Point, and Kellogg, Brown & Root. There's a convention center containing the main USAID office and other offices, as well as the small theater where proconsul Paul Bremer and allied forces military commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez hold those press conferences you see on TV all the time. Military camps, CPA and military mess halls rub shoulders with collapsed palaces, a state-of-the art military hospital, some gyms, and the Al-Rasheed hotel -- still mostly empty following the RPG attack last October that killed a colonel and left 18 soldiers and CPA employees wounded. Full parking lots stand next to abandoned office buildings and the Saddam-commissioned "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier," which, at first glance, I mistook for a soccer stadium.
In one corner of the vast enclosure sits a large neighborhood of Iraqi homes and apartment buildings, unwillingly annexed into the Green Zone due to its proximity to the American headquarters. This neighborhood lies just over the 14th of July Bridge and is as isolated from the rest of Baghdad as the American-occupied parts of the zone. In October, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Americans shrunk the Green Zone perimeter and opened the 14th of July Bridge to general traffic, enabling Iraqis who live in the neighborhood to come and go as they pleased. But soon after, due to security concerns, the military shut the bridge again. Now, in order to use the bridge, Iraqi residents of the neighborhood must show a special pass and endure a long security check. For those traveling by car, this means waiting anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours in a line that backs up along Karada Street.
The other day, I took a fast taxi ride with my translator, Amjad, to the 14th of July Bridge. We got dropped off in front of an American tank that acts as the bridge's first line of defense. A few yards further, on the pedestrian walkway, we stopped to show I.D. (an American passport and press badge for me, a CPA-authorized badge for Amjad) to a combination of American and Iraqi soldiers. They patted Amjad for weapons and checked out the contents of my backpack and let us continue.
We walked across the bridge under a dark mica sky and paused at a large empty intersection on the far side of the bridge. The main CPA gate is miles away, right next to the convention center, so Americans don't have reason to come to this part of the Green Zone much. A few cars with Iraqis -- residents of the nearby neighborhood -- passed us, then a stubby convoy of Army trucks. On the sidewalk, an Iraqi woman, her three teenage daughters and a small boy hustled toward us on their way to the bridge. Two of the girls, wearing long skirts, hijabs and light-blue eye shadow, held the handles of an empty duffel bag that they swung between them as they walked.
Amjad flagged the family down and asked whether they lived in the Green Zone. They did, but they were in a hurry. They needed to cross the bridge, walk to some shops and return (past the security with its requisite check of their parcels) before either the dark or the rain caught up to them. So we accompanied them for a few minutes, back toward the bridge, while they told us a little about their situation.
They were part of a family of 12 living in one of the apartment buildings we could see poking at the sky a few blocks away. They lived on the seventh floor in a four-room apartment. Like a lot of neighborhoods in Baghdad, they had power for two hours on and two hours off. These power outages don't affect the American portions of the Green Zone where high-voltage generators ensure 24-hour electricity. When the power went out in the family's apartment building, the water went out, too, meaning a seven-flight trip to use the bathroom or fetch buckets of water for cooking and cleaning. The elevators in the building didn't work at all. The family had chipped in to pay 10,000 dinars to have them fixed but that was weeks ago and nothing had changed. Complaints to the Americans did nothing, they said.
I asked whether they saw many Americans or interacted with them. They said no. This is not a surprise in greater Baghdad: For many of the Iraqis I meet, I am the first American they've ever spoken to. But it seems strange for five people, locked by circumstance behind the Green Zone walls, to have so little contact with their inadvertent neighbors.
The girls became impatient to get over the bridge so we said goodbye. Before we parted, I asked them their family name but they shook their head in response. They didn't want to give their name. Didn't want to get in trouble for complaining about the Americans. They used to have Saddam as their neighbor. Now it's the Americans, occupying his old digs, that perpetuate their wariness.
A few minutes later, Amjad and I met up with five middle-aged women walking in a clutch toward the bridge. All five worked in the Bechtel camp -- four as cleaning staff and one as a cook. They kindly stopped to talk with us and we stood on the sidewalk in the deepening gray while a flock of lost seagulls flew corkscrews overhead. All five lived outside the Green Zone and were on their way home from work. On the other side of the bridge, they would use taxicabs to take them the rest of the way home. Cab rides to and from work were expensive, they said, but they had no other options. One woman, terribly skinny and holding a napkin over her mouth to block the worst bite of the cold air, told me she lived in the Jedida neighborhood, which takes half an hour to an hour to get to in a cab, depending on the traffic.
All in all, the women felt very happy to have their jobs, though. Most supported their whole families with the money they made. "The men are sitting in the house," one woman said, "and we are working. I wish you could find work for them!" It was their impression that Iraqi women have an easier time getting work in the Green Zone. Many of the service jobs there (for instance, staffing in the enormous Kellogg, Brown & Root mess halls where soldiers and CPA employees eat all their meals) were filled right after the war by imported workers from Pakistan and the Philippines. These guys sign one-year contracts, get flown to Baghdad, and live in their own small compound within the Green Zone. They get paid wages that are relatively high compared to what they can make at home (although low by U.S. standards), and they don't pose any of the security threats that Iraqis potentially do.
The women I met had been hired by a company whose name they couldn't remember -- a Bechtel subcontractor. Not knowing the name of your employer would be strange in the U.S. but doesn't seem at all weird here. Iraq has no checking system right now, and thus no traditional payroll system. The women get paid in cash each week from a company representative and probably haven't heard their company name uttered in months. The cook -- a bubbly woman with a streaked bob -- found her job first, then she brought in her friends. She said that was the way it works, "like a chain." I asked whether she or any of the women had been questioned about their background or undergone a security check. They all shook their head. "No," they said. "No."
Lately, though the women are still very grateful for their jobs, they feel worried. All but the cook hide the fact that they are working for the Americans. Only their closest family members know. It's just too dangerous these days. I asked whether the women knew anyone who had been assaulted for working with the Americans. One of the women, who was short and round and had been swaying from foot to foot to stay warm, said, "Not personally. You hear stories. The women outside the military base ..."
She was referring to the nine women whose minibus was attacked as they were on their way to their jobs in the laundry of the Habbaniyah American military base west of Baghdad. Four of the women were killed, others badly wounded. Working with the Americans in any capacity here in Iraq has become a hazardous job. Perhaps because of these fears, perhaps because they didn't want to get in trouble at work, all five of the women declined to tell me their names before continuing on their way.
