- BAGHDAD -- Ayad Daoud doesn't
look to be a day older than 8 but, like most able-bodied children in the
rubbish-strewn slum once called Saddam City, he now insists he's 15 years
old.
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- That's because 15 is the minimum age for day labourers
on the trash-collection crews bankrolled by the U.S.-led occupation authority
and administered by the clannish networks of public servants who dole out
scarce jobs, often in return for kickbacks.
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- The streets are cleaner after nearly two weeks of what
the U.S. initiators claim is Baghdad's first citywide sanitation service.
The Herculean effort to clean up a city that sullies itself anew within
hours employs about 25,000 Iraqis.
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- But in the two-steps-forward, one-step-back rhyt-hm of
Iraq's postwar reconstruction, the cleanup also has provided new opportunities
for corruption and child labour.
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- Ayad's reason for wanting a part in the gritty work that
involves shoveling du-st, rubble and garbage into a flatbed truck is that
he, as much as a typical working-age Iraqi, needs the money. Officials
here tend to agree.
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- "Some children under 15 have to work because they
have no one else to provide for them. Maybe Saddam Hussain killed their
parents and they have no one left," said Emad Mubdir Jasim, head of
the municipal office overseeing the hard-up area where Ayad and dozens
of other children beg trash-collection contractors to hire them. "Sometimes,
for humanitarian reasons, you have to let them work. Otherwise they might
take a wrong way to getting money."
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- As envisioned by Susan C. Tianen, the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers solid-waste management specialist who pulled the program together,
private contractors who are paid $150 a month were to hire local workers
for each route at a rate of $3 per day.
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- But neither Ayad nor the adults on the crews in Saddam
City ,Äì now called Al Sadr City, after a late, revered cleric
,Äì were getting even 3,000 dinars a day, half the sum provided
by the coalition. "We're forced to accept it because there is no other
work," complained Mohammed Qasim, who said he owned a clothing shop
before the U.S.-led war destroyed his business. "Everyone is out of
work now, and the contractors tell us take it or leave it."
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- Qasim drives a battered tractor along the streets of
his contractor's route to collect piles of trash assembled on medians and
sidewalks by the young road crews, who sweep or shovel trash from apartment
stoops, vacant lots and curbsides. He said he must pay for gas out of his
already depleted wages.
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- The contractors also pocket half the money provided to
rent trucks from citizens, said Hamid Hasim, another 15-year-old whose
family provided its flatbed tractor for 25,000 dinars a day, not the budgeted
50,000.
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- Al Sadr City is the kind of rough neighborhood where
outsiders seldom tread and even less often understand its inner workings.
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- But the fawning staff and unapproachable venues where
city leaders are ensconced speak for themselves, with guards blocking entry
to those thronging the gates to lodge complaints and public servants parceling
out grunt jobs at a handsome profit.
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- From behind a massive desk, Al Sadr City 'mayor' Rahim
Daraji insisted that each person hired for the garbage detail is getting
his $3. Tianen conceded that the Iraqi traditions of favour-itism and kickbacks
made U.S. organisers alert to potential corruption.
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- © Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
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- http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=96235
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