- IRAQ -- Correspondents Stephanie
Nolen, Mark MacKinnon and Geoffrey York recently returned to Iraq, where
they covered the war that began one year ago next week. Their notebook
of observations concludes a week-long series on Iraq.
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- Basra, the second-biggest city in Iraq, is filled with
signs of economic revival. Sidewalks are crowded with appliance and furniture
markets. Highways are transformed into used-car lots, selling sedans from
Dubai, Oman and Kuwait. Entrepreneurs are opening new shops and restaurants,
including an ice-cream parlour with "I.M. Cool" written on its
sign. Many streets are clogged with traffic jams, controlled by uniformed
traffic cops who blow whistles to direct the traffic.
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- Last year, one of the biggest new markets in Basra was
nicknamed the Robbers Market because it was the place where looters sold
the goods that they stole in the post-war looting spree. Now it has expanded
to legitimate goods, but it remains an open-air jumble of stalls and traders.
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- A year ago, if you saw a truck piled high with heaps
of furniture, you could be certain that it was looted. Today, if you see
a similar truck, it is usually filled with imported furniture from Kuwait
or Dubai, for sale to the new middle classes with their higher salaries.
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- A year ago, "Ali Baba" was the insult yelled
at looters. Now it is the name of a new hotel in Basra, one of many that
have opened in recent months.
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- "Our teachers loved Saddam, and they taught us songs
about him to sing on his birthday, and they taught us to love him. But
then one day last year the teacher said we had to tear his picture out
of all our books. She didn't say why. We were confused, because we loved
him: he was our leader. It seemed very silly to me. I don't know if we
will have to put the pictures back next year." -- Tayyibeh, a seven-year-old
Arab student of Grade 2 in Kerkuk.
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- The Iraqi border point with Jordan remains largely unsecured.
A few armed men in civilian clothes poke their heads into the cars that
pass, mostly to ask for bribes. A few dollars is enough to persuade them
not to ask for passports. Entry cost for my trip into Iraq: 10 facial tissues
plucked from a box on the dashboard, and two small bottles of mineral water.
Exit price: US$10 and a package of M&M's (chocolate, not peanut).
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- U.S. soldiers who stop foreigners at checkpoints don't
want to see passports - most are young men who had not left the U.S. before
the war and they are unfamiliar with passports. Instead, their preferred
form of identification is that American symbol of freedom, the drivers'
license.
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- In the muddy town of Halabja, a new monument has opened
to the 5,000 people who died in the gas attack on the town on March 16,
1988. At the front entry is a huge sign reading, in Kurdish and in English,
"No Baaths allowed to enter."
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- The coalition force in northern Iraq has been charged
with figuring out to do with the bloated ranks of the peshmerga. For much
of the past 60 years, the Kurds have kept their male adult populace armed,
as de facto reservists, and the formal military is enormous - perhaps 60,000
men - for the population size. The U.S. wants to see some of these men
move into a national Iraqi military and others normalized into para-military
function. Among the new initiatives: a "forestry police" to guard
the sparse trees and two or three remaining deer in the northern mountains.
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- American Forces Network (AFN) has occupied (liberated?)
104.1 on the FM dial in Baghdad. On the play-list recently: bands like
Def Leppard, Bryan Adams and Evanescence.
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- Hordes of foreign journalists last year turned Baghdad's
Palestine and Sheraton Ishtar hotels into gold mines for their owners.
These days, most of the media stay in compounds with their very own concrete
car-bomb barriers and Kalashnikov-toting guards.
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- At one checkpoint near Tikrit, The Globe and Mail's car
was stopped, and the driver asked what was in the trunk. In an astonishing
display of bad taste, he jokingly told the policeman that he had grenades
in the back. Rather than investigating, the obviously nervous (and perhaps
hungry) policeman warned that it better not be true, and asked for a banana
and two bottles of water in exchange for passage. The trunk was never checked.
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- To the looters who still scavenge for anything to steal
in Basra, even the symbols of the old regime have some value. A broken
headless statue of a brother-in-law of Saddam Hussein, once a top cabinet
minister in the old regime, is lying outside the main police station in
the centre of Basra. The police said they confiscated it from a gang of
looters who were trying to make off with the statue.
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- Some of Iraq's civilian police, supplied with donations
from the U.S.-led military coalition, are wearing smart new uniforms and
driving impressive pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the back.
But their old reputation for corruption and brutality has not improved
much. In Basra, bystanders who witnessed a murder last month were unwilling
to take the female victim to the nearest hospital because they feared that
the police would blame them or arrest them.
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- "There is no humanity," said the man who eventually
took the dying woman to the hospital. "The situation is so bad that
people are even afraid to take a victim to the hospital."
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- The police, he said, are just as dangerous as the criminals.
And he confessed that he too would have probably refused to take the victim
to the hospital if he hadn't been agitated by impulsive emotions when he
saw the shooting.
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- © 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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