Coping with a pinch of liberty in Baghdad

Skilful thieves, lecherous men abound; Western women are often harassed

By ROSIE DIMANNO

Strolling along Rashid Street on a sunny morning, the sky an even more luminous shade of blue than the mosaic-tiled domes and minarets of the city's mosques.

I've just found a shop selling dog-eared English-language books, decades old, but more of a treasure right now than all the loot in Ali Baba's cave. The young proprietor slips my purchases - William Thackeray's nicely fat Vanity Fair and E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear To Tread - into a plastic bag as I count out two dozen 250-dinar notes from a wad of money as thick as my arm.

On the sidewalk outside, men in long white gallabiyyas cluster companionably around a brass kettle on a rickety table as a boy washes out little glasses in a pail of water, then sets them up in neat rows, each centred atop a saucer and filled at least a third of the way up with sugar. Iraqis like their tea ultra-sweet. The drinkers stir and sit and tap their tiny spoons against their glasses. Tinkle-tinkle.

The capital feels almost normal, at least in the daytime, which is to say hectic and traffic-jammed and cacophonous, yet simultaneously idle and indolent. The heat contributes to the lassitude. No one actually knows the temperature because nobody owns a thermometer. Under Saddam Hussein, even the weather was classified information. So, although the regime - in one of its slyly benevolent edicts - had a policy whereby all Iraqis were promised a holiday whenever the temperature soared above 45C, which happens often enough in the summer months, officially it was never hotter than 44 degrees, as determined by state officials. Who could dispute it?

The men keep cool in their white cotton chemises; the women consigned, more often than not, to their heat-retaining black abbas, swaddled from head to toe, an infuriating sight that almost makes one nostalgic for the secular tilt of the Saddam regime.

It's not modesty that thus enshrouds grown women, so that they look like crows and crones, or a literal reading of the Qur'an and pious observance of its laws. This is the cultural subjugation of women in the Muslim world, who must hide their persons lest they arouse the male to acts of lust for which he could not be held responsible. It's paternalism and sexual proprietorship, where a woman emerges from her funereal cocoon only in the bosom of her home.

Accuse me of cultural insensitivity if you wish, or even racism; I will lay counter-claims of sexism and misogyny disguised as Muslim orthodoxy.

The women promenade past, their abbas billowing like sails before the wind. Toothless old men squat and chat. Backgammon players hunch over game boards. Smokers inhale from ornate hookah pipes. Street urchins with shoeshine boxes slung about their necks solicit customers. Money-changers riffle through their scrip, happily trading Iraqi currency for U.S. dollars, and sometimes - as when I changed a $50 bill - handing over useless counterfeit notes to the gauche client. When I later return, wiser for my troubles and demanding restitution, the money-changer simply shrugs his shoulders, then offers to buy back the bogus notes - for $20 (U.S.).

This is Baghdadi entrepreneurism, which probably augurs well for the country's future. Iraq, with its vast oil resources - second largest in the world - and reconstruction contracts will be open for business soon to both West and East. Skilful Ali Babas abound - which is what Iraqis call thieves and looters, not necessarily as a slur. They appreciate cunning and usury. A can of Pepsi that cost 1,500 dinars a fortnight ago now goes for 10,000, although there are fewer buyers and more commodity, thereby turning the law of supply and demand on its head.

(One of Baghdad's loveliest public monuments, at Ali Baba Square, depicts an episode from the delightful Arabian Nights story: Ali Baba's housekeeper, Murjana (Kahramana), shrewdly rooting out the thieves hiding in 40 big jars by pouring boiling oil on their heads, one by one.)

Baghdad is not so much lawless these days - many policemen are back on the job, in their crisp olive uniforms and black berets, lured by promise of pay in American dollars and patrolling the city often in tandem with U.S. servicemen - as a law unto itself, in the exhausted wake of citywide looting and paramilitary turf wars, which makes it more of a crime to steal water than bullion.

I walked the other day by a bank robbery in progress, which is really scraping the bottom of the looting barrel, given the pitiful state of the Iraqi dinar (3,600=$1 U.S.), and hardly seemed worth the effort. Few bothered to watch. Nobody intervened. A few hours later, on my way back downtown, I passed by the bank again. The thieves were still robbing the bank - laborious sackful by laborious sackful.

We've all turned into scavengers, whether just pilfering a jerrycan of petrol from an army fuel truck, or ransacking and torching every public building in the capital, or pinching whole racks of Uday Hussein's Elvis-kitschy wardrobe, as was done by a certain British journalist of my acquaintance who pillaged the Number 1 son's Shag Palace.

Media vehicles, excessively identified, continue to career about Baghdad, particularly with the late arrival of the Pixie People - those well-groomed TV correspondents who comfortably sat out the war in foreign capitals, yet even now don flakjackets to do their stand-ups from the roof of the Palestine Hotel, as if incoming rocket propelled grenades were about to drop on their coiffed heads.

Yet Baghdad is a city best appreciated on foot now that the dictatorial gloom has lifted and the bludgeoning of war has ceased, although every perambulation is an adventure into the unknown - no maps of the city, indeed of the entire country, have been produced since the war with Iran in the '80s.

Many shops and stalls, even art galleries, have reopened, proprietors dusting off their wares and taking down the gratings that largely thwarted looters who were more intent on government property. In crooked alleys where smoke from sidewalk kebab-grills makes the air tasty - unlike the recent hydrocarbon haze from oil fires and smouldering buildings - artisans sell copper pots and pewter salvers; bolts of lustrous textiles are unrolled for customers; saucy red lingerie, so jarring a display in this conservative society, hangs by pegs in souk kiosks alongside baskets of nuts and aromatic spices.

On foot - and trusting that the hungry lioness escaped from Zawra Park has either been captured or slain - one takes deeper notice of the lovely latticework of wrought-iron balconies and gates, more tenderly appreciates the architecture of the many mosques, with the yin and yang of their feminine domes and their masculine minarets.

Here are housewives beating intricately-woven rugs strung across clotheslines, clutches of men gossiping - more a male than female activity - in barbershops, many of which stayed open during the bombardment of the city, and gazetteers handing out a sudden profusion of political newspapers, each the mouth-organ of a formerly banned party, all of them now jostling for ascendancy and popular support, their posters and banners affixed about the city.

Also distributed are mimeographed sheets of the 55 individuals designated as wanted war criminals by the American-Anglo authorities, cleverly presented as a deck of cards with Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades.

Alongside the River Tigris, men and boys are tossing rocks into the boughs of nebk trees and I think at first they're hoping to dislodge hidden caches of money such as the $250,000 thus discovered a week ago by U.S. troops. But they're just looking to shake out the tree's fruit, a kind of tiny crabapple that tastes like chalk to me but is greatly fancied by Iraqis who collect bagsful.

Soldiers carrying M-16s are kind to ragamuffins whose company helps pass the many hours of boredom, teaching them snatches of English and handing out the candy bars in their MREs (meals ready to eat). Servicemen from places like Flint, Mich., and Tampa, Fla., and Barstow, Ca., lounge on tanks, reading Popular Mechanics and Sports Illustrated when not distracted by the staccato of gunfire, mostly courtesy of neighbourhood militias or Baghdadis firing celebratory rounds into the air when power is returned to another patch of the city.

In the square where the colossal statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down the afternoon marines entered the city, an ad hoc post office has been set up for mail service to Amman by automobile. Across the way, another sidewalk entrepreneur who's somehow secured a satellite phone is enjoying a brisk business from Iraqis calling relatives outside the country, finally being able to reassure loved ones of their survival and safety.

There's a childlike openness to many Baghdadis in this still new and uncharted era of non-Saddam. Where once they were not permitted to speak with foreigners, many now approach boldly on the street, or just toss off a friendly hello, salaam.

I cannot imagine the wonder and disorientation of it, of unencumbered expression, for a people reared in repression and secrecy and endless snitching. But Iraq is spilling more and more of its secrets. If not the Big Secret - where are those weapons of mass destruction? - then the little ones that made ordinary life so grim and menacing.

At one local police station the other day, reporters found a stash of curious documents. Nothing earth-shaking, just a list of local barbers and hairdressers, all of whom had to sign agreements with the authorities in exchange for their licences promising to provide to security agencies all the idle gossip overheard in their establishments: Who might have made a disparaging remark about Saddam's wife, who was rumoured to have a little too much money in her handbag, whose son had perhaps slipped out of the country - anything that might be used to threaten and punish.

The regime survived so long because it made tattle-tales and conspirators out of everybody. Iraqis were enslaved by their own betrayals and the conviction that all others were doing the same. There were jins - mean spirits - down every telephone line and telex machine. This is my favourite story: A United Nations worker from Ethiopia phones a colleague in New York, switching in mid-conversation from English to his native Amharic. At which point a voice cuts in, instructing the gentlemen to "please continue in a language we can understand.''

Trust died a long time ago.

Understandably, many Iraqis are a bit gaga now, relishing their freedom, trying to reverse three decades of hermitry and prohibition in one fell swoop, and flexing their liberation most particularly on foreign women, all of whom are presumed to be of low character and loose morals.

The men make kissing and sucking noises at Western females on the street. One mooning youth sang me a snippet of - egads! - Lionel Richie: Is it me you're looking for? That was sweet, but too many are overly familiar and sexually malevolent, suddenly turned into lechers and satyrs.

Wallah!

That's an Iraqi yelp. Emerging from my throat. Because I've just had my left nipple pinched by a passer-by who simply reached out his hand and squeezed. Hard. And kept on going.

Stunned, but only momentarily, I wheel around and rain curses on the young man's retreating back. He doesn't bother even turning his head. I am insignificant. Just another Western woman in a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, ripe for the tweaking. The miscreant would never have attempted such a thing on an Iraqi woman.

But I am not so docile. Catching up with the creep, I give him a firm kick in the ass.

I think it's time to say bye-bye to Baghdad.

FAIR USE NOTICE