June 21, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
Baffled in Basra
Self-defeating behavior persists.

By Steven Vincent

Basra, Iraq — It comes on the government-run TV station every night at nine. Opening with a percussive anthem, the eight-minute segment features a montage of stirring images: soldiers rushing down streets; policemen roaring around in pick-up trucks; infantrymen peering through rifle scopes; a SWAT-like team bursting into a house and rousting its inhabitants; soldiers deploying across rubble-strewn fields; more cops; music; the Iraqi flag; smiling children; soldiers; cops…

In most countries, such rousing depictions of constabulary and martial vigor would smack of police-state propaganda. But this is Iraq, where heroic images of security forces are meant to bolster public confidence that the new national government can stand against psychopathic Saddamites and blood-thirsty jihadists. Civil libertarians may squirm, but many Iraqis view respect for the police and army as fundamental to nurturing a democratic spirit. (Once upon a time, most Americans did too, before the era of "pigs" and "baby-killers.")

Still, this is Iraq — or more specifically, the city of Basra, where image and reality often clash, especially when it comes to the police. A few weeks ago, cops at the Al-Jemayat station house broke into a gun battle over accusations that some were former Baathists. A businessman told me that his partner was recently kidnapped and held for ransom by four men, who used their own police cars to commit the crime. Last May, the city's police chief admitted to the press that 75 percent of his force was "unreliable," and 50 percent was affiliated with religious organizations. And who is behind many of the assassinations (100 during one week in May) of former Baathists around town? Ask your local policeman — or, on second thought, don't.

Basra's police force isn't the only example of the social and psychological dysfunctionalities that plague this city of 1.5 million residents. Even as brave and dedicated people here begin to reconstruct their lives in the face of daunting problems — terrorism, a lack of investment funds, corruption, and a political process dominated by incompetent religious parties — others seem just as determined to, well, totally screw things up.

Take "Emergency 115." Recently, the city, with British assistance, instituted a "911"-style system for residents to dial in case of need. Humanely enough, the Brits designed 115 with a provision that allows Basrans to contact help even if they lack SIM cards in their mobile phones. (Land-lines are few and unreliable, so people live by their cells, which require the constant purchase of expensive "scratch" cards to replenish their minutes.) "We created 115 so the call is free," a British officer who supervises the program told me.

Gang atfa gley, Robert Burns might say. For a certain segment of Basra's population discovered the hilarity of making bogus emergency calls. To add to the fun, they remove their SIM cards and remain on the line for hours, tying up the system and preventing people with real crises from getting assistance. According to the British officer, "Only about 5 percent of people contacting 115 call actually need help."

And probably even fewer call with medical emergencies. This is because public hospitals in Basra are medical emergencies, short on medicine, equipment, manpower — everything, it seems, except germs. Private centers are another matter, as evidenced by the Al-Moosawi Hospital, a sleek, clean, expensive establishment that looks American right down to the anodyne artwork on the walls. According to director Zaineldin Moosawi, the hospital contains 36 beds and serves up to 250 outpatients a day. "We even have a dental clinic," he enthused.

What they don't have is the one thing you'd expect in a well-equipped Iraqi hospital: an emergency room. "We had one," Dr. Zaineldin recalled. "But it got to be a security problem, with all the gunmen coming in." Seems that young tribal bucks would go a-feuding at night, get themselves shot up, then demand that the Mooswawi Hospital patch them up — and woe to the medic who proved unable to save a wounded brother or cousin's life. "The British encouraged us to shut down the center," said Dr. Zaineldin.

Then there's garbage: Basra is choking in it, from shredded plastic bags ensnared on coils of barbed wire to archipelagos of rotting offal floating in the city's canals. A few months back, the Brits — yes, them again — initiated a program that would pay trash collectors to cart waste material to a landfill in the desert. The plan seemed to work: Contractors brought truckloads of trash to the site, earning dinars in return. But the city seemed no cleaner. As the Brits soon discovered, contractors were loading up their vehicles with garbage from already-existing piles, located on the edge of town or smoldering in the city center. By the time the British rejiggered the program to compel contractors to direct their attention to city streets, the funding for the project disappeared, a victim of canceled plans, bureaucratic reorientation, or — more likely, locals say — theft.

I don't mean to paint a bleak picture of Basra or its residents. Well, maybe I do. It's painful to watch so many people persist in self-defeating behavior, especially considering that with its potential revenues from oil, agriculture, and tourism, Basra could become the next Bahrain, Dubai, or, for all we know, Orlando. No wonder a few Basrans have expressed the despondent wish, "If only we could empty people out the city and start over again with a new generation."

Many would start by ejecting the city's religious parties, which seized control of the political process after the January 30 elections. I don't have space to outline all the changes these groups have imposed on this once tolerant and carnal city; suffice to say, no booze, no discos, no music CDs, no un-hejabed women — and heaven help you if you're ex-Baathi. And that doesn't even consider the hundreds of small but significant problems created by various sheiks, sayyids, and imams.

Consider the brouhaha over Basra's work week. Last year, the Allawi government announced it was adding Saturday to what was then a Friday-only Iraqi weekend. Outraged, many religious leaders took to the streets in protest. Why? Because Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. With its political machine under the sway of the turbans, Basra caved, declaring itself a Thursday-Friday zone. No matter that the city's business week would have only three days' overlap with its Western counterpart. Muslim dignity was restored.

Except for one inconvenient fact: Many Basrans are employees of state ministries in Baghdad, which remains divided on the weekend controversy, with some ministries opting for Thursday, others for Saturday. "What passes for our social lives here is even more unsettled now," said a woman who works at an NGO that last June switched from Saturday to Thursday. "It's always the same here," she added with resignation. "Everyone is confused."

Everyone, it seems, except the religious parties themselves, which always seem to know what to think, do, and say, especially compared to the city's frightened intellectual class. Consider, for example, Professor M. and his run-in with renegade Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. An expert in radical Shiite movements, Professor M. wrote a well-researched, politically neutral history of the Sadrist phenomenon, which ran on the front page of a daily newspaper. Unfortunately, the periodical accompanied the piece with a photograph of a Basran crowd that included women who were not wearing hejab!

Reaction was swift. Sadrists claimed that M. and the newspaper had conspired to defame them — a charge, of course, both parties vehemently denied. No matter. M. began receiving increasingly disturbing death threats, which climaxed when someone fired a bullet through his front window. Despite his innocence, he published an open-letter apology to the Sadrists in the newspaper, which, to mollify the populist thugs, reprinted the article with a more acceptable photo of women bundled in their Islamic-sanctioned fabric prisons.

"Liberation brought us freedom of the press," an Iraqi journalist once told me. "And as long as you don't probe into matters like civic corruption, organized crime, or the religious parties, you're free not to be killed."

And that's the way it is. For every step responsible Basrans move forward — a gradually improving security situation, glimmers of economic development, some political leaders who are beginning to understand they must provide benefits for their constituents — irresponsible, ignorant, and frequently violent elements drag the city backwards. A race, or competition, exists between the forces of enlightened synergy and progress and traumatized entropy and decay. Basra teeters between the two, its future up in the air. And with Basra, so goes the rest of Iraq.

— Steven Vincent is a freelance investigative journalist and art critic living in New York City. He is blogging from Iraq at www.redzoneblog.com.

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