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Monday, 20th June 2005
| 11:00 AM Riverbend is an Iraqi girl who has a blog, and has just managed to get her book published in book form. I got the following extract from her blog via The Guardian. I realise that most of my readers are probably people who share my view on the mess in Iraq, and that by posting this I'm probably preaching to the choir, but it's still an eye-opener nonetheless. Behold, one and all, the real 'liberation' of Iraq: Yesterday, I read how it was going to take up to $90bn to rebuild Iraq. Bremer [the former head of the US Occupation Authority] was shooting out numbers about how much it was going to cost to replace buildings and bridges and electricity, etc. Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad, well-known for building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who'll listen. As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the south-east end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn't too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward - $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labour, contractors, travel expenses, etc. Let's pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let's pretend he hasn't been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let's pretend he didn't work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf war. Let's pretend he's wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated - let's pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let's just use our imagination. A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to a US company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around - brace yourselves - $50,000,000!! Something you should know about Iraq: we have over 130,000 engineers. More than half of these engineers are structural engineers and architects. Tuesday, October 21 2003 Ever since the occupation, employees of the Ministry of Oil are being searched by troops - and lately, dogs. The employees have been fed up ... the ministry itself is a virtual fortress now with concrete, barbed wire, and troops. The employees stand around for hours at a time, waiting to be checked and let inside. Today, one of the women who works at the ministry, Amal, objected when the troops brought forward a dog to sniff her bag. She was carrying a Qur'an inside of it and, to even handle a Qur'an, a Muslim has to be "clean" or under "widhu". "Widhu" is the process of cleansing oneself for prayer or to read from the Qur'an. We simply wash the face, neck, arms up to the elbows and feet with clean water and say a few brief "prayers". Muslims carry around small Qur'ans for protection and we've been doing it more often since the war - it gives many people a sense of security. It doesn't mean the person is a "fundamentalist" or "extremist". As soon as Amal protested about letting the dog sniff her bag because of the Qur'an inside, the soldier grabbed the Qur'an, threw it out of the bag, and proceeded to check it. The lady was horrified and the dozens of employees who were waiting to be checked moved forward in a rage. Amal was put in handcuffs and taken away and the raging mob was greeted with the butts of rifles. The Iraqi police arrived to try to intervene, and found the mob had turned from a security check into a demonstration. One of the TV stations showed police officers tearing off their "IP" badge - a black arm badge to identify them as police and shouting at the camera, "We don't want the badge - we signed up to help the people, not see our Qur'an thrown to the ground ..."And one of her entries from last month, titled "The Phantom Weapons" definitely touched me and confirmed a lot of what I suspected: Now we're being 'officially' told that the weapons never existed. After Iraq has been devastated, we're told it's a mistake. You look around Baghdad and it is heart-breaking. The streets are ravaged, the sky is a bizarre grayish-bluish color- a combination of smoke from fires and weapons and smog from cars and generators. There is an endless wall that seems to suddenly emerge in certain areas to protect the Green Zoners... There is common look to the people on the streets- under the masks of fear, anger and suspicion, there's also a haunting look of uncertainty and indecision. Where is the country going? How long will it take for things to even have some vague semblance of normality? When will we ever feel safe?I can't believe it's over 2 years since I first saw the first scenes of the Iraq war. After weeks of "debate", I remember being on the bus on my way to work one, seeing on TVMobile the scenes of the Iraqi night-sky being lit up as Iraq was being bombed. I closed my eyes, looked down, and tried not to stop tearing up for the inevitable fatalities and casualties. There weren't many people on the bus at that time because it was reaching its last stop on its route, but I remember everyone being quiet on the bus. I think we were acknowledging the power of the American military, and we feel the helplessness and the outrage that this can happen. I'm sorry to be all depressing on Monday morning, but I thought this is something I'd like to share. Two years after the start of the war, I'd like some people to remember that it's not just pictures of anonymous pictures or news about people I don't know anymore. This mess is about real people and real names, that the people who've have died in the Iraqi war on all sides are as real as the people who've died in 9/11. In the way warfare dehumanises "the enemy", I'd like to try and remember all that. -
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recent entries: Monday, 27th February 2006 - My house of cards finally comes down Saturday, Feb. 25, 2006 - Books and fitness Thursday, 23rd February 2006 - Still fat and sleepless Monday, 13th February 2006 - Fat sleepless me Sunday, 5th February 2006 - It's more than just cartoons
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