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Birth Pangs: As a New Era Dawns in Baghdad, Life Goes On -- Sometimes, Just Barely By Richard Leiby Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 5, 2003; Page C01 BAGHDAD, May 4--What is everyday life like in liberated Iraq? For Maryam Khaldoon Hakim, born eight days ago into an upper-middle-class family, it goes like this: First a cat climbs through a bomb-shattered bedroom window and tries to bite her. Then the electricity fails for a while, as it so often does. Maryam's mother, Mona, changes diapers by the flame of a smoky oil lamp. The baby becomes congested and won't nurse. After seven days she turns yellow, stricken with jaundice. The children's hospital in her south Baghdad neighborhood where she was taken Saturday doesn't have enough of the special lights required to treat jaundice. It doesn't even have clean water. There is no propane gas with which to boil it. Transfusions of blood from an uncle keep Maryam alive. No vitamins or calcium supplements are available to strengthen her, but she's a plump child. Alhamdulillah, says her mother. Thanks to God. Eventually another treatment bulb is found, but not an incubator. So Maryam lies in a rickety metal crib draped with an old carpet and towels. A few inches away writhes a scrawny boy, born one month prematurely, also jaundiced. Throughout the Al-Alwiyah Children's Hospital, a place of dirty tile floors and concrete walls painted pale green, tiny patients wail, their bellies distended and hot to the touch. Of the 160 children here, most are suffering from diarrhea. They drank contaminated water. Mothers and grandmothers, many in full-length black abayas, crouch over the children, panicked and praying. They haven't seen a doctor here for several hours. Some clutch precious stocks of bottled water and canned milk -- enough, perhaps, to keep their babies alive through the night. Mona, 31, dressed in a flowered housecoat and head scarf, is so distraught she can barely speak, but repeats something twice: Her baby, Maryam, is among the lucky ones. "Many other people are worse off." Nearly a month after the coalition's conquest of Baghdad, Mona and her extended family are not going hungry and still have some money in reserve. Her father, Ghanim Khedhr, is a retired Army officer. Her 40-year-old husband, Khaldoon, is an engineer, a lieutenant colonel who worked on helicopter projects under Saddam Hussein. As the sun starts to set, Khaldoon stands weeping outside the entrance to the hospital. The grandfather, 65-year-old Ghanim, normally a placid man, flares with anger: "There's no milk, no medicine, no salaries, no safety in the streets. What kind of freedom are you talking about? Under Saddam it was better than now!" He collects himself, seems to regret the outburst and continues. "I don't know if tomorrow I will find my granddaughter dead." 'Nothing From Bush' This Iraqi family of 10 -- Mona and her husband, her parents, her sister and two brothers, and her three children -- share a Mediterranean-style home with a palm-shaded courtyard and gated driveway. They have one car, a 1984 Toyota Crown sedan, which they use sparingly. Some lines now snake 500 cars long at the official gas stations in Baghdad, and in the street-corner aftermarket, hustlers are demanding more than $1 a gallon -- 20 times the normal price. This neighborhood not far from the children's hospital is called Zayuna, but residents still like to refer to it as "Officers City." An Arlington-style suburban civility prevails -- though occasionally drivers roar up streets the wrong way, taking advantage of shortcuts and the lack of traffic cops. It's populated by white-haired Army and Air Force retirees and their grown children, many of them engineers, well-educated bureaucrats and members of the professional class. They proudly tend the gardens and lawns attached to tan brick or stucco homes with uniform floor plans (1,800 square feet, two stories, with servants' quarters and balconies). Gen. Abdel Karim Kassem, who led the overthrow of Iraq's monarchy in 1958 and became Iraq's president, built Officers City in the early 1960s. Saddam was among the Baath Party hitmen who tried to kill Kassem in 1959; they succeeded four years later. Across a major road lies Saddam City, a Shiite slum where many blame the Iraqi military for their persecution. Officers City residents say they live in fear of thieves and murderers infiltrating from Saddam City. Citizens pass along harrowing reports: Did you hear about the man who was machine-gunned while waiting outside a barber shop the other morning? Or the woman who was stripped naked in the street and kidnapped when she refused to give up her car? Many large shops -- which in peacetime sold groceries, furniture, appliances and textiles -- remain shuttered, their owners still fearful of looters. The pharmacies are open, but the owners are wary; one stockpiles medications in her home for safekeeping -- a trove of antibiotics, insulin and baby bottles, just in case the looting begins again. In a once comfortable south Baghdad neighborhood, two men climb a light pole to try to pirate electricity. Richard Leiby - The Washington Post During Saddam's regime, medications were readily available, distributed by quota at state-run neighborhood health centers. Patients, pharmacists and hospitals last received allotments in March. Everyone is running low. Where is the United Nations, where are the Americans, people demand to know. It's coming soon, the officials say, but many Iraqis no longer believe that. "We hear about the humanitarian aid, but that's only for the TV and the pictures," says Mohammed Abdul Rahman, pacing the ward in the children's hospital. His 11-month-old son is severely dehydrated from diarrhea, which should be easily treated. "You can see with your own eyes, we are not receiving anything: Nothing from Bush, nothing from the European leaders, just talk about freedom." Television also shows smiling Iraqi teachers and children returning to school, but it's not happening in Officers City. Out of class since March 15, the few students who attempted to return today went home within an hour after discovering that fans, air conditioners, lights and other materials had been stolen. "We'll still afraid that someone may want to kidnap the kids," says Suher Al-Mullah, a mother of teenagers who won't let them walk to school. A ticket agent for Iraqi Air (owned by the government, it no longer operates), she ferried some neighborhood students today, but it turns out that only seven showed up at the high school and three at grade school. In a place that suddenly has no government, few police and effectively no laws, Officers City residents crave stability and many say they wish there was more -- immediately. They complain about what seems to remain a halfhearted military occupation. "You should be our savior," Osama Said Raheem, 35, insists to an American who approaches one darkened street corner. Volunteers like him congregate to surveil pitch-black streets for strangers. "No one provides for us." Can't Iraqis do it themselves? "People here don't know the meaning of freedom," says Raheem, the son of a retired staff colonel. Miraculously, despite looters' destruction of Baghdad's modern central communications exchange, home telephones in this neighborhood still work. It's a triumph of 1950s technology, but you can only reach other neighbors. So when shots are heard, men grab their guns while families dial house to house, awaiting the all-clear. Daily life during wartime presents a welter of annoyances. You can't buy more than a pound of meat at a time, because it's likely to spoil in the fridge after the power shuts down. May Al-Mufti, a mother of three, says it took 45 minutes of driving to find "good bread" for dinner. Bakers don't have enough electricity. At one corner, by the light of a flaming kebab grill and propane lamp, youths scale a ladder to fish a wire from a flickering streetlight directly across the road, hoping to appropriate some of its juice. Hey, it's the Iraqis' electricity, one says: Power to the people. In Baghdad -- population 5 million, daytime temperature approaching 100 degrees -- electricity is cycled block by block for a few hours at a time. The electrical grid remains patchy; nobody seems to know why. The coalition says it wasn't bombed; Iraqis say they didn't monkey-wrench it. "It's just dark, dark, dark," says Osama Raheem, guarding his corner. But here comes one solution. It's a local workman driving a blue flatbed truck loaded with a winch and a large, gas-powered generator. The driver, Mohammed Ali, says he wants to find a good central location on the block so people can tap in. He's selling convenience and hope by the ampere. The price: about $1.50 an amp, per month. Four amps is enough to run a refrigerator, a TV, four fluorescent lights, some fans and other small appliances -- but not an air conditioner. You can only purchase eight hours of power a day, but people line up. As the evening proceeds, the air starts to feel cooler. Just-bloomed gardenias perfume the streets of Officers City. The military's midnight curfew is near. The block is still. The feral cats stop yowling. In a few of these homes, things may soon be getting a bit brighter. Light Arrives In the hospital on Saturday evening, a cluster of distraught mothers start shrieking at an American reporter and photographer. They present their ill children for inspection and beseech us for help -- any kind of help. "Why are you here?" one asks angrily. "If you can't help, then leave. We don't want to be studied like specimens." That night, still fearing the worst, Mona and Khaldoon stay at the hospital, tending to baby Maryam. In a nearby crib, a 5-day-old baby dies. In the morning, a 7-day-old dies too. It's been that way for more than a month. Doctors report seven to 14 infant deaths a week in the wards, nearly all from diarrhea. But by this afternoon, a small measure of relief has arrived: air conditioning. Somebody rigged a line from the city's emergency grid. And now medications can be refrigerated. The hospital pharmacy is rounding up more supplies, some from other hospitals, some donated by a local mosque. A wealthy Iraqi gave a huge cache; some looters also are turning in their medical booty to religious leaders. "We've got enough supplies for two or three days," says pharmacist Adnan Al-Hamza. "Then that will be gone." Maryam receives calcium supplements. Somewhere a proper incubator, with a jaundice-fighting light, is found for her. Her color looks better. She begins to take her mother's breast milk. Thanks to God, the parents say, thanks to God. Their baby, born into freedom, may live to see it. © 2003 The Washington Post Company _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk