By Felicity Arbuthnot
In a small Baghdad grocery store, a child of perhaps five came in, clearly proud to be doing an important errand. He was clutching a five dinar note — approximately 9 British pence at the official rate of exchange.
The five dinars bought one egg, which the boy carefully carried to the door — and then it dropped. Traumatised, he fell to the floor and tried to gather the broken egg up in his small hands. As I searched my pocket, the shopkeeper went over, tapped him gently on the shoulder, and proffered another one.
Fish from the great Tigris River, which divides Baghdad, are, like eggs, from another era. An era before the embargo and August 1990.
Prior to 1990, malnutrition had been virtually eradicated, due to initiatives started in 1979 — the UN Year of the Child. Now, stick-thin children are everywhere. They beg, or sell cigarettes which have recently been included with the monthly government ration package of rice, oil, tea, one bar of soap and other basics.
Novelist and translator Nasra Sadun, whose great-grandfather's statue stands in Sadun Street in Baghdad, who speaks three languages and is equally at home in Paris, London or New York as in Baghdad, boils rose petals for face cleansers, concocts a mixture of boracic and herbs for deodorant and uses clay for hair conditioner. She keeps chickens on what was the patio.
Nasra's most recent novel is trapped in her computer, for want of a few pounds' worth of spare parts. It has been there three years. If it were released, it would be useless anyway. There is no paper on which to print it.
The national newspaper is still printed, but is down from 16 pages to 8. No one has toilet paper. All paper is compulsively collected and re-recycled. Legend has it that when the USA dropped vast tons of leaflets on the marsh Arabs, telling them that they were their friends, the illiterate, but never stupid, marsh people collected this unexpected windfall from the sky and sold them to the government for recycling.
Recently a burst car tyre on the motorway nearly killed Nasra Sadun. Her car was bought in 1986 for 8000 dinars. Today 8000 dinars (about 32 months' average wages) would not buy two tyres for the car. The country's only tyre factory was bombed in the war, and no tyres have been imported since 1990. Shoe repairers have taken up a second job — sewing up split tyres.
People still have to drive the gruelling, isolated desert road to Jordan, to conduct business or to get specialist medical help (if they are lucky enough to be able to pay for it with hard currency). They drive on the resewn tyres, in the searing heat. There is visible testimony to fatal accidents on this route — a bare decimal point to the reality of life and death in Iraq. United Nations personnel, of course, are able to fly in.
At the Saddam Children's Hospital, with its high-tech, Western-supplied equipment and British and US-trained staff, the incubators in the premature baby unit were working again — except for the most vital part, the heat-generating light tube.
Ali Lazam ("the vital one") is four months old, with great black eyes, set in the face of a waxen pixie. He cannot tolerate breast milk or normal formula (even if it were available at 450 dinars a kilo). With the resultant diarrhoea (for which there are no medicines or replacement fluids) he has starved and dehydrated to the point of death, for want of a soya-based formula available at any pharmacy or supermarket in neighbouring Jordan. But it has to be bought in hard currency, and is thus beyond reach of the Iraqis.
Dr Mohammed Hilal is in despair. "There is no oxygen, no antibiotics, no vaccines, no canulars for drips. We use and re-use what we have (disposable syringes as many as 10 times) ... it is a very dangerous practice." The shame showed in his face. He was standing in part of the $750 million hospital complex built without help from the IMF or the World Bank.
There is even an embargo on knowledge. "We have not been able to import medical journals, textbooks, and manuals since 1990. Last year we bought one of each new publication from Jordan and photocopied them all for the doctors, nurses and students. This was the cheapest way, due to the collapse of the dinar. This year, we cannot do that, the shortage of paper is too acute."
Dr Hilal walked me out into the sun and put out his hand. Suddenly his control snapped, he ran his hand through his hair, then put his hands to his face. "What more does the UN want of us, what more can we do?"
I had no answer.
[From Peace News via Pegasus.]