Killing the Future of Iraq

According to a new study by the union of university lecturers in Iraq, "Some 250 university professors have been killed since the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003," and "more than 1,000 professors have left the country in the same period" ("250 University Professors Killed in One Year," The Iraq Press Online, July 10, 2004). Baghdad Burning relates an anecdote that highlights the despair of Iraq's best and brightest:

My mother's cousin is renting out his house, selling his car and heading out to Amman with his three kids where, he hopes, he will be able to find work. He is a university professor who has had enough of the current situation. He claims that he's tired of worrying about his family and the varying political and security crises every minute of the day. It's a common story these days. It feels like anyone who can, is trying to find a way out before June 30. ("Excuses, Excuses . . . ," June 18, 2004)

Not surprisingly, the most coveted possession in Iraq today is a passport:

Iraqi policemen fighting to stem the crush at a newly reopened passport office in Baghdad, beating back people with hands, feet and batons. Photo by Joao Silva for the New York Times.

There is one thing the sovereign [sic] state of Iraq can offer its citizens today, and Iraqis are banging down the doors to get their hands on it: a passport out of the country.

On a recent morning in front of the newly reopened passport office, bodies pressed on bodies for a chance to get inside. Pink and yellow files, each containing a precious passport application, waved in the air, as a young man tried to climb onto a rust-orange gate to get the attention of the bureaucrats inside. In the chaos, a sign that hung above the front door toppled to the floor.

At one point, Iraqi policemen charged at the crowd, wielding batons. A couple of shots were fired in the air. The line, if it can be called that, disintegrated and the crowd retreated toward a barbed wire fence before lunging forward again.

Jobless, rattled, fed up, Iraqis are dreaming of getting out.

"Escape from Iraq" is how Muhammad Kadhum, 26, a college student, described his intentions. "I cannot live here in Iraq. I cannot feel like a man."

Zeinab Heart, 24, waiting in black in the already wilting midmorning heat for a chance to move to her husband's native Lebanon, lamented: "I want to get out. I want my children to live in a peaceful place."

Wesam Mohammed, 22, who arrived at 4:30 a.m. to claim a choice spot in the passport line, only to lose it when the police struck, said: "There is no comfort here. No stability. Explosions everywhere. This is impossible." He wiped his forehead and said he hoped to go to the United Arab Emirates to join a relative.

In Saddam Hussein's day, getting a passport and permission to leave the country was arduous and for most Iraqis prohibitively expensive. During 15 months of American occupation, there was no Iraqi government to issue one. Only after the Iraqi interim government took control on June 28 did the passport office reopen for business. It has been swamped ever since: over 500 applications every day, according to the office director, Sabbar Atia. "Some people don't even need it," he snapped.

This morning, trying to get into his car and leave, he was swamped himself by a beseeching, demanding crowd. His guards seemed unafraid to use their sharp elbows.

Someone told him there were people in his office charging a little extra to process applications quickly. "There are thieves outside this building, not inside," he said testily. "Please organize yourselves. Stay in line. We are giving out passports."

The waiting turned out to be good for vendors, at least. A man sold tamarind juice from a sack strapped to his back. Two small boys pushed a cart piled high with orange soda.

Today, the fervor with which Iraqis crave a passport, and with it a chance to escape, speaks volumes about their frustration with the existing order. At this passport line, one of five in the capital, patience wears thin, and melts again to frustration. It is a grim portrait of this fledgling government coming face to face with its constituents.

"It's a disaster," muttered Mr. Kadhum. "An Iraqi disaster." He watched the chaos from the sidelines and decided to come back another day. He said he wanted to go to Germany. He admitted it was a dream.

Certainly, not everyone here was applying for a passport in order to emigrate. Three Iraqi traders were angry at not being able to get to Syria, where their goods were sitting in a warehouse. A photographer wanted to visit his brother in Romania. A schoolteacher wanted to renew her passport to see the holy shrines in Iran. Her husband, a professor of accounting, said simply, "I want to see the world."

But it was the young men who stood here in the unforgiving, shadeless sidewalk who were among the most impatient to leave, and it is their impatience and ennui that presents an urgent challenge to this government and its backers in Washington.

The unemployment rate here is impossible to gauge correctly, but even conservative American government estimates put it at around 24 percent. Reconstruction projects, dogged by sabotage, have so far created 30,000 jobs for Iraqis -- far fewer than Iraq's American overseers had originally hoped.

Today, in an odd riposte to the trickle of young men who come to Iraq from as far away as the Philippines to cook, clean and drive for American soldiers here, a new crop of employment brokers are promising young Iraqi men a chance to work overseas.

That promise brought three friends, all trained in Iraqi universities to teach Arabic, to the passport line this morning. One of them, Sami Jabbar, 29, was almost certain he would receive a two-year contract on a timber plantation in Malaysia. It would be his first trip out of Iraq.

"I am really looking forward to it," he said. "I want to make something of my future."

Standing at his side were two friends, also praying for jobs in Malaysia. Fifteen of his neighbors, Mr. Jabbar said, are applying for passports, just to be able to go abroad to work.

The company making the arrangements for Mr. Jabbar has already arranged to send 750 men from Nasariya, its chief, Abdul Rasoul Hussein, said in an interview in his office. In August, an additional 700 Baghdadis, all men in their 20's, are scheduled to be shipped off to Malaysia. Most are to be hired as loggers and drivers.

"If we found work here, we wouldn't be leaving," said Mr. Jabbar's friend, Sabah Abdul Hussein. (emphasis added, Somini Sengupta, "In Iraq, the Most Coveted Item Now Is a Passport," New York Times, July 16, 2004)

While the New York Times reports only the most conservative and unreliable estimate of Iraqi unemployment, more credible sources say that the unemployment rate runs at least at 50% -- and as high as 70% for young men:

Iraqi joblessness doubled from 30% before the invasion to 60% by the middle of 2003. Before it was transformed into the US embassy on June 28, the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) claimed that unemployment was down to 25-30%. However, a report released on June 23 by the US-based Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), estimated the combined rate of unemployment and underemployment in Iraq at 50% of the labour force. The unemployment rate among young Iraqi men is running at an estimated 70%.

The catastrophically high levels of unemployment estimated by the EPIC report are supported by a May 26 UN humanitarian information unit (IRIN) report that “60% percent of Iraqi families depend completely on the monthly food ration” distributed by the UN’s World Food Program. “Markets are full of food products”, the IRIN report noted, “but unemployment currently stands at an estimated 50% or more, and most families say they cannot afford to buy even the most basic items.”

According to the IRIN report, even with the food ration, “a million children under the age of five are estimated to be chronically malnourished”.

A major cause of continuing high unemployment has been the CPA's refusal to award reconstruction contracts to the largely state-owned infrastructure firms in Iraq. Before it dissolved, the CPA reported that only 15,000 Iraqis, out of a potential workforce of 7 million, were employed on reconstruction projects.

The CPA's refusal to provide work to Iraq's state-run companies was part of a privatisation strategy — economic “shock therapy” as the EPIC report calls it — imposed by CPA head Paul Bremer. (emphasis added, Doug Lorimer, "Iraqis Worse Off since US Invasion," Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004)

Murder of university professors. Exodus of intellectuals. Unemployment of youths. Malnourishment of children. The invasion has already destroyed Iraq's priceless and irreplaceable historical treasures. The occupation is now killing the future of Iraq.