Mariam Shahin reports from Baghdad

A series of contradictory positions have been taken by the international community, which appears to be seeking simultaneously to ‘contain’ and to ‘aid’ Iraq.

The middle classes grow increasingly bitter about the levels of deprivation to which they have been reduced, and the extent of the privileges enjoyed by those who have become wealthy as a result of sanctions and war.

At the Karch cemetery south of Baghdad the family of eight-year-old Omar Al Bayyatie are saying their final prayers, before his small body is lowered into the ground. Unlike most Muslim funerals, the women of the family are in attendance along with his father and other relatives who have come to pay their last respects; they kiss the white sheet wrapped around his body one last time.

The demise of the Iraqi medical infrastructure is affecting all layers of society, and especially the poor

Omar, like many children in Iraq, suffered from leukaemia. His family, middle class and staunchly pro-Baathist, did all in their power to save him. In a private room at the Saddam Paediatric Hospital in Baghdad, Omar was treated with medicine bought by his family on the black market. What he desperately needed was a bone marrow transplant, but Iraqi hospitals are no longer equipped to undertake this procedure. Omar, who died seven days before his ninth birthday, was destined to perish as a result of the illness.

The demise of the Iraqi medical infrastructure is affecting all layers of society, and especially the poor. In the Iraq of the 1960s, 70s and 80s it would have been unthinkable that a child, especially a child born into a middle class, Baath Party family, would perish under such circumstances. But mortality for children under the age of five has doubled in the last 10 years in the central and southern districts of the country, where the majority of Iraq’s 22 million population live. Pollution caused by a combination of the effects of war and sanctions-related circumstances are undoubtedly the main reason for the high mortality rate.

While no one can actually escape the circumstances created by bad water and polluted air and soil, some — a very few — can buy medical treatment by travelling outside the country. But with the overall family income averaging around $5 a month, the $400 a person exit fee, required by the Iraqi government, is attainable only by a tiny minority.

In Iraq the difference between the haves and have-nots is starkly apparent.

“The society is being split into two,” says 30-year-old Hassan Saad, a PhD student in environmental science at the University of Baghdad. “There are the so called ‘new rich’ who are very wealthy and can afford everything and there are the rest of us who can hardly afford to eat.”

While some claim that removing Saddam Hussein from power or disarming Iraq is the raison d’etre behind the economic sanctions, what the sanctions have actually done is pit the once well-established and secure middle class against the small nouveau riche group, described by the increasingly embittered middle class as ‘war rats’.

Before its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was on its way to becoming a fully industrialised country with a strong economic middle class. The country sits on the second largest oil reserves in the world, earnings from which provided its citizens with free health care, education and electricity for some 25 years before 1990.

These days all the privilege is in the hands of the nouveaux riches.

It is difficult to gauge the number of people who make up this ‘elite’ formed as a result of what amounts to “war profiteering”, but local observers claim it is probably no more than 50 or 60 families who are benefiting from the dire straits into which Iraq has been plunged.

Members of the group are described as ‘businessmen’ who import and export from and to Iraq. The vast majority of them deal with countries such as Turkey, Iran, Syria and Jordan and to a lesser degree with Russia, France, Italy and the Far East, including China.

The international community has no interest in toppling the regime

They import everything from Korean televisions to German cars and American and French beauty products. But these largely consumer items cannot be sold in large quantities in today’s Iraq and the ‘businessmen’ are selling such luxuries mostly to each other. It is the consignments of foodstuffs, building materials for the vast construction projects mounted by the government, and spare parts for machinery of all sorts, which are the mainstay of profiteering by these merchants, who cruise the streets of Baghdad in their new, expensive cars, accompanied by private security guards hired specifically to protect them from the ‘have-nots’.

According to UN officials, for every truck crossing the Turkish-Iraqi border that is checked by the UN food-for-oil monitors, 200 pass by unchecked; the same is true at other points of entry into Iraq such as Syria, Jordan and Iran. According to one UN official who asked to remain anonymous, nearly anything can get into Iraq; since officials do not monitor checkpoints too closely, the probability is that the smugglers will get away with it.

It is also common knowledge that the international community has no interest in toppling the regime, since it has not found anyone it believes is a suitable replacement, the UN official observed.

Among the import and export scions are the president’s sons, but they are by no means the only ones involved, nor do they necessarily hold the majority of the market shares in the new free market that exists in Iraq today. “If you can pay the money you can buy anything you want,” concluded the PhD student from the University of Baghdad.

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