06/20/2000 - Tuesday - Page A 6
  INSIDE IRAQ
Survival of Innocents
How Iraqi children
cope with poverty and homelessness

By Matthew McAllester. MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

Basra, Iraq-School is over for Mohammed Al Ramahi-for good. From now on,
he's going to be selling vegetables in the market.

"There's no use going to school," said Mohammed, 13, who this month
completed what his father has decided will be the boy's last year of formal
education. "Life is so hard and I have to help my father. I don't feel so
happy about it but I must help." Mohammed stood behind a row of cucumbers at
his father's stall, his body language confident and adult, his voice still
unbroken. His father, Karim Al Ramahi, appeared out of the shopping crowd
and explained why he had taken his son out of school.

"I appreciate that learning is very important and he's still a kid but
things are so tough," said the father of five. "The embargo has created a
real crisis so everyone has to do his best to get through. I have to take
care of my family or they'll collapse." Mohammed is part of a generation of
young Iraqis who have grown up in a decade of increasing poverty and
continuing economic sanctions. Many his age are dropping out of school to
start work before they have started to shave. In Basra, Iraq's second
largest city and a place of perhaps unparalleled poverty in this formerly
wealthy country, there are many children like Mohammed. All over the town's
souk, or market, young boys push large barrows of potatoes or flour. They
call out the prices of car parts from stalls. They offer shoeshines. For the
first time in people's memory, children are sleeping on the streets of the
capital, Baghdad. The kids who do stay in school, teachers and aid workers
say, are becoming increasingly apathetic, hopeless and bitter about the
outside world that the children blame for their loss of opportunities and
hunger.

Some aid workers and diplomats are worried that the Western countries like
the United States and Britain that insist on continuing the decade-old
embargo are helping to create a generation that is demoralized,
under-educated and developing a hatred of the West.

"If you look at the possibility of a whole generation not feeling that their
hopes and aspirations can be met, combined with this situation of isolation
by the international community and feeling to a great extent that the rest
of the world is responsible, you have to look at the ramifications for
peace," said Anupama Rao Singh, the head of the United Nation's children's
organization, UNICEF, in Iraq.

Abdul Razak Hashemi, a minister in the Iraqi government, was less
diplomatic: "God help the West for the hate growing up in Iraqi children." A
State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged
that the United States government is aware of the hostility to the West
among the younger generation in Iraq but said it is not a top priority.

"At this point, it's not a war for the hearts and minds," the official said.

"It's a question of the security of the region. At this point it's not a
popularity contest." Young Iraqis, the official said, are bound to feel
hostility toward the United States and its allies because the people of Iraq
do not have access to free information and are susceptible to President
Saddam Hussein's propaganda.

For many young people, however, daily survival is life's main concern.

It was past midnight on a recent night and the platforms of Baghdad's bus
station were dark and punctuated by the bodies of sleeping men. By the bare
electric light bulbs of the food stands that stay open all night, a boy sat
behind his shoe-shine box.

He can't read or write. Behind his bony chest are lungs that struggle with
asthma. His mother is long dead. He's a sweet boy, polite and a little
nervous and usually hungry. He left home more than a year ago because his
stepmother wanted him to beg in the streets and he hasn't been back since.

"Sometimes I sleep here," said the boy, Ibrahim, 15. "Well, every day."
Ibrahim makes 1,000 dinars, or 50 cents in a day, sometimes a quarter. What
he makes he has to split with the man who actually owns the box full of
brushes, rags and polish. He's a nice man, Ibrahim said. No one in the bus
station, the regulars, takes advantage of him. Even the police are
sympathetic.

"Sometimes they even offer me food," he said.

Ibrahim is part of a growing number of homeless children in Baghdad, a fact
that the government is highly sensitive about. Although the government
minder who accompanies foreign journalists everywhere was quite willing to
take a journalist to see dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, it took several
days for Newsday to gain permission to interview homeless children. Requests
for access to Baghdad's only center for homeless children, Dar Al Rahma
(House of Mercy), were denied.

And the reason for the sensitivity is this: Iraqis, people with a history of
extended family responsibility and extensive government social welfare
programs, are simply embarrassed that families and society at large can no
longer guarantee a home for every Iraqi child. While dying children is a
crime against Iraq, to many Iraqis, the existence of homeless children is a
stain on the national honor.

Officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs did not
respond to requests for interviews, but Singh said the Iraqi government is
beginning to address the problem.

"It's one of the areas we've had a lot of forward movement in the last two
years," she said. "Two or three years ago they weren't willing to discuss
the issue." Some are critical of the progress. According to aid workers who
have been there, the 18-month-old Dar Al Rahma center resembles a prison
more than a haven for homeless children. Armed guards surround the building,
which the children cannot leave. Street kids are mixed inside with young
criminals.

There are no social workers to help the roughly 75 children inside-only a
sociologist and a psychologist. Still, inside the center the children can go
to school and learn crafts like carpentry, so things are getting better, aid
workers said.

But the news has spread on the streets that Dar Al Rahma is best avoided.

When the police do speak to Ibrahim, they tell him he should go home or find
the center. Home is where his drunken father and abusive stepmother are.

He won't go back there. And he said he hasn't made it to the center because
"I don't know the address." An Iraqi man listening to the conversation had
his own interpretation. "He knows where it is," the man said. "He just
doesn't want to go there." What are Ibrahim's dreams? An end to the
sanctions perhaps? A change of government in Iraq? "I hope one day I'll have
at least enough clothes and pocket money to survive," he said. "And I would
like to go to school." Some young Iraqis are more politically aware and have
complex, conflicted views of the West. They are bitter at what they perceive
as an unjust economic stranglehold that countries like the United States and
Britain support and yet they are attracted to the fruits and freedoms of the
West.

Fahed Yousser Hamoud is 19 and hopes to go to medical school in September.

He lives in the old city of Basra, once a neighborhood of elegant homes and
canals that Iraqis called their Venice. Most of the houses are now on their
last legs and the canals are dried-up dribbles of sewage and trash.

On a recent afternoon, Hamoud was walking home after finishing his final
exams at high school. Many of his friends have dropped out of school,
knowing they can make more money in the souk or driving cabs than they could
as doctors or engineers. Hamoud is determined to push ahead with his
studies, hoping that by the time he is a fully qualified doctor, in eight
years, the sanctions might be over.

One of the things Hamoud most wants is access to the Internet-illegal in
Hussein's Iraq.

His Chicago Bulls T-shirt and Phoenix Suns baseball cap give a clue to the
country in the world he would most like to visit. "I would love to go to
America," he said. "I would love to see the countryside there. And Michael
Jordan." Even so, Hamoud strongly opposes the U.S.-backed sanctions against
Iraq.

"It's no use continuing the embargo on people," he said. "It's a crime to
join politics and this campaign against innocent people. It will just create
hatred."