By MATTHEW HAY BROWN
The Hartford Courant
October 22, 2000

BASRA, Iraq

It wasn't a big business - just three trucks and three drivers -but it was enough to keep Habib Mohammed and his family comfortable. Mohammed, his wife and their four children lived in a six-room house alongside engineers and civil servants and other small-business owners. They owned a car and several televisions, and a freezer full of chicken and mutton and fish. The children went to school and played soccer.

Now the family squats in a single, cavelike room in the al-Moufakia Flats, a sprawling complex of unfinished buildings without sanitation or running water. Mohammed, the former trucking company owner, works 14 hours a day, seven days a week, earning 1,000 dinars a day - about 50 cents - driving for local officials. Without government rations of flour, rice and lentils, the family would starve.

"This is not living," says Mohammed, 50. "I have died."

Here in Iraq, the wide-ranging economic embargo intended to force President Saddam Hussein to comply with weapons inspections has reduced a once-vibrant nation of 24 million to a daily struggle to survive. While the United Nations and Saddam exchange blame, sanctions are bleeding the life from Iraq.

A decade of deprivation has devastated a people proud of their rich cultural heritage in the cradle of civilization. This is where the wheel was invented. And agriculture, and writing, and mathematics. Artists here gave the world Gilgamesh and Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad. More recently, oil money fueled health and education systems that approached European standards.

Now, babies die of curable diseases for want of basic medicine. Schoolchildren sit on the floors of crumbling classrooms without pencils, papers or books. Families sell heirlooms for money to buy food. Artists paint over old canvases, sculptors search junkyards for bronze, violinists play on rusted strings.

Sanctions are pulling apart the ties that bind society. Hunger, disease and bombings are driving increases in mental illness, child abuse, divorce and street crime. Observers warn that rising anger over the embargo is breeding radicalism, fundamentalism and xenophobia in a traditionally moderate, secular, outward-looking society.

"It's very much like Germany after the Versailles treaty, where we destroyed the economy and the well-being of the German people, which of course led to fascism, and we know the consequences of that," says Denis Halliday, the former U.N. coordinator for humanitarian aid to Iraq. "The danger signs are all over. Iraq of the future is going to be an unsettling, dangerous, unstable presence in the world."

That future may already have arrived at the al-Moufakia Flats. Planned in the 1970s to house civil servants, the complex was half-built and then abandoned during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Used as a temporary camp for families displaced by that conflict, it is now home to thousands of squatters - refugees from the sanctions.

The complex still looks like an abandoned construction site, with concrete modules stacked three and four stories high, connected by crumbling staircases and walkways without rails. Residents say dozens of children have fallen to their deaths, and it is not difficult to believe, watching 4-year-olds jostle and leap across edges and gaps 30 feet from the ground.

Falling is not the only danger here. Frayed extension cords carry pirated electricity to the concrete shells; open gutters carry raw sewage out. Emaciated, rag-wearing children wade barefoot through the green muck that pools in the weedy, garbage-strewn lots between buildings. Mangy dogs lie dead or dying in 120-degree heat.

In the 1980s, when Mohammed drove past the complex on the road to Baghdad, he would feel sorry for the people who lived here. But that was when he still owned his business and his home.

Then, in August 1990, Saddam ordered his army into Kuwait, and the U.N. Security Council shut off trade to Iraq. In early 1991, a coalition led by the United States drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. After the Persian Gulf War, the council voted to continue the embargo to compel the regime to cooperate with inspections of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

The economy, heavily dependent on foreign trade, collapsed. Mohammed's earnings were worthless; his savings evaporated. There was no money to buy food.

He sold the house first. Then the televisions. Next, the furniture. Then the car, and the trucks. Finally, the refrigerator and the freezer.

The family moved to the al-Moufakia Flats in 1993. Their room has only a rug, a picture of the seventh-century Shiite Muslim caliph Ali and a clock. Mohammed wears a 2-year-old dishdasha, the dusty green robe that is his only garment. He worries that the government will raze this complex, leaving the family homeless.

Twenty thousand people live in al-Moufakia.

"We are all here because of the embargo," Mohammed says. "We have no choice."

With the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world, Iraq's per-capita gross national product in 1987 was more than $3,500, according to the United Nations Development Programme. By 1995, the figure had dropped to $750, to a level comparable to those in Madagascar and Rwanda.

By 1997, 55 percent of the population was living below the poverty line of $9.10 per person per month, according to U.N. figures. Doctors, nurses, teachers and other public employees now earn about $4 per month. Current estimates of unemployment begin at 50 percent.

"There has been a massive impoverishment of the people," says Anapuma Rao Singh, the UNICEF representative in Iraq. "Except for a small proportion of the elite, the majority of middle-class people in Iraq find themselves having to do all sorts of menial and unskilled jobs or petty business just to survive. ... You will find doctors and engineers working as taxi drivers, selling cigarettes or ice cream."

In Basra, the Chaldean Catholic diocese has opened its churches and priestly residences to the homeless and supplies meals to the poor. Bishop Dijabreel Kassab, an outspoken critic of the embargo, has instructed his priests to teach the faithful "the new meaning of sanctions."

"We tell them they are sharing the suffering of Christ," Kassab says. "We sing songs of hope."

Parishioner Najim Abad says the lesson provides little comfort. An electrician who earns $3 per month, he lives with his wife and three children in a low stone hutch amid the crowded, narrow streets of Old Basra. A fourth child, his 6-year-old daughter, died in 1997 when doctors did not have the medicine or equipment to repair a hole in her heart.

"Christ is something bigger than us," Abad says. "This is too much suffering for us."

A 10-foot crucifix with an emaciated Jesus dominates the Baghdad studio of sculptor Mohammed Ghani. Iraq's greatest living artist earned international renown for monumental representations of the great figures of the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations. His stylized bronze statues of the lawmaker Hammurabi, the poet Abu Nuwas and the storyteller Scheherazade testify to his nation's cultural heritage.

Now, Ghani has a new subject: sanctions. His studio, in Baghdad's wealthy Mansour neighborhood, is cluttered with models of pieces the artist hopes to complete when the materials become available again. A mother with withered breasts consoles the child she cannot feed. Small, naked men struggle under the weight of large blocks inscribed "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday ... " A fatherless family huddles together and waits for the embargo to end.

"I don't do political figures," says Ghani. "This is not politics. This is humanity. Children are dying for food and medicine. It is savage."

The 72-year-old artist has received invitations to teach at universities in Europe and North America. He refuses to follow friends who have left the country.

By staying, he deals with the conditions that limit all artists in what was one of the region's most productive cultures. He cannot obtain enough bronze or wood to complete his works. Painters have difficulty acquiring brushes and paints. Musicians cannot get strings or reeds. All are isolated from communication with their counterparts in other countries.

"You have to manage," says Said Otman, director of the struggling Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. "Otherwise you stand still. We do what we can with what we have."

The theme recurs throughout everyday life. The windshield of nearly every decade-old Datsun, Toyota and Volkswagen in Baghdad is cracked; most ride on bald, hand-patched tires. Drivers keep headlights off well after dusk to conserve bulbs and batteries. With power frequently out, major intersections operate on the honor system.

Government employees continue to work in buildings half-destroyed during the gulf war. Women still meet in the souk, the open-air marketplace; men gather on street corners to play backgammon and dominoes.

But under the brave veneer of familiarity lies a growing desperation.

Ahmed al-Noori grew up in Britain and earned a master's degree in robotics from the University of Iowa. After graduating in 1993, he traveled to Iraq to visit relatives and was drafted into the army. Now unable to leave the country, he lives in a Baghdad hotel and works as an interpreter for Western visitors.

"There's no future here, no respectable life," says Noori, 35. "There is always fear: The drought is coming. Today we're going to be bombed. Tomorrow we're going to be invaded. We try to occupy ourselves with football, things to take up the time we are wasting in this country. We are looking for mercy."

The number of Iraqis seeking treatment for mental health problems more than doubled from 1990 to 1998, according to the World Health Organization. The U.N. agency noted a rise in anxiety, depression, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder, and increases in vandalism, theft and murder.

The strain is tearing at families. UNICEF has reported increases in family conflicts, divorce and polygamy. More households are headed by single mothers, and more children are working or living on the street - both unusual developments in a family-oriented Islamic society.

The University of Baghdad, Iraq's largest and most prestigious academic institution, once attracted students and faculty from throughout the Arab world. Here, environmental chemistry Professor Jamal Abaychi led his laboratory students in experiments to measure water pollution. Now unable to obtain the chemicals or laboratory equipment, he simply stands in front of the classroom and describes the reactions that should take place.

"Students have to see with their own eyes," Abaychi says. "This is not an acceptable way to teach."

The university, on which the government once lavished state-of-the-art equipment, now has difficulty obtaining chairs and desks. Instructors piece together out-of-date textbooks for students. The school's few dozen computers are 10 years old. Professors connected with the Internet for the first time earlier this year; the computer, overwhelmed, promptly failed.

The foreign students and teachers left on the eve of the gulf war. Exchange programs through which Iraqis studied or taught in Europe and Asia ended with the embargo. There is little access to international scholarship.

"A university can't be isolated from other universities in the world," says university President Abdul-Ilah al-Khashab. "We need to have contact. We have to have communication. Since sanctions, this is impossible."

The embargo has affected education at all levels. The government spent $230 million per year on primary and secondary schools before the gulf war, according to UNICEF. Allocations under a U.N.-monitored oil-for-food exchange, which provides Iraq with a range of humanitarian supplies, have averaged $23 million annually. Teachers have left the profession for better-paying menial work. School attendance has dropped from 88 percent in 1991 to 67 percent in 1999.

Singh, the UNICEF representative, says such conditions will make it difficult for Iraq to recover from sanctions.

"There is a whole generation of Iraqi children that have grown up in the present circumstances," she says. "The fact that people do not have access to information, technological developments taking place in the rest of the world. ... A 10-year gap of this sort may not have meant that much 100 or even 50 years earlier. But now, knowing how rapidly things are progressing in the rest of the world, if you are isolated from these developments for a 10-year period, it's going to be extremely difficult to catch up."

For now, Khashab says, it is difficult to convince students of the value of education.

"Sometimes you will hear them say, 'What's the future for me?'" he says. "'What's the opportunity for me after I get my degree?'"

The U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid to Iraq tracked several recent university graduates. Ammar A., trained as a mechanical engineer, was working as a weaver. Salah N., trained as an architect, was painting signs. Farqad Z., another mechanical engineer, was working as a confectioner. Laith I., a medical school graduate, was not working at all.

Halliday, who resigned as U.N. humanitarian coordinator in 1998 to protest the sanctions, warns of an increasing radicalism among Iraq's frustrated youth.

"They see no hope, no opportunity, and they're angry with Saddam Hussein because they believe he's too moderate, he's compromised too often, he's backed down too much," says Halliday.

"They're the ones saying, 'To hell with the U.N. We'll go it alone. We will stand up as Iraqis. We'll make it work. It will be tough; maybe there will be greater loss of life. But we will restore the dignity and the honor to Iraq and to the Iraqi people.'

"They are the future of Iraq, the Taliban of Iraq, the inward-looking types who are going to be very difficult for the Arab world and the greater world to communicate with. We're creating a nightmare situation."

In June, an Iraqi gunman forced his way into the Baghdad mission of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, triggering a shootout in which two U.N. workers were killed. Fowad Hussein Haider, a Baghdad car mechanic arrested in the attack, said he had planned to take hostages to demand the sanctions be lifted.

"I know I will be sentenced to death, but I am not sorry," Haider, 38, told reporters during an unusual press conference at the police station where he was held. He said the sanctions had driven him to despair, and he warned that there are millions of people like him in Iraq ready to follow his example.

Iraqi officials echo Haider's warnings.

"Punishing the whole country in the name of the United Nations, what do you expect at the end?" asks Ambassador Saeed Hasan, Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations. "Certainly you should expect that this population, this nation, feels it has been abandoned by the international community. The task of the Iraqi government will be difficult to contain the situation as it is."

Visitors entering Baghdad's famous al-Rashid Hotel must step over a mosaic depicting a snarling President Bush with the legend "BUSH IS CRIMINAL." Graffiti in Basra condemn the United States in English and Arabic. Individual Iraqis warmly welcome the few American aid workers, activists and journalists still trickling through their country. But after 10 years of suffering, resentment of the United States is growing.

"It was only a matter of time before people were going to say, 'Because of the Americans, I don't have enough to eat for dinner. Because of the Americans, I drive an old car,'" says a middle-aged professional in Baghdad.

"This is very bad for the future. Even President Saddam Hussein says our problem is not with the American people, but the administration. But many people will not make that distinction."