The waiting game By Wendell Steavenson
Since Baghdad's fall a year ago, the violence in central Iraq has been relentless. Fallujah, long synonymous with resistance to US forces, this week slipped into chaos as supporters of the radical young Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr attempted an autonomous uprising.
But these daily reports of bloody mayhem have largely excluded Iraq's second city, Basra. In fact, when Sadr's militia took over the governor's building in Basra on Monday the BBC correspondent present described it as a peaceful sit-in.
Some shots were fired, and there were unconfirmed reports of one death; negotiations were entered into. In Baghdad, similar takeovers of police stations resulted in the deaths of eight Americans, and US helicopter gunships fired rockets into civilian areas.
Before these events I wanted to see whether it was true that it was so different in Basra and, if so, why.
I travelled south from my base in Baghdad and on my first night in the city, gazing across the estuary where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, I heard bangs, looked up and saw only boys playing with firecrackers.
I heard booms and looked to the date palm horizon for smoke; it was wedding drums. The next morning I told Ahmed al-Saad, a journalist at the new Al-Manarah newspaper, that I was worried about whether I would find a story. "The calmness is the story," he said.
Calm, in Iraq, is a relative thing perhaps in the coming weeks it will come to mean only a lower body count here than elsewhere. At the time of writing it is impossible to say.
But somehow Basra seemed to me to be different. What I found provided a telling insight into the events of the past week and a worrying pointer to what might yet come.
Nearly everyone I had interviewed in Baghdad and in Sunni areas hated the Americans. They were outraged by the occupation, the shortage of electricity, the lack of security, unemployment, random detentions and night-time kick-in-the-door raids by US soldiers.
They were full of conspiracy theories about American-Zionist intentions in the region. Balmy Basra where Brits drive around in soft-skinned Land Rovers listening to the Today programme on the radio while people along the road give them the thumbs-up and shout "British Good!" and "Hello Mister" - felt like a different country.
In the Sunni Triangle, I lost count of the number of times I heard an angry tirade against American brutality, tempered by the belief that the south was so much more peaceful because the British knew how to behave.
They had experience of Iraq, I was told, from the mandate by which they ran the country from 1920 to its independence in 1932, and the influence they continued to exert until 1958, when a military coup kicked out the Hashemite king and the remnants of a British garrison.
"The way the British treat people in Basra they don't fire at demonstrators. That is why there isn't much resistance in the south," one man told me.
He said he had been thrown off a bridge with his cousin by an American patrol; the cousin drowned. "The British forces have experience. Maybe they understand better how to treat Iraqis."
A sheikh in Samarra, scene of bloody running battles between the resistance and American forces, actually referred to the British as "our uncles".
Basra city is low-slung, scarred and strewn with crumbled concrete. Bombed in the Iran-Iraq war and not much rebuilt, it was so badly neglected after the 1991 uprising that the power lines fell down and the sewage backed up into the streets.
Rubbish, wind-blown plastic bags and that peculiar developing-world mulch of cardboard and vegetative scraps picked over by goats lie in drifts over much of the city. Although the hotels in the centre have bricked up their ground floors against looters and bombs, there is some trade through Kuwait of cars, electrical goods and mobile phones.
The electricity is now on for up to 20 hours a day, an unheard-of luxury in Baghdad; petrol queues, once the cause of mass demonstrations, are modest. Perhaps the most visible difference in Basra is that the pictures of Saddam have been replaced by those of Shia religious leaders. In general, people in Basra feel, in a way that people further north tend not to, that life is better now than it was before.
The British, in control of the southern four provinces, would like to take credit for the relative peace. They patrol on foot around Basra in soft hats and no sunglasses, so their faces can be clearly seen and eye contact made and are much lauded for it.
The military brass makes regular visits to tribal chiefs and religious leaders to listen to their suggestions. But the real reason Basra is so far relatively free from resistance activity is that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whom the Shia in Basra follow, has decreed that resistance should be non-violent. Seyyed Hasanain, son of Seyyed Ali, Sistani's representative in Basra, said the policy was patience.
"We want them [the people] to wait; we tell them to wait for instructions." The Shia were looking beyond the petrol crises and the gunfire at night, he explained, and demanding elections that would bring, finally, real Shia representation in a central government.
"People want their rights and Sistani will protect their rights, he warned. If he says he cannot guarantee their rights then it would be a very dangerous situation. Look at Fallujah, "he told me.
"In Basra there would be 100 Fallujahs." I asked him if this was a threat. "No," he replied, "it's not a threat, but there won't be control over the situation. "
I talked to a group of archaeology students at Basra University, which was being repainted and having new furniture delivered after the looting that followed the Baathist fall. "We have accepted the occupation for a short time, " one told me. "It is quiet in the south because we are being quiet."
"We will follow what Sistani tells us, " said another. "We believe in him. He is a religious man. We look up to him. We follow him. His opinion is the same as our opinion. His belief is our belief."
Professor Sha'ab Ahmed, of the English department at the university, summed up the situation: "No matter how much you polish it, it is still occupied and occupiers."
There's a British cemetery in town, smashed up during the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war or the uprising no one can recall. It's a stretch of fenced-in dirt where kids play football around a single white stone cross. In one far corner, a few gravestones remain, not much of a testament to a colonial-mandate past.
But some Basrans remember: "It was the British who built the Red Bridge," resident Najim Abid told me, sitting in his reception room, " and the area called Khamsamil. Abid was born in about 1930 and his father was a member of the Levies, local auxiliaries raised by the British, for 27 years.
He, too, joined the Levies in 1949 and served until they were disbanded in 1955. He is a small, hunched man, working now as a translator for the British army, for not much more money than the last time he was in their pay.
He showed me his old photographs. There was one black and white snapshot of an Iraqi military band in British uniform, complete with cockades in their hats, being inspected by British officers wearing tropical khaki shorts and knee-high socks.
Abid's career had followed the fortunes of the Iraqi state and was back where it started. In 1955 he transferred to the Iraqi army and worked his way up.
>From the early days, before the Baathist takeover in 1968, his best
friend was a young officer and cousin of Saddam Hussein's called
Adnan Khairallah, who later became defence minister. Abid had met the
Iraqi dictator himself some time between the two Baathist
Revolutions, in the mid-1960s, at lunch at Khairallah's house.
He remembered Saddam as being poor and thin and railing at someone to get a message to Abdul Rahman Arif, the then president who would be deposed in 1968, that if Arif didn't stop persecuting Baathists, Saddam would stuff a grenade in his mouth.
The Khairallah connection served Abid well: he became a protocol officer during the 1970s and early 1980s, meeting foreign delegations coming to Baghdad to sell arms.
Underneath the snap of the Levy band there was a sheaf of big glossy pictures: Americans in a restaurant in Baghdad, one pointed out as intelligence; Abid dressed in a military uniform with silver braid, standing next to some Bulgarian generals; a Russian military attach in a white dress jacket with a medal ribbon row; an Iranian military attaché in the time of the Shah.
Abid looked sleek and well fed; in many of the photos he wore sunglasses and a wide smile. Those had been the good, fat years, before his sponsor, Khairallah, was killed in a suspicious helicopter crash in 1989 and Abid himself was imprisoned in 1990 for several months, for some complication about a visa for an Armenian arms dealer. The Abid sitting across from me now looked like Basra hollowed.
I asked Abid's daughter, Dhekrah, an unmarried mathematics teacher in her 40s, if life was better now, if she thought the price of this interim anarchy had been worth it. She said, haltingly, yes, from her point of view, the electricity was better and her salary had improved since the war.
The security situation was worse. Her father lamented this also. He said the liquor stores had been firebombed by religious groups and he hadn't had whisky in the house for a month.
Do you feel freer? I asked Dhekrah. "From what angle?" My life is now the same as before. What is the point of talking about Saddam and mass graves? It is over. Now we can't talk about the religious parties. It is just the same situation as Saddam."
The coalition has set a deadline of June 30 to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government. No one yet knows how this transitional government will be appointed, but while Baghdad is full of politics, negotiation and murderous bombs, in Basra the British army and CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) are trying to move towards this date, trying to train the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, a kind of national guard, and the police to help with security. I spent several days on a press tour of this effort, which seemed somewhere between colonialism-lite and peacekeeping.
"I'd be surprised if the Brits weren't getting it right, to be honest, " said Captain William Strickland of the Queen's Royal Hussars.
He was involved in training the police, and this attitude of reasonableness, efficiency and "get-on-with-it-not-like-those-trigger-happy-Yanks" prevailed, along with Marmite and orange squash in the canteen and bangers and mash for tea.
Sitting in a base in the middle of Basra one afternoon after a typically uneventful foot patrol, I asked how many British soldiers had been killed in Basra in the past three months.
"Deaths through malicious attacks? " considered Captain Evans of the Royal Welsh Regiment. "None".
It's not the worst place we've been, says Corporal Bennett, who has served in Kosovo, Bosnia and Northern Ireland.
What's the worst place you've been?
"Merthyr on a Saturday night, probably."
Captain Mohammed Hassan Atty, a former officer in the Iraqi army, is now being trained as part of a special police squad.
This serious, diligent Anglophile found plenty to praise, including the way the British hold their weapons: Iraqi soldiers hold their weapons without caring about it, he said (and they do dangling AK-47s from their trigger guards and cutting off the rifle butts so they look cool but can't be braced properly to fire accurately).
"If an Iraqi sees something he will shoot it immediately. But the British taught us you should not fire unless you are fired at."
I asked him if he thought it was ironic that British forces had invaded Iraq as a pre-emptive measure. He did not understand the question. He said he had lost friends and had had death threats over his decision to join the police, often seen as an auxiliary to the occupation. Iraqis working with the British are respectful. "The British taught me and I follow what they say. They are right because they are just, " said Captain Atty.
He said he knew this because on duty the British soldiers never looked at women.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jonny Gray, commanding officer of a 400-strong contingent of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, with responsibility for training 5,000 Iraqis, said experience in Northern Ireland was key. "Minimum force, an indirect approach, it's in our blood, it's just the way we do things.This is not the Sunni Triangle; if it was we'd be facing problems."
The colonel told me a story about appointing a brigadier for the new civil defence corps, and showing him on a map where to meet.
"He couldn't understand how to read a map, none of them could. They had this command that was almost a centralised communist command structure. In the Iraqi army they weren't allowed maps. They were not in any sense encouraged to think they all want to be told what to do."
Major Harry Clark of the Royal Artillery put it best: "It's like I am trying to run Cornwall and someone has removed all the adults it's a giant Lord of the Flies. No one in this area has been allowed to make a decision for 30 years."
I went south into the Fao Peninsula in the back of a military Land Rover. The land is battle-scarred mud dried to dust and pocked with salt-rimmed water pools and tank carcasses left over from the British assault last April.
The area is a vast looting and smuggling zone. Power lines are stripped for copper, lorries pull up at odd places along the Shatt al-Arab and disgorge their loads into boats that take it to Iran. Hijacking is common.
I was with a patrol supporting the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps in their new brown uniforms, setting up random checkpoints. Private Stuart McQueen ("my friends call me Stevie"), a cheerful Scot standing up top with his rifle trained on the road, had been in Iraq for a month and thought, frankly, it was going to be busier.
He still hadn't been shot at or fired his weapon. I actually feel safer here than in Northern Ireland 'Salam aleikum!' he shouted out to the children who ran up to wave as the convoy went by. We drove past a parade of flagellants practising their rhythm of drums and metal flails for the upcoming Shia holy day of Ashura.
A burst of gunshot went off, loud and pretty close. Stevie peered through his rifle sight. No one reacted at all. We drove on through the broken-down land, criss-crossed with septic tank run-off.
The Iraqi police, about 13,000 based in Basra, are universally despised as being useless, illiterate and self-interested. I watched two British military policemen lecturing a group of them on how to treat people when they were taken into custody. Prisoners, they were told, should be given light, ventilation, food and blankets.
The police leaned against the walls in mismatched uniforms and did not take notes. Outside they complained in a sullen, excitable crowd: they had no guns, and if they were given a gun they were allocated only seven bullets a day; the police station had only one car and that was used to drive the chief to and from work each day. They wanted winter jackets, they wanted sidearms.
The day before I had seen a group of police outside the Coalition Provisional Authority gates who had come to collect their delayed monthly pay. Salaries for the police, including a danger bonus, are close to $300 a month, which is not bad.
They were furious and full of conspiracy theories. One, an officer of sorts, drove up in a gold Lexus with the word Police stencilled on the outside. I asked him where he got the car. It was a gift from our leader, he told me.
At night there was still gunfire and roaming packs of dogs, howling. The undercurrent of violence seeped into your bones, as elsewhere in Iraq. In Basra it was more likely to be criminal than political, but that doesn't make the insecurity feel any better.
(After I left Basra a bomb blew up in front of the hotel next to the one I had stayed in. A demonstration about job shortages resulted in front-page pictures of a British soldier on fire.) There was a permeating sense of tension.
In January the British intervened after the police fired shots into a demonstration by former soldiers demanding their stipends. There was another incident when the British shot dead two policemen because they were waving their guns while in plain clothes.
In the week I was in Basra, five men selling alcohol on the street were shot by a group of men wearing police uniforms and driving police trucks. Protests by the unemployed have continued in one case, rocks were thrown as the British tried to back up Iraqi police evicting squatters.
There was a sense that Basra is not immune from the violence further north. Foreigners may be feeling targeted, but ordinary people know that they too are on the frontline of the uncertainty.
"The police are nothing," said Hassan Maliki, a civil engineer, who brought his family back to Basra just days after it fell, after 10 years in exile in Iran. Indeed, when the militants occupied the governor's office the police evaporated.
Maliki doesn't keep a gun in his house (which is very unusual), but his wife doesn't go out alone to shop. I asked him if he wants to stay. "I dont know, " he answered carefully. "It is my country and I want to do something, but it is not in my hands."
"What about the coalition forces?" Iraq needs a teacher, we need more developed people to show us but no, I don't see much help from them. They are just an army. What can they do?
After several days I had heard so much about British equanimity that I went to find a man who had been tortured by British soldiers.
Kefah Taha is a pleasant, softly spoken middle-aged engineer who is now employed as a hotel receptionist. He was arrested, along with eight others, while working at the Ibn al-Haytham Hotel on September 14 last year. Soldiers carrying out a routine search had broken into a safe in an office connected to the hotel lobby and discovered a cache of weapons, money, Saddam medals and a folded olive-green uniform.
Taha and the others taken from the hotel were handcuffed and hooded and taken to a room in a British base inside Basra. Taha said they were kept there for three days and beaten continuously. Their handcuffs and hoods were never removed.
They had no access to a toilet. They were given food once but none of the prisoners who had been kicked repeatedly in the stomach could eat. They were practising their karate on us. Two of them were having a competition to see who could hit me the hardest. They were kick-boxing with army boots.
On the last night, Taha remembered hearing one of the prisoners, Baha Maliki (no relation to Hassan), crying softly, as if he were far off, "I am going to die, I am going to die. There is blood, my nose is broken."
Taha was eventually discovered and taken to the British army hospital on the base at Basra airport. He said he was very well treated in the hospital and he had tears in his eyes when he spoke of the staff there, "my friends."
On his wound assessment and evaluation form was written: "Patient sustained extensive generalised bruising following repeated incidents of assault." He was in hospital for 64 days, and after a month the military police came and took a formal statement for a complaint. Taha said: "We were unlucky to get a bad group of soldiers who behaved like criminals."
I asked him whether he thought the war was worth it.
"A foreigner cannot understand the continuous fear that we lived under and the uncountable victims every day." Taha's brother was imprisoned in the 1980s for being a member of the Dawa Party and he himself had been picked up and beaten.
He refuses to hate the British. "They got rid of Saddam and that was something we could not do ourselves. I know they have come for more than the liberation of the Iraqi people, for political and economic reasons, but they still have done us a favour."
Baha Maliki, in fact, died in British custody. He was a widower. His wife had died of illness six months before. His two small sons are now orphans, living with Maliki's father, a policeman,and brothers.
The eldest, about four, was quiet and listened. The younger one squirmed through the folds of his grandmother's abaya. "When I come home, " said Ala, Baha Maliki's elder brother, my daughter runs up and shouts. Daddy's home!" and they just have to stand there.
Baha Maliki's father went to identify the body at the airport. "His nose was broken, there was a tube in his mouth to suck blood out with, the skin on his face was flayed and there were marks on his wrists where he had been handcuffed.His chest and his legs were covered in black and blue bruises."
A British professor, flown in to examine the body, told him that Baha had died from being strangled with a piece of cloth. Ala, however, echoed Taha: "The British told us what had happened and we respected them fully. They saved us from the deprivations of Saddam and we have faith in their justice. When the family is compensated it will be an honour to know our rights have been upheld.Otherwise, when they grow up his sons will only remember that their father was killed by the British." The family has been offered $5,000 as compensation for Baha's death.
Sergeant Major Ian McClymont stands outside the gate of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It is his job to listen to complaints beggars, intelligence tips, salary riots, he gets it all.
"Even a woman who wanted us to send her to England for fertility treatment. She was divorced by her first husband because she produced no children, now she's married again and is desperate."
McClymont does what he can: he had found a wheelchair for a 22-year-old disabled woman who lives nearby.
She had never had a wheelchair before and crawled everywhere. But then there are the 200 cases pending transfer for emergency medical treatment abroad that no neighbouring countries will take. There is plenty of freedom to complain, but still no government to complain to.
The latest clashes with Sadr's militia are indicative of a political problem that the coalition is trying to assuage with a military solution. McClymont is a friendly face, an interface, but often there isn't much he can do. Friendliness is not representation; a man on a gate writing down grievances is not a government.
Wendell Steavenson is the author of Stories I Stole (Atlantic Books) about her time in Georgia. She is currently based in Baghdad, working on a book about Iraq.