Aftermath; by Nir Rosen (pg.13-15)
”Ninety percent of Baghdad’s violently killed passed through the Criminal Medicine Department before burial. Ever since Baghdad fell on April 9, Dr. Lazim had been seeing an average of fifteen to twenty-five corpses a day - all murdered, he said, pointing to a large stack of files on a shelf and opening a drawer to show another stack. Before the war he would see about five such cases a month. The state had a monopoly on violence, but victims of the regime were taken elsewhere. He said it was also possible to accommodate oneself to life under Saddam, and to live without arousing the state’s ire and incurring its wrath. The new violence was random, and Lazim attributed to the lack of security.
‘Weapons are easy to find, and Iraqis are full of anxiety from three wars and the economic circumstances after 1991,’ Lazim said. Since it was so easy to obtain a weapon and there were no legal consequences, disputes were often settled violently and with impunity. ‘I am afraid to argue with any person on the street,’ he said. ‘There is no regime, no order.’ He added, ‘It is the duty of the international forces to create security.’ Lazim recently had begun seeing female victims for the first time. One was a teenager found by American soldiers with her throat slit. Two others set a ghoulish precendent - they had both been raped and then murdered.
For those wounded in Baghdad’s gun battles, there was little hope of finding help. Yakub al-Jabari, a microbiologist at the National Blood Transfusion Center for Iraq, located in the complex of buildings known as Medical City, summarized the situation when asked if there was a shortage of blood. ‘There is a shortage of everything,’ he said, ‘blood, equipment, staff.’ He had not received his salary for 3 months. The labs looked like a dusty basement where a hospital might store its obsolete machines. The staff used food refrigerators to store blood, though frequent blackouts made Jabari’s effort worthless, as everything became contaminated. ‘If you want t save people’s lives, bring us more of these machines - you will go to paradise,’ he said, opening a dirty refrigerator & pointing inside. ‘We kill people here, we don’t save them.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘Many people are dying because of our shortages. We lie when we give people hope, but we can’t be honest with them.’ Iraqis in need of blood must bring their own, which meant bringing a friend or relative to donate. I heard shooting from outside the blood center as I hurriedly asked Jabari about HIV and other concerns the center faced without the ability to screen donors. He told me he knew of only two cases of HIV in the past decade. He believed Saddam had executed them.
Baghdad’s hospitals collapsed at a time when improved health care was needed more than ever. Hospital directors and doctors complained that they had receieved no assistance from the coalition forces, only promises. They relied on generators, because they got only a few hours of electricity a day. Sometimes they were forced to operate by candlelight. Most hospitals and clinics receieved contaminated water or none at al. Contamination resulted in outbreaks of typhoid, gastroenteritis, and diarrhea. They had no air-conditioning, medicine, oxygen, or anesthesia. And there was no one to clean the floors, so they remained stained with blood.
Chaos reigned, as staff were overwhelmed. They had no computers and they recycled carbon paper. Ambulance crews had no gas or security escorts, and Americans stopped them at night for violating curfews when they transported patients. Security concerns led staff to leave work early in order to get home safely. When hospitals did receive supplies, staff worried about attracting looters. Hospitals had no cooling systems because of electricity shortages, so medicines and vaccines were routinely destroyed.
A visit to a hospital coincided with a car screeching to a halt in front. A shrieking, black-clad woman was thrown onto a borken wheelchair, her relatives had to hold it together as she was wheeled in, blood pouring from her womb. A midwife had botched her labor. A thick trail of blood led from the hospital driveway to the reception and down the hall to the emergency room.
Iraqis grumbled about their invisible ruler, the proconsul Paul Bremer, who rejected presentation for them, declaring Iraqis too immature to decide their own fate. The country had three dictators in three months; Saddam was replaced by the bucolic Gen. Jay Garner and then the urbane Bremer, while others, such as Gen. Tommy Franks and George W. Bush, issued edicts that affected their lives, and Arnold Schwarzenegger visited but did not greet his Iraqi fans. Even the name of the government changed three times; the Baathist regmie became the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which was replaced by the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority (OCPA). In his ‘freedom message to the Iraqi people,’ Franks, the commander of coalition forces in Iraqi, announced that the Americans had ‘come as liberators, not occupiers,’ adding that they aimed to ‘enforce UN resolutions requiring the destruction of weapons of mass destruction.’ These weapons, of course, had not existed for years.
The foreign troops became an onerous presence as the burden of Saddam was removed. Iraqis had to suffer numerous intrusive checkpoints, roadblocks, and lines for gasoline, and there were raids, killings, arrests, and property damage. They were awakened by the rumbling of tanks through streets. Unaware of the fact that many soldiers chewed tobacco, they asked me why Americans spit so much. Frustrated young soldiers pointed their machine guns at grandmothers and teased Iraqi youths about how easily they could kill them.
In the face of the American juggernaut, Iraqis were lost and confused. They were used to the way ministries got things done. Now they had to march through long paths carved out with barbed wire and stand in the sun with gun barrels facing them. They were searched, patted down, and questioned; their IDs were declared unsuitable; they were told they could not be helped, or sent elsewhere, their protests and supplications falling on deaf ears. Tempers were lost, and Americans screamed in English as Iraqis shouted in Arabic, neither understanding the other. American soldiers did not sympathize with the inconvenience. ‘We stand in the sun all day,’ said one soldier, looking at the hundreds of men standing or squating, waiting.”
