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Re: [casi] Western Vice - Iraq's New Tyrant



I read it that they have "liberated" the prostitutes, the pimps, the sex
film operators, the drug peddlers, .. the worst sections of communities.
"Civilized" society should have all these "good" things!
Former police commissioner of New York Bernie Kerik said "he was ready to
deal with vice when it became a problem". NOT YET a problem? probably he is
talking from his "moral" standard and not Iraqi or Muslim standard. I hate
to see Bernie Kerik forcing his low moral standard on Iraqis


Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar

Baghdad, Occupied Iraq

----- Original Message -----
From: <rubytoo@xemaps.com>
To: <casi-discuss@lists.casi.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 1:44 PM
Subject: [casi] Western Vice - Iraq's New Tyrant


Western vice - Iraq's new tyrant
Date: August 13 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://tinyurl.com/k3lu
Iraq's brutal dictatorship has been replaced by a crime wave. Now sex and
drugs are freely available on the street, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad.

It is 10am and the crowd is pouring into the seedy Al Najah cinema on
Baghdad's Al Rasheed Street. They come, at 70 cents a ticket, for sex on a
loop - fleshy scenes from a dozen B-grade movies spliced into a single
program, for which there is standing room only.

In Sadoun Street the midday temperature is 50 degrees and the prostitutes
tout for business from the shade of a beach umbrella. Further along, in
Fidros Square - where US troops stage-managed the demolition of a statue of
Saddam Hussein on April 9 - as many as 30 teenagers are sniffing glue and
paint thinner.

Drug dealers in the treacherous Bab al Sharqi markets, just off central
Tahrir Square, are doing a brisk trade in looted prescription drugs.

The biggest demand is for mind-altering, and addictive, medications. Each
trader has a special, half-hidden box for what he calls feel good capsules
and tablets - the Herald came away with a multi-coloured cocktail of 200
pills for less than $10.

At the other end of the day hundreds of street drinkers converge on the
banks of the Tigris River, openly selling and drinking gin, arak and beer in
a raucous celebration of the ending of Saddam's rigid control of vice.

Under Saddam, alcohol, drugs, pornography and prostitution were
state-controlled for the pleasure of a few. But in the post-war vacuum vice
has exploded and the likes of Majid Al Sa'adi's tea house, just back from
the bustle of Sadoun Street, has become a one-stop shop.

The TV on which patrons were obliged to watch endless speeches by Saddam and
oily reports of his daily activities is now home to hardcore German
pornography. Among the 25 adults sitting in the shop glued to the screen is
a 12-year-old boy.

Al Sa'adi's jeans pocket is stuffed with tablets. He sells between 60 and 80
a day for 80 cents each to customers who, he says, take them with their tea.

This morning he shows all the woozy signs of having consumed his own
product. But he has another line of business - offering the services of two
black-shrouded prostitutes who sit on the pavement across the way. They,
too, have obviously been drinking or taking drugs.

Al Sa'adi dealt drugs, albeit secretly, when Saddam was in power - for which
he spent two years in jail. But he says, all the while playing with a
long-bladed Japanese knife: "Business is much, much easier now that Saddam
is gone. Now, there are no police.

"The prostitutes used to operate from hairdressing salons, but now they have
come onto the streets and nobody stops them. Those girls," - and he pauses
to wave the knife at the two sitting on the pavement - "would not have sat
there when Saddam was in power. Even without the paint thinners they'd have
been arrested. And I couldn't have carried even a single tablet in my
pocket. It would have been too dangerous."

There are no sensible crime statistics in the new Iraq. What is clear is
that crime has risen in a way that has left much of the population more
fearful of the present than of the past.

Thousands suffered appall-ingly under Saddam, but the vast majority knew the
rigid rules imposed by the regime and, by the perverse double standards of
the Iraqi dictatorship, they were able to live a deprived but peaceable
enough existence.

Suddenly, starting with the looting when Baghdad fell, they have been
burdened with the excesses of a whole new criminal class. Add to that the
prewar release of thousands of criminals by Saddam from his jails and it is
easy to understand the fear in the streets.

Many Iraqis go to sleep listening to gunfire. Gangs trade shots in the
streets in broad daylight and rampant car-hijacking frequently ends in
death. There is a spate of kidnappings - most of which are followed by
ransom demands as much as $60,000, with some of the victims undergoing
torture as well.

Businesses are robbed so frequently they close at 2pm and most homes at
night are bolted and shuttered against thieves.

There are frequent revenge killings of those accused of helping the old
regime - like Dr Mohammed Alrawi, who had treated Saddam and was gunned down
in his Baghdad consulting rooms last week

But there is a further complication.

In the past the worst crimes were carried out in the name of the state and
executed by the police, which commanded none of the community's respect or
confidence.

Now non-state crime is taking hold, and because Iraqis lived for decades in
fear of the police, they believe there is no point in reporting crime and so
remain at the mercy of the gangs.

The US Administration in Iraq has been so slow in dealing with security
issues that mosque communities, particularly those of the majority Shiites,
have set up their own vigilante squads and Islamic courts, which hand out
instant decisions on criminal and civil matters. There has even been a
retreat to tribal justice in some parts of the country. Last week the Herald
reported that a father had been ordered to kill his son or have his family
executed after the young man was accused of collaborating with the US
military.

The coalition is busy setting up a new police force, but hard-line Islamic
clerics, and the movements that support them, are already running their own
clampdown on vice - liquor merchants, cinema and tea house operators and
video shops have been warned they will be bombed out of business if they do
not stop selling alcohol or put an end to even the mildest pornography.

Scores of liquor shops have been torched in the country's south, and in
Basra three Christian liquor sellers have been murdered. Basra used to have
almost 150 liquor outlets - now all are said to have closed down. Several of
Baghdad's distilleries and breweries have been torched or bombed and many of
the capital's liquor shops have been gutted by fire or sprayed with gunfire.
One in Baghdad was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade.

Baghdad's cinemas have also been warned - from the pulpit and in flyers and
graffiti. Some have taken to blacking out the offending body parts in
promotional posters, others have hired armed guards and a few have simply
closed down.

Senior Islamic clerics have condemned the campaign of direct action - but at
the same time they speak well of its impact, claiming that all vice offends
the deeply held principles of Islam.

There were some limitations in Saddam's Iraq - alcohol could only be sold
warm and by Christians, and be drunk at home; cinemas could not show
pornography. But for all that it remained a broadly secular society.

Now the clerics are endorsing the setting up of mosque committees, the brief
of which appears to have been directly lifted from Saudi Arabia's and the
Taliban's ministries for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice.

Women have also been told to return to wearing the traditional hejab head
dress.

The Pentagon has given the bullet-headed, blunt-talking former police
commissioner of New York Bernie Kerik the task of reconstructing Iraq's
police force.

Mr Kerik claims that busier streets and markets are a sign of Iraqis'
growing confidence.

He told said he had sacked about two-thirds of Saddam's police and that all
existing and newly recruited officers would be put through a training course
in the most basic concepts of community policing.

Acknowledging that state-sanctioned crime represented about 80 per cent of
all crime under Saddam, he said: "We have to build the people's confidence .
. . and the police have to understand why they are not liked. They have to
shift from being a force to being a service.

"We have to teach them the principles of policing in a free and democratic
society. Teach them how to patrol - this is a concept they don't know.

"We actually have to get them to understand that torture, abuse and killing
are not a part of investigation; and that they have to treat women who come
in with complaints with dignity and not as criminals.

"It's very basic stuff. But to them it's something they have never heard
before."

The immunity from prosecution the police enjoyed under Saddam would end.

Mr Kerik said he was ready to deal with vice when it became a problem, and
he suspected that, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, many of those who turned to it
would be former security forces now looking for easy money.

But for now he is not sure it is a problem. "I have heard that we are making
some arrests in prostitution and pornography, but these are not violent
crimes, and there is evidence that it was happening before the war."

And he is across the clerics' drive to impose Islamic discipline. He said
several clerics had volunteered dozens of men for the police force, but he
directed them to the police recruiting office to apply for jobs and to
submit themselves to the new vetting process.

But at the Sunni Al Khudriri mosque, on the north side of central Baghdad,
Sheik Thalib Ahmed was a measure of the challenge facing Mr Kerik and his
new force.

Outlining in great detail how vice offended Islam, Sheik Ahmed declared that
its explosion in Iraq was a Jewish plot.

"After the fall of Baghdad the people who use these services found a gate to
get into this dirty war and there was no one to watch or punish them.

"What was the name of the philosopher who asked how many crimes would be
committed in the name of liberty and freedom? This is one of those crimes.

"Saddam held a stick over the people. For a time he executed prostitutes and
their male pimps. But now nobody threatens or punishes the people who are
into vice. There is no authority."

Asked if he supported the threats against alcohol dealers and cinema
operators, he hedged his bets: "Sometimes this good medicine must be
administered without offending our Islamic principles.

"At first we order the people to abstain from these bad things, but if they
do not follow the wisdom we offer, then we have to use our hand against
them."

For now, Majid Al Sa'adi is unmoved. The tea house proprietor said: "The
people from the mosque are chasing me. A few days ago they dropped a grenade
in the Sinbad Cinema, around the corner. And they came here and warned me
that they will do the same if we keep operating like this. For now, we're
still in business."

And, it seems, so too are the bad habits of Saddam's police. In the last
week more than a dozen motorists have complained about being pulled over by
members of the new force on a trumped up charge, only to be let go after
paying a bribe.

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_______________________________________________
Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss
To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk
All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk


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