Battered Iraqi Port Emerging From Rubble

The evidence of two crushing wars and a bitter rebellion within 11 years is still vivid in this age-old port on the Shatt al Arab waterway.

The flame-blackened facade of the Basra Sheraton Hotel bears testimony to the terrible pounding the city has taken, over the decade perhaps the heaviest in the country.

During Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran, shellfire battered the Sheraton. Rebuilt, the hotel was burned out again two months ago in the Shiite Muslim insurgency against Baghdad. Nearby stand the ruins of the telephone exchange and TV stations knocked out by allied bombing in the Persian Gulf War.

Just in the last few weeks, Basra and the rest of southern Iraq have begun to crawl out from the rubble, but the region remains isolated by broken bridges and disrupted communications. Messages from Baghdad come only by road or military radio.

Electricity has been largely restored to the cities, but blackouts are common, and the humble Shiite villages of mud-wattle homes are dark. Relief workers are racing against the summer heat to rebuild water systems and fight off disease.

From Nasiriyah to Basra, engineers are laying pontoon and steel Bailey bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates. The rivers that bring life to the south have become a curse to transportation. Traffic creeps at the bridgeheads.

These are the wages of war in the south, traditionally the poorest region of Iraq and now destitute.

“Everybody who can afford it goes to Baghdad,” said a foreign relief worker in Basra, a city of 1.5 million before the allied bombing and insurrection. “It’s clear there is no future in this place.”

Under the rule of a military governor, the populace is both groggy and edgy from the last outburst of violence, the rebellion against Baghdad’s authority that was accentuated, most people say here, by men and weapons sent in by Mohammed Bakr Hakim’s Iraqi rebel forces in Iran.

Others insist that the insurrection was the product of spontaneous anger--”rage against the state,” a diplomat in Baghdad termed it--but the evidence suggests it was at least a mix.

An aid official, speaking about rebel damage to the city’s sewage system that has heightened medical problems here, said:

“It was very deliberate destruction in the control system itself. When somebody walks into a sewage plant and walks to the central control panel and disables that, he’s not venting his emotions.”

The rebels held major parts of Basra for five days before Iraqi units, retreating from their debacle in Kuwait, could put them down. A month ago, with the insurgents still active on the outskirts, “tanks were everywhere in the city,” another aid worker recalled. “It was like a country at war, a heavy military presence to impress the population.”

Last week, Iraqi armor was still stationed at key intersections, and visiting reporters were told not to venture out of the city after dusk.

During the day, hot winds covered the city in dust, obscuring the sun. Depression hung in the air. “We’re aimless. We lost the war. As Arabs, we’ve lost our dignity,” said one Iraqi.

“The people are fed up, and they are tired,” the aid worker explained. “But they are fatalistic.”

Markets were open, but prices were high and quality low. It has been worse. Last week, the shops had oranges, tea and rice. A month ago, there was nothing but tomatoes and onions.

No major reconstruction has begun beyond the water and power systems. The Pepsi-Cola plant, hit by a stray allied bomb, will have a low priority. Burned-out state offices remain empty: headquarters of President Saddam Hussein’s ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party, the government labor federation, barracks of the military and secret police. The governor has taken over a new building since his capitol was torched by the rebels.

The only growth industry in the city is replacement of the ubiquitous roadside portraits of Hussein, many of the originals having been shot up by rebels.

Hospitals are busy, mainly with cases of infant dehydration and diarrhea, but the intensive care ward of the Basra University teaching hospital has been closed, damaged by the concussion of an allied bomb that landed in an empty field outside. Five patients were killed when the ceiling collapsed, a hospital official said, but no one could put an accurate figure on the number of dead and wounded in the war and rebellion throughout the city.

Bakhil Jerew, president of the university and a 20-year resident of Basra, has experienced both wars and the insurrection. He pointed out a few shrapnel scars on his front door from Iranian artillery and said the blast of allied bombs cracked two windows in his house.

“The damage was different with the mob,” Jerew said, using the regime’s pejorative for the insurgents. “The mobs made damage to our food preserves. They looted.”

And he did not seem sure that the trouble was over. In an after-sundown interview in his home, he told two reporters: “I never drive at night, and I’d advise you not to.”

In the confusion of war, the most agonizing scenes are the mothers and wives searching for missing husbands and sons. Every morning, the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross are packed with relatives seeking news of missing men. At a prison near the edge of the city, Shiite women in black chadors sit in the sun on a baking sidewalk, hoping for news that their sons or husbands are among the suspected rebels held inside.

Across the south are other symbols of war:

* Along a westward bend in the highway from Basra to Nasiriyah, the shoulders are littered with knocked-out Iraqi tanks and trucks. U.S. forces had been there, and in American style had left their calling cards: spray-painted graffiti on overpasses saying things such as “We Rocked Iraq.”

* In a three-to-four-mile stretch of road near the site of ancient Ur, 29 burned-out hulks of MIG fighter planes lay in the adjoining desert.

There was no airstrip nearby and no apparent reason why the planes had been parked there, some behind simple earth revetments. Whatever the reason, allied planes obviously found them.

* In Nasiriyah itself, reporters saw a sure sign that the south remains restive. Three men blindfolded with green cloth were being loaded into the bed of a pickup truck, apparently rebel suspects in a region that Baghdad has neglected over the years--and now has paid the price for that neglect.

BACKGROUND

Basra is an ancient cultural center founded in 636 by the caliph Umar I, an adviser to the Prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam. It went into decline with the decay of the Abbasid caliphate, which ended in 1258, and the Persians and Turks long wrestled for control of the city. Basra flourished again after World War I, when a rail line was built to Baghdad and a modern harbor developed. But it has lately fallen on hard times again. During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and again in the Gulf War, it was a major target.