Iraqi City Is a Test Case for Democracy

It was one thing the Americans had not thought of: ice.

The first team of American administrators to set up shop in devastated Iraq came here to Umm al Qasr. They summoned prominent citizens from the town: a schoolmaster, a sheik, a couple of lawyers. To start with, the Americans said, give us a list with your priorities.

They expected No. 1 and No. 2 on the list -- water and electrical power. But No. 3, ice, came as a surprise.

An ice-making plant was once one of Umm al Qasr’s big industries, and the increasing summer heat has made ice a precious commodity, especially in homes without refrigerators.

And so U.S. officials got their first lesson in how to rebuild Iraq.

“The point is you let them make their priorities,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, commander of the reconstruction effort, said later. “We’re notorious for going in and telling people what to do.”

With numerous missteps, the United States has embarked on the tortuous, costly task of creating a new Iraq -- reshaping the government, repairing the infrastructure, reordering the economy. Across the board, from schools and the media to banks, hospitals and ministries, U.S. officials want to bring change.

In addition to the physical and the institutional, U.S. planners will have to confront psychological and cultural realities. The regime that the U.S. and British forces ousted was a heavily centralized, Soviet-style system that relied on terror, repression and obedience; there is no recent tradition of Western democracy or constructive dissent.

“As we spread through the country,” Garner said last week in Kuwait in his first extensive newspaper interview, fear, anger and mistrust “will subside.”

“The end point is them governing themselves.”

Umm al Qasr is the test case. The town’s small size and ethnic homogeny make it easier to tackle than most of the rest of Iraq -- the town has one-hundredth the population of Baghdad -- and it is here that the U.S. plan is being put into practice. What does and does not work here will influence the way Garner’s team approaches cities and villages across the nation.

Garner’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA, has been roundly criticized as an occupation regime dominated by U.S. military officers who outrank veteran diplomats with extensive experience in the region. The group has not been forthcoming in outlining its plans, which has sown suspicion.

It is also moving with what some see as glacial speed. In fact, its arrival in many parts of Iraq may turn out to be too late: Shiite vigilantes are seizing control of parts of Baghdad and returning exiles are installing themselves as rulers in other areas.

Slowly, Garner’s group is lurching into action.

After weeks in a placid seaside resort in Kuwait City, 44 members of ORHA moved to Umm al Qasr a few days ago; another team arrived in the northern city of Irbil last weekend, and Garner and the bulk of the office probably will transfer to Baghdad this week.

In Umm al Qasr, the team settled into an abandoned building at the port. Makeshift wooden dividers create offices and a large dorm for bunking.

The self-government experiment in this town, the first to fall to U.S. and British forces, began more than a week ago when the Americans met with leading citizens and then anointed 10 who volunteered to form a town council. The first transitional government in Iraq was in business.

“It was a brave thing to do,” Garner said of the volunteers. They risked reprisal from still-lurking Baath Party officials and clandestine paramilitaries; they risked being tainted as American lackeys.

Schoolteacher Najem Abdulmahdi, the de facto mayor by agreement of the other council members, has gotten death threats for his efforts.

The town council members began meeting in a decrepit hotel guarded by British troops. They erected a large bulletin board on which tasks are listed, with target dates. “Democracy 101,” said one of Garner’s aides.

“Building structures is easy,” said one council member who is a veteran of Iraqi prisons. “Building human beings is going to be hard.”

The meetings are held behind closed doors for now, although members routinely solicit the opinions of fellow residents.

The group made its first public appearance last week, 10 men emerging hesitantly from their makeshift office and standing on the steps of a courtyard where palm trees had grown ragged with neglect.

They spoke of restoring water and electricity and creating jobs, and of freedom after decades under Saddam Hussein’s regime. But they seemed nervous, cutting their words short, and, when pressed by reporters, retreating into the hotel.

Outside the well-guarded hotel gate, children begged for water. Women held slips of paper bearing telephone numbers; they wanted someone with a phone to call distant relatives to let them know they had survived the war.

Some of the town’s poor neighborhoods stood within view, dusty streets where men have no jobs and kids loiter because schools remain closed. Streets laid out in an orderly fashion that speaks of a better time have fallen into disrepair. Thousands of refugees from nearby Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, have arrived in search of jobs and shelter that do not exist.

The central marketplace is all but deserted. With no cargo ships in port, no produce trucked from distant farms, the price of food has risen. A single egg that once sold for 75 Iraqi dinars now costs 250.

“They have nothing,” a U.S. official said uneasily as he watched the town council meet with a small group of journalists. “They know it will get better in the next few weeks, but how are they going to survive the next few weeks?”

Abdulmahdi, the de facto mayor, said Umm al Qasr needs internationally funded projects to employ its residents.

Sheikh Mohammed Lazim, placed in charge of general services, spoke of the United States as savior. “You have the ability and power to help us,” he said. “You can do everything for us.”

A week into the transition, many residents had mixed emotions. After the council concluded its first appearance, two men remained on the steps, talking about their hopes and fears.

“Iraq is free at this moment ... that is the dream,” said Azmi Mahmoud, a veterinarian who now gets occasional work as an interpreter for the British military. “The big problem is, we need a good government.”

Having heard from the men -- only men appeared when the residents were summoned -- several U.S. officials sought the opinions of Umm al Qasr’s women. What was their top priority?

Get our kids from underfoot, came the response.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quickly razed a lot and built a soccer field. Next came the schools. Even though only a few weeks remain in the school year, Umm al Qasr’s mothers wanted the classrooms reopened.

At the That al Sawawy school for girls, Navy Seabees bustled through classrooms patching plaster and painting the doors bright yellow. They banged nails into a building that had suffered from years of deterioration.

The town council put out the word that administrators at other schools should return to their jobs and teachers to their classrooms. About 120 teachers were expected this weekend. Children already were showing up with backpacks.

The shift to a new government could mean more than fresh paint. Bushra, the headmistress, has textbooks that bear Hussein’s photograph and, no matter what the topic, include Baath Party ideology.

But even as she hopes for a better future, Bushra already has experienced the difficulties of change. In private, several councilmen have accused her of being loyal to the Baathists.

Bushra acknowledged that she once belonged to the party, but said she was forced to do so in order to work as a teacher.

“You cannot be appointed as a teacher unless you are a member,” she said. “I was in the middle. I was doing my job.

“I’m afraid of the situation,” Bushra, 37, continued. She refused, for example, to give her last name, saying she was fearful that Baathists holdouts might seek revenge. “Who is the friend? Who is the enemy? For 35 years we were raised to consider Americans as the enemy. I hope you are a friend.”

The Baath Party was an omnipresent, controlling force in Hussein’s Iraq. Now, the new town council insists it has no room for Baathists, whom acting mayor Abdulmahdi refers to as “gangs of thieves, of killers.”

Yet if council members exclude all party members from government and police posts, they would throw out half of their constituents, not to mention a few of themselves. They, and the Americans, will have to discern between loyalists and reluctant participants.

“It’s tricky, and there will be mistakes,” conceded one ORHA official. “Good people will be unfairly punished, bad people will get into the system. Eventually, you equal out the playing field. The bad will get weeded out over time.”

Ever confident, Garner put it this way: “You assume the really bad guys are gone or dead. The others are gray.... [Over time] leaders will emerge that we haven’t even thought of.”

One leader the Americans did think of, and who has not been welcomed very enthusiastically by Iraqis, is longtime exile Ahmad Chalabi.

A favorite of the Pentagon, Chalabi traveled to Baghdad last week with several hundred men armed by the U.S. military, and he is trying to muster support. But some U.S. officials now believe promoting him was a mistake and are trying to distance themselves.

Garner, for example, stressed that he had never met the man and was dismissive of the huge amount of attention paid him by the American media.

Putting a government together also has been complicated by the widespread looting that left ministries, records and data bases in ruins.

“We weren’t expecting everything to be so looted,” said an ORHA official. “We thought we’d be able to go into the ministries, meet with remaining officials, have tea, plan things.” ORHA officials say they hope a significant portion of Iraq’s civil service eventually will return to work.

Another pillar in rebuilding Iraq is the economy, and Umm al Qasr will benefit because it is home to the country’s only deep-water port. The port at one time employed almost a third of the population, handling most of the food that entered the country and oil that left it. Though it is reasonably modern with giant gantry cranes, a rail system and yards large enough for container storage, much of the port’s equipment is filthy and rusted.

A pair of old dredgers are removing silt that accumulated during weeks of inactivity. Until the depth is increased, only military ships with small drafts can reach the dock. Train service from the port to Basra also is being relaunched by British forces. A trial-run took place Saturday.

Hoping to put people back to work on the docks, ORHA is searching for records that survived the looting, anything that shows who worked where, what jobs they held and how much they were paid. The military screens prospective employees.

Osama Kadem Ali Timimi, who worked at the port for eight years before the war, heard that the U.S. military needed workers and hurried down to the harbor gate. He got a job supervising a small crew of workers. He makes $90 a month, about three-fifths of his former salary, but says: “It’s OK ... what can we do?”

The effort is in its early days, and it remains to be seen how long U.S. commitment to rebuilding Iraq will last.

Residents in war-torn countries such as Bosnia and Afghanistan can speak to good international intentions gone awry and intense attention fading quickly.

“At what point can we say we’re done?” asked Maj. Jeff Jurgensen, the ORHA spokesman here. “It’s just too big an issue, even in a small place like Umm Qasr.”

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Wharton reported from Umm al Qasr and Wilkinson from Kuwait City.