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When Is Safer Safe?

December 13, 2007 9:28 PM

In a city that has been living through outright carnage and mayhem for so long, how do you know when things are getting better?  Or more importantly, how do you know it is safe to go outside?

Well, first off, Baghdad is quieter than it used to be.  Less gunshots, fewer loud bangs from mortars that used to fly overhead and land in the Green Zone, fewer window-rattling booms from car bombs.

Then there are the statistics –- less bodies found, not so many kidnappings, a lower level of admissions to the emergency rooms at the main hospitals.  The papers are full of statistics from the government, eager to boast about how much better it is getting in Baghdad.

People are skeptical about what their government tells them in Baghdad.  What influences behavior more are the everyday experiences people share, the stories they pass on about streets that are newly busy, shops that have reopened, friends who have come over from other neighborhoods for the first time in many months.  It is this informal intelligence network that helps Baghdad residents decide where is safe and where they still need to be very cautious.  So we went out to find out what ordinary people are talking about.

Abu Hani is a taxi driver. He said he is now driving right across the city with his fares because he feels it is safe to do so, whereas before he stayed within his own neighborhood.  The day before we met him, he had stayed out picking up customers on the streets until 8.30 pm, about three hours after dark, something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing six months ago –- when there was an 8 p.m. curfew anyway, forcing everyone to go home early.  Abu Hani is happy. He said that he is now bringing home two to three times as much money as he could earn in the bad days.

At the Karkh primary school, the teachers told us that their classrooms are filling up again. Parents who used to either be scared of sending their children to school or who had temporarily fled the country for Syria are now back and feel secure enough to let their children outside during school hours.

We walked down the main shopping street in Karadah, and it was crowded with people shopping for Eid, a Muslim festival that this year just happens to fall around the same time as Christmas.  When I tried to do a piece to camera, I had to weave around people on the sidewalk to keep a line of sight with the camera.  And in the north of the city in the big market in Kadhimiyah, which is a staunch Shiite area, we came across a Sunni woman from the neighboring Adhamiyah district who was shopping for children’s clothes.  Only months ago, Shiite militias were shooting mortars into Adhamiyah. Now she feels it safe enough to come into the Shiite area.  The choice of goods, she said, was much better than in her own area.

There are still plenty of no-go areas –- Mansur and Ameriyah in the west of Baghdad are very dicey, and few people who are not from the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in the east will venture in there.  But the word is out: Much of the center of Baghdad is now open for business.  Nobody knows how long it will stay that way.  But for the time being they are happy to go out shopping, eating, even staying out in coffee shops smoking water pipes until late at night.  And telling their friends all about it.

December 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

TWO ROADS DIVERGE

December 10, 2007 4:57 PM

We flew to Jordan last week from Baghdad to see another face of the US in the Middle East – and how young Arabs’ lives can go in such totally different directions, depending on what they are exposed to in their teens.

In Iraq 160,000 US troops are engaged in a lethal battle with insurgents, militias and criminal gangs for control of a blood-smeared battlespace.   Across the border in Jordan, 45 minutes south of Amman in the newly opened King’s Academy boarding school US education principles are engaged in bringing young Arab boys and girls to adulthood with a good chance of getting into a top US university and a broadly tolerant and benign view of the world.  It is two very different faces of the same coin.

The King’s Academy is the pet project of King Abdullah of Jordan, who was sent by his father, then King Hussein, to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in the 1980’s.  The young prince had the time of his life with the other prep school boys (it turned co-ed some years after he left) playing sports, studying literature and interacting with a relatively liberal faculty in the pastoral New England countryside. 

After he took over from his father, King Abdullah decided to modernize Jordan’s education system, and in addition to revamping public schools, he decided to recreate Deerfield – in the desert.  600 students from around the Middle East, boys and girls mixed (that in itself is revolutionary – there are no other mixed boarding schools anywhere in this region), studying an American curriculum with teachers who were half local, half from the US. 

Some in the region thought it could not get off the ground – but in September the King’s Academy opened with its first 100 students, half in 9th and half in 10th grade, including girls.  They came from Saudi, Dubai, Egypt, Kuwait, Cyprus and Jordan.  As I walked around the campus, barely an hour’s flight from the war in Iraq, I couldn’t stop thinking of the irony of it all: these 14 and 15 year olds, along with their parents, were buying in to America by attending this school.  Most that I talked to wanted to move on to a US university, become doctors, engineers, people with something to offer to their society.  Across the border young men their age were still being recruited for a couple of hundred dollars to plant roadside bombs, to shoot at American or Iraqi government soldiers, or to strap explosives to their bodies and walk into a crowded market to cause maximum carnage.   Same kids, same culture, different role of the dice.

One thing that was very interesting was how the boys and girls interacted at King’s Academy.  In traditional societies in the Middle East – particularly in Saudi Arabia – boys and girls are kept strictly apart by religious police and other arbiters of conservative social custom.  In the King’s Academy, where the only overseers are open-minded teachers, the male and female students were pleasantly liberated – to be themselves.  There are firm regulations about keeping dormitories separate, and public displays of affection like hand-holding and kissing are banned, but apart from that the boys and girls ate together, studied together, chatted in mixed groups in the courtyards.  After spending an entire day on the campus it became clear to me precisely how visionary the school is.  These boys and girls, many of whom will go on to become leaders in their own countries, will bring with them an open-minded attitude and a network of friends from different countries in the region that is the direct opposite to the closed-mind extremism of the young men crossing into Iraq to blow themselves up as suicide bombers.  And I dare say that is one of the goals the King of Jordan has in mind with his school.

December 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)