. . . . there's a fag stall of all flavours every 10 metres and almost as many sidewalk vendors of alcohol: Johnnie Walker, Dimple, Bells, Absolut, all $25 (U.S.) a bottle. Suddenly, tubs of ice-cold Heineken and Amstel have appeared, replacing the Turkish-brewed Efes Pilsener that was the suds-of-choice (actually, no choice) in Saddam's hermetically sealed Iraq.Yeah, baby!
Where did all this contraband come from, almost overnight? But then Iraqis, after 12 years of United Nations-imposed sanctions, have become expert at smuggling and bootlegging. Oil, spirits, what's the dif?
. . . There was a time — and many Baghdadis will remember it, or have a vestigial sense of it — when this Westernized capital was a racy metropolis indeed. Before it became, in the last decade of the Saddam regime, a sort of Albania of the desert, all greasy gloom and dreary, Baghdad knew how to frolic.
. . . and here's another Baghdad slice-of-life from Toronto Star reporter Rosie Di Manno.
At one local police station the other day, reporters found a stash of curious documents. Nothing earth-shaking, just a list of local barbers and hairdressers, all of whom had to sign agreements with the authorities in exchange for their licences promising to provide to security agencies all the idle gossip overheard in their establishments: Who might have made a disparaging remark about Saddam's wife, who was rumoured to have a little too much money in her handbag, whose son had perhaps slipped out of the country — anything that might be used to threaten and punish.
The regime survived so long because it made tattle-tales and conspirators out of everybody. Iraqis were enslaved by their own betrayals and the conviction that all others were doing the same. There were jins — mean spirits — down every telephone line and telex machine. This is my favourite story: A United Nations worker from Ethiopia phones a colleague in New York, switching in mid-conversation from English to his native Amharic. At which point a voice cuts in, instructing the gentlemen to "please continue in a language we can understand.''
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