Grim time for Iraq's street children
Doaa, 11, opened her eyes to the bright
sunshine of early morning and tried without success to blink away the
dust covering her eyes. Her face, her clothes, and the brothers and
sisters who spent the night huddled close to her on the heat-seared,
rock-hard banks of the Tigris River, all are coated with the fine, brown
powder. ''We've been sleeping here . . . too long. I don't know how
long,'' she said. ''We don't have a house. We used to live in a house,
but during the war our parents died. A bomb fell on the house.''
The children were emaciated and dazed. They clutched
one another with what looked like desperation, even when they slept.
''We don't know anyone; we don't have anyone to ask
for help,'' said Rawaa, a brother Doaa said is 13 but who looked much
younger. ''We get food from those Americans,'' he said,
pointing to an Army encampment perhaps a hundred yards away, ''and we
sleep here every night.''
But a couple of days later they were gone, leaving
behind unanswerable questions not just about the impact of the war and
the Saddam Hussein regime on Iraqi children, but about whether the
United States can cope with the social problems and attitudes of this
very different culture. Indeed, a confrontation may be looming between
US forces and Shi'ite clerics over orphans and street children.
Homelessness and child abuse existed before the US
occupation, but so did a system, however flawed, that Iraqis understood
and accepted. Now that system has been destroyed, and the problems have
been exacerbated by the US-led conflict.
''We have to rebuild Iraqi society by rebuilding the
Iraqi people,'' said Dr. Ali Hameed, a psychiatrist and official at the
Ministry of Health who is working with US Army officers as they deliver
food and health services to the children and try to get them off the
streets. ''Twelve years of sanctions and, even more important, the
suppression and brainwashing of the previous regime, have made Iraqis
hopeless and helpless.''
Iraqi society attaches a heavy stigma to street
children, whether they are orphans or war victims. These days, most
orphanages are accepting only the children they cared for before the war
who scattered during the conflict. The newly orphaned and deserted
children on the streets, said to number at least a few thousand, are
objects of scorn.
Mohammed, a teenager who lives in one of the
middle-class homes near the US encampment, says Doaa and her siblings
left because ''some Americans came to help them, but they were afraid
they would be put in jail'' — something that might well have happened
to them under the regime, especially if they were caught begging.
''Anyway, they're not homeless,'' Mohammed said.
''Their parents left them.''
He dismissed with similar ease the plight of a lone
boy who was sleeping on the brick sidewalk to get as close as possible
to the Americans. ''He uses drugs — sniffs glue, like many street
children here,'' he said. ''That's why he sleeps so much.''
The boy, Ali, woke up, tugged at his too-big rags to
make sure they would not fall off when he stood, and explained that he
has been on the streets since Baghdad fell and US troops opened the
gates of Dar Al Rahmah, the House of Mercy, where he was sent months
before the war when he was arrested for begging. Ali, 13, limps because there is a piece of glass in
his left foot, the result of walking barefoot across this war-torn city
after other street people stole his shoes. He, too, soon disappeared.
Contempt for the down-and-out extends from youths like
Mohammed to the staffs of Baghdad's better child-care institutions.
Ibtissam Rasheed Al Habash, 54, a longtime staff
member at Families of Iraq, an orphanage now receiving support from both
Sheikha Fatima of the United Arab Emirates and the US Army, resents Army
efforts to bring the street children to her institution.
''They are not bringing orphans; they are bringing
homeless kids,'' said Habash, though she has no way to know whether the
children have been orphaned or not. ''We are suffering because of that.
Homeless children have no manners. Our children have manners. They are
clean. They are educated.'' The street children ''are different,'' she said. ''I
prefer if they don't come here.''
US Army Captain Stacey Simms, a reservist from
Rochester, N.Y., who leads the US effort to help the street children,
said he ''just can't believe the mentality'' of the orphanage staffs.
''They have condemned the street children. I have to constantly remind
myself that I'm from a different culture.''
''These are children and they need help,'' Simms said.
''We don't know why they became street kids. Their house could have been
blown up, their parents could have abused them or kicked them out. But
as soon as they take a step on the street, they are considered
`unworthy' of help. . . . These orphanage people do not want the job to
be hard.''
Progress at getting the children off the streets is
slow, Simms said. In addition to the prejudice, some orphanages were
stripped in the looting between April 9, when Baghdad fell, and early
May, when US forces began solidifying control of the city.
''I would like to provide homes'' for the street
children, ''but that's fantasy,'' Simms said. Right now he is
concentrating on getting them food, water, medical care, and toys.
But he is trying to navigate a situation that might
pose a threat to dozens of children and cause a breach in the uneasy
cooperation between American forces and Al Hawsa al-Ilmiya, a Shi'ite
Muslim school and social organization that has largely taken over
Baghdad's worst slum and restored order.
Known as Saddam City before the war, now renamed Sadr
City after a clergyman assassinated by the Hussein regime, the slum is
also the site of the House of Mercy, an orphanage surrounded by prisons
for men, women, juvenile offenders, and the criminally insane.
Attractive girls from the orphanage were taken to
Hussein's palaces, says Sheikh Bakr Al Sa'idi, 22, a Baghdad University
law student who has been designated by the Hawsa to renovate the
orphanage and protect the students. Other girls were sent out as
servants. Young boys were trained in Hussein's army of Young Lions;
older boys became part of his fedayeen militia.
''We found cells and dungeons here,'' Sa'idi said.
''They beat the kids brutally for the silliest mistakes. The guards
raped the girls. I can't describe how ugly it was.'' When Sa'idi arrived, three days after the fall of
Baghdad, the orphanage had been looted and the children had scattered.
He now has 18 Hawsa volunteers rewiring and renovating the place. It is
still barren, but beds, cooking utensils, and other necessities
gradually are being acquired. A banner reading ''No to America; No to
Saddam; Yes, yes to Islam'' hangs over the entrance.
About 50 of the 163 children who were there before the
war are back, and a call has gone out for men to go to their mosques and
arrange marriages with the older girls. Three have been married so far
and another six are engaged, he said.
The Muslim association has no desire to run the
orphanage for the long term, Sa'idi said, and ''when there is a new
government and the Hawsa is sure the Ministry of Social Affairs will
provide competent care and ensure security, we will turn it back'' to
the state.
But a confrontation with Simms may occur long before
then. An international organization that has visited the institution has
told Simms that children are being abused there still. Simms is working
on plans ''to move the children to a better, safer facility.''
Whatever happens at the House of Mercy, a much bigger,
broader effort will be needed to keep children who have been traumatized
by three major wars and 12 years of sanctions in the last 20 years from
becoming ''a maladjusted, psychopathic generation,'' said Dr. Hameed,
the psychiatrist.
''It is the Americans' duty now to help us normalize
Iraq,'' he said. ''You shouldn't leave Iraq . . . you should do what you
have promised.''
By Charles A. Radin
5 June 2003
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/155/nation/Grim_time_for_Iraq_s_street_children+.shtml
home
|