Iraq’s most prominent clerics have ruled that using a water pump on one’s own pipes is akin to stealing resources from a neighbor, so what does a person do when it takes half an hour to fill a cooking pot with water from the tap?
Iraqis pray for forgiveness, then pump away.
To them, the real crime is that five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they still swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter because of a lack of electricity. Government rations are inevitably late, incomplete or expired. Garbage piles up for days, sometimes weeks.
The list goes on: black-market fuel, phone bills for land lines that haven’t worked in years, education and health-care systems degraded by the flight of thousands of Iraq’s best teachers and doctors.
When the Iraqi government announced that 2008 would be “the year of services,” workaday Iraqis had their doubts.
“Under Saddam’s regime, we had limited salaries but we had security and decent services. Now we have decent incomes but we lose it all to water, propane, groceries, fuel. We save nothing,” said Balqis Kareem, 46, a Sunni Muslim homemaker who lives in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Muslim district of Karradah.
At Kareem’s modest home, a wall in the living room sprouts a tangle of electrical wires, a reflection of the three power sources she juggles throughout the day: the government’s supply, her own small generator and the neighborhood’s larger generator. Even so, for five years she hasn’t been able to keep milk or meat in the refrigerator for more than a few hours.
A kitchen cupboard holds a barely touched box of rationed tea, which Kareem described as “so bitter no amount of sugar can sweeten it.” She barred her four children from drinking tap water after she found worms floating in a glass she had poured.
The family’s home phone rarely works, though earlier this month a worker from the phone company showed up demanding payment for calls that they both knew she hadn’t made. Like so many employees of government utilities, he wanted a bribe.
“I just got to the point and told him, ‘Don’t waste my time. How much do you want?'” Kareem said. “He told me, I paid him and then went on with my day.”
As another scorching summer approaches, everyone has to improvise to find electricity. At most they’ll be able to run a TV set, a couple of fluorescent bulbs and maybe the water pump. Of course, that’s only when the electricity is on — never more than five hours a day.
“Anyone who says that solving the services issue will take two or three years is exaggerating. Iraqi cities need years of work and billions of dollars,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “Ending this needs time and effort, but the prime minister is determined to start the work.”
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