Quotes of the Day

Oh, the hours Saabreen Kheithem spent memorizing Saddam Hussein's speeches. An aspiring journalist in Baghdad's working-class Al-Aylaan district, Kheithem, 20, could recite many of Saddam's landmark orations word for word. It didn't take much prompting from her mother, Muntaha, for Kheithem to launch into a singsong rendition of his classic 1991 "mother of all battles" harangue. Before the war, she believed this talent would help her land her dream job as a reporter at the official Al-Iraq newspaper. After all, she said, "the job of any Iraqi journalist is to convey the thoughts and wishes of the President to his people."

Not anymore. With Al-Iraq shut down and scores of independent and religious newspapers sprouting across the country, the journalist's job description is changing dramatically. So are most other occupations in post-Saddam Iraq, seven of which are profiled in these pages. Kheithem knows her dream career is doomed; no one needs her special skill now. She still wants to be a journalist, but isn't sure how to go about it. "Everything I worked for has changed," she says. "Most of the things I learned before are useless, and I don't know what I should learn now."

Freedom can be a frightening thing. The end of the Saddam regime means Iraqis like Kheithem are facing a future they never anticipated or prepared for. During more than two decades of totalitarian rule, a great many aspects of Iraqi public life — from politics and commerce to education and the arts — were twisted and corrupted. Now the people who filled those roles are trying to learn new ones. "Iraqis are like children with abusive parents," says Professor Behnam Abu al-Soof, an archaeologist and politician in Baghdad. "They beat us and starved us and they didn't teach us anything. Now we have to learn how to be a normal society. We have to go back to what I call the kindergarten of life."

It doesn't help that Iraqis must go into the big, bad world just when it is at its baddest: two months after that Saddam statue was brought down in the heart of Baghdad, anarchy reigns in Saddam's place. Some things have got better: gas lines are shorter, there's electricity most of the day and many schools have reopened. But the economy is in limbo, jobs are scarce and large sections of the population are buried in poverty. Jinan Ali Ahmed, the 7-year-old girl whose unflinching gaze looks out from Time's cover this week, lives in the abandoned guardhouse of the Tuwaitha nuclear plant, where radiation levels are dangerously high. "So far we haven't seen anything good" from the liberation, says her uncle Hilal. None of the 12 family members has a job. "If they kick us out of here," says Hilal, "we'll have to live in the streets."

The streets are a deadly place, with criminals and Saddam loyalists harrying American soldiers. It's no surprise that many Iraqis long for the relative security most had under the despot. Struggling to avoid street thugs and make ends meet in the war-torn economy, some wonder if they weren't better off before: at least Saddam gave them free food and cheap gas.

The Americans haven't managed as much — but then they want to see capitalism take root where many Iraqis are expecting charity. Two weeks ago, Paul Bremer, the new American civil administrator of Iraq, spoke of reviving the private sector and creating new jobs. But after years of cronyism and the systematic rape of the economy, few Iraqis have any understanding of how legitimate free enterprise works. Muhammed Alameen, 35, who was a commercial manager at a Baghdad trading firm before the war, believes himself to be an exemplary private-sector executive, "not like people with government jobs, who never had to use their brains at work." But ask him how his firm did business, and Alameen starts almost every sentence with: "The government instructed us to ..."

The Saddam regime is a phantom limb: Iraqis reach for it instinctively, even though they know it's no longer there. Weaned on in-your-face authoritarianism, they are perplexed by the low-key administrative style of the Americans. Bremer's predecessor, retired Lieut. General Jay Garner, was rarely seen or heard by Iraqis in the chaotic aftermath of the war, so people turned for advice and instructions to the only authority figures that they could see and hear: their imams. "Iraqis have become completely dependent on a leader who tells them what to do and how to do it," mused Syed Munem al-Musawi, the imam of a Shi'a mosque in the slumlike Baghdad suburb formerly known as Saddam City, who took charge of the protection of the National Library. "Saddam can't do that anymore, and the Americans don't want to ... so the job falls to us."

While Bremer is more visible than Garner, he can't — won't — be the ubiquitous presence Saddam was in Iraqi lives. That'll take some getting used to. "We have developed many, many bad habits without even realizing they were bad habits," says Abu al-Soof. The white-haired professor has some learning to do too. Although he regards himself as a politician, he has little practical experience. Before the war, he was an independent member of the Baathist-dominated Iraq National Assembly, a rubber-stamp body if there ever was one. Abu al-Soof was "elected," but admits the Baath Party allowed him to run virtually unopposed. As a Christian, he fit Saddam's diversity requirements. But could he win a real election? He says he will be a candidate whenever elections come, but has no clue how to conduct a campaign. "Oh, people know me," he says airily. "Ask them about Behnam Abu al-Soof, and people will tell you he is a good man. I don't have to ask them, they will vote for me." The professor, like the people in the pages that follow, may need a stint in that kindergarten of life before he can face up to his — and Iraq's — future.

When I Paint My Masterpiece
As he watched his fellow Iraqis celebrate the end of Saddam's rule by tearing, burning, smashing and trampling every portrait of the despot they could find, Haider Dehloz took it personally. A painting instructor at the Baghdad Institute of Art, Dehloz was chosen four years ago to become one of Saddam's official portraitists. Working off a single color photograph of Saddam, Dehloz churned out hundreds of presidential portraits, from lithographs to pencil sketches to charcoal drawings to large oil paintings, all of them commissioned by the government-run Saddam Center for Art. For Dehloz, 32, it was tedious, stifling work, but the money allowed him to support his eight brothers and sisters. "I had to take those jobs," he says. "Painting Saddam was the only way I could get paid." However loathsome the subject, the ubiquitous portraits also gave Dehloz's work an enviable public visibility. Which is why two months later, the memory of watching so many of his own paintings destroyed still pains him. "I am suffering at this," he says. "Not because this dictator was removed, but because those paintings were the product of my efforts, not anyone else's."

For artists like Dehloz, as for all Iraqis, life now holds both promise and peril. Under Saddam, artistic expression was suppressed almost as ruthlessly as political dissent; the Baathist government valued art solely for its ability to bolster Saddam's cult of personality. The regime's insatiable demand for portraits of the dictator forced many professional painters to abandon their own work. Dehloz says that during his four years of working for the government, he produced a new painting of Saddam every 10 days. The content of the pieces was closely managed by a committee at the Saddam Center for Art, down to the colors Dehloz chose for Saddam's shirts. (Red and white were favored.) In all, Dehloz completed 50 large canvases of Saddam; the Center for Art paid $50 for each. But he painted little else during that time, and had no place to display the few non-Saddam works he managed to complete. Dehloz's personal paintings resemble works of the Abstract Expressionist school, using a full palette of colors and bold, darting strokes. "If I had the time, and a real opportunity, to express my own feelings and ideas," he says, "I could have filled my own museum."

Now he has the chance. But while he relishes his new freedoms, Dehloz has lost his only patron. Since the war, he has earned just $20 — his monthly salary as a teacher at the Institute for Fine Arts. He used to supplement his income with private lessons, but his students can't afford them anymore. "Our suffering is very bad," he says. "I am still responsible for my family." He can't afford to buy new canvases, so he's planning to paint over the handful of Saddam portraits he never sold.

Still, he's painting again; his studio is cluttered with vibrant new pieces he began after the war. On one easel sits his latest work, a simple still life of flowers in bloom. "I am happy and optimistic, even though I'm really poor right now," he says. "The freedom is inside me." — By Romesh Ratnesar / Baghdad

The Mayor Of Sadr City
When the war ended, Sheikh Halim al-Fatlawi was at the Shi'a academy for clerics in the holy city of Najaf, studying how to apply Islamic principles to modern phenomena. These days, the cherubic sheikh, with a round face, chubby waist and somber gaze, spends most of his time attending to the temporal, rather than the spiritual, needs of his flock. As deputy director of the eastern Baghdad office of the Sadr movement — a religious and political group that also provides social services — al-Fatlawi, 35, is effectively the administrator of a big chunk of Sadr City (formerly Saddam City), a down-at-heel suburb that is home to about 3 million people. In the chaos that followed the collapse of the Saddam regime, imams and religious scholars like al-Fatlawi took over the administration of vast swaths of the country; to this day, in the eyes of many Iraqis, the clergy represent the closest thing Iraq has to a government.

It's a tall order for anybody, let alone a religious scholar: most Iraqis relied on the Saddam regime for everything from food to jobs, and they've transferred that dependency to people like al-Fatlawi. He was sent to Sadr City in anticipation of a postwar food crisis. Over 60% of Iraqis lived entirely off free government rations; another 20% relied on the rations to supplement their meager incomes. When the distribution network collapsed with the war, looters broke into government warehouses and made off with supplies. Al-Fatlawi's solution could only have come from a religious mind: "We issued a fatwa that looted food and medicine be returned to us, and we reopened the warehouses and began distributing food to the people." The fatwa resulted in a huge return of food and medicine, he says — enough for al-Fatlawi to distribute to hundreds of people a day.

With the help of an army of volunteers, al-Fatlawi also supervises the repair of electricity, water and sewage systems, and the provision of armed security to hospitals, neighborhoods and warehouses. "There are many problems now because there is no law and order in the country," he says.

At any given time, his office is filled to bursting with people pleading for help. He listens intently, his legs crossed and his round face serene. Those needing food get a note to take to a mosque, where they will get rations of rice, milk and other essentials. Those who need money get a weekly $2-$5 per person. Al-Fatlawi never expected to be spending his time this way when he signed up for religious studies at Najaf. But like most Iraqis, he's learned not to dwell too much on the past, or to make too many plans for the future. Coping with the present is a full-time job. — By Nir Rosen / Baghdad

Taking Saddam Out Of The Schoolhouse
When Nihad Shawki returned to work, it was one of the best and worst days of her life. The effervescent history teacher was overjoyed to be back at the Baghdad Preparatory School for Girls — but once inside, she found that Iraqi soldiers had taken over the school during the war, dug trenches in the playground and stockpiled ammunition and explosives in her classroom. The scene tested her emotions. For several weeks she had anxiously endured the thunderous American bombing of Baghdad and was still grieving for a beloved cousin who, drafted into Saddam's military against his will, had died in the U.S. assault.

But as soon as her classroom was cleared of the dangerous ordinance and her eleventh-grade students were safely back at their wooden desks, Shawki, 45, began another clearance operation: she gave the class an instruction that she would never have dared before. "Tear the pictures of Saddam Hussein out of your books," she said, "and throw them in the trash!" The girls enthusiastically obeyed.

Hardly anywhere in Iraq has the end of Saddam brought more dramatic change than in the nation's schools. Before the war, Shawki's classroom, like thousands of others across Iraq, was adorned with the obligatory portrait of Saddam, and she was required to teach about the noble achievements of Iraq's infallible ruler. In the faculty lounge or the cafeteria, Shawki and her students were terrified to utter a disparaging word against the regime, even when among presumed friends, lest one of them report the comment to Saddam's secret police. With smiles and smirks, they are only too eager to say what they really think now. "I told my students, 'Forget about what happened in the past. From now on, you can express your ideas freely,'" she says. "They were astonished. They kept asking, 'Are we going to have a better life?'"

Besides tearing up Saddam's picture, she had her students go through their books and smudge out the 52 sayings of Saddam that every Iraqi schoolchild had to memorize. For the final exams that began last week, all questions relating to Saddam's regime and its glorious achievements were tossed out. Iraq's schools now await a new syllabus handed down by the interim education ministry with the oversight of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The plan is to have a new, temporary curriculum ready by the fall; a complete overhaul will be left to the next Iraqi government. The principal task is expunging Saddam's cult of personality and Baath Party ideology, which encouraged xenophobia and justified warmongering and despotic rule as being in the national interest.

During class last week, Shawki took obvious pleasure in peppering her students with questions about democracy. They have only sketchy notions of the concept, but understand that whatever it is, they never had it before. "All our history books were a lot of nonsense," says Marwa Jawal, 17, an aspiring pharmacist. "We knew that what our history teacher taught us was not from her heart." Now, Shawki seems less concerned about how to teach the past than she is about surviving in Iraq's unwritten future. She enjoys being able to speak freely, and looks forward to perhaps earning more money. But taking a break from grading papers last week, she and some fellow teachers worked themselves into a lather with complaints against Iraq's occupiers. Anger that Baghdad is still experiencing violence and power outages prompted suspicions that America was out to harm, rather than help, them. "We hear a lot of promises," Shawki says, "but so far we haven't seen anything solid." For the third straight month, she complains, another scheduled payday came and went with no salary. Then she smiles and says, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Like her students, she is getting a history lesson that she scarcely ever imagined. — By Scott MacLeod / Baghdad

Free To Write, Perform And Go Hungry
Two years ago, playwright and actor Haider Minathar previewed his new production for the intelligence and security officers whose job it was to decide what Iraqi theater audiences saw. The play, roughly translated as Dish I Will Dish, was about the fall of a dictator, and how the population would be too fascinated by satellite television to work on rebuilding the country. The audience of Baathists gave him a standing ovation. "They said, 'Fantastic! Fantastic!' — and then said I couldn't put it on," Minathar recalls with a rueful smile. It wasn't the first — or last — time he was shut down by the authorities. In all, six of his 20 plays were banned. During the premiere of one, Iraqi police broke up the performance and arrested him on stage.

Saddam is gone and sure enough, satellite dishes are the hottest-selling items in Baghdad's shops. Minathar, a soft-spoken 38-year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, thinks it's the perfect time to revive Dish I Will Dish. "I predicted this would happen two years ago," he says wryly. But the end of the Saddam regime is a mixed blessing for Minathar. What he fears now is not prison but poverty. Although his plays were sometimes banned for poking fun at the old regime, he refrained from overtly attacking it; after all, like many actors, he was dependent on it for his living. The government tolerated his more subtle ribbing and didn't see him as much of a threat. It even kept him on a monthly salary of $150 — generous in a state where teachers made only about $10 a month. With that support gone, Minathar doesn't have the funds to put on his shows. He's been elected the head of the new Iraqi Theater Artists' Union and has approached the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (now the Coalition Provisional Authority) to try to get actors the same $20 payments made to other government employees. But so far he's struck out. "Saddam Hussein, who was so oppressive, still gave the actors salaries. And the Americans won't — is that possible?" he asks.

Lack of money isn't the only hurdle facing Iraqi theater. Minathar has a list of complaints: "How can people come to a play when there's no gas, no transportation and no security when it's time to go home?" So he spends his days idling with other actors in the looted and burned al-Rashid Theater, where the banter is sometimes drowned out by the clatter of passing tanks.

And he's written another play, a light comedy called Where Is the Government? about a busload of Iraqis who find out that their regime has fallen. The play is a gentle poke at the hypocritical behavior that followed Saddam's fall. One passenger responds to the news by taking off her veil and declaring that she's a belly dancer, another immediately starts to pick the pocket of his friend in the next seat.

Earlier this month Minathar's new play premiered in the northern city of Sulaymaniya, where the autonomous Kurdish government is funding some performances. "I was always trying to get people to protest against the regime," he says. "But now the regime is gone so I have to find something new to protest." — By Joshua Kucera / Baghdad

Good Morning, Baghdad!!
Back when he worked at the Palestine Hotel, videotaping and photographing visiting dignitaries and businessmen, Jaleel Banie could only dream of a different life. For as long as he could remember, his ambition had been to become a radio broadcaster. "It was what I really loved to work with," he says. But Banie, 45, knew it couldn't happen: in the eyes of the Ministry of Information, which ran all of Iraq's radio stations, he was politically tainted. In the early 1990s, the regime had executed Banie's cousin for belonging to the Dawa Party, an Islamic opposition group. "They knew about my cousin. It was useless to even apply for a job," he says, "because it was so obvious that they wouldn't approve of me."

But two months ago, the opportunity finally came — and Banie seized it. Two days after the fall of Baghdad, he was in the Palestine looking for work in the U.S. military's press center when a U.S. commander asked for volunteers to restart radio transmissions in the city. Banie immediately grabbed his friend Mohammed Hassan, who had worked as a radio engineer in the old regime, and set out to find a functioning radio transmitter. Every station in Baghdad had been burned or looted, but Hassan, 33, knew that the Ministry of Information had stashed a 1-KW emergency transmitter in a storage closet in a children's amusement park on the edge of Saddam's presidential compound, just in case of emergency. U.S. troops had moved into the park, and when Hassan and Banie got there, they found the transmitter intact. "It was the last place to look," Banie says. With the help of a handful of friends, the two hooked up Hassan's personal computer and a sound mixer to the transmitter. On April 12, they started broadcasting — the first radio station to go on air in Baghdad after the war.

Baghdad Radio (AM 1026) has since moved into the abandoned outdoor movie theater next to the park. Around 25 volunteers, most of whom worked for official radio stations before the war, keep the station on air, broadcasting to all of Baghdad — and as far west as the city of Ramadi — for 12 hours a day. The programming schedule remains prosaic: hourly news updates provide a summary of articles culled from Iraqi newspapers and some foreign sources, such as the BBC and Agence France-Presse; for the rest of the time, there's music, and the DJs' tastes seem to lean toward Arabic easy listening. But in Iraq, this counts as a minor media revolution. "In the old regime, every daily broadcast began with, 'Good Morning, Saddam Hussein,'" says Hassan. "All news, programs and songs were focused on him. You were forbidden from broadcasting foreign news. No one could think of doing anything like what we're doing here."

Now they do. In Baghdad alone, more than 20 new radio stations have hit the airwaves since the fall of Saddam. That's in addition to the dozens of independent newspapers hawked all over the city's sidewalks, put out by student groups, religious leaders and political parties. Most, like Baghdad Radio, operate on a shoestring — but even by the standards of their fellow media pioneers, Banie and Hassan run a spartan enterprise. Despite its roomier new digs, the station hasn't managed to upgrade its equipment and has so far subsisted on a single grant of $200 from the Iraqi Media Network, a group set up by the U.S.'s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance to support local journalists. The network also supplies the newspapers and website printouts read by the station's on-air personalities. Office staffers dine solely on the ready-to-eat meals donated to them by U.S. troops stationed nearby.

Banie and Hassan wonder why the Americans aren't doing more. They are bewildered, for instance, that no coalition officials have come by to check up on them. "We've been working for two months, but don't know who we're working for, who the authority is, who's in charge of our station," says Banie. So used are they to the idea of state control, it hasn't yet sunk in that they are in charge of their station, or that controlling Baghdad Radio is the last thing the Americans want to do. What Banie and Hassan could use are some quick lessons in American-style sales and marketing. They haven't even tried to solicit advertising from local merchants. When asked whether they have hired a business manager to try to raise funds for the station, Hassan and Banie shoot each other quizzical looks. The idea doesn't seem to have occurred to them. "No one wants to give anyone money because of the looters" who might steal the cash before it can be used, Banie says finally.

Though it's hard to find an Iraqi who won't complain about the slow pace of economic recovery, most, like Hassan and Banie, know that money isn't everything. Last month they were approached by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), offering to buy the station and make it the kdp's house organ. "We thought about it," says Banie. "And we decided that we're serving the Iraqi people and we won't work for any political movement. No matter what happens, we will not be connected to any political movement, group or ideology." On their own, sentiments like that won't be enough to remake Iraq. But they're a pretty good place to start. — By Romesh Ratnesar / Baghdad

• BOBBY GHOSH
• Iraqis can finally think and act for themselves — and that takes some getting used to