Out Of The Wreckage

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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