Out Of The Wreckage

(3 of 4)

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.