Toil and rubble for Saddam the nation builder

Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 2002

It has been more than 10 years since the guns of the Gulf War fell silent, but civilian armies—humanitarian and engineering—still labour to repair the damage.

The engineers have made great strides, rebuilding bridges, communications and industry.

The task for the humanitarians remains daunting, but they believe they are on the verge of a significant achievement in just keeping a war-impoverished people alive so that they might have a future.

Suddenly, the prospect of another war puts it all in jeopardy.

The health statistics are appalling. Infant and maternal mortality and preventable diseases have been dragging oil-rich Iraqis to their graves at a rate that outstrips the worst environments in Africa.

But the Iraqi trend in malnutrition is improving and there is an air of anticipation about new figures to be published soon. Between 1996 and 2000, acute malnutrition declined from 11 per cent to 7.8per cent and chronic malnutrition from 32per cent to 30 per cent. Appalling, but improving.

Casual visitors to Baghdad have to dig for data on the humanitarian crisis because, on the surface, the teeming city holds together. Water purification and power generating capacity still lag, but there is enough water and power to have all the city's fountains operating and floodlit, even at three in the morning.

This appearance of normality is important to the regime. When journalists poured into Baghdad to cover the Gulf Crisis in 1990, one of the first guided tours arranged for them was of reconstruction on the Fao Peninsula, the scene of the worst fighting in the Iraq-Iran war that had finished in 1988.

The policy means that what the humanitarian workers deride as glamour projects get all of the Government's limited resources at the expense of the less obvious, such as schools and hospitals, which are in desperate need.

One of the men charged with sending the you destroy, we rebuild message to the world in the wake of the Gulf War is 56-year-old Mustafa Aubiadi. But he insisted that one man alone drove this reconstruction program: Saddam Hussein.

In an office decorated with pictures of Saddam hauling baskets of building rubble and of new swathes of highway and of bridges spanning the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mr Aubiadi said: Saddam supervised the lot. He drew up the plan and he insisted on the deadlines for completion. He visited every project. He worked hard, so we all had to work hard. I think he was working 18 hours a day because he followed even the smallest projects. He came to the projects I worked on.

Mr Aubiadi said Iraq's prewar capacity for water, power, communications and oil production had not been fully restored, but most of it was functioning to give adequate service.

He said of the phone network: At the end of the war there was no communication in all of Iraq. They knocked down the Saddam Tower, but we rebuilt it—bigger.

And of the oil industry: They did to us what they said we did to Kuwait. But we have rebuilt the important storage facilities and we are producing again.

However, this engineer's love is bridges, and he soon showed visitors a before-and-after album of photographs of what he said was bomb damage to more than 130 road and railway bridges—a devastating blow to a country that is carved into three very separate corridors by its two great rivers.

Everything was bombed. Even floating bridges that were used only by farmers to cross canals; even bridges that were under construction. But we have rebuilt all but three of them. Sometimes the bomb they dropped cost 10 times more than the bridge it destroyed. But we fixed it with Iraqi dinars, not US dollars. We did it with no outside help—our labour, our machines, and our power.

He lingered over pictures of Baghdad's Jamahiriya Bridge, with its decking submerged in the turbid Tigris. This was the biggest challenge, he said.

It might have been easier to demolish it and start again, because all the bearings had shifted and each span was damaged in a different way. It took five months to do the work.

But it took two years to do this one, he said, as he pulled out a picture of restoration of Baghdad's graceful suspension bridge.

Many of the repairs are temporary. In some bridges steel sections have been used to replace missing concrete spans. In others, new bridges have been built next to damaged spans, so that when the damaged structure is finally repaired there will be a separate crossing for traffic in each direction.

So how does the engineer feel about another war?

What are we to do if they want to destroy our country again? I'll be very angry if I have to do it all again because our people and our country have suffered so much. I hope for peace, but we are ready for war. We have the power.