[R-G] Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The New York Times is proud that the USG has restored prostitution as
well as gambling and consumption of drugs and alcohol in Baghdad to a
Saddam-era level of prosperity.  It's so proud of it that it put it on
the front page (burying an objection raised by an Iraqi human rights
group in page six)! -- Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/world/middleeast/19baghdad.html>
April 19, 2009
Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways
By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001
varieties of it.

Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists
and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to
illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.

Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for
clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen,
have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more
than 10 of them.

Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers
seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations
between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding
places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just
pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the
pretense.

It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps part way back to
the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the
American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful.
Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street
cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even
in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.

“Everything is going back to its natural way,” said Ahmed Assadee, a
screenwriter who works on a soap opera.

Men gather in cafes to smoke a hookah and gamble on dice and domino
games. On weekends, the Mustansiriya Coffee Shop’s back room is
crammed with low bleachers set up around a clandestine cockfighting
ring. On one recent day, the 100 or so spectators were raucous while
watching the bloody spectacle, but they placed their bets discreetly.

Gambling, after all, is illegal.

Walid Brahim, 25, a bomb disposal expert with the Iraqi Army, and his
brother Farat, 20, an electrician, recently sat side by side at a
table in the Nights of Abu Musa bar, on an alley off Saddoun Street,
working their way through a bucket of ice and a bottle of Mr. Chavez
Whiskey, an Iraqi-made hooch.

“This is great,” Walid Brahim said. “We used to buy alcohol and just
drink secretly in our house.”

The bar is men-only, as pretty much all respectable taverns are, but
the brothers look forward to an even brighter future.

“If this security continues,” Farat Brahim said, “within a year all
the waiters will be girls.”

The local police, weary of years of dodging assassins and cleaning up
after car bombings, are blasé about a little vice.

“Today we are dealing with more normal things. All the world is facing
such problems,” said Col. Abdel Jaber Qassim Sadir, assistant police
chief in Karada, a central Baghdad neighborhood.

“Prostitution, this kind of behavior cannot be stopped,” Colonel Sadir
said. “It’s very hard to find it in public; it goes on in secret,
isolated places.”

Actually, not so secret. There are a half-dozen night spots in Karada
now where the entry fee is $50. With $150 a week considered a good
wage, customers would not pay that much merely for the privilege of
drinking.

At the Ahalan Wasahalan Club on Al Nidhal Street one recent night, the
owner, Tiba Jamal, was holding court, as she usually does, on the dais
at the front of a room with a mostly empty dance floor and lots of
tables.

Ms. Jamal calls herself the Sheikha, or a female sheik, an honorific
title she has apparently adopted. She dresses in a head-to-toe,
skin-tight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of
solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings and rings, her
response to the financial crisis.

The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but
nothing that would be considered risqué on a street in Europe — in
August. At one point in the evening they outnumbered the men, as they
sat in a big group until being summoned to one of the men’s tables.

“It’s nice to see people having fun again,” Ms. Jamal said.

One regular customer said, “You can have any of those girls to spend
the night with you later, only $100.” First, though, patrons are
expected to spend a few hours buying $20 beers or even more costly
whiskey.

A young woman who said she was 28 but looked 18 sat smoking, and
downing soft drinks while her “date” drank Scotch. A university
student, she would give her name only as Baida, but she was frank
about her nighttime profession. Had something happened to force her
into this? “No,” she said. “I go out with men so I can get money.” To
support her family? She seemed stunned by the question. “No, for
myself.”

One police detective said he would not dream of enforcing the law
against prostitutes. “They’re the best sources we have,” said the
detective, whose name is being withheld for his safety. “They know
everything about JAM and Al Qaeda members,” he said, using the acronym
for Jaish al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia.

The detective added that the only problem his men had was that
neighbors got the wrong idea when detectives visited the houses where
prostitutes were known to live. They really do just want to talk, he
said.

“If I had my way, I’d destroy all the mosques and spread the whores
around a little more,” the detective said. “At least they’re not
sectarian.”

Others are uncomfortable with the prostitutes’ presence.

“It is terrible to see prostitution increased like this,” said Hanaa
Edwar, secretary general of the Iraqi human rights group Al-Amal.
“These are women from displaced families, poor people, people who have
to sell themselves to get money for their families and children.”

She was incensed after she raised the subject before the Iraqi
Parliament. “They were shocked and didn’t agree to open discussion on
this issue,” she said. The shock, she said, was that she dared to
mention the problem.

Al Amal commissioned a report last year that surveyed prostitutes
working on the streets in Baghdad. One was a 15-year-old girl who had
been thrown out of school for dressing inappropriately, then took to
prostitution, the report said. Another was an 18-year-old forced to
become the second wife of an older man; she ran away and had no other
way to support herself. One girl was 12.

Certainly, vice often has an ugly side. During a recent undercover
operation in Karada aimed at a human trafficking ring, a pimp offered
a plainclothes officer an opportunity to buy a young woman to take to
Syria, according to a detective, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the sting.

Drug abuse, at least, is one problem that has not shown up much, or
has stayed well underground, the police say. “The only problems we see
are some illegal pills occasionally,” Colonel Sadir said.

Not surprisingly, the Baghdadis’ drug of choice is Valium, the colonel said.

Most people have had enough excitement these past six years just staying home.

Riyadh Mohammed, Suadad al-Salhy and Muhammed al-Obaidi contributed reporting.