fbaezer wrote:Looting is normal when there is no authority, or when the authority is too lenient...
Looters are looters, they don't care who they loot, and hardly what they loot. Beware of those who say: "Hey, they're looting the French Embassy, the UN headquarters, etcetera, because they consider them traitors". They loot because there is availability, that's all.
Here is today's chronicle of Rubén Cortés, a Cuban-Mexican journalist in Baghdad. I trust Rubén. I know how "my mate" works. And he was the catcher in my baseball team (my translation):
Baghdad: The Mother of All Chaos
Armed guys who stop you in the streets and rob you aiming at you with a bazooka, a house of Allah transformed in a guerrilla bunker, a van of foreign journalist that is assaulted right in front of US soldiers' noses, a guy who charges 10 dollars to kill whoever you want, because "at the end, he will be one more person killed by the Americans"...
One day after Saddam Hussein's fall, Baghdad is the mother of all disasters and a place more unsafe than the open combat zones.
After a morning and an afternoon marked by astronomical pillages, ranging from a lamb chop to five IBM computers conducted by one sole character in a supermarket cart, as nicht fell a suicide bomber killed a marine and wounded 22 other people at a US army checkpoint.
The attack was just a stone-throw away from Palestine Hotel, where many journalist sojourn, most of them sleeping in the lobby as in a lost town's bus station.
Hours before, another US soldier died and 20 of his comrades were wounded in a shooting around a sunni mosque in the capital's downtown.
The robbery Iraqis have condemned the most, was of the ambulances and medicine boxes, taken from AL Kindi Hospital, one of the biggest in this city. Doctors and paramedics could do nothing. They asked the Americans for help, but they refused to intervene.
10 dollar murders
"You know, this is not the Iraqi people, what you see is the trash, decent people are locked in their homes... these are the same debris Saddam used for his marches and now that he's defeated, they piss on his portrait", explains Baker Addoum, owner of a small travel agency.
"A man who worked with me as a driver, a couple of years ago, came to me yesterday and offered to kill whoever has dishonoured me, and blame it on the Americans. You know how much he asked for? 10 dollars. That's the situation we're living in", says Baker.
"Saddam was garbage, but this didn't happen with him; no one broke the law because punishment was severe: for stealing some candy in the market you could go seven years to jail".
If one wanders through the streets, one can almost understand Baker. Iraqi civilians, armed with Russian RPG-7 bazookas have installed checkpoints in some streets and force vehicles to stop and the passengers to give them all what they have, under death menaces.
The van of a German television team was assaulted by four armed men, who took even the cassettes.
Few shops dare to open, and those who do impose foreigner golden prices: three dollars for a piece of bread with goat best, one dollar for a glass of tea.
Luck for some journalists is that those incoming from Jordan bring water, chocolates and bread, and share them generously.
It has been worthless that many imams, specially those in the centuries-old Rashid street mosque, urged they feithful not to take what does not belong to them, because the Qu'uaran condemns the thieves and to rob is a offense to Allah, the Merciful.
Abdel Rahman, a 65 year old driver, after leaving the Rashid mosque commented:
"No more Saddam, and that's very good. But it seems we have no future now".
-"Because of the thieves?"
-"Those are our thieves. I mean the Americans".
Anarchy and revenge
If things continue this way, and the Americans don't impose control, the number of dead will grow and anarchy will take its grip in a city that was craddle to civilization and no one respects any more.
Small clusters of Iraqi resistance remain, but the common citizen is living in the euphoria of first felt freedom, after 24 year of ruthless dictatorship. For the moment, that sentiment of happiness and freedom has become a special revenge against Saddam Hussein's regime. Too bad it has also become freedom to loot and to destroy.
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