Weapons of class destruction

12 years of UN sanctions have taken their toll on Iraq's "dispossessed" middle class, writes Rory McCarthy

Adnan Hadad keeps his memories in a creased brown envelope in a fridge in the corner of the shabby cafe he now runs in one of Baghdad's squalid industrial districts.

Inside the envelope are the tenderly preserved newspaper reviews and programme notes from the dozens of plays he once starred in as one of Baghdad's leading actors.

When the UN imposed stiff sanctions on Iraq in August 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the Iraqi theatre industry promptly went out of business.

No longer could the government afford to pay Mr Hadad's salary or stage the Shakespeare, Chekhov and Moliere plays in which over the previous 30 years he had made his name. So Mr Hadad, now 56, gave up acting, sold his house and his car and opened a cafe.

"For the past 12 years I have felt such profound sorrow. I used to have a good salary and a proud job, now I work only to live. I barely have enough to survive," he said.

When the UN sanctions were first introduced 12 years ago they were intended to force President Saddam to pull back his troops from Kuwait, to pay reparations and return captured prisoners to Kuwait and to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction.

They had a dramatic and immediate effect on a country used to £8.8bn in annual oil revenue. Over the next five years Iraq plummeted back down the development scale. The health and education system crumbled. Water provision and sanitation dried up and child mortality soared.

In 1996 the Oil for Food agreement allowed Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil to buy strictly monitored humanitarian and medical provisions. The decline in health, water and sanitation conditions has been slowly halted. But Iraq's large, well-educated and affluent middle class has been so deeply eroded it has never recovered.

"The sanctions damaged the culture of Iraq. It took away our contact with the outside world," said Mr Hadad. "The whole of our society has been affected." In the early 1990s across Iraq bright young students dropped out of universities to find work as taxi drivers or waiters. Teachers and doctors are now paid barely dollars 10 a month. Most have given up work.

Every Friday off Baghdad's crowded Rashid Street academics bring vast piles of books from their private libraries at home to sell off for a handful of dinars. Mohammad Fakhary, 40, who has degrees in English literature and theatre studies, gave up his job as a teacher in 1990 when the sanctions were imposed. He bought a small shop and started selling off his book collection.

"The ones I found hardest to part with were my collection of Dostoyevsky and a collection of Shakespeare. It makes me very sad to see these books being sold," he said. Many others have since come to him to sell their book collections.

"Most people's lives have suffered from the sanctions. We feel like it is our society that has been destroyed," he said. "We have been humiliated."

There is a small, powerful elite that has prospered from black market trading despite the sanctions, importing expensive cars, designer clothes and Cuban cigars. More honest businessmen have struggled to stay afloat. Because of Iraq's isolation on the world stage few businesses are willing to deal directly with Iraqi businessmen.

Faris El-Hadi sells imported electronic goods and is trying to open a peanut-processing factory in Iraq. He has to do most of his business through an expensive mediator in neighbouring Jordan. Foreign firms are reluctant to allow him credit lines so he pays upfront for his products, often months before they arrive. Even when they reach the market he faces competition from a flourishing second-hand market fuelled by middle class Iraqis selling off their most expensive possessions.

"It is very difficult for us to compete. Now even the average Iraqi cannot afford to buy the products we are selling," said Mr El-Hadi. "The middle class has disappeared. Most people find it difficult to make ends meet."

Aid workers are now concerned the vast majority of the Iraqi population is much more vulnerable to a potential conflict than it was before the Gulf War in 1991. Many Iraqis rely on cheap government rations every month but their diets are limited. If there is an attack Iraq's limited electricity supply will almost certainly grind to a halt, affecting water and sanitation plants.

"Immunity levels are very low. The rations may stop if the government is unable to function. A war will have a devastating effect. There is no cushion for the Iraqi population," said Margaret Hassan, a Briton who has lived in Iraq for nearly 30 years and who now runs the office of Care International, one of the few aid agencies operating in the country.

"People at the moment are not moving forward, they are just marking time. They are a dispossessed people. It will take at least a generation to get back what they have lost."