BASRA, 14 April 2003 — On a dirty Basra street, Jonny Juba stops cars as they pass through a military checkpoint, scanning identification cards and asking the drivers a couple of questions.
A local policeman, Juba returned to work yesterday for the first time since the Iraq war began. British troops controlling Basra province were eager to get the local forces back up and running, to help train them, and to reassure the population that things are getting back to normal.
“This is the first day we have come back to work,” Juba said, as crowds hovered around the checkpoint to watch the un-uniformed Iraqi policemen working alongside British soldiers in red-feathered berets.
“The police were in their houses, they were scared during the fighting.”
About 300 policemen have volunteered to come back to work, and have started manning the many checkpoints that have sprung up around the ramshackle southern city, Iraq’s second largest. Law and order disintegrated in Basra after the fighting ended. Buildings and vehicles were looted and set on fire, their charred remains now scarring the dusty city.
The streets were less tense yesterday, and British military police patrolling the city said having Iraqi colleagues back on the job could raise the spirits of the population.
British Corporal Cameron Leslie said those willing to return to work would be trained up slowly, given uniforms and vetted to ensure they had no strong links to the ousted Baath leadership.
“There has been no police force for a while, and even then it wasn’t that good, so it’s pretty much anarchy,” Leslie said. “The main thing is to show the public we have got the police back on the streets.”
Now that tensions have abated, people appear to be getting used to the idea that the British Army now controls the city.
Crowds swarmed the crumbling pavements, watching the soldiers move through a town now dotted with collapsed government buildings, their concrete roofs imploded from the bombs dropped by the British as they fought for control. The main concern is clean water. The dirty rivers which flow through the town from the Shatt Al-Arab waterway can still supply the water stations, but electricity is down in many parts of the city and pumps stand inactive.
At a Red Crescent center at the southern end of the city, dozens of people pressed up against the metal gate, waiting for bottles of water which arrived by road from Kuwait.
Staff at the center said clean water had long been a problem in Basra, aggravated by the war but familiar to a community that had always had to buy its drinking water from tankers or shops in the impoverished city.
“It’s a very big problem,” one employee said. “Basically we have had no clean water for a long time. The problem has become bigger because of the war, but did we get clean water before? No. If you wanted clean water you had to buy it.”
It will be a long time before the city is back on its feet. The British say the basic infrastructure is good, but in disrepair after more than a decade of neglect by Baghdad.
The British say they are eager to put Iraqis back in control of their city, but say it will take time to recruit and train new administrators to replace the Baathists.
