BAGHDAD, 3 January 2003 — Hamid has wasted another day, waiting in a Baghdad square, along with hundreds of other Iraqis, desperate for work.
Professors and engineers toil away as taxi drivers, laborers and street vendors as Iraq’s economy remains stagnant at best, battered by years of war and trade sanctions lifted only in May.
An October survey released by the United Nations and the World Bank put unemployment at around 50 percent. Already high under Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath regime, joblessness has soared to alarming levels, according to various estimates.
Some say it has been aggravated by the US-led coalition’s dissolution of the one-million-strong Iraqi Defense Ministry apparatus, which ranged from state-owned industries to soldiers. “It is hard to make estimates,” said Sobhi Al-Jumaily, an Iraqi Communist Party official.
“The job situation was very bad before due to Saddam’s policy of favoring sectors like the army and also due to the international trade sanctions. But with the fall of the regime, the state has collapsed.”
Hundreds of thousands of former military personnel and civil servants have swelled the ranks of the unemployed, thanks to the “de-Baathification” policy pursued by the US-led occupation administration.
At the “Syndicate of Jobless Iraqis” set up last May, a few dozen people fill up forms every day in the hope of finding work.
But their numbers are dwindling because “they are losing hope,” said Awfi Mazi, a syndicate official.
“We occasionally manage to get them employed as security personnel. It’s probably the only sector that remains buoyant,” he said sarcastically.
“It is difficult to create jobs in these circumstances. Still, authorities ought to take social measures,” said Qassem Hadi, head of the syndicate, which organized several demonstrations last autumn to demand, among others, unemployment benefit of $100 a month.
“We have so much on our hands - the handicapped, the widows, the orphans, the unemployed,” lamented Sami Azara Al-Maajun, Iraq’s interim minister of labor and social affairs. His figures put the jobless at around 20 percent of the workforce — “a legacy of the Baath regime,” he insists, predicting that unemployment would “go down within three to five years as a result of foreign investment and reconstruction.”
Maajun’s ministry has opened six recruitment centers in Baghdad and major cities like Najaf, Arbil and Kirkuk, where job-seekers come to register and fill up forms. Sawsan Mahdi, who oversees the recruitment centers, said the plan was to open 28 such facilities across the country by end June. “We try to employ these people in ministries or in foreign and Arab firms operating in the country. The problem is that many are illiterate and can’t aspire to such jobs,” she said.
The World Bank-UN report stressed the importance of quickly creating jobs, albeit of a short-term nature.
Noting that 72 percent of the Iraqi population is under 25 years of age, the report said this large segment could become a source of instability if unemployment persists, much as it had the potential of boosting economic growth.