Iraq Solidarity Project member Ehab Lotayef reports from Baghdad on how some Iraqis are taking direct action to secure housing for themselves under the occupation. He sees hope as people struggle and begin to organise themselves to create a future out of the devastation.

Baghdad, December 15, 2003. We had left the car and started walking in the barricaded Ministry of Interior road. All of a sudden we heard gunshots. Then heavier gunshots. A group of youth passed us by and one of them said, "Saddam," and gestured with his hands what seemed to mean, handcuffs.

We were on that street responding to an invitation by one of the residents of the "Department of Military Surveillance" we met downtown a couple of days earlier. He is one of many squatters, who after the army deserted its buildings all over Baghdad, and probably many other places in Iraq, took refuge in those buildings with their families. Some of them lost their source of income after the invasion and couldn't pay their rent anymore, wherever they lived, others were living in very cramped conditions that these buildings provided a far better residences than where they were before, while a few were homeless, living under bridges or in containers before they moved to this place.

It took us and the squatters a while to get over the news of capturing Saddam, and get to what we were there for: seeing their living conditions and knowing more about their past, their current needs and their hopes for the future.

The situation is difficult to understand without knowing about the socio-economic changes that happened in Iraqi over the past 30 years. In the 1960s Iraqis seemed to have high hopes for a bright future and expectations of economic prosperity. The youth dreamed of owning homes and cars. As the years passed, war after war then sanctions that seemed to be getting tougher by the day, the dreams never materialized. But those dreams didn't disappear either. So, some of the squatters consider that it is their right to own a part of the "new free Iraq". Most of them probably know that they will not be in these buildings forever (in some estimates there are hundreds of such buildings and army camps occupied by squatter all over Iraq), but they want to be secured against sudden evacuation They insist that they won't leave without getting promises of replacement housing by the government. Yet, while they are there, they have urgent needs.

Food doesn't seem to be a problem, but heat does. All these make shift living quarters are created from pieces of old furniture and sheets of metal and wood. There are no doors and no windows. Most of these buildings were looted long before the squatters moved in. The squatters need heaters and blankets more than anything else.

As Iraqis feel that the coalition, or the US, used WMD and Saddam as excuses to take over their recourses, the squatters feel that many political parties and NGOs use them and their suffering to gain popularity and raise funds they only partially benefit from.

The squatters have another problem, sanitation. Most of the created units have no sewage due to the deign of the building. I overheard them talking about designing and building a sewage system for themselves. I don't know how far such plan will go.

The most encouraging part of this whole experience is that in this community, and as I hear in all similar ones around the country, the squatters elected a coordinator to organize their new society, its needs and plans. Maybe right here a new Iraq is being built, from the ground up.

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Ehab Lotayef, a Montreal poet and a computer engineer at McGill University was in Iraq with the Iraq Solidarity Project during the month of December. The Iraq Solidarity Project (ISP) is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to
help provide international monitoring of occupation forces and the corporate reconstruction of Iraq and protective accompaniment to Iraqis under the occupation. To join ISP listserv, send a blank email to psi-...@lists.riseup.net. For more about ISP, p...@riseup.net.