The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Author:Rory Stewart [Stewart, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2007-01-31T21:00:00+00:00

JOBS

If one wants to keep up a reputation for generosity one must spend lavishly and ostentatiously . . . You can be much more generous giving away what does not belong to you or your subjects.

—Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 16

The next demonstration at our gate was against the existing employment scheme, theoretically run by the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works but in practice through a tense collaboration between the Prince of the Marshes and the Sadr office. The demonstrators believed that, of the thousands of jobs, only a few hundred actually existed; that the civil servants collected salaries for ghost individuals and the few genuine slots went to their political supporters. This was true. The demonstrators claimed that the Coalition was the only trustworthy body in the province and begged us to start a new scheme and run the whole thing directly. This would test our capacity, take more authority away from the ministry directors, further undermine our successors, and generally run counter to all good development practice. But political unrest was spreading and we needed to calm the streets, create employment, and win back credibility for ourselves so I told the demonstrators that we would announce our plans in a fortnight and produce the first jobs in six weeks. They insisted on a note. I wrote one. Everyone stood up, smiling broadly and shaking my hand; it was as though we had just closed a Wall Street deal.

The province was now waiting for us to deliver. Since all our officers were busy we gave the task to Chris, a forty-five-year-old British major. Chris had never run an organization of this size before and he had only been in Iraq for a few days; he would have to process thousands of applicants and could offer only twenty-five hundred jobs to ten or even fifty times as many unemployed. If the process went wrong or did not produce results within six weeks, we could expect more riots.

Everyone wanted the patronage power over twenty-five hundred families: the tribal sheikhs told us to let the tribes (by which they meant the sheikhs) decide whom to employ; Seyyed Issa, the district council leader from the Marsh Arab area of Beni Hashim, insisted we should leave it to the district councils; and the union of unemployed laborers suggested we choose from the union. The brother of the Prince of the Marshes, the alternative councils, and the Ministry of Municipalities, who were theoretically already controlling seven thousand casual laborers, were furious not to be able to control more.

The work was unskilled, so qualifications were irrelevant, but jobs given to the wrong people would be worse than no jobs at all. If we gave too many jobs to the Albu Muhammad tribe, the Beni Lam would muster; too many jobs in the villages and the urban poor would riot. I therefore proposed that we enter the applicants’ names into a computer and select the workers at random.

We wanted projects that required little equipment. I suggested planting trees but Chris said that there was no irrigation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.