Virtual escape
Amidst the rubble of the Anglo-American invasion, the Internet arrives to reopen the connection between this once cultural capital and the world. Michael Jansen reports from Baghdad
Post-war Baghdad remains a city of 1001 tales. Today's story worthy of Sheherezade concerns a boxed jinn that enables Iraqis to communicate, whether they are on opposite sides of capital or on the other side of the globe. This not-so-beguiling but omnipresent spirit is the Internet, which is being re-established to connect Iraqis to a world that has fixed its attention on their country since the major debates about an American-led war began about a year ago.
The other day two young men sitting next to me in an Internet café were conducting a lengthy chat session with Iraqi friends in China. On the monitor flickered their dark, blurred images, clinching the personal connection. This connection would probably not have been possible until very recently.
During the war and the weeks which immediately followed, Thuraya satellite phones provided Iraqis with a problematic replacement for their bombed, looted and arson-devastated telephone network. Shops selling, servicing and renting time on Thuraya phones sprouted like mushrooms along the main thoroughfares in central Baghdad. In many districts enterprising youngsters stood on street corners holding up the distinctive Thuraya handsets and hawking a minute of conversation for 2,000-3,000 dinars ($1.00-1.50, depending on wildly fluctuating exchange rates). Businessmen, journalists and aid workers travelled round the city gripping Thuraya sets on the satellite-activated mode to catch calls. Fashionable young women, some in trendy coloured headscarves, stood outside homes and shops chatting with their friends.
The dash outside to answer a Thuraya summons became a regular feature of everyday life for those who could afford to have personal phones. But as Baghdad's long hot summer sent the temperature soaring to 50 degrees Celsius, firms, hotels and shops installed Thurayas in special cradles with external satellite antennas for use indoors. With these accessories Thuraya become almost as good as ordinary phones, depending on whether or not the satellite was working.
Just when Thuraya became well established on the Iraqi scene, however, satellite Internet connections took over as the most common form of communication. Internet cafés and centres have been opening at the rate of one or two a week at the heart of the city and its more prosperous outlying quarters, like Mansur. The cost for an hour on the net ranges from 2,500-3,000 dinars ($1.50-1.75).
Before the war, government-run Internet centres, operating on ordinary phone lines, charged 1,000 dinars to surf the net and 500 dinars for each e- mail. In the run-up to the war, Iraqis could read largely uncensored newspapers and other material on the net but could not receive e-mails from abroad. The Ba'athist security apparatus made e- mail servers inaccessible because US intelligence agencies were said to be bombarding Iraqi military officers with e-mails calling on them to defect or desert. Today, no sites are banned, Iraqis are free to send and receive e-mail, free to converse as they wish on the net. For the time being, there is freedom for all who want to set up Internet centres and cafés. But this may not last for long.
Susan Hamrock, senior US adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, told Al-Ahram Weekly that there are plans to regulate Internet centres and to establish officially-sponsored facilities.
One of the most heavily frequented Internet centres, known as "Karada Barra" or "Out of Karada", is located on the avenue nicknamed "Electronics Street" -- due to the dense concentration of computer and components shops. Karada Barra has 50 computers, each housed in a booth enclosed in brown and cream cloth screens for privacy. Beyond conventional Internet services, all computers are fitted with headsets and phones for inexpensive conversation over the net. Those who have not mastered the mechanics of World Wide Web (WWW) surfing receive instructions from staff or friends.
Customers have various reasons for consulting the jinn of the net. Men, women and children converse with relatives and friends abroad. Businessmen send off bursts of e-mails to clients and suppliers or arrange appointments. Students log onto Google and Yahoo in search of answers to questions put by teachers and professors. Men with money to waste cruise pornographic sites, picking up electronic viruses which have to be swept regularly from computers.
Children, freed temporarily from imprisonment in their homes, play computer games.
Air conditioned Internet cafés serving up the WWW, cold drinks, tea and coffee to both men and women have, in some neighbourhoods, supplanted traditional male-only coffee houses, not usually equipped with cooling systems. The Internet centre is a place where men and women meet on equal terms. A session on the net offers escape from daily trials and tribulations as well as an opportunity to dress up and leave home for an hour or two.
Breeding the reassurance afforded by contact with others, the Internet café is a place to meet friends, a place where Iraqis can maintain a degree of normalcy in an occupied city of five million people, where most fear "Ali Babas" and suffer from power outages, fuel shortages and unemployment.
Unfortunately, the services at satellite net centres and cafés are disrupted frequently by electricity cuts, failing generators and slow or broken connections with distant providers in Kuwait, the Gulf or Europe. When the contact falters, clients lean back in their chairs and stare glassy eyed at the screens in front of them, bitter over the blow they have been dealt, waiting, hoping that the young geniuses operating the master computer will reconnect once again soon. Often the provider does not oblige. Customers hand in their time slips, pay their dues and go on search of a working connection, braving the devastating heat, "Ali Babas", US checkpoints, and resistance fighters to once again log onto the "world-wide-escape".
