'Now they have Saddam, let them give us electricity and fuel,' echo Iraqis

Iraq may be oil-rich, but a chronic petrol shortage means people have toqueue for hours or buy from the black market. Michael Jansen reports from Baghdad

At dawn yesterday morning, the day after the capture of Saddam Hussein was announced, Iraqis wishing to drive round their capital hooting horns to celebrate woke to empty tanks in their vehicles. They dragged themselves out of bed, wrapped themselves in coats and scarves and searched for the shortest lines at petrol pumps not yet open.

Thus, on the first day of what my friend Muhammad Ghani, Iraq's greatest living sculptor, calls the "real post-Saddam era", Saddam's seizure meant no instant improvement on the ground. A driver of a European diplomat spoke for most Iraqis when he said: "Now they have Saddam. Let them give us electricity and fuel."

Indeed Iraqis define an optimist as a man who forms a line at a closed petrol station in the hope of securing precious petrol in case there is a delivery.

Electricity is even more erratic than it was a few weeks ago and fuel more scarce. But the fuel shortage is more grating because individuals are personally involved in the quest for petrol and engine and heating oil, while electricity comes and goes at the whim of those running Iraq's ramshackle power stations.

Iraqis cannot understand why a country that has the second largest oil reserves in the world and is exporting an increasing amount of crude cannot get fuel to ordinary citizens. The difficulty is Iraq's inability to refine enough crude to meet rising demand - an estimated 100,000-250,000 vehicles have been imported since the fall of Baghdad on April 9th.

Iraqis rank the lack of petrol and electricity on a par with insecurity. But while some argue that security has improved over the past few weeks, power and fuel supplies have diminished.

Last week, as the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) met in Vienna to discuss levels of crude exports and pricing, Iraq imposed petrol- rationing. Each Iraqi driver is, theoretically, limited to 50 litres at the government price of 20 dinars or one US cent per litre.

However, the only way to secure petrol at the official rate is to queue for hours and hours and hours. Then, perhaps, if the petrol does not run out before they reach the head of the queue, drivers may be able to buy the ration at 20 dinars a litre.

But it could be two or three times that price, depending on the petrol pump they patronise.

While Iraqi oil ministry officials told OPEC that their country's production level had reached two million barrels a day in November and would rise to 2.3 million barrels a day by the end of December, the lines at petrol pumps throughout the country grew and grew and grew.

In Baghdad the average queue wait is 8-12 hours; the line creeps around two sides of one section of the vast Shia cemetery at Najaf where the wait is 36-48 hours; in Mosul, the shortage is more acute than in the capital but less serious than in Najaf. Iraqi crude exports may be 1.7 billion barrels a day but the people of Iraq are starved of all refined products. On the black market they can cost 5-50 times the fixed price.

Blackmarketeers and petrol pump owners who provide them with officially-supplied petrol can be sentenced to long prison terms, but the gain is so great they they are ready to be locked up to make a profit.

While little boys with plastic jerry cans have been swept from main city streets, they lurk down side roads and in empty lots. Men with barrels of petrol and oil sell it from the verges of highways in the countryside in full view of police patrolling in their vehicles. They are not prepared to risk life and limb by taking on black market dealers or motorists desperate for an illicit fuel fix.

The most surprising aspect of the petrol line wait is the extraordinary patience of normally impatient Iraqis. Yesterday as we headed out to meetings in the Mansur district, we passed at least half a dozen lines stretching for three or four kilometres, lines broken at driveways and the entrances to streets. Double lines and single lines. At the head of a line on Saadoun Street, three men were dancing the twist, flinging their arms out in wild abandon, their mates laughing and drumming on the roof of a car.

Now that Iraq's long hot summer is over and the weather is cool and fresh, the petrol line wait has become less fraught and tense, a social occasion which some outgoing Iraqis might even miss when, once again, enough petrol begins to flow into neighbourhood pumps to slake the thirst of Iraq's millions of ever- thirsty vehicles.