IRAQ: Despite the pro-Palestinian rhetoric of the Saddam years, Iraqis are now showing their true feelings towards Palestinian refugees, reports Lara Marlowe.
The US invasion of Iraq has not been kind to Ramziyah Amin (39). Like the rest of Iraq's small Palestinian community, her parents fled the region around Haifa, now northern Israel, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
She was born in Iraq, studied economics at Baghdad University and married Nasser Farid, a labourer. They had four children, and until May lived in a small apartment.
"It was only one room," Mrs Amin says. "But I felt safer with walls around me."
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Baghdad property owners have expelled 551 Palestinian families - more than 3,000 men women and children - in a burst of greed and vengeance for the pro-Palestinian rhetoric of the Saddam years. Mrs Amin's landlord raised their rent from 20,000 Iraqi dinars (about €8.50) to 50,000, and they could not pay it. PLO officials say that 1,500 more families have been told to leave their dwellings. Fifty-five years after their first exile, these refugees again find themselves in tents in a hot, fly-infested camp where the only amenities are communal toilets built by the United Arab Emirates. "We're looking after ourselves," Mrs Amin says as she cooks potatoes. "No one helps us."
There are just a few bedrolls and blankets in the tent, so nine year-old Basma doesn't have to look hard to find the souvenir X-ray of her right arm with an American bullet in it. The child was playing in the street on September 9th when US troops opened fire; no one knows at what.
There is a constant resonance, almost daily reminders, that events in Iraq and Palestine, the two Arab lands under military occupation, are somehow linked. The first victim of the US bombardment of Iraq in March was a Palestinian taxi driver on the Amman to Baghdad highway, Ahmad al-Baz. He was buried at al-Ghazali cemetery in Baghdad. And though it is surely a coincidence, the worst attacks against US forces in the Iraqi capital take place on a dusty boulevard called Palestine Street.
At the political science department of Baghdad University, Prof Amer Hassan Fayad stresses that the US occupation of Iraq freed the country from Saddam Hussein.
"In Palestine, it is occupation without liberation. But US forces here and Israeli forces there are two faces of the same coin," he says. Some US tactics - closing roads, forcing men to undress at check-points, the hand-cuffing and hooding of detainees - mimic Israeli treatment of Palestinians. And Palestinians here admit, the suicide bombings in Israel have been imitated by Iraqis fighting US forces.
Iraqi-Palestinian relations have been closer than most Arab friendships. In the 1948 war, Abdel-Karim Qassim, later to become Iraq's Prime Minister, defended the West Bank town of Jenin. It is because the Iraqis fought fiercely that Jenin is today not part of Israel proper. But years later, the same Qassim allegedly said it was up to Palestinians to liberate their country. Saddam, like all Arab dictators, exploited the Palestinian cause to divert attention from the lack of freedom at home. Six months after his regime fell, Iraqis and Palestinians tell different versions of the same recent history.
"The previous regime insulted Iraqis," says Prof Jaber Habib, also a member of the political science faculty.
"Saddam gave Palestinians houses when there were Iraqis without houses. He brought people wounded in the intifada to Baghdad for the best medical treatment, when Iraqis were dying because of sanctions. We resented it."
He and Prof Fayad agree that Iraqis are too preoccupied with their own problems to feel much sympathy for Palestinians.
Mr Anwar al-Sheikh is the deputy leader of the PLO in Iraq. His boss, Mr Abul Abbas, was arrested by US troops on April 12th for his role in the hijacking of the Achille Lauro liner, in which an elderly American was killed.
Yet Mr Abbas had made peace with Israel at the time of the Oslo Accords and had even visited Israel and the Occupied Territories. The Americans arrested the Palestinian ambassador, consul and commercial attaché when they ransacked the PLO's Baghdad embassy. In all 38 Palestinians are still detained by US forces, Mr al-Sheikh says.
The notion that Palestinians led a privileged existence under Saddam "came with Iraqi political forces on the back of US tanks", Mr al-Sheikh says.
"They misrepresented the truth, claiming that Saddam was good to us and took care of us and gave us property. It's not true." Until 2002, he notes, Iraqi law did not allow Palestinians to own cars, houses, businesses or factories.
"They were not allowed to work in the foreign, oil or interior ministries. They could not open a bank account. Iraqis had to obtain government approval to marry Palestinians."
The political scientists and Mr al-Sheikh do not even agree on the number of Palestinians here. The former estimated their strength at several hundred thousand. They are only 30,000 Mr al-Sheikh says.
Iraqis also resent the cheques that Saddam sent to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. This financial support enabled Israel and the US to further demonise both countries. Yet Mr al-Sheikh bridles at the suggestion that Saddam hurt the Palestinians more than he helped them.
"Socially, politically, economically in Iraq, we were treated badly," he says. "But he stood up to Israel, and he was the only Arab leader who did so. We were clapping when he fired Scuds at Israel [in 1991]. We applauded him, though his laws oppressed us. Many years have passed since an Arab leader talked the way Saddam did. And the Palestinians were suffering." But Mr al-Sheikh would rather talk about the present. "The illegality of the US invasion is more important than the way Saddam treated Palestinians," he says.
In the build-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration claimed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would make it easier to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chastened by Saddam's example, the argument went, Palestinians would fall into line.
But Israel is farther away from making peace with the Arabs than ever. "The US says it wants democracy and to fight terrorism," says Prof Habib. "If they're serious, they have to start with the Palestinian question. If the Americans would force the Israelis to leave the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it would make [the occupation of] Iraq much easier for them."
"The American mentality is not to ask why there are terrorists," says Prof Fayad. "Terrorism is crime, and every crime has three elements: a motive, the tools and the result. The US only cares about the tools and the result. When they came to Iraq, they tried to deal with one motive - dictators. But injustice to the Palestinians is also a motive and they don't address it."
Nor will they, in Mr al-Sheikh's opinion. "The main thing for the Americans is making the Arabs weak and making Israel the most powerful country in the Middle East," he says. "Since September 11th, they've acted like mad dogs, intervening all over the world. They're hungry to start wars with Syria and Iran now."
Back in her hot tent in Haifa refugee camp, Ramziyah Amin is resigned to the chaos in Iraq and the region. "God decides," she says. "I cannot blame anyone. I lost all hope of seeing Palestine a long time ago."