- Title: IRAQ: Iraqis eke out living in Baghdad rubbish dump
- Date: 2nd March 2007
- Summary: (MER1) BAGHDAD, IRAQ (FEBRUARY , 2007) (REUTERS) PEOPLE SCAVENGING IN RUBBISH DUMP/LORRY DISCHARGING GARBAGE BOYS AND MEN SEARCHING THROUGH GARBAGE BOYS CARRYING CANVAS SACKS GATHERING NEAR PICKUP TRUCK PEOPLE SEARCHING THROUGH GARBAGE PEOPLE CARRYING CANVAS SACKS PEOPLE SEARCHING THROUGH GARBAGE / SHEEP WOMAN CARRYING SACK ON HER BACK AND PULLING ANOTHER ONE TEENAGE BOY C
- Embargoed: 17th March 2007 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Iraq
- Country: Iraq
- Topics: Social Services / Welfare
- Reuters ID: LVA89LFAREQ8QQ1KC8NQWHMTPLXS
- Story Text: Some increasingly impoverished Iraqis are trying to make a living by scavenging Baghdad's rubbish dumps, while others have made the city's dumps their homes. A report by the United Nations and an Iraqi government agency has found that 5 percent of Iraqis live in extreme poverty, while a third of them were living in poverty. Sitting amid mounds of rotting garbage in a rubbish dump in Baghdad, 13-year-old Huda Hamdan is the human face of a new U.N. report that says a third of war-torn Iraq's 26 million people live in poverty.
The teenager, wearing a black veil, is taking a break from scavenging for aluminium cans and glass bottles that she sells for a few Iraqi dinars. She tries not to gag from the stench of the decomposing household refuse surrounding her.
Hamdan said she and her siblings fled Falluja, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, after a U.S. sniper shot dead her mother, leaving them orphaned. Now they live with her grandparents and uncles in Sadr City.
She and her six brothers and sisters compete with scores of other diggers, many children and women, made homeless by sectarian violence that has forced them to flee their homes and seek refuge in the sprawling Shi'ite slum of Sadr City.
"We are seven and we have no one. My father is dead and we are working in the dumps. We are seven and my little sister can not walk. She crawls. She is disabled. We are working in the dumps. All of my brothers work in the dump except for the little ones. My finger was cut when the door of a minibus was closed on it," said Hamdan, holding up her right hand, she takes off a blue and white woollen glove that helps protect her injured hand against the filth and carefully unwraps a surprisingly clean bandage.
Her little finger was severed by the tailgate of a rubbish truck as scavengers crushed around it, desperate to search it before it dumped its load on to the rubbish heap.
Scores of displaced Shi'ite families have made the rubbish dump their home -- living in unsanitary conditions in tents, crude shacks made from oil cans or squatting in an empty building -- and trying to eke out the barest of livings.
"Our house is built out of cans and tins. I bring dates from the garbage and we eat them. I swear by God, I bring bread from the garbage and eat it. I bring flour from the garbage. I can't buy and I can't afford it," said Umm Ali.
Umm Ali has one dream, which she wished to live and see it comes true.
"I wish I had a house built out of bricks. I wish that my house was built out of bricks (the woman cries and wipes tears with her cloak). My daughter is ashamed to go outside (woman bursts in tears). I have nourished this wish since Saddam Hussein until now. We do not have a house (crying). Our bed and sheets are from the garbage. I collect cotton from garbage to make mattresses and pillows," said Umm Ali.
A recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and an Iraqi government agency found that 5 percent of Iraqis live in extreme poverty, with Baghdad the least deprived area, and the southern provinces the worst.
The report said a third of Iraqis overall were living in poverty. It gave no comparison with previous years.
But the UNDP said the study "showed a deterioration in the living standards of Iraqis" since Iraq was a thriving middle-income country in the 1970s and 80s. Four years of war, following a decade of U.N. sanctions in the 1990s, has paralysed the economy and fuelled soaring unemployment.
"It shows the failure of the state authorities to provide adequate services to the population," UNDP said in a statement that also blamed Western-backed efforts to transform the economy into a free market for "exacerbating deprivation levels".
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqis displaced inside the country, including 425,000 who fled their homes after the bombing of the Samarra shrine in February 2006 unleashed a wave of sectarian violence.
Illness and infections among the diggers are common. Looking around the dump it's not hard to see why. Men, women and children, their clothes caked in thick grime, wade through fetid pools of water or climb mountains of garbage, poking through the rubbish with long, curved metal rods to hook the cans.
Fifteen-year-old Saif has struck lucky.
"I found this bread in the garbage. We will clean it and then eat it for breakfast. We live in poor conditions, very poor. We come and work here because we do not have work. We have this (pointing to heap of garbage behind) only," he explained.
The plight of Huda, Umm Ali and Saif is the result of a "deeply complex political and security crisis with no quick apparent solution", the UNDP said in its report. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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