What the Iraqis know of current events ...

[smee2]

My contact in the middle east is a former student, an Egyptian, who came to Canada to do his post graduate degree work at the University of British Columbia. After his work here was finished he got a job with IBM working in the Middle East. He travels from country to country. We speak on the phone occasionally, as I do with his father and mother who became long distance friends. And we keep in touch on the computer also.

According to him the local Iraq people are divided up into very clearly defined classes, or levels. Like a caste system I think. There are two kinds of poor, the ones who can read and the ones who cannot. Those who can are in the majority and do the reading of news to the others. Usually in a family that is a widow with children, perhaps one or more of the children will read, or are learning to now. There is also an attempt at programs to teach the widows to read and do numbers. These people are not well linformed about what is happening in their own country. They do not have access to information about the budget, the currency value, or the RV. They only know that the cost of bread and milk has gone up, and can only see it getting worse.

The poor who do read, know much more, but tend to read and believe the small news notices printed up on copiers and distributed by hand. Some of these are printed on the blank side of paper that has something else printed on it on the other side. It is mostly someones version of events, very unreliable, much like our rumour section.And again these people are not being educated or informed about what is really happening in their own country. It would seem the most reliable source of information for this class of people is when someone from a somewhat better class, who has access to news, comes into the area to visit family or friends at the local coffee shop and gossip. Word of mouth news, reliable?

Then comes the middle class, of which there isn't much. They read the same news releases we do and shake their heads at the contridictions, changes in plans, postponements,outright cancellations of meetings or progress, and are confused, ticked off, and leaning toward supporting the poor who usually start the uprising. In fact this time, as in Egypt, the protestations are being started by people considerably higher up in the food chain than those on the bottom.

Then, he says, you have the upper class, what we would consider the wealthy. Anyone in authority, taking pay from the government, from members of parliament to government paid security guards and teachers and doctors ... most of the professions ... are considered upper class, rich. And, he says, most of them are just that, very well off. There is very little blurring of the lines and the rich keep getting richer and distancing themselves from the middle class and certainly from the poor.

I spoke with Tarek a few days ago and he said that he has been into and out of Iraq and Iran and Egypt and Jordan in the last couple of weeks and he sees a change in attitude of the wealthy people, the upper class. In all those countries they seem to be fearful that the lower common people could actually cause them harm in some way. They feel entitled to what they have, until someone plants a firecracker on their door and makes it go pop, knowing it could have been a bomb.

So, Tarek thinks the protests are getting through to people in the upper echelons, and leaders are getting the message and for their own good have to start doing something for the good of the people. He laughs about Iraq making this shift in consciousness because he feels they are not really aware of what it will take and have not really resolved within themselves that they must change to survive, themselves and their country.

smee2