IRAQ:Iraq's new uneducated middle class is reflected in parliament's make-up, writes Michael Jansen
Almost four years after the fall of the Baathist regime, Baghdad has become a city of terror. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, nurses, teachers and most thinkers, painters, poets and musicians have left.
Salah Ayoubi, a Sunni intellectual who, fearing for his safety, prefers to use a pseudonym, his Shia wife, a secondary school teacher, and their three children are typical middle-class refugees.
They lived in a modern house in the Mansour diplomatic quarter, now a Shia-Sunni battleground. Ayoubi lost his job, his wife was afraid to go to work, their eldest son could not attend university, and they could not collect rent from flats in a building they own, their remaining source of income.
But they did not join the exodus into exile until last July when they received an envelope containing a note giving them 48 hours to leave, and a live bullet.
"We sold everything, our three cars, the paintings and antiques in my collection, and my wife's gold for a quarter of their value and left," Ayoubi said.
"The situation was worse than when I was serving in the front line during the Iran-Iraq war."
They spent three months in Jordan before moving to troubled Beirut. Ayoubi said , with a shrug: "We jumped out of the fire into the frying pan." But they feel safe.
The departure of tens of thousands of families like the Ayoubis, and population shifts from quarter to quarter, are changing the character of Baghdad. Ayoubi said only 20 per cent of residents remain in the city's main mixed middle-class districts. The city is becoming a warring collection of sectarian neighbourhoods.
Faleh Abdel Jabbar, head of the Beirut-based Iraqi Institute for Strategic Studies, which conducts surveys in Iraq, said only half of Baghdad's pre-war upper and middle class remains. Before the war, of the 5.5 million to 6 million people living in Baghdad, 54 per cent belonged to the middle class: 90 per cent were salaried and 10 per cent lived off property or business. The upper middle class accounted for 1 per cent. Thirty-eight per cent were working class.
Since the war the population of the city has risen to about 7 million, due to an influx of Iraqis from Iran and marginalised people from elsewhere.
The composition of the middle class has changed because of the inclusion of less well-educated people in its ranking. Its percentage in the population has risen to 57 per cent: 40 per cent are in business or own property while 60 per cent are salaried. Many people get civil service jobs, for which they are unqualified, because of party or militia connections. Performance is declining.
"There are 40 members [ in the 275-seat parliament] who do not have the educational qualifica- tion of a secondary school leaving certificate and have forged this document," Dr Abdel Jabbar said. "Some speak Arabic very poorly. The centrally controlled economy of the socialist Baath party has been transformed into a precapitalist economy - a form of 'mafia capitalism' or pillage based on threat - and characterised by rampant corruption.
"Iraq's civil war is in Baghdad, for Baghdad, and against Baghdad."
It is a class war of the marginalised against the remnants of the large educated elite, said Dr Abdel Jabbar. "The marginalised follow fundamentalist clerics and militia commanders who dominate the Iraqi political scene. They care nothing for the country, its long history and great culture. They care only for power.
"The state, the institutions and structures which used to hold it together, and the rule of law, are now absent."