Intent unclear in Baghdad crackdown on alcohol

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BAGHDAD — It started in the Green Zone, with Iraqi soldiers ordering restaurants to stop serving alcohol and confiscating bottles from politicians at checkpoints.

Then, mysterious signs began appearing across the rest of Baghdad declaring alcohol sinful and warning of damnation for those who drink.

Finally, the crackdown came. Phalanxes of soldiers
and police officers descended on the nightclubs, cabarets and bars that
had proliferated across the capital in the last two years and
symbolized for many a return to normality.

Now Baghdad
is almost dry, for the second time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
But this time the government is enforcing the prohibition, not militias
or insurgents.

“Our new constitution guarantees all freedoms for all Iraqi people,” said Ahmed Jassim Hamza, whose Deluxe nightclub on the Tigris River
was among those raided by soldiers and ordered to close. “But the
political powers in control are Islamic, and they can’t handle social
freedoms such as alcohol because their minds are narrowed by religion.”

The crackdown was headed by the Baghdad
provincial council, which is controlled by Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party. But many suspect al-Maliki himself
played a role in the decision to restrict alcohol, to burnish his
credentials among Islamist voters before national elections in March.

Hamza and several restaurant and liquor store owners
said police told them they were acting “on the orders of the prime
minister’s office.”

“It is Maliki who is doing this,” said Mithal Alusi,
an independent Sunni Arab lawmaker with an acknowledged fondness for
good wine. He questions the Shiite Muslim leader’s much-touted
reinvention as a secularist at the head of his new State of Law
coalition, even while continuing to lead an Islamist party.

“We are not that far away from having a Taliban
state in this country,” he said. “We are really driving in two
different directions: One is toward a beautiful democracy and the other
is toward the Taliban parties who are trying to turn us into an Islamic
state.”

Baghdad
officials with al-Maliki’s party say they are acting only to impose
order on a situation that had spun out of control in enforcing a liquor
law that has been on the books since 1994. Introduced after Saddam Hussein embarked on a campaign of religiosity, it restricts sales of alcohol to licensed stores and a few private clubs and hotels.

On the eve of the regime’s fall, 55 businesses had licenses to sell alcohol, Baghdad provincial council chief Kamal Zaidi said. Islamist militias and insurgents soon closed them, blowing up liquor stores and intimidating merchants.

With the restoration of a measure of security in
2007, alcohol returned, and by late last year more than 350 shops, bars
and clubs serving liquor had opened, almost all without permission,
Zaidi said.

“This is too much for the social fabric of Baghdad.
In no country is such chaos allowed,” Zaidi said. “It’s not an issue of
whether I personally want to ban alcohol. We don’t have laws on the
basis of wish. Our concern is dealing with those who do anything to
violate the freedoms of others, their customs and traditions.”

Even for many secular Baghdad
residents, the expansion of their city’s night life had gone too far.
In the upscale neighborhood of Arasat, nearly a dozen clubs had opened
in recent months, transforming the sedate area into a throbbing
nighttime hot spot.

Crowds of young men would descend noisily on the
streets, swigging from bottles, urinating on the walls of homes,
cavorting with women and getting into fights, residents complain. Many
of the clubs were thinly disguised venues for prostitution, and men who
live in the area said they were afraid to allow their female relatives
to go out after dark.

“This is a family area,” said Ali Kadhim,
who lives next to one of the clubs and welcomed their closure, even
though he says he would not support a ban on alcohol. “It was too much.
It was abnormal.”

Whether the crackdown is merely an attempt to impose
order or the beginning of a broader effort by Islamists to outlaw
drinking altogether is unclear. On one Baghdad street, liquor stores
have reopened without incident. Zaidi said licensed stores would be
allowed to open but that all clubs and bars will remain closed.

When Saad Khalaf recently tried to
reopen his store — which has a valid license prominently displayed next
to a poster of a bikini-clad blond — police stormed in and beat him
with rifle butts, leaving him with bruises and cuts all over his body.

“This is worse than it was under the militias,” he
said. “At least with the militias you could talk to them, you could
bribe them.”

Several bar and restaurant owners, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, said they had
been bribing the police all along but that the bribes had stopped
working.

“Now they take the money, but still they shut you
down,” said the owner of one restaurant who has been serving alcohol
since the 1980s.

The upcoming elections may help decide the fate of liquor in Baghdad. A strong showing for Islamist parties could give momentum to those who would like to ban alcohol, said Mohammed Rubaie, a Baghdad council representative with a secular party.

“But I don’t think it would be possible,” Rubaie said. “Iraq is not an extremist society. It is neither very religious nor very liberal.”

Meanwhile, people who drink are chafing.

“The mosques are all still open and anyone who wants
can go and pray, so why can’t the bars also be open?” said retired army
officer Hamza Khafajee, who used to sip whiskey in a bar with his
friends every night but now stays home and hasn’t had a drink in nearly
a month.

“The Iraqi people lived in agony for far too long.
We should be allowed a little comfort and relaxation,” he grumbled.
“It’s not asking for much.”

(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

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