Searching for 'normal life' in old Baghdad

Diners can choose their own carp for dinner at Baghdad's al-Wiyah club

By Gabriel Gatehouse BBC News, Baghdad

Baghdad is much less violent than it was five years ago, but today's version of "normality" bears no comparison to the city's heyday in the 60s and 70s, before Saddam Hussein took power.

The first thing most people ask me when I tell them I live and work in Baghdad is: "What's it like?"

A perfectly natural question, for sure, but one I find difficult to answer.

The litany of Iraq's current problems is too long to list, but it starts with virtually non-existent basic services like electricity supply, and ends with the continuing violence which claims the lives of hundreds of Iraqis every month.

"But isn't life getting back to normal?" they ask. "Aren't things getting better?"

That is true, they are. Or at least, things are not nearly as bad as they were two or three years ago.

But is Baghdad a city where one can now lead what might conceivably be termed a "normal life"?

Well, there is one small corner of the capital where they are trying very hard.

Old Baghdad

If you climb up on top of the blast walls that surround the BBC compound and negotiate your way past the guards armed with Kalashnikov rifles and around the coils of barbed wire, you will come to a little wooden stepladder.

At the bottom is a warren of narrow concrete alleyways, and yet more blast walls.

And behind one of those walls, a short walk away, there lies hidden a small oasis of the old Baghdad, a place where things are, more or less, the way they used to be.

Barbed wire, guards and blast walls are part of everyday life

This is the al-Wiyah club.

The other night some Iraqi friends and I went to the club for dinner. We sat at a table towards the back of the large garden.

Children played on the well-watered lawn, families and groups of friends sat on plastic chairs or swing-benches, the men and women together, smoking nargileh (hookah pipes with fruit-scented tobacco) and drinking tea, or even something stronger.

The first thing to do was to select our carp. Right at the back there was a roaring charcoal fire, and next to it a tank full of enormous fish.

No, these had not been caught in the sewage-filled Tigris, a man in a turban assured me, they were farmed.

He scooped our chosen carp out with his hands and, with a broad grin gave its gaping mouth a kiss of death, before whacking it over the head with his large knife, and slicing it open length-ways.

Halcyon days

While we waited for our dinner, the Baghdad speciality mazgouf, we sat down with a drink and a nargileh.

Mustafa, an engineer in his 40s, had brought along some old footage, reels of family film taken in the late 60s and he 70s.

Life back then seemed to have consisted of an endless series of birthday parties, weekend excursions and holidays abroad.

Men and women, smartly dressed in the latest European and American fashions, were joking, singing, dancing together, heads uncovered, and women's skirts firmly above the knee.

This was Iraq in its heyday, a country that was relatively liberal, prosperous and well-educated. It looked like a carefree existence. Life, Mustafa said, was quite literally a picnic.

People come here to drink and to eat - to forget what's outside these walls, the bombs and the killings Al-Wiyah club manager

Everyone round the table agreed that three historical events had killed off what now seems a charmed way of life.

The first was the rise to power of Saddam Hussein and the outbreak of war with Iran in 1980.

The second was the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the crippling economic sanctions that followed.

But by far the biggest and most shattering change came in 2003, with the American and British invasion, which plunged the country into unspeakable violence.

At least under Saddam Hussein, Mustafa said, Iraq was the safest country on earth.

As we waited for our food, the garden suddenly went dark, briefly, as the city's power-supply gave out, and the rumble of a dozen generators kicked in.

Just then a pair of American helicopters hovered overhead - a sound that provides the quintessential accompaniment to life in Baghdad today.

The carp arrived, and we all tucked in, using our hands to scoop up the salty warm fish in big chunks of flatbread.

'Losing hope'

Then the manager stopped by for a chat. He told me that the club had been open continuously for more than 85 years.

"But since 2003, we're all scared," he said. "People come here to drink and to eat - to forget what's outside these walls, the bombs and the killings."

"So is this normal life?" I asked him. He shrugged. Another friend chipped in.

"The problem is," he said, "people have lost hope that things will change. So we are all trying to get used to the way things are now."

We turned back to Mustafa's old film.

Grainy footage showed a young girl sitting on a dining table surrounded by beaming friends and family.

There was a birthday cake with three candles, and the girl was trying, and failing, to blow them out, much to the amusement of the onlookers. Suddenly, the screen went dark.

Mustafa roared with laughter. "Even back then there were power cuts," he said.

Some things, at least, really have not changed.

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