More Iraqi kids forced to work

By BORZOU DARAGAHI
Newhouse News Service

WATHIQ KHUZAIE / GETTY IMAGES Two Iraqi boys sell cigarettes in Baghdad, Iraq. War and poverty pushed large numbers of Iraqi children out of school and into work to support their families.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Everyone in the neighborhood knows little Mohammad, the short, sunburned boy in a worn track suit who runs the sidewalk knickknack stand in the Jaderiah district of Baghdad. To them he's the polite kid who sells cigarettes, packs of stale gum and Iraqi-made soft drinks to passing drivers and pedestrians.

But they may not know that Mohammad Hamid, 13, whose labors earn him $2 a day, harbors a dream.

"I want to be a doctor when I grow up," he says. "And I'm capable of it."

Before he joins the Iraqi capital's hardscrabble army of working kids each afternoon, Mohammad plays the model student at his middle school, worrying about maintaining his grades and trying to make a favorable impression on the other kids despite his modest clothes.

"When there are no customers, I study," says Mohammad, who uses the money he makes to help support his extended family of 11. "We're poor. My parents asked me to go to work and school at the same time. Sometimes I feel ashamed that I have to work. But I also feel proud that I'm helping my family."

Once home to one of the Arab world's most middle-class societies, Iraq has been ground into poverty by decades of political trouble. The country's successive wars and internal violence have killed off many breadwinners, leaving widowed mothers and orphaned children.

Woes predate invasion

Iraq's child-labor woes predate the U.S.-led invasion of last year. Indeed, just before the war, the White House cited "instances of forced labor" among children and "military training camps for children" as one of its top 10 reasons for deposing Saddam Hussein.

But if anything, life amid the violence and instability of occupation has become even more grueling and dangerous for Iraq's youngest.
 
"The situation was better before the war," said Ibrahim Nimat, an official at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. "There is no support for some families and the absence of steady income is causing a loosening of the family. They push their children to work selling petrol or cigarettes. This used to happen before, but never to this extent."

Thanks to a food-rationing program begun in the late 1990s, almost all Iraqi families receive a monthly allowance of rice, cooking oil, salt, sugar and other basic food needs.

But years of United Nations-imposed sanctions, booming rents and postwar inflation have driven even well-to-do families into poverty and forced many of their youngest members into the work world.

There they face a variety of risks and challenges.

One of Mohammad's best friends, a fellow cigarette vendor, was killed when an insurgent's car bomb blew up last May.

"That was the scariest thing," he recalls. "I was sitting right here at my stand when the explosion happened. I couldn't go back to work for the next three days."

Statistics on child labor are sketchy. The International Labor Organization estimates that 66,000 Iraqi children between the ages of 10 and 14 hold jobs — a reduction from the 74,000 at work in 1995, before the U.N.-monitored rationing program began lifting the lives of some Iraqis out of utter despair.

In a more startling study, conducted by the Children's Parliament on the Right to Education, one in four Iraqi children between the ages of 6 and 12 were found not to be enrolled in school, nearly four times the average in the wider Arab world.

Iraq's child laborers lead quietly stoic lives. Old before their time, they are in constant danger of exploitation, exposed to all manner of threats on the capital's increasingly mean streets.

In theory, Iraq has some of the most progressive child-labor rules in the region. Iraqi law bars children under 15 from working and demands strict worker-safety conditions for those 15 and over. By law, working children must receive the same rights and benefits as adults, as well as regular health checkups. They must draw at least one-third of an adult salary and are barred from working more than seven hours a day, says labor ministry official Nimat.

But in practice, few abide by such regulations.

"Nobody obeys the law," Nimat says.

Unlike Mohammad, many of Iraq's children forgo school for work.

Mohamed Abdul-Wahab, 15, works at the Sheik Omar car-mechanic shop on Palestine Street. He says he quit school when teachers began demanding money from parents for teaching their kids. "Work is better," he says through rotting teeth. "As long as I know how to read and write, that's all I need."

But like many of Iraq's child laborers, his tough-guy demeanor masks real anguish over lowered expectations and dashed dreams. He works 7-1/2-hour shifts six days a week for about $10 a week in pay and tips. And after a few minutes of conversation in the noisy, oil-splattered garage, the skinny youth admits he'd rather still be in school.

Support for the family

Ali Munther, 14, works as a waiter at a Palestine Street restaurant, grinding away from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. for $23 a week, which goes largely to his mother.

His father divorced his mother a year ago and remarried, refusing to pay alimony or child support. Iraqi law-enforcement authorities, shorn of authority and respected by none during the last 18 months of chaos and occupation, have been powerless to make him pay living expenses for his family.

"I get angry because all of the kids my age play," Ali says. In poverty-stricken neighborhoods like Sadr City, home to 2.5 million Iraqi Shiites, the vast majority of children must work, often doing backbreaking manual labor for a few dollars a day.

"Everyone from Sadr City works," says Ahmad Naji al-Rubayee, a car washer who claims he is 15 but looks no older than 10. "No one goes to school."

He earns about $3 a day.

He gives half his income to his parents. Ahmad's face becomes blank when he's asked about his future.

"I've never thought about what I want to do when I grow up."