Apr. 24, 2003. 01:00 AM
Liberated Baghdad streets awash in booze, smokes

ROSIE DIMANNO

BAGHDAD—As this liberated city gets off its knees, what it seems to crave most is a smoke and a drink.

That must say something — I'm not sure what — about the reawakened appetites of life unrestricted.

The capital is still in need of water and electricity. Little of the promised humanitarian aid has reached Iraqis, which is a disgrace shared equally by American-Anglo authorities and charitable institutions. But the streets of Baghdad are awash in booze and tobacco.

The heart wants what it wants and the body hungers even more.

Two weeks ago, American troops eagerly traded their MREs — Meals Ready to Eat (or, in grunt parlance, Meals Rejected by Ethiopians) — for individual cigarettes, none so coveted as a good old Marlboro, but even the revolting Iraqi brands would do. Nowadays, there's a fag stall of all flavours every 10 metres and almost as many sidewalk vendors of alcohol: Johnnie Walker, Dimple, Bells, Absolut, all $25 (U.S.) a bottle. Suddenly, tubs of ice-cold Heineken and Amstel have appeared, replacing the Turkish-brewed Efes Pilsener that was the suds-of-choice (actually, no choice) in Saddam's hermetically sealed Iraq.

Where did all this contraband come from, almost overnight? But then Iraqis, after 12 years of United Nations-imposed sanctions, have become expert at smuggling and bootlegging. Oil, spirits, what's the dif?

Yet for a Muslim country, ostensibly disapproving of alcohol and tobacco, Iraqis sure do enjoy indulging their vices. Because U.S. troops and foreign reporters are not the only consumers of this stuff. And rare is the Iraqi male, Sunni or Shiite, without a butt between his fingers, even with prayer beads intertwined.

It delights me immeasurably to see so many Muslims enjoying the secular life. It's humanizing, and rather ecumenical in its way, for the practitioners of this self-consciously pious religion to burn the candle at least at one end. This is most reassuring, especially as the Shiite clerics — so tightly circumscribed by the secular-cum-Sunni Saddam — appear poised to flex their turban-sanctioned muscle in pursuit of a grim Islamic society.

There was a time — and many Baghdadis will remember it, or have a vestigial sense of it — when this Westernized capital was a racy metropolis indeed. Before it became, in the last decade of the Saddam regime, a sort of Albania of the desert, all greasy gloom and dreary, Baghdad knew how to frolic.

It was here, especially in the neon-lit cafes and casinos of Abu Nuwas Street, which runs along the eastern bank of the River Tigris — an upscale red light district — that profligate Kuwaitis came to escape their own dry and severely anti-fun kingdom, shoving U.S. dollars into the skimpy costumes of the Thai and Filipino dancing girls who worked the strip. During the Iran-Iraq war, the bargirls disappeared. And no white-robed Kuwaitis-on-a-toot have set foot in the country since Desert Storm.

The apolitical restaurateurs and club owners on Abu Nuwas have dearly missed those free-spending Kuwaitis, but look forward to a renaissance of boulevardier society in Baghdad.

"We will open soon," promises the fat proprietor of the Shatt-Al-Arab Restaurant, which claims to serve the finest mazgouf fish on the river. "You come back, bring all your friends. It will be like it was in the old days."

Abu Nuwas is named for the poet Al-Hassan Hani Abu Nuwas, who lived in Baghdad in the late 8th century and was famed for his erotic verse. Also, for his love of the licentious and the dissolute. A statue of him stands on the river bank, holding up a cup of wine.

Of course, the licentious was smothered in the Saddam era, except for himself and his ultra-bacchanalian oldest son Uday, he of the "Shag Palace" abode and unrestrained libido. The rest of Baghdad's residents had to be furtive about sex outside marriage, especially after the bargirls skedaddled, replaced by pitiful war widows driven into prostitution.

"Under Saddam, you even had to make love secretly," snorts Kiyork Aleksunyan (Koko), an Armenian Christian still unmarried at age 40 because he can't afford a wife. "I was a little better off because I lived alone in my own apartment and I could bring women back there. Also, we had an Armenian social club where we could meet to have a few drinks.

"At first, Saddam allowed the bars to stay open. But then the trouble started because Muslims would go to prayers on Friday, then go to the bars and get drunk instead of going home to their families. So Saddam ordered all the bars shut. No bars, no alcohol, no fun."

And does he expect a return to the idle, dissolute days of yore? "Not for me. These days, I only make love to my computer."