March 10, 2011
By JACK HEALY and OMAR AL-JAWOSHY
SAMARRA, Iraq — The mosque at the heart of this ancient city, once a bombed-out epitaph for Iraq’s spiral into civil war, is now heralded as a symbol of its painstaking recovery.
Five years after an insurgent bombing partly destroyed the shrine and spawned waves of sectarian killings, its rebuilt concrete dome again hangs like a low moon over the city. Two new minarets are wrapped in a bird’s nest of scaffolding. And with violence down sharply here and across the country, throngs of pilgrims again pray at Samarra’s Askariya Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam.
But in Iraq, even stories of revival are not so straightforward. And this one, which lies at the intersection of religion and real estate, has reawakened old suspicions and sectarian divisions in a town where the fighting never fully ended.
The current dispute centers on a warren of old houses and twisting stone streets near the Shiite shrine, where about 1,500 people, most of them Sunni Muslims, have lived and worked for generations.
As Samarra rebuilds, planners and developers with connections to Iraq’s Shiite-led central government have begun to imagine a gleaming new city center flanking the shrine, with new hotels, parks, restaurants and parking lots to serve the one million pilgrims who visit each year.
“The plan for improving the shrine is to tear down everything around it,” said Mohammed al-Mashqor, a member of Iraq’s Parliament who sits on a committee that deals with religious affairs and holy sites. “It will be a great entertainment and tourism area.”
Some of the area’s Sunni residents see their patrimony at risk.
They say the Shiite Endowment, an Iraqi council that oversees the country’s Shiite shrines, has been making generous offers to buy out homeowners, with the aim of taking control of the old city.
“What’s happening now is a challenge to the people,” said the head of Samarra’s city council, Omar Mohammed Hassan. “If they take this area, the economy of Samarra will die. I think Samarra will explode one day in protests after suffering for so long.”
The redevelopment of the area is still in its early stages, but it poses a vexing question, one that resonates in ethnically splintered towns and neighborhoods segregated between Sunnis and Shiites: As Iraq rebuilds after years of war and stagnation, who gets to draw up the blueprints?
The Askariya Shrine, built in 944, is claimed both by Shiite worshipers and by Samarra’s Sunnis.
For the busloads of pilgrims arriving from Iran and across Iraq, it is the burial ground of two of Shiite Islam’s 12 imams, a spiritual destination in Iraq secondary only to the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. The pilgrims are a mainstay of the city’s economy, and a rich source of income for whoever runs the hotels, shops and businesses in the central city.
“This old village is the real Samarra, the heart of Samarra,” said Sheik Khatan Yehiya al-Salim, a tribal leader. “They want to change the faces of this area.”
Officials from Unesco, which designated Samarra as one of three World Heritage Sites in Iraq, said they were trying to negotiate an accord between the central government and provincial officials to balance preservation against development.
Mr. Mashqor, the member of Parliament, said that the Shiite Endowment planned to spend the next three years buying houses and stores in a 650-foot radius surrounding the mosque, then begin construction in the neighborhood.
He said the expansion and modernization was critical to accommodating more pilgrims, and would jump-start Samarra’s staggering economy. Already, the Shiite Endowment has bid up home prices to entice people to sell, offering more than double or triple what homes were worth a few years ago, residents said.
“We know there are some people who don’t want to sell their homes,” Mr. Mashqor said. “But with money, everybody gets convinced.”
Mr. Mashqor said 80 homes had already been purchased. Dhia Abdul Rahman, 53, said he jumped at an offer of nearly $400,000 for his crumbling home.
“I have six sons, all of them unemployed,” he said. “With this money, I can support them.”
These days, the people who live in the shrine’s shadow offer elegies to something they say is slipping into the past.
Though the shrine’s reconstruction has already come a long way, residents reminisce about the days before bombings destroyed its gold-plated dome in February 2006, and its minarets, in June 2007. They talk about how, before blast walls and pat-downs, they would stroll past it every day, visit before weddings, take bodies there before funerals. Residents of the neighborhood have long worked there, serving food and sweeping the grounds at day’s end.
“It’s very painful for our history,” said Mustafa Abed al-Mounem, a burly 36-year-old Koranic scholar who lives a short walk from the shrine. “You lose neighbors, you lose your neighborhood. You lose your closeness to the imams.”
Mr. Mounem, the scion of orange growers and palm-tree cultivators, lives in an eight-room house his great-great-grandfather built, on land his family owned before there was even a country named Iraq. For 400 years, he said, his ancestors have lived in the same neighborhood, watching empires, strongmen, coups and invasions pass by like eddies in the Tigris.
He says he is determined to stay, but believes it is ultimately a doomed effort.
“This is the land of my grandfathers,” he said. “I will be the last one.”
No comments:
Post a Comment