Tales from an Iraqi gripe center

Safwan Ahmed's brother-in-law stole his car and ran it into a ditch. Nasser Sadoon had his pistol confiscated and wants it back. Khalan al-Husseini is a sheep herder looking for a job.

Each is in line at the cracked pink marble reception desk of the Mosul Hotel, once the five-star pride of this city. Today it's home to the 101st Airborne's Regional Information Center (RIC), otherwise known as the office for public complaints.

"We have never been able to complain as much," says Ziad Hamadi, who has come here to explain about his nephew's bad shoulder and ask for treatment in the US. "It's marvelous, the American way."

In many ways Mosul is Iraq's first postwar success story. Since Saddam Hussein's fall, this northern city has a new mayor and a town council, and is a model for other cities wanting to hold elections.

But the streams of people queuing up at the RIC show one of the challenges of pulling Iraq out of decades of tyranny.

Few here are used to doing things for themselves, always running to the authorities to lodge even the smallest complaint. That this lingering mentality of dependence is so strong in Mosul, which had a degree of autonomy under Mr. Hussein, foretells difficulties ahead for bringing self-rule to the new Iraq.

Talal Ahmed al-Atraqchi, an interpreter working at the Mosul Hotel RIC, is not surprised by the numbers of those coming in - more than 300 a day here, hundreds more at other RICs around town, and thousands across the country. He is also not surprised at the requests.

"For 35 years Saddam Hussein trained us to go to the top power for every need," he says. "We did not have PTA organizations or unions or elected representatives. If you had a problem, you tried to go to the senior minister. Usually, that did not work well. But that was the only way."

"People have been robbed of initiative in this country," says Saman Zia-Zarifi, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. "And now, with expectations raised, they expect miracles to be done for them.... America and Britain have to address these needs - when you occupy a country you have to take it along with its neuroses."

Sgt. Jeremy Vance, at the Mosul Hotel RIC desk, ran a similar service during his time in Bosnia. "It's a lot different here," he says. "In Bosnia they knew how to find solutions to their problems on their own. So those who came for help, mostly, did not want to do it themselves. You knew who you were dealing with. Here you have no idea who you are dealing with."

A scruffy man with teary eyes approaches the reception desk. He had been selling black-market fuel and is here to lodge a complaint against the soldiers who confiscated his fuel cans. The next man in line is an elderly sheikh who wants help organizing an election in a nearby village of Tel Afar. After him comes a woman who thinks her former son-in-law intends to come to Mosul from Baghdad to steal the family furniture. Vance has no idea, he admits, how to help her, and suggests, meekly, trying to have a chat with the man.

"That many years of dictatorship will turn anyone into a zombie," he says. "We really need to wean them off this dependence."

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