Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.
That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that has shadowed Iraq's second-largest city since the U.S. invasion in 2003: What is the role of Islam in daily life? In once-libertine Basra, a battered port in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, the question dominates everything these days, from the political parties in power to the style of dress in the streets.
In the days that followed the melee, hundreds of students, angry about the injuries and arrests, marched on the school administration building and then the governor's office, demanding an apology and, more important, the dissolution of the dreaded campus morality police. The militiamen who attacked the picnickers at first boasted of stamping out debauchery, even distributing videos of the event. But, gauging the popular revulsion, they later admitted to what they termed mistakes. The governor, himself an Islamic activist, urged dialogue to calm a roiled city and deemed the case closed, even as students insisted they remained unsatisfied.
To many in Basra the students managed what no local party or politician had yet done: They interrupted, if briefly, a tide of religious conservatism that has shuttered liquor stores in a city that once had dozens, meted out arbitrary justice and encouraged women to wear a veil and dress in a way considered modest.
"The students broke through the barriers of fear," said Ali Abbas Khafif, a 55-year-old writer and union organizer jailed for 23 years under former president Saddam Hussein. "This was the first mass response to religious power."
The victory may be fleeting in a city where Islamic activism and guns often go hand in hand. Even in their moment of triumph, many secular students acknowledge they are fighting a losing battle; some suggest it is already lost.
"We have felt both our weakness and our strength," said Saif Emad, 24.
The day began with eight yellow school buses lined up by 10 a.m. at one of the two campuses of Basra University, a sprawling expanse where pink bougainvillea interrupts a dreary landscape. Hundreds of students from the university's engineering college piled into the buses. They were joined at Andalus Park by hundreds more on foot and in their own cars. By 10:30 a.m., there were from 500 to 750 students and guests at a picnic the university had approved.
Young men started playing soccer. Others went to buy ice cream. The more boisterous began dancing to a song, "He Went to Basra and Forgot Me," by Ali Hatem, an Iraqi singer. A few grew exuberant, thrusting tape players along with red-and-white scarves into the air. Most of the women were veiled, although a handful, including some Christians, went bareheaded.
‘Students started running’
"All of a sudden, students started running," recalled Garabet, 21, a civil engineering student.
At that moment, from 20 to 40 militiamen loyal to the militant young Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army charged into the two-acre park of overgrown grass, concrete picnic tables and paths of colored tiles. Some of them wore checkered headscarves over their faces, others black balaclavas. They carried sticks, cable, pistols and rifles, a few with a weapon in each hand. They were accompanied by two clerics in robes and turbans: Abdullah Menshadawi and Abdullah Zaydi.
Garabet, an unveiled woman from an Armenian Christian family, never saw her assailant. He struck her twice in the back of the head with his fist. "I was afraid to turn around," she said.
She stumbled, then headed with others toward the black steel gate. Militiamen were shouting "Infidels!"
"It was chaos," she said. "Everyone was yelling."
As she walked out the gate, a second blow to the back of her head almost knocked her unconscious. Two weeks later, she is still wearing a neck brace, and her vision is blurred. She has numbness in one hand and suffers severe headaches.
At about that time, students said, a militiamen struck an unveiled 21-year-old, Zeinab Faruq, with a stick. Another accosted a couple, they recalled. The militiaman fired two shots at the legs of 22-year-old Muhsin Walid; another shot grazed Walid's hand.
‘Focused on the women’
Sinan Saeed, 24, a husky mechanical engineering student, described seeing one girl run toward the exit, then seeing a man stumble over her. Both were beaten with sticks and cables as they lay on the ground. Some surged through the gate; others tried to clamber over the chain-link fence, Saeed said. At the exit, militiamen slapped students with one hand, gripping their pistols in the other.
Students accused the men of stealing cell phones, cameras, gold jewelry and tape players as the students left.
"They focused on the women," said Saeed's friend, Osama Adnan. "They were beating them viciously."
"Without any discrimination," Saeed added.
Within half an hour, the fracas had ended. University officials said 15 students were seriously injured. The militiamen detained about 10 students, who were taken to the local office of the Sadr movement before being released that evening. By all accounts, police were present in force but did not intervene. The students insist that the police were cowed by Menshadawi, one of the two clerics.
One student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled Menshadawi shouting, "There is no secular government! There is only the government of the Mahdi Army!" as he stood on some park steps brandishing a stick and a pistol.
‘Mistake in our execution’
In the Sadr movement's office, Heidar Jabari acknowledged excesses but defended the action. "There was a mistake in our execution, but we had the right to intervene," he said.
Tall, with a friendly demeanor, Jabari said he had warned students two days before the incident that the picnic was inappropriate. Shiites were still observing the sacred month of Muharram, he said, and a suicide bomb had recently killed 125 people in the southern city of Hilla. "The blood from there was still fresh," he said. "No one listened to us."
Jabari conceded that students were hurt and the beatings "went beyond what was legitimate." But, he added, "They say freedom means they can do what they want. This is not freedom. Freedom does not mean you can transgress traditions." He spoke calmly but with clerical sternness. "There are traditions and rules in an Eastern society that are different from a Western society. Every Iraqi has a right to act against these transgressions."
To bolster their case, the movement, one of Basra's most powerful, released a video of footage it had gathered of the picnic. It distributed it to local stores, which in turn sold it for about $1.
The images were relatively tame, even by Basra's conservative standards. Men are shown dancing. In the most exuberant moment, one dancer ties a scarf around his waist and swivels his hips. A man pushes a woman on a swing.
"At a wedding party, they do a lot more than that," said Saleh Najim, the dean of the engineering college.
The night of the confrontation, word of a protest went out, and the following morning about 150 students gathered at the engineering college, itself divided between secular and religious students. Their numbers swelling as they went, they made their way to the president's office and issued their demands: no work for the Islamic groups on campus, an official apology, punishment of the militiamen, return of stolen property, disbandment of the much-feared security committees that act as morality police in each university department and their replacement with Iraqi army troops.
Students vowed to remain on strike until the demands were met. Classes were canceled.
The next day, the students convened again. This time, they said, they planned to head to the governor's office. Police tried to block their path, firing shots into the air at the gate, but they managed to leave through another exit in 15 school buses. Once at the governor's office, they found hundreds of students from smaller colleges and a few high schools already gathered. Inside, the governor met with members of the city council and the Sadr movement, student representatives and school officials.
Two hours later, students recalled, Mohammed Abadi, the president of the city council, emerged. The students' demands would be met, he declared. He read a text from a microphone mounted on a police car outside the office, going over each demand.
‘Still scared to speak’
"We will compensate what was lost," students recalled Abadi saying.
"What was stolen!" someone shouted from the crowd, correcting Abadi.
Following Abadi's statement, city officials and Sadr's movement treated the matter as closed.
"The issue is settled," said Mohammed Musabah, who took over as governor of Basra the day of the melee. He acknowledged that police had not arrested anyone, as students had demanded. But, he said in an interview, "We spoke with them in a stern tone. Both sides wanted to resolve it by way of dialogue."
Few students this week said they were thinking about dialogue. Nor did they seem to believe their demands had been met.
Saeed said that as he passed out leaflets during the protests, a student sympathetic to Moqtada Sadr tapped his shoulder. "Be careful," he said he was told menacingly. On the wall at the campus gate, scrawled in black, graffiti reads, "Basra remains Moqtada's Basra."
"For a moment, we felt the strength of our voices," Saeed said. "We were making up our own minds."
But, he added, "You can see on campus that students are still scared to speak."