The death of fun in Baghdad?

BAGHDAD – "If you do not stop participating these platitudes and practices that do not fit to Islam, you will be killed," read the message on Audis Rebal’s* Facebook page. It was just one line, but the stranger’s note managed to turn the 24-year-old Iraqi’s life upside down.

"I am confused. I do not know who this is, what does he want? Is he close? Is he waiting for me in front of my house? Does he standing outside my workplace?" Rebal told MEE in a shaky voice over the phone, afraid to turn up for a meeting in public.

Two weeks ago, Rebal, who does not have a steady job, was one of several young Iraqis who organised a festival in the Iraqi capital. "Baghdad Festival for Youth" was meant to celebrate the Muslims' Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.

The festival’s organisers were inspired by the Indian "Holi" Festival, an ancient Hindu religious event celebrating the victory of good over evil – and perhaps best known for coloured powder that participants release in the air and throw on one another. Holi Festival has become popular with non-Hindus in many parts of South Asia, as well as people of other communities outside of Asia.

Without supporters or sponsors, Rebal and his friends covered the expenses of the festival by selling tickets.

More than 200 participants – male and female - turned up for the festival, dancing and exchanging fire with water pistols by coloured water. In a relatively conservative country like Iraq, it was literally – and figuratively – a colourful site as boys and girls interacted with one another.

Waves of criticism, crackdown

Photos of the festival later circulated by the organisers and participants on social media have sparked a fierce wave of reactions among Iraqis, especially Islamist lawmakers and officials who see the festival as an attempt to undermine the core of Islam.

“These painful views of the immodesty and moral deformation …are aimed to spread moral turpitude and destroy the manners of the Iraqi society," Hassan Salim, a Shia lawmaker and a prominent leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a Shia militia, wrote on Facebook.

Salim accused the festival leaders of being members of the Islamic State group (IS). “The religious institution and the government have to stop these immoral practices and deviations," he wrote.

IS has seized about a third of the territories in northern and western Iraq since last summer. Asaib Ahl al-Haq - the militia which Salim leads with several others - is a key group that has been battling IS in Iraq since June 2014.

The waves of criticism, mostly among Islamic political parties, were followed by security crackdowns in Baghdad’s nightclubs and large hotels last week. Many clubgoers and artists have been beaten and arrested, security sources told MEE.

On Monday, unknown gunmen raided a night club in central Baghdad, shot and killed a civilian and wounded two policemen, according to a federal police officer who declined to use his name or share further details.  

Secular Iraqis say that the Islamic party leaders have deliberately launched a campaign against every non-religious and civic activities in an attempt to impose their rules and habits on the daily lives of Iraqis and to distract the public so they won’t press local authorities to provide basic services.

“They want life to be in one colour and one ideology while we want it to be coloured and with multiple ideologies. This is the core of the conflict between us [the Islamists and others]," Jassim al-Helfi, a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party and a prominent human rights activist, told MEE.

The Islamic parties, Helfi said, “aim to distract us away from countering the corruption, lack of basic services, unemployment and abuse of power".

"They are trying to show people that we are defending the bottles of wine and cabarets," he added. 

Local councils, local clashes

Since the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraq, one of the largest oil-producers in the world, has faced serious electricity and drinking water shortages, unemployment, corruption and high rates of poverty.

The system of political power-sharing and the decentralisation of state administration, adopted by Iraqi political parties after the toppling of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, has meant that local officials are under less scrutiny than they once were. Financial and administrative corruption has flourished while services for residents have been found wanting.

Two weeks ago, a teenager was killed in northern Basra, 600km south of Baghdad, when the local police opened fire on demonstrators who were protesting against the acute shortage of electricity in their town, local police said. 

And just in the last few days, many of Iraq's southern provinces witnessed mass demonstrations to protest electricity and water shortages.

Local councils in many provinces, including Baghdad and Basra, are controlled by Ahrar Bloc, the political wing of the anti-US Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and al-Mowaten Bloc, which is led by the Shia cleric Ammar al-Hakim, the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

The two parties are among the largest and most prominent Shia Islamist parties in Iraq and, by forming a local coalition, the Sadrists were able to get one of their members into the governor post in Baghdad, while ISCI took the governorship in Basra. In Iraq, governors lead local government, controlling all provincial departments including security forces.

Many Iraqi human rights activists have said that they have been facing serious challenges in the provinces that are dominated and governed by Sadrists (Ahrar Bloc) and ISCI, as officials who are affiliated with these two parties are publically seeking to impose their own regulations. The festival - and the uproar it has caused - appears to be a watershed moment for these tensions.

"The Sadr movement is a religious party and, of course, if the practices of these festivals are violating the Islamic and social manners, then we are against it," Thaier al-Bahadli, a member of Baghdad's provincial council and a Sadrist leader told MEE.

“These practices [youth festivals and night clubs] were witnessing moral violations and we had received many complaints from families which were impacted by these practices, so we acted," Bahadli said.

Wanted: Fun

Despite the harsh criticism and threats that targeted the festival and its organisers, thousands of Iraqi young people are desperately looking for similar initiatives. Many non-government organisations in Basra and Hilla, 100km south of Baghdad, have since created their own local version of the Holi festivals, but they have not dared to invite girls to participate after the uproar sparked by the Baghdad event.

In Baghdad, however, the demand for events for both sexes, together, remains.

"We want another festival of colour, another festival of love. It's really great to feel that we still love life and taste it despite the daily explosions and killings," Hadi Abdulataif, a university student and one of the Baghdad festival’s participants, told MEE.“As long as we are not harming anyone, not breaking any law and do not force anyone to join us, then no one has a right to interfere our affairs," Abdulataif said.

* Audis Rebal is a pseudonym used to protect Audis’s identity.