Webloggin » Cemetery Workers Face Pay Cuts in Iraq

Four and a half years ago, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq. And then we had a bunch of stories about the damage we were doing, plainly being pushed in front of us by ambitious and energized persons and groups with agendas. In some cases, with well-funded agendas. Much of it concerned our soldiers — ahem, the ones “we all” support, cough *bullshit* cough — engaging in abuse, non-provoked hostilities, flushing the Koran. Some of it was true, some of it was not.

Back in the early days, if you had engaged in a joke about…the standard whimper-whine media boilerplate template about those poor cemetery workers not getting as much business as they need, now that the violence is falling off…that would have been bad satire.

Later on, as more people became accustomed to those media watchdogs sniffing around looking for suffering in Iraq they could throw to the EYE HAYT BOOSH crowd, ignoring more substantial things like those psycho terrorists we know are trying to kill us…that same thing would have been somewhat good satire.

Now 2007 is on it’s last legs. And lookee what we got here.

At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

“I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead,” said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. “People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don’t talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more.”

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it’s 4,000 or less, he said.

The cemetery workers. Won’t someone please think of the cemetery workers? I guess those anti-war liberals and Ron Paul are quite right after all — things were much better under Saddam.

H/T: Rick.

[Discuss This Topic With MK Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes]