Angry Iraqis

ANOTHER Friday, another Tahrir Square, this time in Baghdad. At the end of last week, several thousand people came for a day of shouting and chanting. But things turned nasty when the demonstrators tried to push down a blast-wall barrier onto a bridge leading out of the square into the heavily-guarded Green Zone which houses Iraq's parliament and its ministers. As parts of the wall collapsed, riot police sprang into action. Later they used  water cannons, gas and live ammunition on protesters, said eye-witnesses.

The protest may have been small but the authorities were determinted to quash it. The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, gave a stern speech saying that Saddamist and al-Qaeda factions would try to take over—or attack—any protests. Security officials predicted bombs. Clerics, who are close to or part of many political factions, urged their followers to stay away. Journalists filming the demonstrations were arrested and a curfew banning vehicles was imposed across the city. Everything closed down. The city was silent except for children playing in the streets unusually empty of cars, and a few hundred people—mainly young men—who walked miles from the suburbs to the square, waving banners. Largely secular, they were a mix of graduates and working class, all with the same grievances: not enough electricity and clean water, no jobs, corrupt politicians who wasted eight months on full pay forming a government. Iraq’s democracy, they said, was not worth much unless their elected representatives worked harder.

The "day of rage", organised like others in the Middle East on social networking websites, spread across the country, with bloody consequences. Around a dozen people were killed in clashes between police and protesters in Mosul, Kirkuk, Fallujah and even near the usually peaceful Kurdish city of Sulimaniyah. A number of government buildings went up in flames, and various politicians stepped down, notably the governor of the oil-rich southern city of Basra.

Mr Maliki released a conciliatory statement promising to look into the demands of the people. Protesters said they would be back on the streets soon. When demonstations began in Tunisia, ministers said Iraq was immune to such unrest because it was already a democracy. They may have underestimated Iraqi anger about their government. As one old man in Tahrir Square said, "we did vote for them, but they’re gangsters."