> El libro Imperial Life in the Emerald City, de Rajiv Chandrasekaran acaba de ganar un importante premio en Inglaterra para libros de reportajes (El Samuel Johnson Prize, de £30,000). Describe la vide en la zona roja: la ciudad amurallada en Irak donde se instaló el gobierno de los EE.UU. tras la invasión. Detalla la abominable corrupción que ocurre: por ejemplo, la ex empresa de Dick Cheeney –Haliburton—recibió mas de 1.6 mil millones de dólares de ganacias de las petroleras del país; la bolsa financiera del país fue puesta a cargo de un joven de 24 años sin experiencia en financias; las reglas de tránsito fueron las del estado de Maryland que se bajaron de internet…
20.6.07
"Imperial Life in the Emerald City" gana el premo Samuel Johnson
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Award for account of life inside Iraq's Green Zone
John Ezard
Monday June 18, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
A book chronicling the chaos and cronyism that characterised the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's government of Iraq has swept to victory in the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, says that more than $1.6bn (£800m) of Iraq's oil revenue was paid to the US vice-president Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton; that the Baghdad stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never worked in finance; and that the Iraqi capital's new traffic regulations were based on the laws of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the internet.
The Halliburton payments were for trucking fuel into Iraq and came from a $20bn development fund fed by the oil revenues which was almost all spent. By contrast, bureaucratic delays caused almost nothing to be spent of another $18bn budget intended for construction, health care, sanitation and clean water.
These are among hundreds of allegations based on interviews, documents and case studies which led the judges to salute Chandrasekaran's book as "up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years" at an awards ceremony in London. The chair of judges, Lady Helena Kennedy QC said it was "as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote's In Cold Blood". "The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed," she added. "Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle."
The author - an ex-Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief - sets his narrative mostly inside the Green Zone, the heavily-guarded Baghdad sector inside which the US governed Iraq for the first year after Saddam's downfall. In this "little America on the Tigris", women danced in hot pants at a disco, buffets were piled with pork, a shopping mall sold porn, and the car park was filled with new SUVs.
Iraqi workers were rarely allowed inside the Green Zone in case they blew it up. Clothes handed to the military laundry service run by KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, and returned "if at all" after a fortnight; KBR had them laundered in Kuwait instead of trusting laundries in Baghdad. The result was that, unable to wash their clothes during frequent interruptions to the water supply, US diplomats were embarrassed to meet smartly dressed Iraqi government staff.
Runner-up for the award, which is never officially revealed, is thought to have been Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell - which also has an Iraqi connection. It is a biography of the archaeologist, spy, Arab linguist, mountaineer and poet Gertrude Bell who helped king Faisal draw the borders of the fledgling state of Iraq.
Lady Kennedy criticised some biographers entered for this year's prize for making their books "unwieldy", though she made it clear her remarks were not meant to apply to two leading biographers, Claire Tomalin and Hermione Lee, whose widely-praised studies of Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton narrowly failed to make the shortlist.
"Some biographies get better with more editing, even some of the fabulous ones need a tougher hand," she said, "The problem is that people become more and more successful and [editors] become reluctant to interfere. There are aspects of people's lives, like laundry lists, that we don't need to know about. Biographers' scholarship is so fabulous that they are eager to show the lengths to which they have gone."
The other judges were scientist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili, writer and editor Diana Athill, historian and journalist Tristram Hunt;,and broadcaster and journalist, Mark Lawson.
The other books on the shortlist were Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma, Having it so Good by Peter Hennessy, Brainwash by Dominic Streatfeild and The Verneys by Adrian Tinniswood.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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