BAGHDAD, May 4: Efforts to restore basic services and refashion a government in Iraq inched forward on Sunday amid warnings by international groups that the war-battered country was still ripe for a humanitarian disaster.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) renewed its calls to be granted access to all Iraqi prisoners of war in US-British custody, warning coalition forces to comply with Geneva war conventions and demanding access to all Iraqi prisoners of war.

“The ICRC still does not have access to all the prisoners and detainees in the country,” ICRC spokeswoman Nana Doumani said on Sunday.

“The parties must respect the Geneva Convention on prisoners,” she said.

US Central Command in Qatar announced Saturday that 342 more PoWs had been released taking the total number set free to 5,745. Nearly 3,600 Iraqis prisoners remained in detention.

Much of Baghdad remained without basic services, including all-important electricity, fuelling local anger and frustration with the US occupation.

Engineers struggling to restore power in the capital were grappling with unusual layouts of distribution networks and the destruction of the main distribution plant, said US Captain Travis Morehead. Work is proceeding slowly because of a bizarre power grid — a Saddam legacy built to light his golden palaces rather than to efficiently channel kilowatts to the capital, Morehead said.

In addition to going without power, many in Baghdad are going without food and water, creating conditions for a possible catastrophe, warned the United Nations’ chief of mission in Baghdad.

“We have not yet got over the hump. The conditions for the development of a humanitarian disaster still exist,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva.

“It’s (already) a humanitarian disaster in the sense basic services have collapsed or are at the risk of collapsing if we don’t put them back into shape rather quickly,” he said. Lopes da Silva, who returned to Baghdad on Thursday with other UN officials who fled two days before the war began on March 20, said nearly two-thirds of Iraqis totally depended on food aid. Malnutrition was rampant.

And the director of British charity Oxfam accused US-led forces of failing to do enough to protect aid workers.

“At the moment it’s very high risk for our staff to be in Iraq... that’s not good enough,” Barbara Stocking told BBC radio.

“The occupying power has to provide the security and they are not. That’s their legal obligation under the Geneva Conventions,” Stocking said.

The chaos still enveloping Iraq was highlighted by a report in the Washington Post that a radioactive waste dump in the country was so heavily looted that a Pentagon team could not determine whether dangerous materials had been removed from the site.

As coalition forces struggled to restore order, five political leaders thrashed out the rules of choosing an interim government in Iraq.

They include Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani; Ahmed Chalabi, an Shia Iraqi expatriate who enjoys selective US backing; Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, deputy head of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), and Iyad Allawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord Movement, a secular group.

As cars waiting for gasoline snaked out of petrol stations in Baghdad, US authorities there have announced a new management team to run the oil ministry, headed by an Iraqi and an advisory board headed by an American.

Thamir Ghadhban, the ministry’s director of planning before the war, would head an interim management team and Philip Carroll, a former president of Shell Oil, would head the advisory board, according to a statement.

Oil production in Iraq stands at around five percent of its pre-war level of 2.5 million barrels per day.—AFP