US-led coalition underestimated work: Oxfam: Challenge in Iraq
LONDON, May 25: An official of the charity group Oxfam has strongly criticised the US-led coalition for not putting in enough staff to reassure Iraqis and get the country up and running again.
Iraq was suffering from “corrosive fear of lack of security,” said Alex Renton, speaking on BBC morning television on Sunday.
The coalition “has got to get enough people on the ground to restore people’s sense of a civil framework... there are not enough soldiers or policemen in Iraq at the moment to do that,” he added.
British General Tim Cross acknowledged during the programme that coalition forces had underestimated the challenge of rebuilding civic institutions in postwar Iraq.
“The whole regime (of former leader Saddam Hussein) over 30 years had really made such a huge impression on people in Iraq that I for one had underestimated that,” Cross said.
“I was surprised how people would just not move without some form of authority,” said the general, who has been working in Iraq with top US administrator Paul Bremer.
“There is no doubt that bringing back to life a nation is not easy and we have had lots
of difficulties, and we will have more in the days ahead,” said Cross, although he stressed that the situation was improving.
“Of course people are in difficulties — it would be nonsense to suggest otherwise,” he said, although he insisted that Iraq had escaped the humanitarian crisis and the reconstruction crisis that many had expected the war to provoke.
Proportionately however, Cross said coalition forces in Iraq were working with a far smaller number of peacekeepers in the field than, for example, during early stages of reconstruction in Kosovo.
SACKED: : The coalition came face to face with local realities on Saturday, with the British sacking a council in the country’s second city and a row brewing over another local body in the mainly Kurdish north.
The top US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, meanwhile left his office in Baghdad to visit Iraq’s only deep-water port at Umm Qasr, where he examined reconstruction efforts.
In Basra, British forces announced they would replace an Iraqi city council that had been hailed as a model of post-war cooperation with a committee of technocrats chaired by a British military commander.
The decision sparked an angry reaction from the 30-member council, which is headed by a local tribal chief and has laboured to re-establish civic order in the southern metropolis.
And in the northern city of Kirkuk a US commander also risked raising local hackles when he swore in six members of the local council whose nominations had been contested on the grounds that they were mostly from the majority Kurdish community.
The nomination by US officials of the six councillors — four Kurds, one Turkmen and one Assyrian, appointed to a council of 30 whose other members were elected — had brought protests from the minority Arab community.
In another headache for the US forces, the pro-Iranian Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, a leading Shia cleric who returned from exile earlier this month, lashed out at the US presence as he visited the holy city of Karbala for the first time in 23 years.
“Why is the running of the country and the government not transferred to Iraqis? Are they still minors who cannot govern their country?” he asked at the Imam Hussain mosque.
At least some of the efforts by Bremer, who was brought in two weeks ago to breath life into a floundering reconstruction process, appeared to be bearing fruit, however.
The US-led administration started to pay state employees salaries on Saturday and rubbish collection started around Baghdad, where endemic looting and violence has marred the postwar outlook.
The payments to Iraq’s civil workers, the first payment of back wages since the US coalition took control of the country on April 9, came amid mounting local frustration.
The first tranche of payments was delivered to staff representatives at a power station in south Baghdad. Another 28,000 power workers were due to be paid by Monday.
Civil servants have protested almost daily outside the coalition administration headquarters in Saddam’s main Baghdad palace and the payments were hoped to ease some of the popular frustration.
In Umm Qasr, Bremer was briefed on the scope of the work needed by Lewis Lucke from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is overseeing the repair and running of the port area.—AFP
