BASRA: The top British official in southern Iraq says business is booming in what Iraqis hope will once again be known as the Venice of the East - at least measured by the traffic jams that paralyze the streets of this port city.

"Six months ago, it took me 20 minutes to go to the hospital, this morning it was 45," Sir Hillary Synnott said in his office in the palace of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the western bank of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

"In August they (businessmen) said, business is good. Today, they say business is booming," he said. But Synnott, the head of Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Basra and four southern governorates, was unable to give details on the level of unemployment among Iraqis or say how many have found jobs in post-war reconstruction schemes.

Nor could he say how much money the US-led coalition occupying Iraq has given to civil servants since Saddam was toppled in April. "We don't have precise data about that," Synnott replied to each and every question.

Although recent figures pointed to 50-60 per cent unemployment, coalition officials insist that conditions have improved for the Iraqis since Saddam was ousted.

The CPA spokesman for Basra, Dominic D'Angelo, said more than 250,000 cars have been imported in Iraq since the end of the war. Major Tim Smith, spokesman for British troops in southern Iraq, says black market oil activity has dropped, 80 percent of Basra's inhabitants have access to clean water and a third of the city's sewers have been rehabilitated.

Officials acknowledge, however, that a lot still remains to be done if the Iraqis are to reap the fruit of the reconstruction drive launched in the war-battered country.

As much as 92 per cent of the water that flows in the city's networks fails to reaches the homes of Basra residents because the water mains are too old, D'Angelo said. The Iraqi "economy has been out of touch with the real world" and "more than 80 per cent of the economy was run by the state", D'Angelo added.-AFP