Desperate and in danger

By GREG ANSLEY

Five trucks groaned into the southern Iraqi town of Sufwan yesterday laden with food carted across the border against an appalling sandstorm that kept an even larger convoy locked in Kuwait.

Another seven trucks, guarded by American forces, reached the deepwater port of Umm Qasr, where - as in Sufwan - mobs of hungry Iraqis battled for food and water in depressingly familiar scenes of desperation.

Lying off Umm Qasr was the Royal Navy auxiliary ship Sir Galahad, with several hundred tonnes of aid supplies aboard, and Australian vessels loaded with wheat earlier turned away by the war but now sent back by Canberra as part of a promised gift of 100,000 tonnes of grain.

In the murky waters of the harbour, Australian, British and American Navy divers were clearing mines left by Saddam Hussein's retreating forces to deny Iraq's only deepwater to coalition-supply ships.

This tiny trickle of assistance to a population scarred by its second war and crippled by 12 years of United Nations sanctions is just the beginning of a flood of aid planned to pour across the borders of Iraq as resistance to the invasion ends.

But the difficulties faced by these first few shipments will pale beside the complexities and politics that are crowding the task of feeding and caring for Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the war.

The reconstruction of a new Iraq without Saddam is infinitely more fraught.

Crucial UN involvement is being blocked by countries hostile to the invasion and to American plans to install its own transitional administration; significant donors for the long haul have yet to emerge, and international anger is growing at Washington's intention to ensure its companies benefit most from the new Iraq.

Even as the process begins, rivalries are appearing between international aid agencies and the military, the shadow of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq is deepening with the commitment of its fighters against Saddam's Army and the arrival of hostile Turkish forces, and the rest of the Middle East is watching with concern.

"The stakes are enormous," warned the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

"For much of the Middle East, Iraq will be a test case for judging US intentions in the region and the Islamic world."

Adds Andrew Hewett, of Oxfam Australia: "It is important that any transitional authority not be seen as the creation of the occupying countries but, for both the sake of the rebuilding of Iraq and the support of the international community, it must have a broader base [than the planned US body]."

Hewett's own country, bitterly divided over the war, is facing further angst over the future of Iraq: insistence that it will offer humanitarian aid but not peacekeepers, demands that the task be administered by the UN despite the sidelining of the organisation in the decision to invade, and problems in finding money to fund aid and reconstruction.

Aid agencies emphasise Australia's moral and political obligations to help rebuild Iraq, but fear that even the A$17.5 million ($19.1 million) committed so far will be taken from aid projects elsewhere.

The shifting of aid dollars from one crisis to another frightens international aid agencies: as Iraq dominates news and political priorities, other emergencies - the 14 million people facing famine in southern Africa, for example - are likely to be forgotten.

"That is a real danger," Hewett said.

The world has been slow to commit to Iraq.

New Zealand has pledged $3.3 million for immediate emergency relief, Japan has allocated US$112 million ($203 million) - mostly to help refugees in Jordan - and will commit hundreds of millions more if the UN leads reconstruction, France has offered 10 million euros ($19.4 million) under similar conditions, and South Korea will send 700 medical personnel and engineers.

But UN agencies want at least US$1.9 billion ($3.45 billion).

The UN High Commission for Refugees, expecting at least 600,000 refugees to flee the fighting, last year began shifting spare supplies from the Balkans and Afghanistan to the region and borrowing money from other UN accounts to start stockpiling in the countries neighbouring Iraq.

As of last week it had just US$21 million ($38 million)- 14 per cent - of the US$154 million ($280 million) it is seeking to fund emergency relief, and had spent US$28 million ($51 million).

But huge amounts of assistance are already in place - food stockpiles in Jordan, Syria and Kuwait, 600,000 tonnes of US grain awaiting shipment, camps, medical supplies and doctors set up by the UNHCR, and teams ready to register, identify and return refugees once the war is over.

What they will return to is the urgent question.

Before the 1991 war Iraq was classed as a rapidly developing country, with modern and well-constructed infrastructure, a thriving middle class with considerable assets and savings, and a good welfare system.

Most of that has vanished through war and 12 years of sanctions.

Iraq's ranking on the UN Human Development Index has plummeted from 96 to 127 - further and faster, says the New York-based Centre for Economic and Social Rights, than any other country.

It adds: "Iraqis have been extremely isolated from the outside world for 12 years. The mental, physical and educational development of an entire generation has been affected adversely by the extraordinary trauma of war and sanctions."

The number of primary healthcare centres has been halved to about 930, electricity generation runs at 43 per cent of capacity, and the national output of potable water is only half the 1990 levels, much of it substandard.

Life expectancy is about 15 years lower than New Zealand and Australia; infant mortality, at 93 in 1000 live births, is double the regional average and compares with figures of 5.3 and 6.5 in 1000 live births in Australia and New Zealand.

About 60 per cent of the population depends for its basic needs on Government rations, funded since 1996 by the UN's oil-for-food programme that until its suspension at the outbreak of war allowed Iraq to sell up to US$1 billion of oil every 90 days and use the money to buy humanitarian supplies.

"It is not possible to base the needs of the Iraqi people now with the situation in 1991," the UN said in December.

The analysis said that before the first Gulf War most Iraqis were employed and held significant assets and savings. Now, all but the most privileged had exhausted their cash reserves and in most cases sold all their material assets.

What lies ahead is frightening.

The Catholic aid agency Caritas has already experienced on a small scale the crisis expected to engulf large areas of Iraq, handing out mattresses, high-protein biscuits, cooking oil, lentils and spaghetti to 200 families, each of about six people, who fled the villages of Alkosh, Tilkafe, Batnaya and Telliskuf as the coalition bombarded the Mosul area of northern Iraq.

"The Caritas network is working under the assumption of attending to the needs of a population estimated to be between 200,000 and 500,000 displaced people, both within Iraq as well as neighbouring countries," said Australian programmes manager Jamie Isbister.

Much larger problems are looming.

The confidential UN report warned that a wartime collapse of essential services could overwhelm the resources of its agencies and those of international aid organisations.

Based on the experience of 1991, when a similar collapse contributed to the deaths of 42,000 children in the eight months after the war, UN health officials fear that almost one-third of Iraqi children under the age of 5 may risk death from malnutrition.

War has cut electricity supplies, knocking out power for water, sanitation and essential services.

It is also expected to hammer trains, bridges, culverts and tracks; trucks, roads and transport depots; damage east-west communications by hitting the crossings of the two major rivers that trisect the country; and slice fuel lines carrying petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas.

Already low supplies of limited medications and drugs are likely to rapidly run out; respiratory infections and diseases such as cholera and dysentery will almost certainly follow contaminated water, pollution and towns overcrowded with refugees.

Ethnic, religious and political divisions and retribution are waiting in the wings.

The Sunni and Shiite divisions within Iraq's Islamic population have yet to be reconciled; the Marsh Arabs persecuted by Saddam's regime must be rehabilitated; the issues of purging Iraq of the Ba'ath regime while maintaining the essential functions of government and its food distribution system have yet to be addressed.

The International Crisis Group warns that the Kurds could again become a serious, long-term problem, with violence likely around the city of Kirkuk - claimed also by Turkomans and Assyrians, and the hub of an almost autonomous region abandoned by Saddam's forces a decade ago.

With proven oil reserves of 10 billion barrels, any new administration in Baghdad will not allow a Kurdish splinter: the US has said Iraq's borders must remain intact, under a strong central government.

So security becomes an even greater issue. Military estimates place the size of a peacekeeping force at 250,000 - but while the US wants help, no one apart from Britain is yet prepared to give it, and while security is a problem, humanitarian aid is at risk.

"You can't work in a situation like Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai is really little more than the mayor of Kabul," Hewett said.

This casts another shadow over the rescue and rebuilding of Iraq: tensions between the military and non-government aid agencies that has increasingly marred humanitarian work in countries from East Timor to Afghanistan.

Too often, military aims conflict with those of aid agencies.

The UN complains that for years the military has tried to carve a niche for itself in the direct delivery of aid, instead of confining itself to providing security, logistics and engineering support - "very much an uncharted field that has more cons than pros".

The UNHCR cites the return of Kurdish refugees to Iraq after the 1991 as a prime example. "The large number of humanitarian organisations and military contingents involved, and their lack of experience in working together, created serious problems of co-ordination."

Oxfam is more blunt, arguing that aid delivered by the military is often more costly and fails to take into account the long-term needs of the country involved.

Also, Oxfam says, when troops dress as civilians and operate like aid workers - as they did in Afghanistan - people have trouble distinguishing between the two, leading to anger and violence against genuine humanitarian relief agencies.

Beyond this is the question of who will pay for the new Iraq.

France, Russia, China and Germany are blocking United States proposals to re-start the oil-for-food programme and use it to pay for aid and reconstruction, and oppose plans for an American-led transitional administration.

The US, faced with estimates of a bill of up to US$1 trillion ($1.8 trillion) for the war and its aftermath, wants to use up to US$6 billion ($10.9 billion) it believes Saddam and close associates have secreted overseas, and intends helping to meet the cost with US$2 billion ($3.6 billion)in Iraqi assets frozen in more than 10 countries after the first Gulf War.

Economists warn, however, that this will not be enough.

And Washington faces international condemnation over its plan to impose an exclusively US transitional administration on Iraq, with American values of free-enterprise democracy built on a model starting at village council level and extending to a national government limited to "essential national functions" - defence, the economy, justice, foreign affairs and strategic assets such as oil and gas.

Iraqi exiles would be brought back to lead local and provincial administrations.

Contracts, inevitably, will be primarily signed with American interests.

Other governments and international aid agencies warn that the plan will be discredited from the start and seen, said Australian Labor Leader Simon Crean, as "an American military protectorate".

Herald Feature: Iraq