- It was just another day in the process of "getting
Baghdad back to normal". Well, on this most normal of days when news
was supposed to be slow, the US-appointed Health Minister finally resigned
at the time of a steadily mounting public health crisis after a week of
relentless pressure from doctors disgusted at his prominent past in the
Saddam Hussein regime.
-
- A senior State Department official turned up at the old
Iraqi Police Academy to sack in person the self-appointed police chief
for the whole of Iraq, with whom US forces had ö initially ö
amicably worked. A huge fire in the Baghdad central telephone exchange
went untended for most of the day despite ö admittedly unconfirmed
ö reports that a potential survivor was still in the building. Nobody
is yet collecting the rubbish that is still rotting in the city after a
month. And Barbara Bodine, the very US official directly charged with "getting
Baghdad to normal", has been peremptorily recalled to Washington.
-
- It's hardly surprising that the grandly named and even
more grandly sited (in the biggest of all Saddam Hussein's palaces in the
city) US-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance is undergoing
a rapid restructuring in preparation for the imminent arrival here of its
new boss, the former head of US counter-terrorism, Paul Bremer. For if
this really was a normal day in the Iraqi capital, Mr Bremer, who will
report directly to the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rather than
to the generals commanding the occupying forces, is going to have his work
cut out.
-
- Each of yesterday's episodes in its own way reflects
the crisis of post-war Baghdad. Having spent three days trying in vain
to contact Hamid Rahman, the former general with a senior position in the
pre-war Ministry of Interior who had been identified as the potential Iraqi
to run policing through the country, Bob Gifford, a State Department policing
expert who did the same job in Afghanistan, turned up at the joint US military-police
headquarters in person to confront Mr Rahman when he turned up around midday.
Mr Gifford told him bluntly: "There is no control. We are not going
to announce this appointment. I want you to go home until we contact you."
Asked about this scene, witnessed by chance by the Independent, an ORHA
official conceded that Mr Rahman was "not the right man for the job".
His background as a senior functionary of the Baathist regime coupled with
what one US Military Police officer called his tendency to run his "own
mafia, taking big decisions we were paying for without consulting us"
appears to be among the reasons for the sacking.
-
- Captain Steve Caruso of the 18th Military Police Brigade
is among those valiantly running the mere 12 joint patrols a day with US
forces that can so far be mustered, given that in this lawless city of
some five million only 4,000 former police officers, enticed by the so
far one-off $20 emergency payment, have so far reported to the Academy
in the much-heralded ö by ORHA ö return to work. "The quicker
we can get the Iraqi police doing their job, the quicker the coalition
forces can go home," he said. But Mr Rahman's dismissal, justified
as it surely is, leaves a serious vacuum. A US Military Police officer
said pregnantly that relations between the military and the local Iraqi
police are slowly getting better, but that from his personal point of view
"relations between the military and the civilians are getting worse."
-
- The reasons were plain to see at the Police Academy.
Up to 1,000 Iraqi civilians arrive each day trying to report anything from
murders and rapes to complaints that the invading US forces commandeered
the government trucks for which they had responsibility along with their
essential identity documents. "There's virtually nothing we can do
about any of this," the officer said. "All we are doing is sending
people away pissed off, angry and swearing because we can't do anything."
-
- But 80 per cent of the actual police stations, in which
arrest policy was anyway centrally dictated by the regime, have been rendered
unusable by looting. This week, two workers for the charity CARE were reportedly
robbed at gunpoint and their cars stolen on the road from Baghdad International
Airport to the city centre. And there have been reports of AK-47s being
used to kill motorists to steal their cars.
-
- All this, of course, in a country whose prisons have
been emptied of criminals by Saddam's infamous amnesty and the breakouts
which came when Baghdad fell. The two murders a day reported at the Academy
clearly leave wholly unaccounted for the results of the sporadic shooting
throughout the city in the day at night.
-
- "We just don't have visibility on a lot of that,"
the officer admitted. Security, of course, is the number-one concern of
the vast majority of decent Iraqis. It has been dramatised by the looting
which infuriates most Baghdadis.
-
- But it isn't by any means the only problem. Yesterday's
fire at the telephone exchange drew a large crowd of angry onlookers after
the single fire engine that attended it ran out of water. Hussein Ali,
a carpenter, said: "The Americans were here at 11am and they went
away. An hour later the fire started. It is their responsibility to stop
people going into the building. There are not enough people patrolling
at night. We hated Saddam but at least under Saddam you could be safe.
The Americans said they were coming to liberate the Iraqi people, not for
the oil. But this is not liberation."
-
- And as if the security crisis didn't already hamper NGOs
trying to provide medical aid to the city's stricken hospitals, the burgeoning
health problems were intensified yesterday by political turmoil. Ali Shnan
al-Janabi, the former Baathist unwisely designated by the ORHA to run the
health service, finally stood down after a week of pressure which culminated
when on Saturday he was equivocal about his past in a TV interview.
-
- It hardly matters whether Barbara Bodine was recalled
because of a failure to overcome these problems or because ö more
likely ö she came up against the Washington establishment when she
complained as Ambassador to Yemen about the heavy-handed FBI investigation
into the attack on USS Cole.
-
- There are some effective things happening in parts of
ORHA, such as the skilful weeding out of Baathists in the Ministry of Planning
whose role in the regime was discovered by the tell-tale "special
bonuses" on the payroll documents. But overall it has not done the
job it was appointed to do.
-
- This is why Jay Garner is going home and why Mr Bremer
has a bigger job on his hands than perhaps even he realises.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=405397
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