- "The (U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority)
has so far not inspired confidence that it can do anything right, much
less administer a massive programme of food aid to 25 million people."
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- UNITED NATIONS (IPS) -- The
U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) will get control of billions
of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues beginning midnight Friday when it formally
takes over the seven-year-old, U.N. administered "oil-for-food"
programme (OFFP).
-
- The United Nations has already transferred three billion
dollars from the programme to the CPA-managed Iraqi Development Fund (IDF),
and will send another 1.6 billion dollars Friday.
-
- The programme had been generating seven to 10 billion
dollars annually in oil revenues, but proceeds from oil sales will now
end up in the coffers of the CPA, headed by U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer.
-
- The change has left many opponents of the U.S.-led war
on Iraq bitter, along with some U.N. officials who helped build and administer
the successful programme.
-
- "The CPA has so far not inspired confidence that
it can do anything right, much less administer a massive programme of food
aid to 25 million people," Jim Jennings, president of Conscience International,
told IPS Wednesday.
-
- The programme, which helped feed over 60 percent of the
people in the sanctions-hit, war-ravaged country, was run by a network
of some 44,000 Iraqi food agents under U.N. supervision.
-
- "This is an enormous programme with somewhere around
10 billion dollars in cash flow every year," Jim Paul, executive director
of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS on Wednesday.
-
- Paul said published reports have said the CPA has had
about five billion dollars in oil revenues at its disposal since it was
established more than six months ago but only one billion dollars have
been accounted for.
-
- "There are a number of delegations who have been
talking about a black hole where the money disappeared," Paul said.
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- Last month, the London-based charity ActionAid charged
that four billion dollars was missing.
-
- Soon after, the CPA began publishing a skeleton budget
for the IDF online. It said it had received only one billion dollars from
the oil for food programme, 1.4 billion dollars from oil revenues since
May and 200 million dollars from seized Iraq assets in a U.S. Treasury
Department fund.
-
- It added that 1.5 billion dollars from seized assets
was put in the CPA's budget before the IDF was created.
-
- "The predictable outcome is that food will be taken
out of the mouths of babies, and many of Iraq's impoverished people will
be even worse off than before," predicted Jennings, whose organisation
has been closely monitoring the humanitarian situation in Iraq.
-
- "And that's hardly a formula for winning hearts
and minds or even suppressing Iraq's increasingly violent resistance,"
he added.
-
- The OFFP was established by the U.N. Security Council
in 1995 to relieve the humanitarian crisis that followed the rigid sanctions
imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
-
- Under the programme, the United Nations used Iraqi oil
revenues to purchase and manage some 46 billion dollars worth of humanitarian
assistance, supplies and projects.
-
- These included buying and providing food, medicine, water
and electricity to Iraqis, as well as the construction of schools, medical
clinics and houses.
-
- In financial terms, the OFFP has been the largest programme
the United Nations has administered in its 58-year history. "The OFFP
has also been one of the most efficient of U.N. programmes operating through
nine agencies with a 2.2 percent overhead," the United Nations said
in a statement released Wednesday.
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- A Security Council resolution adopted in May set Friday
as the day the agency would terminate the multi-billion-dollar programme.
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- Before the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in March, some 893
international staff and 3,600 Iraqis worked for the OFFP. But since the
bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad in August, the United Nations has
pulled out virtually its entire international staff due to security reasons.
-
- The CPA has said that it will maintain most of the ongoing
projects -- with Iraqi staff -- and operations, eventually turning them
over to Iraqi authorities.
-
- But Paul was sceptical the CPA has the capacity and the
political will to successfully administer the programme.
-
- "What is striking and shocking is that until two
weeks ago the CPA didn't really make any effort to coordinate with the
United Nations and figure out what should go forward," he said.
-
- "The idea that you can take over a programme like
this with all its enormous complexities and somewhat make a carbon copy
of it in two weeks' time is simply ludicrous," Paul added.
-
- Having talked to senior U.N. officials, he said, he got
the impression that no crisis will erupt immediately because most Iraqis
have received their food baskets and some of the food is already in the
pipeline or in storage.
-
- "But what's frightening is to see what would happen
in a couple of months time when we will run into a crack up," he predicted,
pointing to insufficient storage facilities and other logistical problems.
-
- For the last seven years, Paul said, the United Nations
virtually ran the Iraqi economy. The agency, he added, was rightly proud
of this accomplishment -- and had never faced a charge of corruption.
-
- "There is real bitterness at the United Nations
now," Paul said, "particularly if you work hard to help the Iraqis
and then you see the whole thing going down the drain."
-
- Paul also said that when the Security Council adopted
a resolution handing over the programme to the CPA, it did not act in the
interest of the Iraqi people.
-
- "The members of the Security Council -- not just
the United States and Britain -- were more concerned about ensuring contracts
for companies in their own countries," he said. "And that's a
tragedy."
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- Jennings said the important question is what will follow
in the wake of the OFFP.
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- "The unfortunate answer is that the U.S. administration,
under Bremer, intends to impose on Iraq the same disastrous 'trickle down'
economic theory now being touted for the United States, which lost three
million jobs since (U.S. President George W) Bush took office."
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- Copyright © 2003 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights
reserved.
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- http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21201
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