Subject: potholes on the road to guided democracy


There were several stories in the Guardian that provide a somewhat different view of progress toward democracy than you may have seen in the US media.  If you want to subscribe to a free daily posting from the Guardian, visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/thewrap After you open one of the Guardian links, you will find on the lower left other stories they did not choose to headline.

--John

Delegates agree new talks on government

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Tuesday April 29, 2003
The Guardian

Around 300 Iraqis accepted an American invitation to start the process of forming an interim government yesterday, surrounded by the tightest security since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

At the end of a chaotic 10 hours of rambling discussions in a Baghdad conference hall, delegates pledged by a show of hands to hold a new meeting within a month to select a transitional government.

The delegates gave no other details. American and British spokesmen talked up the conference, describing the "striking vibrancy and emotion" of the occasion, which had given people repressed by years of dictatorship their first chance to talk politics in public.

But they conceded that the meeting, which critics have called a gathering of US puppets, was "not sufficiently representative to establish an interim authority". About half the delegates were exiles, and the rest had remained in Iraq under the previous regime.

Apparently to disguise the poor attendance, officials refused to supply a list of those invited. Some delegates were afraid to have their names published, an official said.

The biggest Shia opposition group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has its headquarters in Iran, sent a low-level group but said it had come to discuss civil administration issues such as security, water, and electricity rather than the formation of a government.

The US adminstrator, former general Jay Garner, told the delegates the meeting was aimed at working towards "a democratic government which represents all people, all religions, all tribes".

His words were backed in Michigan by President George Bush who told Iraqi-Americans that democracy would flourish in Iraq. "There were some in our country who doubted the Iraqi people wanted freedom or they just couldn't imagine they would be welcoming a liberating force. They were mistaken," Mr Bush said. "We know why: the desire for freedom is not the property of one culture, it is the universal hope of human beings in every culture."

The Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien, who attended the Baghdad meeting, said the process to form an interim administration would be as quick as possible. "I believe that the process will deliver a result. It's fascinating to watch the birth of democracy."

US and UK officials would not say how they had worked out the invitation lists. The two parties which had the largest representation in Iraq before Saddam's Ba'ath party imposed one-party rule were excluded. Abdel Karim al-Anazi, a member of the political bureau of the Islamic Dawa party, told the Guardian: "We have no idea what they plan to do at today's meeting. We wish the United States would leave Iraq quickly. Even today would be good".

Faris Faris, for the Iraqi Communist party, said: "No one has invited us. We don't know who was invited."

There were no representatives from the powerful Shia clergy, who have called for an immediate withdrawal of US forces.

Apart from the two main Kurdish parties, which run separate administrations in northern Iraq, none of the parties attending the meeting has a solid following. Many were small, newly created parties.

Even the controversial US-backed exile groups such as the Iraqi National Congress did not send their top people.

In a sign of how sceptically other Arab governments view the process, King Abdullah of Jordan chose the eve of the meeting to criticise the INC's leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

"I would imagine that you would want somebody who suffered alongside the Iraqi people. This particular gentleman I think left Iraq when he was 11 or 7, what contact does he have with the people on the street?" he said in a US TV interview.

Jordanian courts convicted Mr Chalabi in absentia in 1992 of fraud and embezzlement after the failure of the Bank of Petra, which he founded and ran, and sentenced him to 22 years in prison.

US and British officials gave an optimistic view of the conference at a briefing at which they declined to be named, but the failure to organise a press conference further highlighted the meeting's lack of results.

"The ideas are inchoate. It was not the most disciplined occasion," one official said.

General Garner has been embarrassed by the increasingly vocal protests by Shia and Sunni crowds at mosques calling for an early end to the US occupation.

"Developing an interim authority has to be done by a process which is internally and externally credible", one official admitted.

******************************************************

Fury at agriculture post for US businessman

Heather Stewart
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

Oxfam last night launched a scathing attack on the man the US has put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq.

Dan Amstutz is a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, and served in the Reagan administration as a trade negotiator in the Uruguay round of world trade talks.

Oxfam is concerned that his involvement is an example of the potentially damaging commercialisation of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, which it would prefer to see conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.

Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said Mr Amstutz would "arrive with a suitcase full of open-market rhetoric", and was more likely to try to dump cheap US grain on the potentially lucrative Iraqi market than encourage the country to rebuild its once-successful agricultural sector.

"Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission," Mr Watkins said.

"This guy is uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market - but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country."

With President Bush on record as saying he wants American farmers to feed the world, Oxfam is worried that the Iraqi agricultural sector will be left unprotected from cut-price US competition at the crucial early stages of its reconstruction.

In a statement on Mr Amstutz's appointment, the US agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, said the head of reconstruction would "help us achieve our national objective of creating a democratic and prosperous Iraq while at the same time best utilise resources of our farmers and good industry in the effort, both for the interim and the long term".

The US government has been repeatedly criticised for giving preferential treatment to US firms in contracts to reconstruct Iraq.

***************************************************************************

US troops 'kill 13 Iraqi protesters'

Sarah Left and agencies
Tuesday April 29, 2003

US troops opened fire on a group of Iraqi demonstrators near Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 13 people and wounding 75 others, according to reports from the area.

Qatar's al-Jazeera television station reported that troops had fired on the demonstrators in the town of Falluja, around 30 miles west of Baghdad, after someone in the crowd threw a stone at US soldiers. The protesters had been demonstrating against the continued US presence in Iraq, al-Jazeera said.

US central command in Qatar said troops had shot at armed Iraqis who had fired on the soldiers. Witnesses said that the demonstrators, who had been protesting at a local school, had not been armed. They said that the protest had been peaceful.

A correspondent for the Reuters news agency in Falluja said that residents put the death toll at between 13 and 17 people. The director of the main hospital in Falluja said 13 people had died and said his staff and treated another 75 people.

A local Sunni Muslim cleric, Kamal Shaker Mahmoud, told Reuters that the demonstrators had gone to a school occupied by US troops to ask them to leave.

"They were asking the Americans to leave the school so they could use it," he said. "They opened fire on the protesters because they went out to demonstrate. We are asking the Americans to completely leave Iraq, but first we want them to leave residential areas."

An al-Jazeera reporter in Baghdad said that the injured were being treated at five hospitals around Falluja. The Reuters correspondent witnessed six burials.

**********************************************************

Fighting is over but the deaths go on

Guardian investigation reveals mines have killed up to 80 civilians since the conflict ended

Michael Howard in Kirkuk
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

Unexploded ordnance and landmines littering northern Iraq have killed or maimed more people - many of them children - since the end of the war than during the fighting, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

In the two weeks after the cessation of hostilities on the northern frontline, which divided the Kurdish self-rule area from government-controlled territory, as many as 80 civilians have died and more than 500 have been injured.

"We are facing an emergency situation," said Sean Sutton of the UK-based Mines Advisory Group, which is coordinating an operation in the region to clear unexploded ordnance and mines.

"Across Iraq, the detritus of war is killing, maiming and scarring for life adults and, most tragically, children."

In the north, human rights groups, anti-mine organisations and Kurdish regional authorities are struggling to document the casualties. And, because of a piecemeal approach to record-keeping, mortality rates could be even higher than suggested.

To assess the scale of the problem, the Guardian visited hospitals and police stations in the city of Kirkuk, as well as in four towns on the south-east tip of the green line: Kalar, Kifri, Khanaqin and Jalula.

Casualty departments were struggling to cope with the effects of the arsenal left by the Iraqi army and US warplanes.

Among the injured were farmers who stepped on mines planted by retreating Iraqi soldiers; scrap dealers who tried to salvage brass from unexploded shells; and children who played a disastrous game of "genie" with gunpowder from anti-aircraft bullets.

Some of the 1,500 cluster bombs the US dropped on Iraq have also killed and wounded people around Mosul, Kirkuk and Jalula. In Mosul and Kirkuk, Iraqi soldiers stockpiled ammunition and small arms in homes and schools. "They clearly believed that by withdrawing into the cities they could make the war last for six months," Mr Sutton said.

Reports from hospitals in Mosul suggest a rise in deaths and injuries since the end of hostilities, only some of it attributable to the unrest in the city after its fall.

But with more than 300 dead or injured so far, the population of Kirkuk appears to have suffered the most.

The Guardian was told of 44 deaths caused by landmines or unexploded ordnance in the five days after the collapse of the city on April 9. And, on April 15, 17 people were killed and three injured in one blast in the district of Dibs. They were reportedly trying to take scrap from unexploded shells.

At the Bayda secondary school for girls, researchers for Human Rights Watch found a classroom stuffed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortar shells, and machine-gun bullets. A school guard said the ammunition had been taken to the school shortly before the war began, and that the girls had been forced to take their lessons in a room next door.

In Kirkuk, anti-personnel mines and ammunition were found packed into makeshift bunkers on common ground near residential areas. Other explosive materials lay around the grounds of abandoned military bases on the city's edge. A local mosque was home to around 700 landmines.

Mr Sutton said the Mines Advisory Group had also found evidence of a new type of American cluster bomb dropped outside the city.

The BLU 108, he explained, is an anti-armour bomblet with a sensor. When the mother unit is dropped it spews out four smaller units with parachutes. Each of these then slings out four lethal circular discs. "These should be directed toward armour," Mr Sutton said. "But we found them in fields. And 75% of them were unexploded."

He said the group had cleared most of the cluster bombs from the city in cooperation with US forces. But more needed to be done.

"We need funds to clear up this mess now. For the price of two cruise missiles we could save many lives."

Yesterday in Jalula locals told of cluster bombs dropped nearby. Hussein Khalifa, chief surgeon at the local hospital, said there had been 12 incidents of burns, mine and UXO injuries in the last few days.

As he spoke, another burns injury arrived. Satair Ahmed Abbas, 15, had been playing with explosives on wasteground near the military camp. He sat stoically as the doctor examined his charred face. "He's lost one eye; we may be able to save the other," Dr Khalifa said.

Later, in the town of Kalar, the Guardian was told of a further 12 deaths and 95 injuries in the two weeks after fighting stopped. Thirty-two of the injured were children.

Meanwhile, in Baghdad on Saturday at least six people died and 10 were wounded when an Iraqi weapons cache under US control exploded.

The US military blamed unknown attackers who had fired four flares into the open dump. Residents accused the Americans of storing the arsenal near a housing estate.