Oral evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee on Thursday 18 September 2003

Members present:

Tony Baldry, in the Chair
Hugh Bayley
Alistair Burt
Mr Tony Colman
Mr Robert Walter

__________

Memorandum submitted by Christian Aid

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR RAJA JARRAH, Programme Director, CARE International; MR OLIVER BURCH, Emergency Programme Manager, Christian Aid; MR ROB MacGILLIVRAY, Senior Emergencies Adviser with special responsibility for the Middle East, Save the Children; and BARONESS NICHOLSON OF WINTERBOURNE, a Member of the House of Lords, Founder and Chair, Amar International Charitable Foundation, examined.

Chairman: Thank you very much for coming this afternoon. Just a few preliminary points. Firstly, the acoustics in these rooms are not brilliant so if it would be possible for everyone to speak up, that would be really kind. Secondly, I apologise that the Committee is slightly light today. I think that is partly a combination of factors: there are no votes expected in the House today, and the reason I suspect there are no votes in the House is that it is rumoured there is a by-election taking place three stops up the tube line and I think the Whips have been coercing everyone of every party to go up and add to the general merriment of Brent East.

Alistair Burt: Nothing should be read from the fact that there are three Tories sitting here.

Q1  Chairman: It shows our commitment to the House. Ann Clwyd is actually on her way to Iraq as we speak, otherwise Ann would certainly have been here. Raja, I know who you represent and I know who Oliver represents, and it is fantastic to see Baroness Nicholson here. Could you and Rob, just for the record, tell us which organisations you are representing?

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Amar International Charitable Foundation.

Mr MacGillivray: I am Emergencies Adviser working for Save the Children.

Q2  Chairman: That is really helpful. Thank you very much. So, you are here instead of Pram Unia?

Mr MacGillivray: That is correct.

Q3  Alistair Burt: Firstly, I would just commend the Christian Aid submission that we have received, thank you very much. I am sure it pulls together quite a lot of stuff from several different sources but I thought it was an excellent precis and that is obviously the basis that we are going to use for a discussion. As a general introductory question, can you describe what the degree of activity is currently being undertaken by NGOs bearing in mind the security situation? Can you talk to us a little bit about the ease of getting around, what physically you are currently able to get done on the ground and whether it really is changing from day to day or whether there is some stability in the security situation in some areas and how variable is it? A general introduction like that would be very helpful.

Mr Burch: From Christian Aid's point of view, we really think the situation is extremely grave at the moment. I should be in Iraq at the moment but we have a travel ban to the country, so we are not visiting. Of the NGOs present, some have actually removed staff. I think almost all of them have consolidated their operations in the interests of security. Some staff have been moved out of the country and operations are effectively rather slowed down. This is very much so in the case of the UN who have moved to central secure locations and externalised their work as much as possible by moving people to neighbouring countries, and also in the case of ICRC who, as we know, are capable of working in really very difficult situations. They have approximately 50 per cent of their international staff out. As regards international organisations, it is very, very difficult. Also, our Iraqi partners, our local partners, are telling us that they find the situation really quite difficult. They are having to work slowly and carefully and it is very much constrained by general insecurity in many parts of the country.

Mr Jarrah: I would certainly echo the comment about slowness and extra care that my colleague from Christian Aid has just mentioned. CARE in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad and the surrounding regions, has never relied on a large international staff, so the recent events have not led to a downscaling of our presence but it does mean that we have to work with greater care and we are using equipment to work with that will improve our security. For example, we use battered old cars rather than proper project vehicles, which are more prone to breaking down and sometimes you end up having to make two or three trips to finish a particular job which under ideal circumstances you could get done in half a day. The other difficulty is that we are finding with the sabotage of infrastructure that is still continuing that one-off repairs often end up being two or three times repeated in order to keep a particular installation going. Water and sanitation is the sector that we have been most involved in and at the moment there are no sewage treatment plants operating in the Baghdad area.

Mr MacGillivray: For Save the Children there is a mixed perspective on this. We have had a history of 11 to 12 years' work in the north of Iraq and we are able to continue with our humanitarian activities north of what was previously known as the Green Line. The perspective in the south and centre is vastly different, both for ourselves as Save the Children UK and for our colleagues as Save the Children US where our humanitarian activities have been reduced considerably. We are able to conduct limited humanitarian efforts, particularly in Baghdad, but we have reduced our complement of international staff to the absolute minimum. That is also the same for our colleagues in Basra and areas around the south. Like my colleagues who have gone before me, we have taken similar security measures in order to ensure the protection of our staff as far as it is possible to do so given the circumstances of today. We feel safer travelling around in unmarked used vehicles rather than the newer vehicles which we are used to. We keep a very low profile. Our activities are confined to moving from house to accommodation and from accommodation to house and each of these journeys being cleared on a case by case basis by the programme director. We also maintain a daily security briefing with our staff in Iraq to ensure that we have the most up-to-date information possible.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: The Amar Foundation, represented by myself and by Dr Peter Clarke behind me, formerly of the British Council, is a service providing organisation. We have 12 years of experience in the south of Iraq and with refugees from the south of Iraq in Iran. We focus on capacity building and the services we provide are very simple but essential ones. We concentrate largely on public health, which of course includes clean water provision and human waste disposal. Our second arm is on education and we do primary and secondary schooling, which in this region is called intermediate schooling. We can get youngsters right the way through to university. Our first ten went to university recently, which was exciting after 12 years of work. We left southern Iraq in 1996 and all of our activity after that was in Southern Iran and this region. Before that, from 1991-96, we were working inside the Marshes. We began again half way through April in Southern Iraq, and we are doing exactly the same at a more modest level than in Iran, clinics, hospitals, primary schools, and we work closely with the health people. We run under the guidelines of the WHO, and I am the WHO Special Envoy wearing another hat, and we have always traditionally worked very closely because of education with UNESCO. Those are our two key closest colleagues and allies. We also work with UNICEF, with UNEP, UNDP and now with UNHCR. Our ministry links are clearly very strong. We work with the Ministry for Health and now with the Ministry for Education. The capacity building is the key. We have found many, many qualified people. We have got one or two army doctors, for example, who lost their jobs who we have taken on, particularly because the army was conscript, not voluntary. We are capacity building and now we are providing health care in Iraq for around 55,000 of the poorest.

Q4  Alistair Burt: Can I probe the travel ban for a second. Firstly, do you have any sense of when it might be lifted? Are different organisations applying different criteria? Secondly, to probe the reasons for it, not to miss the obvious reason but to ask is it the concern of aid workers that they might be in the wrong place at the wrong time because of the general lack of security, or is there a fear that they might be targeted because of a perceived relationship with occupying forces?

Mr Jarrah: It is both those things. Primarily it is the accident factor of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think everybody has had to rethink their assumptions after the attack on the United Nations which has got every NGO that has any international connection in Baghdad thinking that we could be next because we are being tarred with the same brush.

Mr Burch: We made that decision not just because of the attack on the United Nations, awful as that was, but because we were looking at a pattern that has been evolving for months now, that has deteriorated steadily, of a very, very large number of attacks. We get a 24 hourly report from UN security which shows every day ten, 15, 20 lethal or potentially lethal attacks, initially against coalition forces but spreading now to other targets: the UN, NGOs, infrastructure, indeed apparently anything which might effectively work to putting the State of Iraq together again. That is a pattern that has been evolving for a long time. It was really in response to that that we took this decision, which we will review on a weekly basis. What we will be looking to see is an ascending pattern again of an improved security situation over a significant period before we feel that it is really good for doing business again. On your point about NGOs and humanitarian workers and how they are perceived in Iraq, I think we have a really serious problem here. I think I can quote a member of Oxfam just before evacuation who said that he had never worked in a post-conflict situation where the line between the military and the humanitarian operation had become so blurred. We think this is the problem. NGOs worked a great deal in the north before, in the so-called Kurdish autonomous areas, they have a good track record there, they are well known and in effect that is security, but in many other parts of the country we have only just come back to those places, and that includes our local partners, we do not have a track record, we do not have that fund of goodwill built up. We have, in fact, turned up at the same time as the coalition forces and all the other internationals and I am afraid that quite a lot of the Iraqi population probably regard us as part of the same operation. We were afraid of this at the beginning but it is our take that this is really the situation we are in now, there is no differential perspective among ordinary Iraqis, most of them anyway, of who is a humanitarian worker, who is a soldier, who is an administrator, it is largely just an occupation which is becoming resented.

Q5  Alistair Burt: Is it your sense that the only thing that will make a difference, therefore, for your workers on the ground is the passage of time and Iraqi civil society understanding really why you are there, or is there something that coalition forces can do, and do soon, to assist you in the process of demarcation?

Mr Burch: I think some of us sense that time is rather running out, that we have a narrowing window of opportunity now. The solution does not seem to be armed protection for humanitarian workers, that has been tried by some and we do not believe it is the way forward. We think the solution is security for the entire civilian population of Iraq and, in fact, that of course is a Geneva Convention obligation for the occupying powers. We have always said, and continue to say, we think the best way to do that is to internationalise the peacekeeping effort and, in fact, to internationalise through the UN the political leadership in rebuilding Iraq and handing it back to Iraqi sovereignty.

Mr Jarrah: Just on this subject, among the Iraqis we have consulted, and we have conducted an informal straw poll about this, almost unanimously nobody wants more boots on the streets of whatever nationality, other than Iraqi. What most Iraqis want is an Iraqi established rule of law and order which means a credible Iraqi police force.

Mr MacGillivray: What the UN bombing has brought is a depreciating situation into very, very sharp focus for all of us. For the first time we have seen that the targeting has now become humanitarian workers and not just coalition forces. There were examples of threats against humanitarian workers before the UN bombing, and of course you will know the tragic example of the Mines Advisory Group worker who was killed on the way down from Mosul to Baghdad. Without pre-empting the conclusion of MAG's internal inquiry, I think it is worth bearing in mind that the person in question was in a clearly identified Mines Advisory Group vehicle. That is part of the reason why we have decided to take the stickers off our own vehicles. It is about an ever narrowing amount of humanitarian space for organisations to work in. There is definitely a blurring of roles between the coalition forces and humanitarian agencies. I think we all remember the television footage of coalition forces distributing non-food items in Basra right at the very beginning of this conflict and how poorly organised and executed that was. However, coalition forces do tend to prosecute what they believe to be a humanitarian agenda. We, unfortunately, do not believe that is their role, but to afford to the humanitarian agencies the space and the room to be able to prosecute that agenda.

Q6  Mr Walter: A supplementary to that: is there any evidence that these attacks are organised, systematic? Are they predominantly sabotage or is there an element of looting involved?

Mr MacGillivray: There is historical evidence to support that from other conflicts in the world, although perhaps none specifically within Iraq. If we look at Afghanistan and a number of conflicts that have happened in Central and Eastern Africa, for example, the high profile conflicts will start with attacks on troops, on military targets, but these attacks tend to be softer and softer as time goes on in order that that profile can be maintained. I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that the Iraq scenario should be any different from others.

Q7  Mr Colman: You said you did not want any more military boots on the street, you wanted the Iraqi police. Is it also true that perhaps it is more acceptable to have Iraqi NGOs, Iraqi run NGOs, clearly with a governing body which is Iraqi driven rather than international NGOs? If that is the strategy, are you seeking to withdraw? You talked about not having your names on your Land Rovers and whatever else. Are you going to, in a sense, perhaps raise funds for Iraqi NGOs but withdraw completely as UK based NGOs from Iraq? Is this a strategy that you are working on which will perhaps remove some of the ill-feeling?

Mr Burch: In our case Christian Aid has always worked through local partners but, of course, we want to visit them and monitor what they are doing. We even find that our local partners are having problems.

Q8  Mr Colman: And these are Iraqi only driven NGOs?

Mr Burch: They are Iraqi only but this is area specific. Remember some of these Iraqi NGOs were not present in the field a year ago. Saddam Hussein's regime was not very conducive to this kind of local organisation, so they too are quite new on the ground in some areas of the south and the centre, not so in the north and upper centre, the Kurdish areas.

Q9  Mr Colman: The same with Raja?

Mr Jarrah: Definitely. A country with the mineral wealth and the intellectual capital that Iraq has should not need international NGOs. Without doubt the medium to long-term plan should be the phasing out of an international NGO presence in Iraq. It is still very early days. The security issue is not simply between nine and five when people are in NGO vehicles, ordinary Iraqis are working to a self-imposed curfew, they do not go out at night, whereas traditionally social life is carried out at night in Iraq. Ordinary life has been turned on its head. In those circumstances, a nascent NGO that is trying to jockey for position and work out what its role is going to be in the future has got one leg and one arm tied.

Q10  Mr Colman: There were Iraqi based NGOs who were there before the war. Are they being attacked in the same way? Have they got more acceptability? Should they be expanded?

Mr Jarrah: In the Baghdad region there were not any operational NGOs before the war.

Mr Burch: Most of our Iraqi NGOs are effectively opponents of the regime who are now back in the country, that is the typical profile. They are also new on the ground.

Mr MacGillivray: I think it is perhaps of value to broaden this security issue out a little bit because it does not just affect coalition forces and NGOs, whether they be Iraqi NGOs or international NGOs, security is something that affects every person in Iraq today. Apart from what we traditionally consider to be security, whether it be security at the point of a gun or security through legislation, we also have to look at how ordinary Iraqis live their lives at this particular moment in time in the absence of a credible health system, in the absence of water treatment plants, for example, which are still not up and running in Baghdad, in the absence of a guaranteed income, an income which is part of the protection mandate of ----

Q11  Mr Colman: We are going to go into those issues, but the attacks are on Iraqi NGOs, not just international NGOs, that is what you are telling us.

Mr MacGillivray: I think it does us no good to differentiate between the two because local members of staff, for example, are guilty by association.

Q12  Hugh Bayley: Can I move from the security situation to the humanitarian situation on the ground. We last took evidence about Iraq in June. How has the humanitarian situation changed since then? You have made it clear that the security situation has deteriorated badly. Has the availability of food, of medical treatment and so on, deteriorated too, or improved? How have things changed?

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: It is a considerably better situation for the poorer people of Iraq, by which I mean not those who should have an income but those who did not have access to money under the previous regime. If I take the health care system, the previous regime categorised the population and the health system, as far as we can tell, was not led by health need but was led by whether you had some funding and whether, in fact, you belonged to a particular political party. The opening up of health care to the whole population has happened. Of course that is very strictly limited still by the fact that resources are not yet evenly spread in terms of health care. If I can take the simplest kind, which is that there are some hospitals, and we have all seen the photographs and videos of very poor health care in hospitals, what have been missing have been the community clinics, the primary health, a great deal of lack of immunisation. Of course you can find tranches of society which have full care, full access to immunisation and all the rest of it, but what is needed is a reform of the health system so that it is health needs led rather than by some other criterion. That still has to happen, although it has begun. Yes, it is open to many more and, technically speaking, the poor do now have access but in practice most clinics, most hospitals, are not yet in a position to be able to offer that.

Q13  Hugh Bayley: Are there any comments from others about water, electricity, schooling?

Mr Burch: We do not really see an improvement, unfortunately, since the last time we gave evidence. We do not think food is the sector that should cause particular concern. It does appear that WFP have run a very large and quite successful operation despite all the problems over these last months. Food security is not an immediate worry, although the fact that such a large part of the population actually does rely on food aid is a long-term worry. We would concur that water, sanitation and health remain the priorities. In this insecure environment improvements seem to be going very, very slowly, if they are occurring at all.

Mr Jarrah: Our comment on this is that the situation has not got markedly worse but it should have improved with all the investment that has gone into Iraq over the past three or four months. Unfortunately, it all comes back to security every time we open any subject on Iraq. All the electricity repairs that have been done over the past few months do not seem to have led to a sustainable supply of electricity to the population of Iraq, power cuts are still as frequent and unpredictable as ever and that affects the water supply. We should probably take some encouragement from the fact that there have not been any of the epidemics of waterborne diseases that we were afraid of happening in the early summer, which is either judgment or fortune, I do not know. Certainly we feel that the prospects for improvement now are no better than they were several months ago. Unemployment, on one estimate, runs at 60 per cent and even if the humanitarian situation in terms of running out of food and water is no worse, there are no signs that it is going to improve in the short-term. The issue of education is a really important one. It has been the school holidays over the period since we last met. Term starts next week or the week after and that will be a real indicator of the faith and hope that the Iraqi people have in the sustainability of the recovery. If parents are confident enough to send their children to school and schools are all operating, I think we can take that as a good sign that somehow, somewhere behind the scenes something is working, but if not I think the opposite conclusion is inevitable.

Q14  Hugh Bayley: Where you do have public services, whether or not they are improving, whether you have a hospital that works or a clinic that works or a school that is open, who is seen to be providing it? Who do you thank for it? The ministers in the provisional administration, are they seen to be the people who are providing health care, for instance, or is it NGOs, is it the occupying powers? What is the mood?

Mr MacGillivray: The mood is one of disillusionment, I have to say. Disillusionment because in Baghdad when the coalition forces arrived the Iraqi population were clearly of the impression that things would get better, and get better very, very quickly. This has not happened. It is not really for the want of essential drugs and medical equipment, although there have been gaps that we have had to fill, it has been because of essential people within these technical ministries being taken out of their positions, we understand, as the principle of de-Ba'athification. If we look at it from another perspective, and we are trying to reorganise an organisation, then the tendency generally is to reorganise with people in post rather than dismissing people and then reorganising, which would have been a more practical way to approach the subject. What that has meant is that we have a number of very well motivated and very well trained people across the ministries who are willing to come to work, but only for a short period of time and after that they will not come to work because they are not, in fact, being paid. What we do need is good country-wide data on how these ministries have, in fact, performed. There was an undertaking made for the UN to take a lead role in that happening and that, unfortunately, has not materialised. A comment was made about the window of opportunity becoming narrower and narrower as time goes on, and I agree wholeheartedly with that comment.

Q15  Hugh Bayley: What would be needed to enable the UN to collect that data because I think that is very important, is it not?

Mr MacGillivray: Yes, it is absolutely crucial to the issue. The answer to that can be found in April of this year in Northern Ireland when President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed to give a vital role to the UN in Iraq. That vital role has not materialised. There is time for that role to materialise.

Q16  Hugh Bayley: That is rhetoric, but what do they actually need in practical or logistical terms? Do they need more personal security on the ground? Do they need more resources? Do they need computers? If there was a political will for the UN to collect this data so we get a picture of where things are moving forwards, where things are moving back, how resources are spread around the country, where the areas of greatest need are, what is stopping them doing that? What would need to be provided to enable the UN to do that?

Mr MacGillivray: I think in general terms we need to restore confidence in the UN, back the UN as the logical system in a post-conflict architecture, if you like. Certainly from a resource point of view there is a desperate need and we need to look, for example, at what will happen post-November when the Oil-for-Food programme runs out. What structure do we have in place in order to replace that? That has not yet been determined. The $2.2 billion that is required to be placed in that account, we require to see evidence of that. That also helps and assists the UN to be able to execute its mandated responsibilities.

Q17  Hugh Bayley: The UN website states that something like 1.9 billion has been received. Are you saying there is no evidence of those resources being available in the country?

Mr MacGillivray: The figure is 2.2 billion and we would need to see evidence of that after November.

Q18  Hugh Bayley: No, no, I am sorry. For the first six month period the UN said it needed 2.3 billion, I think it was, and when I looked at the website a week or two ago - I may have the figure wrong - it was around 2 billion, just below two billion, that had been received. Again, from memory, 60 or 70 per cent of that was food aid. Are you saying that the resources which the UN says have been contributed are not being spent in the country, or are you making a different point that, yes, they are being spent but a similar sum is going to be needed for the next six months?

Mr MacGillivray: It is additional, the support that will be required for forthcoming UN and NGO activities in Iraq.

Q19  Hugh Bayley: Could I ask just one final point of Raja. All the humanitarian work, starting on post-war reconstruction, is hampered because of security problems. I hear what you say very clearly that Iraqis would like to feel that their security was guaranteed by Iraqi police forces, but in the short-term that is not going to happen. When I was in Canada quite some months ago, four months ago, I met the Director of CARE Canada who have had a big programme in the country, as you know, and he was saying he felt the problem with the occupying forces is that they are very high tech soldiers from Britain, America, Australia, very costly soldiers, and it would be better to spend that amount of money on a much larger number of lower tech soldiers, presumably paid for by Britain and America, coming from Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and other countries. He was clearly saying that you have not got enough people on the ground to provide the security and it is slipping away. Do you think that is still the case, that until one can provide a larger number of disciplined and politically independent, politically neutral, Iraqi security forces, it would be a good thing - I am sure you would agree it would be a good thing - to broaden the nationality base of the forces on the ground so that they are not all seen as belligerents, or possibly would not all be seen as belligerents? Should the numbers be broadened as well if it was a different kind of force?

Mr Jarrah: I do not know, I am not a security adviser, but, on the face of it, it does sound like an interesting suggestion. One of the confusions in the minds of most Iraqis is that the UN and the US are indistinguishable, they are both responsible for the sanctions regime that brought Iraq to its knees and the UN are just as culpable in all of this as the occupying forces. A way of, if you like, giving a complexion to the UN that makes them behave differently from the coalition I am sure would be a help. I think there is going to be a difficulty now in the short-term future with the UN perhaps bunkering down after the attack and behaving more like the CPA, becoming less accessible, less visible on the street, more like an arm's length manager of the process in Iraq. Anything they can do to dismantle that image can only be for the good. I was going to say something else but it has escaped me, I will come back. Oh, yes, coming back on to your earlier comment about who is perceived to be delivering the services, is it international NGOs or whoever, in the places where we work we are certainly very well received as CARE. The workers of the hospitals and the workers of the water treatment plants all say, "Without CARE we could not have done this", but in terms of the consumers of the water and the consumers of the health services it is definitely seen as something that the Iraqi Ministry of Health or Ministry of Water is producing. A little success story in all this, which I would like to share, is that under the CPA there has been a process of dismembering the Ministry of Public Works from the Ministry of the Interior and allowing that ministry to take fairly centralised control over the water treatment infrastructure in Baghdad, and that seems to have worked. We have an Iraqi organisation run by Iraqis taking centralised control over a function that should be centralised, which is the water supply, and in a small way that is perhaps a sign of what could happen if you put your faith in Iraqi institutions.

Mr Burch: If I could add a fairly quick point on that as the Health Ministry was discussed. We really feel the need for more proactive Iraqi institutions to relate to. We have a programme decision at the moment which is really delayed because we realised that the Ministry of Health does not have a policy in that area. This is the issue of whether they really do want to support their rural primary care clinics as opposed to their large, urban centralised hospitals. They do not have a policy and this is the problem, that they are so lacking in capacity at the moment without salaries. They need to formulate their own vision, their own strategy for the future, in order for them to be helped.

Q20  Chairman: This strikes me as being a nightmarish situation for several reasons. What Baroness Nicholson describes is that there are a large number of people who are presumably very delighted that Saddam has gone. There must have been huge numbers of people who were really very pleased that the old regime had disappeared and that essential services would be allocated on the basis of need, hopefully, rather than whether you were a member of the Ba'athist Party. On the other hand, there is obviously another group of people who still have loyalty to the old regime and a mixture of them, presumably, and opportunist vandals are those who are doing the damage to the fabric of civil society. On top of that, what one is hearing is that you must have had some people who are technically quite competent in ministries, but just as people joined the Communist Party in Poland or Hungary because that was the only way they could get a job, they actually joined the Ba'athist Party because that was their meal ticket and that was the only way they could get a job, they were basically technocrats, but after de-Ba'athification they lost their jobs and not only have their lost their jobs but people have lost the technical expertise. Meanwhile, it sounds to me from what you are saying that it is quite difficult to replicate what happened in Afghanistan because in Afghanistan you have got the UN running most of the operations in Kabul and you are saying the difficulty here is the UN is not really seen that much differently from the US or any other occupying force. In Afghanistan you have got 22 quite high calibre ministers, many of whom were brought back into the country but recognised as having independence and some respect for who they were and what they were doing, you have not got that in Baghdad and, as far as I can see, with very rare exceptions, there does not seem to be anyone running any of these ministries who has got any grip on them. As against that background, you have got United States' troops who are getting increasingly confused, they thought they were going to be going there as liberators and are finding that they have moved from being liberators to being occupiers to just being subjects of target practice. All of that looks pretty grim, does it not? Is that a reasonably fair analysis of where we have got to? Okay. I just wanted to make sure I understood the brief. Security: do you think that there would be any greater willingness to accept troops if they came from Muslim states? For example, if the United States withdrew and troops from, I do not know, Pakistan, Egypt, Muslim countries, were to come in as peacekeepers, do you think that would command any greater respect or is the problem that the Ba'athist remnants are going to take a potshot at anyone and everyone? Is the real concern of the United States that if they go then Saddam Hussein will just pop up again?

Mr Burch: I think we do believe that internationalising the peacekeeping effort, as I said before, does offer some hopes. I agree that the image of the UN in Iraq is to some extent tainted by the issues about sanctions, the dislike of the Oil-for-Food programme, which was seen as corrupt and which the UN were not seen to have managed well. We do notice that our Iraqi partners lately, after experiencing some months of the coalition's occupation, are beginning to say that, yes, they do think a UN-mandated multinational transitory period might be more acceptable to the people. I do not really see what else we could possibly offer.

Mr Jarrah: It would probably help also if it was clearly time bound with some milestones of what would happen when, so the Iraqi people could actually measure whether or not they are moving towards total independence and self-determination which presumably everybody has as their final agenda.

Mr MacGillivray: I think what the Iraqi people are looking for is a very, very positive sign within a very short period of time now. Internationalising the peacekeeping force is certainly a very positive way forward, I think. I guess if we were to bring that down to a regional perspective and look around the region for notable people to lead this off then I think also that would be of great assistance because the situation that we have in Iraq at the moment is we still have coalition male soldiers searching females, we still have signs on the streets around Iraq where pieces of military equipment are named, "The road to Baghdad, the bodybag filler, the reaper of misfortune", and I guess that these things do not really instil a great deal of confidence amongst the population. Even taking that away would be a little step in the right direction.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: I think that one of the difficulties is that the mind set inherited, as we know from Central and Eastern Europe, takes a long time to change. After such a period of deep control, people are still anticipating authority to tell them what to do. The question earlier was the expectations as to who would deliver systems and the automatic expectation is that the government will do everything. When you say "What about NGOs?", of course there never have been NGOs in modern-day Iraq, so the NGO concept is not understood in terms of the development of civil society here in Western Europe, nor the development of business and industry either where you have a sequence where the food is provided, sourced and everything done in a circle by the government in a very Central and Eastern European Communistic way. The mind set is the most difficult thing to shift and to have people take responsibility for smaller businesses, for the development of NGOs, for their own livelihoods, I think that is going to be the really slow growth factor. There is a very high expectation now of the new ministers who do have a great responsibility. The other expectation is that after a while they will be able to elect their own ministers. There is a great feeling that democracy means we should elect our own ministers but the expectations of the new ministers are very high. When colleagues talk about security, our experience is quite long in this region on the ground and I wonder if it is not worth recalling the earlier deep instability. Although this was a very dominated society from the top there was massive instability on the ground in many areas, for example some of the teachers have been unable, through fear, to teach in schools for maybe a decade or so. One of the reasons schools have been empty is because teachers have been too frightened to go. There is a lot of work to be done in reassurance and helping people fulfil their potential, but the potential is there.

Q21  Mr Walter: I wonder if we could explore a little more the situation today as far as essential infrastructure is concerned. Recent reports have suggested electricity supplies are meeting about half of the current demand whereas before the war it was approximately two-thirds. The reports do suggest that the improvements in the water supply have been severely hampered by the looting and sabotage. When we took evidence in June, the Secretary of State said that, depending on the area, water was either back up to about 30 per cent of pre-war levels or up to something like 65 or 70 per cent of pre-war levels. I wonder if you could just give us an idea of the quantum of the problem as it is on the ground today as your organisations are seeing it? What is the current situation regarding access to water, electricity and medical supplies?

Mr Jarrah: I would love to know the basis on which those statistics were calculated because I think they were calculated and not actually collected. I do not think they are based on any statistical survey of any kind. I can only add anecdotal stories of electricity for three hours a day for a week on end, restaurant owners having to throw away the contents of their freezers because all the food goes off. I think the main problem is that there is not a systematic collection of information that can give you reliable figures. The coalition is predicting by June of next year to have six megawatts available, which is considered to be a reasonable level for the population it is serving, but that figure is quoted with the caveat that providing no sabotage happens in the meantime, and that seems to be a very unsafe assumption at the moment.

Q22  Mr Walter: There is a DFID Iraq update dated 5 September which says that current power generation is between 3,000 and 3,400 megawatts. The CPA is planning to increase supply to 4,400 megawatts by the end of September. Is this an accurate figure?

Mr Jarrah: That is the figure that we are working on as well but I remind you of that caveat: provided no sabotage happens.

Q23  Mr Walter: Obviously the lack of electricity has a knock-on effect in terms of water and in terms of sewage. I think somebody said that there are no sewage plants operating in Iraq at the present time. Is it possible to sketch briefly a map of the country? Is the situation different in different areas? Is Baghdad particularly bad, Basra okay, and maybe Kirkuk okay as well? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mr Jarrah: I cannot tell you what the overall picture is. I do not know if anybody has tried to put together the piecemeal information of all our experiences into one single map.

Mr MacGillivray: Certainly the situation in the north is significantly better than it is in the south and centre of Iraq. The infrastructure there has been virtually untouched over the period of the last few months. The only thing I would like to add to that concerns the situation on sewage in Baghdad. Baghdad is a flat city and there is no possibility that sewage can move on a gravitational feed basis, it has to be physically pumped from one sewage treatment plant to another, and that requires electricity, so the problem is compounded there because we do not have sufficient electricity for lighting and for cooling purposes but also for the safe disposal of sewage in Baghdad. I understand that it is the same for Basra.

Q24  Mr Walter: So where is it going, in the river?

Mr MacGillivray: Untreated into the river or it stays in compacted drains, which are beginning to collapse.

Mr Burch: I have just been reminded that according to our calculations Bagdad is on about 50 per cent of normal supply, the north is much less affected and the south rather worse. On the subject of predictive future electricity available, I am reminded that arrangements have been made to buy a lot of electricity into Iraq from Turkey and other countries by the CPA, so I am not quite sure in that whether they are referring to generation or to what might be available from outside.

Q25  Mr Colman: Can I ask you questions about food distribution and food security. I think Oliver Burch of Christian Aid said earlier in his evidence that food security was not an immediate worry but of potential medium and long-term concern. How is it holding up? Has there been a reduction in the numbers of people dependent on food aid?

Mr Burch: As we understand it, no. The concern is that you have a very large state with a very large part of the population who live on food aid and has done for many years. Obviously that is not a state of affairs that is ideal or one that we would wish to continue for a long period. The issue of what happens to the Oil-for-Food programme over the next six months to one year is rather a key one.

Q26  Mr Colman: You say in your evidence that the current programme ends in November and you are concerned that a successor programme will not be forthcoming.

Mr Burch: I am fairly sure that food aid will continue and that oil is intended to pay for it, but there are certainly concerns about how that is done. What happens now is that in November the distribution is handed over to the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, oil revenues will continue to pay for it, but as far as we can see the mechanism for doing that does not seem to be entirely transparent. There are two committees that are being formed that will oversee the disbursement of oil revenues. There does not seem to be sufficient Iraqi participation on those committees and we have got concerns that their actual proceedings should be transparent and the minutes of disbursements made will be available to everybody so that Iraqis can see they are getting their full benefit from the oil. That is one way of looking at it. The other way, as I said, is the picture of a country that lives effectively on aid that comes from the government or the UN in some form or other year on year on year, and it is a very depressing one, and we really do have to seek ways in which the economy and the agriculture of Iraq can be brought into play to create a more normal society.

Q27  Mr Colman: You are saying that in this case the UN is suggesting that they are going to withdraw from the administration of this aid and hand it over to a local ministry. Is this something you support?

Mr Burch: That is right. It goes in six-month contracts, the present one ends in November, and that is the present arrangement.

Q28  Mr Colman: This is working well?

Mr Burch: The last few months run by the UN's World Food Programme have gone very efficiently. Despite insecurity they have managed to bring large amounts of food into the country and get it distributed. Indeed, some of our concerns during the war period seem to have been misplaced in that the previous regime in the period going into war also distributed quite large amounts of food. So during this period people have had quite a large amount of at least dry foods in their households, although that is not an ideal diet.

Q29  Mr Colman: Does anybody else want to comment on the concept of the UN pulling out and handing this over to the Iraqis? It is an efficient system and could be built on maybe to do other things, so should the UN still be continuing to run this?

Mr Burch: I should say I have just realised that I have not answered part of your question on whether believe the Iraqis should do this. Yes, we certainly do, but if the source of the money for the food is to be their oil revenues, they should have a say in how that is spent and it should be very transparent.

Q30  Mr Colman: That has happened since the beginning of Oil-for-Food that they choose how the money is spent and that is not a change. The system is working; is this a way of building on to some of the problems we have heard described already?

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: The food aid system earlier was unfair. It did not give food evenly to the people and it was not responsive to need. Worse than that, it targeted areas of the population and refused some areas any food aid at all. If I take the Marsh Arabs, on whom we have done a big survey, 30 per cent or more of the Marsh Arab population received nothing at all from the Oil-for-Food aid programme, so there are these heavy distortions and the imbalance to be corrected. That is why you see genuine malnutrition among so many thousands of children and young people, certainly in the marsh areas where our teams and ourselves are working. The same system of course happened with water sanitation and electricity, so there is a great deal of unbalanced treatment that has to be corrected, and in that sense from these people's point of view the food aid system is certainly not yet right. They have not got sufficient food and they have not had it for a long, long time.

Q31  Mr Colman: But it is a delivery system for services down to perhaps not every village but is this not a way of delivering many of the other concerns that you have?

Mr MacGillivray: I think, yes, it is. There are a couple of positives in this. We have petitioned very, very heavily for wheat to be incorporated into the food ration and that has been done. We understand that there are also plans for ballod (?) to be incorporated into the food ration, and these are positives but there has been significant damage done at the same time. The FAO, for example, report that there has been great damage done to the poultry stock of Iraq, something which was once a source of great pride and joy to the Iraqi people. Plus the fact that there are very few seeds and very few tools and with the planting season coming up very, very quickly, the capacity for Iraqis to take part in securing their own food security future has been compromised.

Q32  Mr Colman: Could I explore that briefly. Under the old regime under Saddam the Oil-for-Food programme could not purchase locally in Iraq despite the fact that there were significant harvests, I believe, and significant food stocks in certain parts of the country. Is the Oil-for-Food programme now purchasing locally in that way and supporting local farmers and is there any move (you are saying there is very little) to encourage that farming to take place in any part of Iraq so they could ultimately feed themselves from within Iraq? Is there any planning going on?

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: One of the great difficulties is the water supply and the irrigation system. For example, the new Water Minister, Abdul Rashid, has got a really big set of problems on his hands. In the 1980s the previous regime reduced the agricultural budget by 15 per cent down to a very small amount indeed. On top of that the previous regime not only provided the seed but also bought the output and controlled the prices. So again if we look at the Marsh Arabs, for example, they received at the end of their labours only 20 per cent of the costs they had to put into it. There is a whole unravelling of the system to undertake. I hope the food aid programme will continue in some way because there is quite a long way to go before all of these contracts can be unravelled and begun again differently, and without water supplies it is not going to happen anyway.

Q33  Mr Colman: Are they buying locally at the moment?

Mr Burch: They are certainly importing enormous amounts. I do not think I can answer whether Iraq's internal market is maximised. I am certainly aware of areas where it is not. A very fertile area around Kirkuk and Mosul is not being used properly because of issues of displacement. Kurds are wishing to return to lands there, Arabs may have to leave it - this is very much a current issue - and I know the harvest has been missed in many areas this year, so I am sure it is not being used efficiently at the moment.

Q34  Mr Colman: I saw on CNN last week that the harvest has been 100 per cent bought by the CPA but has been condemned as being of low quality. Do you think the CNN reports are accurate that there has been purchasing from the farmers in order to ensure that there is a base price for the food which is actually being produced in Iraq?

Mr Burch: I wish I had that detailed knowledge, I cannot answer that.

Mr MacGillivray: That is right, the CPA has bought up 100 per cent of successful harvests but obviously there is no compensation for farmers who have had unsuccessful harvests. We know that there is some commerce between the north and the south and the harvest from the north is going south but I could not quantify that for you.

Q35  Alistair Burt: We know a decision was taken to disband the old Iraqi army en masse effectively and this would add markedly to the already grave problems on employment in Iraq. What is your current impression of unemployment issues? Is there any serious scope for a public works programme that would enable some people to be taken up and used in that capacity? How is the process of reintegrating former soldiers back into civil society going on?

Mr Jarrah: Very, very slowly. I do not know if it is 100 per cent but many of the soldiers that were dismissed from the armed forces are now receiving a salary but they are not working. So there is the idleness issue and we all know what the devil does to idle hands.

Q36  Alistair Burt: Particularly when they have still got their arms.

Mr Jarrah: Among the population that we work in, 60 per cent of households do not have an employed member, and if you take that as a generalisation across the whole area then certainly the scope for a public works programme that is labour intensive would seem to be the easy way out.

Q37  Alistair Burt: Is there any practical work being done to drive this forward? Has this been accepted by coalition forces or the UN as a way forward?

Mr Jarrah: Not that we have seen.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Traditionally Iraq has imported labour and has not been used to using her own people for labour. The Iraqi people are looking therefore for the fullest education and for jobs which will use their talents. They are not really prepared to do the labouring jobs. They are, after all, just about the second richest nation in the globe and although this has been distorted in distribution they are expecting full exercise of all of their talents. I do not think that it is going to be possible to prop up conscript army people digging roads. I just do not think that will work in the way that the Iraqi people are (rightly) looking for a proper position in the world. As Amar sees it, it is the rebuilding of the professional sector of society that would be so very helpful - professional councils, trades unions, associations, that sort of thing. The army's young men and women are full of talent. Amar has taken on several of the doctors, for example, and they are very highly motivated, very hard-working young people. They need professional advance and professional help, fresh air, and to move around. They were not allowed to move before. Teachers, doctors, engineers and all the rest were cut off. They were not allowed to move because the system did not trust them to move outside Iraq. I think that section of society is the best way of rebuilding the morale of the Iraqi people, not trying to think of them as illiterate labour forces. There is a very high degree of illiteracy at the moment but I am sure, given the intelligence of the Iraqi people, that that can quickly be overcome.

Q38  Hugh Bayley: The last time you gave evidence to the Committee you were very critical of Jay Garner's OHRA. To what extent does the CPA share those problems? It clearly has problems delivering humanitarian programmes and, even more so, reconstruction programmes but is it a step forward? Does it overcome some of the problems which you were telling us the OHRA faced?

Mr Jarrah: As a gross generalisation, yes, CPA is definitely an improvement on OHRA. The one mistake that they have repeated, and they have probably been forced into this by the security situation, is that they still not talk to ordinary Iraqis. It is very difficult for an Iraqi individual or organisation to have any direct dialogue with anybody from the CPA. The only presence that most Iraqis sense of the coalition is heavily armed people on the street. That inability to inter-act with Iraqi society is the Achilles heel of the CPA. In terms of the reconstruction and rehabilitation plans that the CPA has put into effect, there are some advances that are visible, and I gave the example of the Ministry of Public Works, which we think has been a small, unsung success story. So things are moving in the right direction on other fronts but it is that alienation from the Iraqi people that has been its biggest problem.

Q39  Hugh Bayley: Has donor co-ordination and access to information improved?

Mr MacGillivray: I think it is difficult for donors, particularly in Baghdad, to construct that level of constructive engagement that they would need with the CPA in order to share information. In some ways I see the donor relationship with the CPA a little bit like "you are more of them than us" when actually they are not one nor the other, they are a professional body of people who are there to discharge responsibilities in their own right. The crux of the matter for the CPA is definitely their terms of engagement with the Iraqi people. There is this massive wall between credible Iraqi opinion about how to deliver on essential services and the CPA, and we still have not bridged that gap at all. What that has led to is for the CPA to make a number of assumptions and a number of decisions based on very little evidence. I feel that this is partly responsible for the CPA's inability to deliver on these essential services. It has been an improvement but it has not been much of an improvement.

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: The CPA is of course very new. It did not emerge until Resolution 1283 and there have been a number of changes of face in a very short space of time, both in Baghdad and in Basra. Given those constraints I think they have done a wonderful job so far. Their focus, as I can see in meeting with them (and we are working closely with them on the ground) lies in transferring responsibility to the Iraqi authorities and so all the time one sees them struggling to get the responsibilities into Iraq ministry hands and perhaps their success can only ultimately be judged by how effectively and well and speedily they complete that transition process.

Q40  Hugh Bayley: Is there a better relationship between the Iraqi ministries and officials and the public than with the CPA? For instance, if you were a village with a complaint that no teacher had arrived to re-open the school - I do not know what the complaint might be but if you had some complaint and you wanted to make representations to authority - how would that happen?

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: From early days, and as I say we came back into Iraq towards the end of April, it has been possible to see the building up very quickly of local councils and to see that the number of those councils that have still existed and have not gone is numerous. What I would call the town councils are still there and still performing and the work on other councils that the CPA has been building up, which are more consultative with more Iraqi involvement at a higher level, has been going ahead apace. That gives a number of opportunities for working more closely with different levels of responsibility that are Iraqi because the CPA had been creating more. The town councils and city councils have survived and they seem to be the same, but more bodies have been brought in where the CPA has been trying to create a greater representation. Could I put a quick marker down here, Chairman, about the imbalance of women. That is not a comment that I have heard raised from colleagues or from members of the Committee. To some of us that is a very troubling matter. For example, it is very simple, you restore a school, there is a playground but it is not a playground where girls would ever play; it is a facility for sport for boys. Right the way through society we can already see how difficult it has been to get even one women minister or two women members on the consultative council and lower down the line tradition is so heavily against this. Could I just put a marker down there that this is a topic as yet unexplored today but it is perhaps one of the biggest topics and it may prove to be one of the greatest difficulties in real representation at all levels of Iraqi society.

Chairman: I am going to take a couple of executive decisions here because we need to move on to Afghanistan. I think I have the following observations to make. When this Committee first started doing work on Iraq it was pre the invasion and our report was a report on the possible humanitarian consequences of conflict in Iraq. The concerns of those from whom we took advice (and they were reflected in the Committee's report) were much more in terms of would there be capacity to do food aid and so on and so forth. I think it would be fair to say the impression that we get from what you are saying today is that people in Iraq are not necessarily starving but the World Food Programme and Oil-for-Food programme is just about ticking over. In fact, that sounds like the only things that are vaguely functioning. Against that background, someone suggested to me that really Iraq had almost moved beyond this Committee because it was no longer a development issue, it was becoming simply a political issue, a security issue, an FCO-type issue. Listening to the evidence you have given this afternoon that is clearly far from the case and we have obviously got some very grim development issues. One understands, taking on Baroness Nicholson's points, all these tensions and for some people it has been a marginal improvement seeing the Saddam regime go, but generally (particularly in Baghdad and probably Basra) the situation is grim. I do not think this Committee should lose sight of all of that but what I think we ought to do is as follows. This House is now going to adjourn for the next few weeks. We next meet as a Committee on 16 October when we are due to take evidence from Baroness Amos and Patricia Hewitt and others and we have got various other things to do. Ann Clwyd will be back from visiting Iraq and of course she has this brief from the Prime Minister on Iraq. With the agreement of colleagues, which I am going to take as an assent, we will meet at 2 o'clock but I would like to suggest, again with the assent of colleagues, that in the intervening period of time that you and the other NGOs might like to get together and have a discussion about what you think should be done to improve the situation. I think we need some fairly specific suggestions and winding back the clock is not one of them. From where we are now, how do we move forward? I will have a brief discussion with colleagues after this as to whether we might have that discussion in private or in public. We might have it in private to begin with and then open it up because we need to have some sort of discussion about how we move forward, otherwise I think we are in grave danger of doing quite a lot of chest-beating but not necessarily getting very far. Would colleagues agree with that? Okay. Would you mind us adjourning generally until 16 October when you will come back at 2 o'clock and in the intervening period of time we would be grateful if you would get together - and there may well be other NGOs that you would want to involve in discussions - and come back with some coherent suggestions as to how you feel the international community should be moving forward and how far it is possible to base those on the ground. I think that also includes various important points that Baroness Nicholson has been making about how does one involve women and so on. I think we have to get some progress going because the original strategy was predicated on the fact that armed forces go in, liberate, get the oil revenues rolling, everything then is hunky-dory, you start generating income, Iraq becomes a middle-income country, everyone is ecstatically happy, rejoicing in the streets, and we tick it off and move back to other more difficult areas. Clearly that is not happening. You have got a country where the vast majority of the population are still dependent on food aid, where, for the capital city, water and sewage treatment is not just working at all, and it is a miracle that there have not been some major water-borne disease epidemics breaking out in Baghdad. That is something that I think we need to revert to. So perhaps we can adjourn Iraq until 16 October, not to give up work on it but do some conscious work on it, and come forward with some solutions rather than a description of the problems.