Oral evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 10 June 2003

Members present:

Tony Baldry, Chairman
John Barrett
Mr John Battle
Alistair Burt
Ann Clwyd
Mr Tony Colman
Mr Piara S Khabra
Chris McCafferty
Tony Worthington

__________

Memoranda submitted by CARE International, Christian Aid,

Oxfam and Save the Children

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR RAJA JARRAH, Programme Director, CARE International, MR NICK GUTTMANN, Head of Emergencies, Christian Aid, MR ADAM LEACH, Regional Director for the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union, Oxfam, and MR MIKE AARONSON, Director General, Save the Children UK, examined.

Q1  Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. Would you introduce yourselves for the record.

Mr Jarrah: Raja Jarrah, Programme Director of CARE International UK.

Mr Guttmann: Nick Guttmann, Head of Emergencies, Christian Aid.

Mr Aaronson: Mike Aaronson, Director General, Save the Children UK.

Mr Leach: Adam Leach, Regional Director for the Middle East for Oxfam.

Q2  Chairman: The acoustics in these rooms are pretty foul. Some of us are slightly deaf and, Mike, it will be slightly difficult for you to catch my eye as I cannot see you! If you could very kindly speak up. Also, as a team, we do not know how much knowledge each of your organisations have, and you are probably working in different parts of Iraq and have different experiences. Can we leave it that you will allocate questions between you. There will be some where only one of you need answer, and some where you will all want to answer, and we will play it by ear. The House of Commons Library have produced quite a useful brief on Iraq and the law of occupation. It struck me there were two crucial bits under the Geneva and Hague Conventions. The first was that the occupying powers, because this clearly in international law is what the coalition forces are, have a responsibility to provide security. The second was they have a responsibility "to the fullest extent of the means available to it to ensure food and medical supplies to the population - and this includes bringing in additional supplies if necessary. Further, it must to the fullest extent possible, and in cooperation with existing authorities, maintain medical services and public health". Those are direct quotes from the Fourth Geneva Convention. Perhaps we could start by asking you a bit about how you as NGOs, not so much see the legal responsibilities of those powers under the Geneva Conventions, see DFID fitting into all of this in relation to the military? There was an article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago from Bernard Jenkin, Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, who said he had been out talking to our military who kept on saying, "Well, where is DFID?" One gets the sense that DFID has been saying, "Look, we can only go for their security. Responsibility for delivering security is the occupying powers. They have responsibilities under the Geneva Convention etc" To whom have you been relating? Have you been relating to DFID? Do you get a sense that DFID has got a grip on this? Have you been relating to the military and, if so, who within the occupying powers are you relating? Who, so far as you are concerned, is running the show? In Afghanistan it was very clear - there was a UN special representative, Mr Brahemie(?), and everyone knew where they fitted in. We are not quite clear of the geography of decision-taking on the ground in Iraq. Perhaps you would like to help the Committee first with that?

Mr Jarrah: I think all of us will want to weigh-in on this question. There is a telling phrase in your introduction about cooperation with existing authorities. The problem we are all facing is that there is no existing authority. The existing authority was removed and it has not been replaced by anything else that is very effective. DFID is not an operational agency, so it is not surprising they are not there on the ground. They have very few avenues with which to engage the current authorities in Iraq. There is a power vacuum which is affecting the activities of all agencies there, including NGOs. Until there is clarity about what the coordination mechanisms are going to be and when the civilian administration is going to become effective, it is really very difficult for any of us to do anything other than piecemeal work.

Mr Leach: For Oxfam, as we have indicated in our submission, there is a general lack of clarity and confusion regarding the OCPA's plans. Because the UN does not seem to be playing and is not able to play a coordinating role, this confusion is very difficult. It is hard for the UN agencies, for the NGOs, to know what their roles should be and how to coordinate with the authorities on the ground. As Raja says, that is creating confusion and difficulty about how to operate.

Mr Aaronson: Most of the contact is with the military, and it takes up a huge amount of time, endless meetings and, frankly, a lot of our people on the ground have the impression a lot of that is one-way traffic- in that we are expected to provide the military with the best of the information we can provide about what is happening, but there is not really any active effort by the military to then provide leadership or coordination to what is happening. I think that is partly because, frankly, they are cast in an inappropriate role. There is no way that 20 year-old soldiers can provide adequate protection to children on the streets of Baghdad. Nor is it appropriate for the US military to go into a girls' secondary school as part of their duties. These things are happening so I think the military are cast in an almost impossible situation. As far as the UN is concerned, hopefully this situation will now change quite significantly with Sergio Vieira de Mello's arrival. He is obviously a very high octane performer and very experienced in these situations. We all hope now there will be a lot more leadership provided by the UN. Again, that really depends on how much scope they are given to play the role we believe they should have.

Mr Guttmann: I would agree with things that have already been said. I think there is another area which needs to be looked at, which is the way in which we relate to the different powers who are in authority in different parts of the country. I think there are big differences, from my experience when I was there a couple of weeks ago, between the British sector in the south and the way in which the Americans are operating in their areas. It seemed to me that in the southern areas there was quite a pragmatic approach being adopted by the British to the local people who had emerged as leaders in the different areas, with good communication between them, the local people and ourselves. In other parts of the country that did not seem to be happening. There was a blockage and the American authorities were not seeming to engage as I think they should have been with local communities who were trying run the services for themselves. For example, in Amarah - one of the places I went to in the south of the country, quite close to the Iranian border area - there was a good relationship between a committee of local Iraqis, the British military and the NGOs, and there was somebody who had emerged from the Ministry of Education who was trying to coordinate all the different activities and it was a good piece of local civil action. They came to an agreement about needing resources to pay staff, with water or whatever. The British said, "Yes, we'll try and get it". They spoke to Baghdad because it is so centralised, and they got no response. It took a week or ten days before they got a response, and then it was not particularly positive. You have got those differences as well. That is a lack of coordination which makes it very hard for local institutions to start functioning themselves.

Q3  Tony Worthington: Can I quote what you write, and it is on the security issue. In CARE's submission you say, "The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance has taken upon itself the mantle of coordinating the international response. This body has no clear mandate for its operation and is staffed by a confusing mixture of military and civilian appointments. Housed in one of Saddam's former palaces, it is operating as if in a bunker, impenetrable to outside contact and with no avenues for dialogue with NGOs and civil society actors. While we have had sight of an organisational chart for staff of ORHA, our staff in Baghdad have found it impossible to make contact with any of them". Do you stand by every word of that?

Mr Jarrah: I would stand by every word of that at the time it was written, which was in late May. The situation has improved with a change of acronym for ORHA and a change of staffing and a change of approach. I think they recognised that they were impenetrable, and it is becoming easier to have dialogue with various parts of that system. I would stand with the spirit of what I said before, which is that dialogue with the CPA (as I think it is called now) is still very difficult to have. There is no open forum for a frank exchange of ideas and information.

Q4  Tony Worthington: Do you think of it as a military body or a civilian body? To whom does it answer?

Mr Jarrah: I do not know. We certainly treat it as if it is answerable to the military.

Mr Guttmann: I did actually penetrate one meeting, and I think my perception was that it was very much an American military body and they were in control, and the civilian was very much lower key. It was run by the military and the military were giving presentations. That was my impression of it.

Mr Aaronson: The other issue worth flagging is that they are hugely short of skilled staff. They have recently had this massive influx of extra people but, particularly given the weeding out of the Ba'ath Party officials from all the ministries, it puts a huge burden on the CPA to provide technical as well as managerial input and it simply is not there. They do not have the people resources to do that.

Mr Leach: I was in Basra at the beginning of May and went to an ordinary routine daily information coordination meeting at which the military were present. In view of the government's response to this Committee's submission, that there would be a recognition and upholding of the importance of independent humanitarian action, that mixing of civilian and military personnel in ordinary coordination meetings is confusing. It is understandable that the assumption is that these bodies are accountable to the military.

Q5  Tony Worthington: The security aspect is, first and foremost, among your concerns. How might you improve that? For example, the links with or the creation of local security organisations, local policing or the importation of overseas policing, what would you do?

Mr Leach: Fundamentally that is not our job as international humanitarian organisations. We see that as the responsibility of the occupying power. We want to see more security on the ground and security forces.

Q6  Tony Worthington: As an NGO what is most lacking? What would you most like to see to help you do your job properly?

Mr Jarrah: I think you have to unpack the reasons for the insecurity. Part of it is opportunist; part of it is the fact that with every passing day we are losing the goodwill and the patience of the Iraqi people, and that is allowing the law of the jungle to take over the power vacuum I alluded to earlier. As NGOs what we would like to see happening is a restoration of services, and a restoration of confidence that there is somebody in charge of this, so that the lawlessness and the opportunist gangsterism that has arisen does not have room to flourish. There is an element of organised crime. There is an element that can only be dealt with through more strict policing and some military patrols and so on. By and large, the insecurity is due to the lack of any authority at all.

Mr Aaronson: As I think I said in evidence to this Committee before the war, none of us could do our jobs without the consent of the civilian population. It is a complete fallacy to think that we somehow go in and provide humanitarian assistance. In the absence of that we cannot do it. There is clearly a lack of what we call "humanitarian space" at the moment. I think it is compounded by the fact that the CPA answers to the Pentagon. Both the civil and the military staff of the CPA are actually under military command. Given that there has been a war, and given that the aftermath of the war is still very much in people's minds, that makes it difficult for all of us to be perceived as purely impartial humanitarian activists. It is a real problem.

Q7  Tony Worthington: Can I finally ask about the staffing on the streets, as it were, the security forces, the armies on the street? There is criticism of the lack of numbers, but I remember reading an article by Fergal Keane saying, "These poor kids just want to go home. They've won a war. They were never told they were going to have to patrol the streets and make friends with the Iraqis" and so on. How is that being coped with? Are the troops being changed. How are they going to be staffed in the future? Now it is a minimum of a year as an occupying force, what is happening about that?

Mr Jarrah: No idea.

Mr Aaronson: We do not know. I would very much agree with the thought that you have expressed. Those troops are actually being placed in a very difficult, if not an impossible, position.

Mr Leach: There is one related issue which is the point about needing more troops. One of the problems we know exists is about the lack of jobs and the Iraqi military has left approximately 400,000 people unemployed with plans, apparently, only to re-employ about ten per cent of that with no apparent plans for jobs and for re-employment of the remaining numbers. Although we cannot answer the question about what should happen to the occupying forces military, there are clearly big issues about disclosure, about what should happen to the military in Iraq.

Q8  Mr Khabra: Security is one of the major problems. Everybody knows the effective delivery of many things depends on security and the NGOs know about their limitations. DDR is a programme which has been established or is planned. There are nearly 400,000 soldiers who have been allowed to keep their weapons and this has actually intensified the small arms available for people which can further aggregate when those soldiers are demobilised and the situation will get worse. It has been reported that some of the local groups are prepared to provide some sort of security but they are very reluctant to be seen to be cooperating with the occupying power. That is a situation which I would like to ask you about. Are the military working with you to help provide safe access for humanitarian workers? Further, the NGOs have raised their concern about the political agendas of some of the organisations which are coordinating the humanitarian relief effort, which is impeding the delivery of humanitarian relief on an impartial basis because they are politically motivated. Has this problem been solved so far? How can humanitarian space be preserved or defined?

Mr Jarrah: The short answer to your first question is, no, we have not had any protection from the military. The longer answer is that we would not accept it. We would find it very difficult to be associated with a military that is unpopular in the country that they are occupying, because it would be a danger to our staff and it would compromise our longer-term ability to work with communities and organisations in Iraq. At the moment there is not an acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq. People are not dropping like flies in the street, so we cannot invoke the humanitarian imperative and say, "We need military protection at any cost to be able to get life-saving aid to dying people". If the situation does not get better, and if in the next couple of months the food pipeline is not restored, and if water supplies are not provided to the whole population then we might get to that point. At the moment we are keen to maintain our distance from the military, for obvious reasons.

Q9  Mr Khabra: Would you agree that there is a need to establish some sort of administration in coordination and cooperation with the local people; that the delivery of relief is guaranteed? For those people who are suffering from lack of water, sanitation or with health issues, all sorts of issues, there are such massive problems that there is a need, as quickly as possible, to establish some sort of police force; because those people will be demobilised and they will all be unemployed and they will further cause problems with the social disorder in the country that I do not know how the NGOs can play their role constructively and give advice to those people who are at the moment occupying the country.

Mr Aaronson: What we have argued all along, and what your comments also underline is the critical importance of giving a role to the United Nations; that the UN is the only body that can operate in that space in an impartial way, in a way that also builds on its experience of operating in these very difficult post-conflict situations. This is where the UN has a distinctive competence and it needs to be allowed to exercise that role as soon as possible.

Q10  Chairman: In Afghanistan the UN clearly had and have had a much more central role. The NGOs, to preserve their humanitarian status, were dependent upon ISAF(?) and upon other troops and so forth, so you need protection. How do you see the mechanics of that working now in Iraq? It is quite clear that the UN special representative, coordinating the humanitarian effort, is going to have limited control over the military. You probably have seen more of this on the ground than we have. Within the politics of "possible" how do you see this functioning? That is really the question Piara was asking. How is the humanitarian space going to be preserved and defined? I suspect it is not good enough for the NGOs simply to say, "We don't want anything to do with the military". You cannot say that on the one hand and then say, "The most important thing for us is security", on the other hand.

Mr Leach: Just to stress a practical need, so far most of our assessment for Oxfam has been carried out in relation to urban areas, to towns along the Euphrates, and access to rural areas has not been possible. Yet our concern is that the kinds of things we can do best are out in the rural areas, where the water systems are simple and where we need to be able to do the kinds of things we do; but we cannot get to those areas at the moment because security is said to be too difficult. The military could make that possible.

Q11  Chris McCafferty: During the war there was a clear power vacuum and for obvious safety reasons NGOs were not able to enter Iraq, and we understand that. You have all referred to a continuing power vacuum. Someone said "no existing authority; few avenues to engage". These are very serious issues. I wondered if you could tell us how you think such difficulties could be avoided in the future? How would you like to see these kinds of problems dealt with should there be any future conflicts, so that we can do it better?

Mr Jarrah: We would be reluctant to go on record as having ever given advice to anybody about how to occupy another country better in future. One thing that confuses us, and we are bewildered, is that there does not appear to have been a post-war strategy in place when the war was started. The immediate target was regime change, and from what we have seen afterwards there seems to have been very little thought given to what was going to happen after that. There has been a stripping of the Iraqi government in terms of the top hierarchies of the various ministries and nothing put in its place. I am not sure I remember the thrust of your question.

Q12  Chris McCafferty: Given that you have all expressed concern about a power vacuum which is continuing, it is a bit late to say: "How can you change that now?" I am asking, how could it have been better prepared for? Do you think there was a lack of understanding that this power vacuum would take place? You have expressed concerns about the military. You have said there seem to be few avenues to engage. How would you prefer to see it? What would you like to see happen, so that there would be more avenues to engage?

Mr Jarrah: A rapid reinstatement of civilian authority, particularly overlying ministries such as the Ministry of Health, coordinated by a visibly impartial United Nations presence that distances the post-war recovery of Iraq from anything that happened during the invasion.

Mr Guttmann: In addition to that, it has to be seen that there is far more Iraqi involvement in that administration, and in the decision-making process. I think there is a feeling from the Iraqis that I spoke to that they are being excluded from the decision-making processes. Even where local committees have been set up, in some places there was a very pragmatic approach taken and they were included, but that certain groups in the centre were actually stopping that because maybe they did not fit with the type of person they would like to have in those roles. There has to be much more Iraqi involvement in the processes.

Q13  Chris McCafferty: I think the Committee are well aware, indeed one of you mentioned this, that in the British area, where the British troops are, the British troops have been practising a pragmatic approach and have been trying to develop relationships with people on the ground, and help leaders in the community to organise themselves, but that has not happened in the greater areas controlled by the Americans. Just to clarify what you are saying, if I understand you correctly you are saying where that has happened on the ground, which we understand to be in British areas, that may have been thwarted by central control higher up in Baghdad, perhaps the American-led organisation. Is that what you are saying?

Mr Guttmann: That is the impression I got when I was there,yes. It is what I am saying. I have just heard that there are new citizens advisory councils, which I believe are being set up and have only just heard about which were not happening when I was there. These are going to be across the country, and maybe this is a way in which people in Baghdad are realising it is very important to include a legitimate voice, however you define what a legitimate voice is; that there needs to be that voice and these citizens advisory councils may be a way of institutionalising that across the country. People may be learning from some of the mistakes that were made earlier. The mistakes that were made earlier and the lack of inclusion will create more distrust down the line and make things harder to establish later on.

Mr Aaronson: In order to answer your question, one really has to go back to the way this operation was conceived and planned in the first instance. This is quite difficult for all of us, because none of us wants to be sitting here and just saying, "We told you so". Actually to link back to Tony Baldry at the end of the last round of questions, there is a difference between security that comes from a Chapter 7-type intervention, where basically the mandate of the military forces, as we are seeing now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is through armed force to provide protection. There is a difference between that kind of security, and the kind of security that comes from being welcomed and being able to operate without armed guard, armed protection. The fact of the matter - and it should not pass unrecorded in this session - is that we were told by the British Government that all these elements had been factored into the planning. We were told that the political, the military and the humanitarian dimensions of the operation were all linked up, and that as much priority would be given to the humanitarian dimension as to the others. That could not have been the case, given where we have ended up. The fact of the matter is there was not a plan, there was not a post-conflict plan, and we are now seeing a situation on the ground that has devastating consequences for ordinary Iraqi civilians.

Q14  Chris McCafferty: Can I ask you if you would revise your policies as individual organisations, because of the experiences you have had with Iraq? What would you see as the ideal division of labour between military and civilian humanitarian organisations such as your own in a post-conflict situation?

Mr Aaronson: I do not think we would revise our policies at all. I think we have been entirely consistent throughout. While there is certainly a role for the military in certain situations, where it is a Chapter 7-type situation where massive military might is needed in order to stabilise the situation, it is very important not to confuse the role the military can play and that the United Nations and other humanitarian organisations can play. That needs to be kept very, very separate; not just so that we can do our job but also so they can do their job.

Q15  Mr Battle: It seems even now there is a crucial contradiction. While you are calling for more Iraqi involvement whenever you use the phrase "looking for the legitimate voices" how can that happen if half the population or two-thirds of the civilian administrators are declared Ba'ath Party members and, therefore, do not qualify; so you have ruled out all the people who could do the administration. Are there plans to train other people to step into their shoes; and what happens with all those disgruntled administrators who have been told they cannot do their job? How has that been addressed?

Mr Guttmann: I think that is a real problem. I personally think it was a big mistake to sack that huge cross-number of people without actually thinking things through about who would actually take their places in running the administrations. Unfortunately, in many countries which are run by dictatorships like Saddam people have to join their party in order to get promoted and get into more senior positions. That does not necessarily mean that all of them are evil and have been involved in the vicious oppression of people. Ethiopia and Mengistu was a good example of that. I go back to the need to take more pragmatic decisions which are actually going to help get through not just the immediate results of the conflict but the 25 years of previous conflict, the Iran-Iraq War, the previous Gulf War, sanctions and a country which was already in a very, very poor state of affairs - and more pragmatic action rather than action based on ideology or the wish for the de-Ba-athification of Iraq. It needs to be more pragmatic and realistic. There are people who need to be included across the board.

Q16  Chris McCafferty: How adequate do you think the planning for post the conflict by DFID, our Government, NGOs and the UN was? You have all said quite clearly that you felt it was wholly inadequate, certainly our government's response was, because of the assurances given that there was a parallel effort to the military response going into the humanitarian response. Do you all agree with that, and how do you feel about the other agencies?

Mr Jarrah: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you look at the situation now, it is impossible to think that a well-laid plan was so badly conceived that it did not work, and we are left with the conclusion that there was no plan in the first place, by anybody.

Q17  Chris McCafferty: Do you all agree with that?

Mr Leach: Yes, certainly. Oxfam and others have had a lot of trouble for a long time to plan as best we could. Again, this is a very uncertain situation. The reality of planning for a crisis that might happen, might not happen, might happen some time, might not happen soon, might happen within the country, might happen on the borders, is that it is extremely difficult.

Q18  Chris McCafferty: Nobody wants to pre-empt war.

Mr Leach: Exactly.

Q19  Chris McCafferty: Did you as individual organisations have difficulty having a dialogue with DFID and the UN prior to the conflict beginning, in terms of making your own preparations for a possible military conflict and a post-conflict situation?

Mr Jarrah: From our point of view, the dialogue with DFID was full and frank in the latter weeks leading up to the conflict. At the beginning, I think everybody was in denial, and we were hoping that it would just go away. When it became very clear that it was not going to, our relationships with DFID were very good.

Mr Guttmann: I would endorse that.

Q20  Ann Clwyd: I just wanted to take you up on what you said about de-Ba'athification. The truth is, of course, that local people, the Iraqis themselves, wanted to get rid of some people from the ministries because of their record. It is erroneous to suggest that everybody who was a member of the Ba'ath party has been removed from the ministries or the police or from the military. They have not. There are various layers of Ba'ath party control, and it is really the highest strata that are being removed. Occasionally, of course, for example, just last week it was discovered that a Ba'ath political cell was regrouping in the central police station. It is local people themselves who blow the whistle very often. Now that the CPA has set up a de-Ba'athification council to advise on the way that process should take place, that will enable whoever is making those decisions to make the right decisions, but there must also be some form of appeal, because some people may be denounced because somebody does not like them, not because of the role they played in the previous administration. I was there just last week and that is the reality of what is going on. Whereas the CPA in the early days did keep people in post, those people are now being removed. At one of the women's meetings that I went to organised by the CPA, women were denouncing other women for their role in the Ba'ath party. So local people can sort it out pretty well.

Mr Guttmann: I agree entirely; local people can sort it out very well for themselves. They know who the people were who were committing the atrocities. In the towns and in the villages it is known, which is why I was saying it is important that there is local control, with the right of appeal, of course, rather than something being led by ideological views about getting rid of the whole top four layers. Some of them should be removed, some from the lower layers probably should also be removed, but it is the people themselves who are best placed to know who they are. That is what I mean by taking a more pragmatic approach.

Q21  Alistair Burt: Can I raise two or three practical issues that have been highlighted by the media as a result of what has happened? Firstly, water. All the agencies pick out the issues affecting water supplies as being of major concern. CARE says "While water is available, albeit erratically, in most parts of Baghdad and elsewhere, the state of the sanitation system is more worrying." UNICEF say, "Lack of grid electricity is a major problem. Water treatment plants are operating on generators or not at all. Water and sewage treatment plants are extremely dependent on the availability of electricity." Do you think more could have been done to highlight water as a likely pressing issue in the run-up to the conflict? What is your assessment of the accessibility of Iraqis to clean water throughout the country at the moment? What is your sense and your estimate of the likelihood of disease breaking out as a result of the problems of sanitation? Could one or other of you give us a brief rundown on those issues?

Mr Jarrah: You have put your finger on the biggest problem that we foresee in the next few months from the humanitarian point of view. If as much energy had been put into repairing and rehabilitating the electricity infrastructure as was put into securing the oil installations, we would perhaps have a better water supply situation in Iraq now, leading up to the hot summer months. Apart from electricity, the other key bottleneck that we are seeing at the moment is a shortage of chlorine in the country, which is needed for water treatment. CARE has been working in south and central Iraq for about 12 years, and round about this time of year there is always an increase in water-borne disease simply because of the reduced quantities of clean water available. This year the indication is that the incidence of childhood diarrhoea is three or four times the usual rate that is experienced at this time, and we see that as an early signal of a possible epidemic this coming summer. That is going to be compounded by the fact that the health infrastructure cannot cope. There are shortages of key drugs, as well as of staff and logistical support for hospitals. We see that as the biggest immediate problem that might hit our television screens.

Q22  Alistair Burt: Do you see anything in place at the moment which gives you any confidence that this is currently being adequately addressed? Although there must inevitably be a time lag in trying to catch up to where we would like to be, do you think adequate steps are currently being taken, or is enough not being done to secure clean, safe water in the near future?

Mr Jarrah: The way you phrased that question is really important. We do not see it. It may well be that there are plans afoot, and it may well be that there is a contingency operation being prepared right now. I quite take your point that these things do take time to set up, but there has been no information about it, no dialogue about it, and there are no indications that anything like that is in hand.

Mr Leach: If I may add to that, in addition to not seeing it, I think it is extremely difficult for UNICEF, the delegated lead for the UN system, to co-ordinate a response and to make sure that adequate provision is made. It is a double problem: it is a problem of lack of disclosure, but also lack of opportunity for UNICEF, in this case, to do its job.

Mr Aaronson: With regard to the first half of your question, whether anything more could have been done to highlight the importance of this, certainly it was highlighted by all of us in a major way. As long ago as last September, Save the Children was pointing out that only 46 per cent of the rural population of Iraq had access to piped water, and already, even then, issues of sanitation were a major factor in the health of Iraqi children, and the likelihood of that being disrupted by a war was very high. So, again, this was foreseeable.

Q23  Alistair Burt: Turning to hospitals, what plans were you aware of to ensure that hospitals remained operational? What is your assessment of hospitals' access to water and electricity supplies at the moment? What is your knowledge of hospital staff being paid or not paid at the moment? What is the impact of uncollected waste from hospitals festering in nearby areas? Do you have a sense that this is an issue which is being tackled, or do hospitals remain seriously hazardous places?

Mr Jarrah: One of the casualties of the dismantling of the previous Iraqi government is that the Ministry of Health is no longer operational, and one of the things that they were very good at was assembling information about the state of the country's health infrastructure, with systematic information about the state of the hospitals, epidemiological data and so on. None of that is now being collected in any systematic way. We have anecdotal information about hospitals that are faring well, and we have anecdotal information about hospitals that are in really dire circumstances. But there is no overall picture about the current state across the board. Without an operating Ministry of Health, we do not know how that overall picture can be arrived at.

Q24  Alistair Burt: We were all shocked and to some degree surprised at the immediate scale of looting in the aftermath of the conflict, and that the most bizarre equipment was removed from hospitals, which would appear to have had no other value beyond being in a hospital, for example incubators. Again, to what extent, in your judgment, could the scale of looting have been anticipated by the authorities? We hear that some places that have been repaired, such as water treatment plants, have been looted again. What do you have that better precautions could have been put in place, and do you think they are there now?

Mr Guttmann: I think there certainly could have been better preparations to have avoided the looting, had the occupying powers provided the security that was needed and taken that on as a responsibility. In Amarah, which is, as I said, an area that I went to, some of the people I was speaking to said, "We are very pleased to have had the British here," even though the British did not actually overthrow the regime there; it crumbed by itself. The one thing they would not forgive them for was their failure at that very early stage to provide security for the hospitals, schools and other public institutions, to stop the looting. The looting in a place like that was an upsurge of people's anger at the previous regime. Schools, hospitals and government buildings were seen as symbols of the previous regime.

Q25  Alistair Burt: Hospital incubators were seen as symbols of the previous regime?

Mr Guttmann: I do not know; I cannot answer whether hospital incubators were seen as that. But the institutions themselves were, and therefore anything was seen as fair game, which is wrong, but is what seemed to happen. There was also common criminality. You have to remember that 70,000 ordinary prisoners were released from the prisons just before the war started, and people probably thought, "Oh, here's our chance to take some stuff, and maybe we can sell it back after the conflict." That is common criminality. More recently, people have been talking about organised crime, and maybe that is what has happened to the water treatment plants.

Mr Aaronson: Could I add something to that? I hope this does not sound glib; it is not meant to. We have to recognise that, if we are going to intervene in a massive way in somebody else's country, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to anticipate how ordinary people are going to react, and I think a degree of humility in anticipating the consequences of our actions in future will be an important thing to learn from what has happened in Iraq.

Mr Jarrah: Can I make an additional point on that question? Some of the looting of hospital supplies was actually benign, if you can call it that, in that the drugs and the bandages and some of the more minor medical equipment reappeared in neighbourhood clinics run by community organisations. So it was creating an alternative health facility for local communities to what was seen as the centralised party system.

Q26  Ann Clwyd: You have partly answered the questions I was going to ask you about co-ordination. It was very difficult to get into the CPA. I found it difficult to get into the CPA. I could only go in with somebody who had a badge, and there were very few of those badges issued. It was a matter of security, and the difficulty of trying to secure that building, with several road blocks before you got into it. There was difficulty with communication, if you wanted to communicate from outside the building, because there were no land lines, only satellite phones which worked intermittently. Sometimes you might try on six occasions to contact somebody inside that building, and unless you persisted, you very often found that you did not make contact at all. One has to look at it also in that context, of difficulty of communication in general, because of the phone problem and the problem over security. We all agree that there is a problem of security, and the people working in ORHA became over-defensive, because they could not get out of the building very easily, so they could not communicate with the people they wanted to contact outside. Obviously, communicating by telephone is extremely important to the proper running of any organisation for interaction between people, and those things need to be put right.

Mr Guttmann: Communication can be established. There also has to be a will among the people inside the security zone to make more effort to get out and to communicate. I think there were problems with Baghdad communicating with the south, and ORHA were hardly establishing themselves at all two weeks ago, and they were saying, "Maybe in three weeks or so we might get our staff there." I would have hoped the CPA could have got things going faster, but I think they did have a role to try harder to get out of there.

Q27  John Barrett: I would like to ask a question about resources and also about the timescale. You mentioned earlier on that in order to get on and do the job, the military, having done their job, need to have moved on. How do you see the timescale unfolding? Do you see the military presence being extended, with consequent delay in the opportunity for NGOs to get on and do their job?

Mr Jarrah: I think there is going to be a longer term need for some kind of backstopping function in Iraq that does not necessarily require it to be a very visible one or one that flies under the flag of the coalition forces. In the best of all possible worlds, if the United Nations were given the mandate and the resources to oversee both the civil security aspect of the post-war situation, as well as the coordination of the rehabilitation efforts, we could get on with our jobs tomorrow. The problem for us is that we do not know how long it is going to be before that space is created for us.

Mr Leach: I would agree with that.

Q28  John Barrett: On the question of the availability of resources, there have been a number of appeals and so on. Do you envisage the resources being available when you need them, and are there local authority resources out there that you need access to, for instance, for rubbish collection and so on?

Mr Aaronson: I think it is worth pointing out that the latest data on the level of funding of the UN appeal is that it is only funded to the extent of 44 per cent of requirements. So there is a serious issue about under-funding of UN agencies, which needs to be resolved quickly.

Q29  John Barrett: Apart from the under-funding, you cannot really move until you have this space?

Mr Jarrah: Yes. Iraq is fundamentally a rich country, and it should not require its social services to be run by NGOs or any other outsider. It is simply a stop-gap measure until Iraqi institutions are functioning using Iraqi resources.

Q30  Mr Colman: We were in New York at the United Nations when the flash appeal was launched for Iraq, which was for $2 billion, and that was to go through to September. You mentioned 44 per cent is funded, and added to that has to be the money which has come through the Oil for Food programme. It seems to be a very fudged issue. My question is, are you being consulted about the next flash appeal, which will take us through beyond September? Are you formulating what is needed? Is it a repeat of the $2 billion? Does it need to be structured in a different way? Should there be more for mine-clearing, which we have not mentioned? Does there need to be more emphasis on the fact that UNICEF are asking for continuity in funding for dealing with water and electricity? Are you being consulted on the next phase of the appeal, and could you tell us anything about it?

Mr Aaronson: The short answer is not yet. I can only say that I would have confidence that we would be consulted. To the extent that the UN is in a position to orchestrate an appeal, I am quite sure that we will be able to input into that.

Q31  Mr Battle: We learned from some of our evidence sessions that before the war some 60 per cent of the people were dependent on food distribution, and the Minister of State said that the food distribution system was resumed on 1 June. Is that your experience, and is it working?

Mr Aaronson: It is true that food is now starting to be positioned for distribution through the pre-existing food distribution network. That is a good thing, because Save the Children has done some survey work in some of the poorer parts of Baghdad, and, if I may, I would just like to read a brief paragraph recording some of the conclusions of that. This is from a small sample of households, and it is from one district of Baghdad, so I put a caveat on it in terms of extrapolating. The report reads, "Of the 20 households surveyed, only 20 per cent had sufficient to sustain a minimum standard of living, assuming that their basic food energy needs are met by the ration, the remaining households falling more or less below this level. The strategies available to households are (I) to reduce consumption and expenditure, (ii) to use savings, (iii) to sell assets and ration stocks, (iv) to take loans or to seek gifts and charity. The picture which emerges is of a general and continuing economic collapse, leading to a wholesale fall in the standard of living, and a growing strata of impoverished, and in some cases virtually destitute households." I think the point about the food distribution is that it will obviously provide a lifeline to families that have become progressively impoverished over a long period of time, actually going back before the war, and which are really now reduced to selling their carpets as their only means. They may have also lost a wage earner in the fighting, or whatever it is. We need to understand that it is vital that food distribution resumes, but it will only keep those most destitute people alive and it cannot in anyway be a substitute for kick-starting the economy in a way that benefits the poorest people. It is as much about poor people having some kind of purchasing power and being able to trade, historically having been able to trade some of the food ration to buy other necessities, and that is what they are not able to do at present. Although the food distribution system is about to start again, I did want to highlight the extreme precariousness of people in food security terms.

Q32  Mr Battle: Just to follow up on kick-starting the economy, particularly the agricultural economy, in Afghanistan after the conflict there, the food distribution system did get up and going, but there was no real work put into alternative seeds and crops, so what happened was that everyone fell back into growing poppy, and we are back where we started with acres of heroin coming out of Afghanistan. Are there any proposals for seeds for farmers in Iraq? Are the farmers starting to plant the next crop? Are there any signs of an alternative economy?

Mr Aaronson: You are absolutely right, and there is a critical issue right now, because planting of some crops needs to take place fairly soon. There is undoubtedly still a great shortage of seeds and other agricultural inputs that will be needed for that. It is true that there is still not really any medium-term strategy as far as food security is concerned.

Mr Guttmann: One of the things that is very important, and I hope has actually happened, is that the crops which were planted and were in previous years sold to the government - the Iraqi government purchased the lion's share of wheat that was grown in Iraq - and the WFP have said they will be purchasing them this year. It is very important to make sure that really does happen, so that that food can go to the farmers who produced it, and there will still be an incentive next year to plant. Historically, the government has always purchased the lion's share of locally produced food.

Mr Jarrah: Also, in urban areas there has always been a local economy of market gardening based on grey water, growing vegetables. One of the side effects of water quality going down is that that grey water is now blacker and not even suitable for irrigation for market gardening crops.

Q33  Mr Battle: Refugees are returning. Is that causing tensions, divisions into ethnic groups? Is that an issue at all, or is it working out reasonably well?

Mr Guttmann: I think there is a huge potential for difficulty in that area. Certainly, in the north, Kurdish people forced from their homes over the last 20 or more years may well wish to return to areas which have been settled by Arab populations from other parts of Iraq. There is a huge potential there for difficulties in the future, and we must all be very cautious about how we approach those problems. It is likely that there will be problems, as we have seen in the north and down to Kirkuk. Already there are tensions between the Kurdish and Turkmen communities there. Also, with refugees coming back from Iran, there will be dangers. As to how to deal with it, I do not have any answers, but we must approach this with extreme care.

Mr Leach: On the subject of kick-starting the economy, can I also put before the Committee the point about the value of Iraq's sovereign debt, which is an estimated $260 billion, and the fact that every citizen carries an $11,000 bill for the debt. We feel very strongly that this is an unsustainable level of debt and is fundamentally unpayable. Also, it should not be paid on moral grounds. If we are talking about Iraqis recovering some kind of livelihood, we think it is really important that this issue is taken up.

Chairman: Thank you all very much. Without wishing to put words in your mouth, what comes through is a situation where clearly the humanitarian programme had not been thought through at the time of the military campaign. It is now being worked out on an ad hoc basis almost day by day. A lot is clearly going to depend upon the Secretary General's Special Representative, and just how effective he is in pulling everyone together and helping provide you with the humanitarian space that you and others need to deliver humanitarian aid. There is not an immediate humanitarian crisis in terms of people dropping like flies; we do not have the situation we had in Afghanistan prior to the intervention there. On the other hand, it is uncertain whether the situation is going to improve or deteriorate over the next few weeks and months. The House comes back in September for a two-week period, and what we would probably like to do is to reconvene some time during that period to receive an assessment. Either you will be able to come back and tell us very briefly that things are improving and starting to mesh together, or the situation will be deteriorating because, picking up something Raja said, people are losing good will day by day and more and more Iraqis are feeling alienated and it will have gone the other way. The Committee would like to revisit this issue with you in September.

Witness: ANN CLWYD, a Member of the House, Special Envoy of the Prime Minister to Iraq, examined.

Q34  Chairman: Ann, we all know who you are, but would you tell us for the record, and would you also explain the mandate given to you by the Prime Minister?

Ann Clwyd: I am Ann Clwyd. I am a member of this Committee, so it is very odd to be sitting here looking at you all from this end. My particular mandate was to look at the human rights situation. Obviously, I have had a very long association with the Iraqi opposition and I am familiar with the human rights abuses that have taken place over the years, and in fact have been an active campaigner for action against the regime over a long period of time. Can I say first of all who I was accompanied by? Originally, someone from the Foreign Office was to have accompanied me, but the day before I was told it was too dangerous for the official from the Foreign Office to go. I also had with me three members of INDICT, an organisation which I chair, three researchers who over the past six years have collected evidence on Iraqi war crimes. I took them along because they have collected that evidence against ten leading members of the regime, and they are also experienced in talking to victims of the regime and taking detailed witness evidence from them which might eventually be used in a future war crimes trial. I was also accompanied by a friend who is an Iraqi Kurd, who obviously speaks Kurdish and Arabic, and by a film cameraman to document what we were doing. We first of all went to Kuwait to talk to the Kuwait government about missing Kuwaiti prisoners because, of course, there were 605 prisoners who were taken during the Gulf War, during the attack on Kuwait, who have not been seen or heard of since. The Kuwaiti government, both the Prime Minister of Kuwait and the Foreign Minister, talked to us at some length about their concerns. They have a team of forensic scientists in Kuwait looking for the missing prisoners. I suspect none of them will be found alive. In fact, there are various reports that Kuwaiti prisoners have been found in certain mass graves. It has been slightly complicated because Kuwait have offered a reward for information on the missing Kuwaitis, and while we were there we obviously asked questions about the Kuwaitis and whether anyone had information about them. Security in Iraq is obviously a major concern for everybody, as we have heard from the NGOs, and we found that right away. We had to be escorted at the airport by the US military and also by the Kurdish Peshmergas, who had agreed to provide security throughout, because there is a shortage of people able to afford that kind of security to visitors. I also chose to stay with Iraqis so that I could better understand what their concerns were, and so as to have more access to the Iraqi people themselves. In fact, very good information was given to me by the Foreign Office, who suggested that it was not a good idea to stay at ORHA because of the difficulties of getting in and out, as has been apparent in the evidence this afternoon. They are in Saddam's former palace, and there are several road blocks on the way in. I do not know how many passes have been issued in all, but I did not have a pass, so I had to be accompanied by a member of the Kurdish leadership who did have a pass. Sometimes this caused difficulties for us, because we might go out on a visit somewhere, come back to what is now the CPA - Coalition Provisional Authority - and then not be able to exit from the building until the appropriate person came to take us away from there, either somebody with a pass who would come and fetch us or somebody from Close Protection who could take us out of the building. It was a problem for everybody. I must say the CPA are working under tremendous difficulties. It is fair to make that point. Unfortunately, that is one of the palaces that we targeted, and we took out the air conditioning. People are working in that building sometimes in temperatures of 104 degrees. There are a few fans about, but they work, sleep and eat in that building, and they all complained about the feeling that they were caged up and could not get out and meet people. Everybody I talked to, both Iraqis and CPA people, said that law and order was the most important issue. The Iraqis certainly do not feel that the coalition forces in Baghdad are addressing those concerns adequately. They criticised some of the US military. This is anecdotal; I have no way of checking whether it is accurate or not. These are stories told to us. On one occasion, US forces shaved the heads of some Iraqis at a checkpoint. The incident was reported at the time to the Australian Ambassador by the Iraqis. Of course, shaving off hair is deeply insulting to the culture, and was a technique used by the former regime, including Uday Hussein, who ordered this to be done to athletes who under-performed. With Iraqi Moslem women there was exactly the same problem that we encountered in Afghanistan. It was said that Iraqi Moslem women are sometimes searched by men. This problem has been raised with the CPA and they are now putting more women out on the streets to try and avoid this happening. Women raised a number of security concerns with me, and I passed on those concerns to the CPA. There are accounts that women are being raped, but of course, there is no way of checking how those match with what happened under the former regime because, of course, rape was an instrument used by the former regime against women. It is difficult to decide at this stage how serious that is. The CPA told us that there was a general decrease in armed criminality, but there was a corresponding increase in Ba'athist attacks. When talking about security, we have to ask ourselves the question where have the former Republican Guard gone? Where have the Fedayeen gone? The belief is that a lot of those are actually stirring up dissent, in order, obviously, to make the point that the country is more insecure than it was before. We received some suggestions from the Iraqi people about what they should do about it. They wanted to police themselves. They wanted to appoint a "neighbourhood watch" with radio links to the appropriate authority. There are thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia resistance fighters who could, we think, be utilised as special constables. The experiment was first tried in Iraqi Kurdistan, after 1991, and it worked very well there. There is no proper police force, but the police are coming back. I do not know if the Committee has seen what the CPA put out every day about progress under different headings, but they are increasing the numbers of police. On the streets you see traffic police, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes, because all the traffic lights are on red; they do not work. There is a lot of traffic on the streets, so either the police are there or there are individuals who are helping to control the traffic.

When you go round the streets the feeling you get is of normality, the kind of scenes that you see in every capital city in the world: people going about their business, people going to shops. We went to some of the markets in very poor areas, and they seemed well stocked with fruit, vegetables, eggs, and in a butcher's window a leg of lamb was hanging - I do not know what the cost of these things was, but supplies looked to be plentiful. Obviously, the vetting process to weed out Ba'athists is continuing quite rapidly. I gave the example earlier on of a visit I went on organised by the CPA and the DTI with Iraqi women, who hopefully will take part in a conference at the end of June or in July where there will be a women's tent and women will participate in the process. There have been a lot of preliminary meetings of the DTI which I have been to here in London, and this is a continuation of it in the CPA headquarters. At the opening session, a lot of women in the room were denouncing other women who they said were Ba'athist. There was a huge row, which I heard from outside the room before I was called in, but after a bit everything seemed to settle down and people were participating in the discussion on what the women should do. On the streets of Baghdad, the infrastructure seems to have been remarkably preserved. I toured around quite a lot and there is very little damage to buildings that you can see, apart from government ministries, some of the palaces, the communications centre, and the restaurant where Saddam was last seen to be dining, which is about three streets away from where I stayed and in which there has been considerable activity in the last few days because they are taking all the rubble away to the Baghdad Airport so they can sift it for DNA. I have to say that there is a general feeling amongst Iraqis that they do want to know what has happened to Saddam Hussain and his sons; they want to know whether they are dead or alive. I stood out on the street with the protection around me, and there was absolutely no antagonism towards me at all. I had an interpreter. They kept saying all the time, "Thanks to Bush and Blair." This is no exaggeration; I heard it very often. Some people I tried to speak to turned away and when I asked why, I was told, "Because they think the Ba'ath are still watching them, and if they speak to you, they may be denounced some time in the future if the Ba'ath comes back." That is why I think it is very important to know what has happened to the leadership of the regime for the sake of the people's own feeling of well-being.

(The Committee suspended from 3.55 pm to 4.05 pm for a division in the House)

Q35  Chairman: Is there anything more you would like to add before colleagues ask their questions?

Ann Clwyd: I have various headings to go through. I want to give you an impression of what it felt like to be in Baghdad. I found no antagonism whatsoever. They were asking questions. The things that they complained about were the things that any MP hears in any surgery in his or her constituency. When I met groups of women, for instance, they always put security as the number one issue. They then talked about not receiving their pension - a woman with three children had not received her pension - somebody else had not been able to return to her place of work, somebody was worried about an electricity pylon which had fallen and there were exposed wires, and they were afraid children would be injured when the electricity was switched on. They were the kinds of things that all of us are used to hearing complaints about. The electricity supply is almost as good now as it was under the regime, and sometimes better. There was no shortage of water where we were, and I did not hear any complaints about shortage of water, although it was not always safe to drink, but then, access to safe drinking water was not a luxury that most of the people of Iraq enjoyed before. On the mass graves, as one Iraqi friend said to me, "The whole of Iraq is a mass grave." The mass graves are being discovered almost daily now. Quite often, people knew the graves might be there but had never dared go anywhere near them. Obviously, now they are going, and I have a list I received while I was there, the latest one issued by the Kurdistan regime government, of 56 mass graves. I will pass these papers over to the Committee. They give details such as, for example, number 1, a mass grave in Al Hilla; there are about 15,000 victims in it. Then near the Abu Grabe prison there are thousands of political prisoners buried, and so on. They list the possibilities. Some of that information is obviously gleaned from newspapers, and those graves have not yet been excavated. One of the things we were trying to impress upon people was the importance of preserving the evidence contained in those mass graves, because obviously, what is found there, if exhumed properly by archaeologists and anthropologists and forensic scientists, can be pieced together and is information that might be used in future war crimes trials. We went to the biggest, which is near Babylon in Al Hilla. They have already taken about 3,000 bodies out, and they think there could be between 10,000-15,000 buried there. These are Shia Iraqis who were probably executed after the uprising following the Gulf War in 1991. The bodies which had been excavated but not identified were put back in graves, with on top of them plastic bags containing what was found with the body in the grave. Sometimes it was a watch, sometimes a pen, sometimes an identity card. The forensic scientists were looking at buttons, pieces of cloth, fingers, skulls, bits of spine. They were examining this carefully on the ground. One of the saddest things was 1,000 bodies which had been excavated and not identified, re-buried, with these plastic bags on top of them. There was an elderly woman wandering around, looking in the plastic bags, and she was looking for evidence that her son was one of the bodies. She was taking out the plastic ID card, but she could not read so somebody had to come and help her. That was a simple thing which could be put right. Somebody should read those cards in advance and spare her the trauma of looking for a body. The CPA are trying to train local people, are trying to get forensic scientists in, and talking to religious leaders about the way they protect the graves and how important it is that the bodies are taken out in the right way. Obviously, there are not enough people available at the moment to do that job. That is also a gap between the CPA's intention and the reality. We visited Kurdistan a few days later and talked to the Human Rights Minister there. The Kurds have been excavating those graves for some time, but he did not know there was any overall plan for Iraq; nobody at the CPA had communicated with the Kurdish Minister for Human Rights or with the Kurdistan government, yet they have compiled this list of 56 sites. So it is important to get that co-ordination in place very quickly because, apart from the destruction of evidence, mis-identification is also possible. We went to one grave near Kirkuk, and this is, I am afraid, typical of what is happening. There was a mass of clouds of earth in the air as you approach the site, and there were bulldozers at work taking the bodies out. We spoke to a Kurdish military commander from the PUK who had seen his men executed in 1991, and 12 of the bodies that had been taken out of the earth that day and laid in open coffins were the skeletons of the men that he used to command. One of them was his best friend. There were elderly men standing by who had lost family. One man had lost five sons, another man had lost two sons. He identified his son as one of the bodies taken out of the grave by the gold ring on his hand. The kind of excavation that was going on was not the careful excavation that is actually needed. The other thing is the loss of documents. There are plans in the CPA to set up evidence repository centres, but a lot of documentation has been lost already, as we all know. A great deal is still lying around uncollected, and the only people, it seems to me, doing any form of analysis are actually Iraqi volunteers. They have no resources, and their system concentrates on identification of victims rather than gathering of evidence, so from a legal perspective it will be of limited value because of the way it is being done at present. There was evidence given to us of documents containing evidence because as you know, the Iraqi regime, like the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis, kept very careful accounts of everything they did. Documents are on sale in the market and Ba'ath party people are buying them up, and it is obvious why that is happening: they want to destroy the evidence before it becomes of any use to people who might want to prosecute them. CPA staff have told us they hoped to have developed an initial strategic plan for criminal investigation within the next few days. I think it is important that war crimes investigations are given some priority, and that personnel, political instructions and resources should be allocated. There are two places I would like to mention. I asked to go to the Abu Grabe prison. The Abu Grabe prison was the largest prison. The numbers of people who were supposed to be there varied a great deal, and I think the estimate is something like 75,000 people held in that one prison. When you consider that the prison population of this country totals about 73,000, it gives you some idea of the scale of this particular prison. It reminded me of some of the Nazi concentration camps I have been to in the past, the scale and the locality, out in the country. There are rings of cells inside and outside the prison. It had been looted, like everything else. However, inside, some of the cells had been freshly painted. Apparently, before the Iraqi regime left, they painted some of the cells. They had not entirely painted everything out, because you see lines from the Koran on some of the cell walls, and you see names of prisoners and the dates when they were in the prison. The last date we saw was 2001. The day before the Americans came, apparently, the last prisoner there was disposed of. The killing of the prisoners left at that prison went on for several weeks beforehand. There were some young boys standing outside aged about 15, and we talked to them while we were trying to get into the prison. Some of them had been prison guards, and they described the methods of execution and how people were put in trenches up to their waists and shot through the head. We saw the execution chamber, with ramps, with hooks, with pulleys. There were levers that were pulled and people were dropped into pits below. Apparently, it is said, sometimes they did not die, and somebody stood on their necks to make sure the neck broke. Most of the people in the surrounding area of the Abu Grabe Prison actually worked there. It was like some isolated psychiatric hospitals we have had in the UK in the past, where all the surrounding area had a job somewhere inside that hospital. The same was true of this prison. There is still a lot of evidence to be collected. There were papers all over the floor. There was a book of hospital records which we just picked up. There were rolls of film that we picked up. We spoke to the American commander of the prison and impressed upon him how important it was that somebody scooped up all the documents, put them in a plastic bag and put them somewhere safe, because you could actually see people's names and methods of execution. We think some of the patients were experimented on as well and those documents will be somewhere. By the way, there were murals of Saddam everywhere around the prison: Saddam with a hawk on his shoulder; Saddam with a dove inside a cannon; Saddam in a silk suit smoking a cigar. A lot of his face has been defaced. People had actually shot the face when they went into the prison originally, but the murals are still there and I think it continues to show his vanity. We went to see a prisoners' group on the last day, which we were told about by one of the television employees, and was about a 50-minute drive across Baghdad. Outside there were queues of people on the pavement, elderly men and women standing there in the hot sun waiting to get into the building. They all wanted information from the documents held inside the building. The man in charge was an ex-prisoner - in fact, everybody in the building, working in the building for free, were ex-prisoners - who had been arrested eight times and on the last occasion he had his toe nails removed. He was somebody who, the last time he was sent a message to go back to the police, did not go, he just disappeared. People inside were just so distressed, when they were grabbing at my arm they were sobbing. They just wanted to know about their sons, their husbands, their brothers; they wanted information. There were three computers which had been given to the people inside there. I think it is the kind of project that needs instant help, because in two weeks of working inside that house they had fed 150,000 names into the computer from documents that had been picked up. Every room in the house was full of documents, but they were thrown all over the place and they had not had time to go through them. Also, there were letters giving instructions for executions signed and countersigned by people working for the regime. That is the kind of thing they were not feeding into the computers because they were saying: "We are not putting those in because we do not want any arbitrary killings. We do not want people to go after these people, we want it done in the proper way". Lastly, Chairman, if you will forgive me, I do just want to show you the kind of thing which you can get in evidence. This was a man who was a lecturer at Basra University and this was one of the photographs that the ex-prisoners had picked up. It is a man who is still alive, his arm has already been amputated and there are other horrible injuries to his body. Obviously, he is now dead, but they know his name and there are lots of similar photographs, so the documentation is very important.

The Committee suspended from 4.24 pm to 4.33 pm for a division in the House.

Chairman: Whilst we are still on the record and we have got a quorum, I think the fair way is for us to adjourn the session with Ann Clwyd and reconvene at a time to be arranged, because I suspect there will be colleagues on the Committee who would like to ask her questions. Thank you.