Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 26)
THURSDAY 11 MARCH 2004
SIR JEREMY
GREENSTOCK GCMG
Q20 Mr Olner: This might be minute
detail. I have no record of how many detainees are being held,
say, in the Baghdad area, which is being policed by and large
by the Americans, and how many detainees are being held in the
Basra area where we as the UK perhaps hold ultimate responsibility.
Is there a significant difference between the detainees we oversee
and the ones the Americans do?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Not in
terms of procedure and law. There are much higher numbers in the
central area than the Basra area. In Basra, as I remember, but
one of my colleagues may be able to inform you, the number of
detainees is in the very low hundreds, maybe a hundred and something.
The number in the American area, many of them held at Abu-Ghraib
Prison, are in five figures, about 10,000. The prisoners come
from various categories. There are prisoners of war from the conflict
period, there are security detainees from the period since the
beginning of the occupation, and there are straightforward criminals
who need to be transferred back into the criminal justice system.
The Americans are trying to sort out these categories much more
quickly. What will happen on 1 July to some extent still has to
be decided. Those who can be handed over to the Iraqi system will
be handed over but many of the security detainees may continue
to be held by the Americans if the Americans, in partnership with
the Iraqis and with their approval, continue to take a lead in
overall security control of Iraq. Some of these things still need
to be arranged.
Q21 Andrew Mackinlay: Can we assume
that there will be no people in the custody of the United Kingdom
on 2 July? If there is the question we cannot avoid is from where
will we derive our authority for holding them?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Ministers
have to make some decisions in this area, but one forward option
which is quite likely to be followed is that with the end of the
occupation we hand over our detainees to the Iraqi system. It
may be that we still have some prisoners whom we regard as prisoners
of war from the conflict and we may have to make special arrangements
for their return or handing over or for their retention for a
while, but we will consult the Iraqi system and the International
Committee of the Red Cross in making our decisions on these people.
Those that we can hand to the orthodox criminal justice system
we will do so, so on the whole our intention is to divest ourselves
of any responsibility for detainees from the conflict or the occupation
period.
Sir John Stanley: We turn now to the
security position which clearly remains very worrying in parts
of Iraq at any rate.
Q22 Mr Hamilton: Sir Jeremy, last
September the Foreign Affairs Committee visited the Middle East
and while we were in Amman we met a young British woman who had
spent some time in Baghdad setting up an Arab/British language
newspaper. The stories she told us were rather different to what
we see regularly on the news. Of course we see the atrocities
that are committed regularly in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq,
but when I met this woman in January she told us that now it is
possible for a European woman to walk around at least Baghdad
without wearing traditional costume and wearing European clothes.
She seemed to imply that normality had returned. What is your
comment on that view? Is it very different in Baghdad and the
rest of Iraq to what we see on the news channels regularly or
are the atrocities keeping any semblance of normal life away?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: There is
absolutely no doubt that it is a mixed picture and therefore journalists
representing that picture can be selective if they wish. The state
of community security in terms of law and order and normal life
differs between different parts of the country. I would say that
in the South and the North the conditions are much more normal,
by whatever standards you choose to describe normality in the
Iraq we have watched over the last several decades, in the kind
of life they would like to lead. The conditions in and around
the South East, in Kurdistan, in some parts of Baghdad and in
some parts of the countryside away from the main towns (where
there have been difficulties) are quite normal. The markets are
operating normally. Commodities can be bought and sold in the
normal way of a market. An enormous number of goods have come
into the country and are being sold and used. There is new agricultural
activity after quite a good winter of rains and large volumes
of seeds and other agricultural materials have come in and are
under demand. However, in certain other areas, particularly where
there is room for terrorism and insurgency to breathe because
of the resentments within that community about what has happened
and about the occupation, there are quite regular security incidents.
Over and above all of that, given the type of cynical, brutal
terrorism that we have been experiencing of large bombings being
used against soft targets, nobody can feel absolutely safe anywhere
where those people can move, and we saw that in the religious
observances of 2 March and how brutal these people can be in a
normal religious crowd. There is always that feeling in people's
minds, "Am I in a safe area or am I not? Might there be terrorists
around or people willing to hit soft targets around?", but
then you get on with life and put it in the back of your mind,
and I think your woman friend is right, that most areas of Iraq
are now seeing a much more normal life than under Saddam and than
under the early weeks of the occupation period.
Q23 Mr Hamilton: Who do you think
are responsible for some of the atrocities, especially that committed
in Karbala last week, and have any of these groups been affected
by the arrest of Saddam?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: The former
regime loyalists, the Saddamists if you like, have been affected,
not just because he was taken into custody but also because his
briefcase revealed a lot of material which caught a lot of people
whose briefcases revealed a lot of further material; and the intelligence
and security services have been quite clever in exploiting that
process. That has affected the morale and the effectiveness of
the former regime loyalists but some of them are still active.
The more sophisticated, if I can use that word about such an horrific
area, planning and operations have been done recently by what
we have called loosely "imported" terrorism, non-Iraqi
terrorism, not all of it al-Qaeda as such or Ansar al-Islam but
people who have learnt from the experiences of international terrorism
and extremist Sunni terrorism and that I think is the most lethal
threat at this moment of spectacular attacks of suicide bombers
coming out of that area, but they do not necessarily form the
majority by number of the attacks that have been perpetrated.
Q24 Sir John Stanley: Sir Jeremy,
before we turn to the final topic we want to raise, could you
tell us whether the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
has been effectively abandoned as a lost cause or whether the
Iraq Survey Group is still continuing to look for them?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Sir John,
I have no responsibility for this area and I have not been engaged
in any of the detailed work of ISG at all. I have never been briefed
by ISG or met any of its number; it is not my area. However, I
understand, just to give you any information that I can in this
hearing, that Charles Duelfer, the new head of ISG, believes that
there remains a considerable amount of work to do and he continues
to wish to do that work with ISG over the coming period. For how
long is up to ISG. I understand that there is a considerable amount
of work still to do in this area, it is not being abandoned.
Q25 Ms Stuart: To allow you to stick
to the time limit I will roll all my questions into one. There
are two issues. The first concerns the regional government and
the restructuring of the economy. Iraq has got 11% of the world's
oil supplies. It uniquely has water so it has a huge potential.
It will end up with a federal structure and we all know people
mean different things by the word federal. We have also got a
system where 60% of the population is still receiving food aid
and a system of subsidies. For the future structure, to what extent
are the Kurdish people satisfied that their demands for regional
government are in place and are sustainable? There are two economy-related
questions. What progress is being made in moving towards a system
of taxation, both corporate and personal, which would give us
a structure of democratic accountability rather than just handing
out largesse by government. Bound in with that, what progress
has been made in sorting out rights of property titles which will
have to be resolved before foreign investors in particular will
want to come into Iraq and help rebuild the country?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: On the
use of resources by the regions, which is the basis of your first
question about Kurdistan as I understand it, there are different
views amongst different parts of the Kurdish population. They
negotiated quite hard in the discussions on the Transitional Law
for the regions to own their own resources and, as it were, lease
them back to the centre. That was not the way the Law came out,
but some decisions on use of resources as between the centre and
regions have been left for the permanent constitutional debate
amongst elected representatives in Iraq. For the moment we are
continuing the orthodox approach, if you like, that resources
are the property of all Iraqis; but to some extent the regions
can benefit from the fact that they produce some of these resources
in getting local business out their production. And of course
some resources differ because oil and water have a certain strategic
quality to them whereas quarried stone or agriculture do not have
that characteristic. There is plenty still to be debated in that
area but from the reaction so far to the adoption of the Transitional
Law I think people feel we have reached a fair deal for the moment
in what is said in the Law about resources. On the taxation system
that you mention, Iraq must be one of the cheapest places to live
in in terms of energy prices, electricity prices and taxation,
and there is no doubt that a responsible governed economy in Iraq
will need to institute prices nearer to market prices for those
commodities and a taxation system that takes some of the burden
off the oil industry to supply all the resources for government.
We decided in the CPA not to make many changes in these areas
for two reasons. One, we have not got much time to institute new
systems and bring them into being and, two, as an occupation under
the Fourth Geneva Convention we are not supposed to bring in laws
that affect the long-term future of the Iraqi state, only what
is necessary for the current administration of it; and to that
extent we have postponed for the sovereign period the larger macroeconomic
decisions and fiscal decisions on taxation, pricing and the relationship
between the centre and the regions in the management of the economy,
so much of that is still to come. Some changes are going to be
necessary, in the view of many economists, for Iraq to be fully
responsibly governed in the economic sphere. As for property titles,
the IGC has recently brought into being the Iraqi Property Claims
Commission, which is going to establish itself to sort out the
controversies over property that have arisen from the displacement
of the populations under the Saddam regime and from other disputes
that arise in the course of any normal community history. That
will come into being quite quickly, I hope, and will start its
work as early as anywhere in Kirkuk, where the politics of territory
are very divisive and tense at the moment. The IPCC has got a
lot of work to do and we want to see it up and running very quickly.
Q26 Sir John Stanley: Sir Jeremy,
the whole Committee is aware that after your very distinguished
period as our Permanent Representative in the United Nations it
must have been a considerable personal challenge to take on this
extraordinary and very difficult and personally by no means free
from risk role as Britain's senior representative in Iraq. We
are obviously very grateful to you for coming in front of us today
but most particularly we as a Committee are very grateful to you
for the signal contribution which you personally have made in
trying to move Iraq towards a free, multi-party democracy. Thank
you very much indeed.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Thank you
very much for those words.
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