CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 244-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

 

 

DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE IN IRAQ

 

 

Tuesday 18 January 2005

MR OLIVER BURCH and MR KEN CALDWELL

MR YAHIA SAID

Evidence heard in Public Questions 91 - 153

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

 

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee

on Tuesday 18 January 2005

Members present

Mr Tony Baldry, in the Chair

John Battle

Hugh Bayley

Ann Clwyd

Mr Quentin Davies

Tony Worthington

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Oliver Burch, Iraq Programme Manager, Christian Aid; and Mr Ken Caldwell, International Overseas Director, Save the Children, examined.

Q91 Chairman: Oliver and Ken, thank you very much for coming and talking to us this afternoon. Could I start off with an issue which relates to both Iraq but other areas as well. I think it was quite clear that right at the outset of the invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces that there was a fair amount of tension as between DFID and the Ministry of Defence in that I think clearly the Ministry of Defence had a view that they would invade Iraq militarily and that DFID would then after that come along and do all the humanitarian bit in their wake. I think Clare Short when Secretary of State had a rather different opinion. She took the view that the invading forces were occupying forces under the Geneva Convention and therefore it was for the occupying forces under the Geneva Convention to provide water, sanitation and other resources to the civilians that they were occupying. We are increasingly now getting situations whereby for humanitarian reasons we are seeing military intervention. It happens in Iraq and we saw it to a certain extent in Syria and Somalia and so on. The first question is do you as NGOs who are very much involved in this feel that the ground rules are clearly enough set out as to what is the role of the military, what is the role of DFID, and what is the role of the NGOs? We will come on to ask about capacity in a second but in terms of who is meant to be doing what, whose role is what, is it sufficiently clearly laid out? Ken, do you want to start first?

Mr Caldwell: The short answer to that in our view is no. There are still major issues for us in relation to humanitarian space. There has been a lot of debate post the Afghanistan and post the Iraq invasions about humanitarian space and some good work put together in the humanitarian community, but from what we see that is not yet percolating through into the military community and therefore we are seeing continuing situations of military activities, including by the British military, straying into humanitarian space, and from our perspective that is not only an issue of inappropriate intervention under international law it also places our staff very directly at risk. Part of the reason why it is very difficult for humanitarian agencies to operate in places like Iraq and Afghanistan now is because of that blurring of the boundary between military and humanitarian space. The crucial issue is to get this message fixed into the military establishment as well as the humanitarian establishment.

Q92 Chairman: When you say "straying into humanitarian space", could you expand on that and translate that into concepts that others will understand? What do you mean, Oliver, is happening on the ground that is causing you concern?

Mr Caldwell: My best example of that will be in Afghanistan but if you prefer to stay in Iraq I can do that.

Q93 Chairman: Both.

Mr Caldwell: In Afghanistan there are things called provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs, which have been conceived of as a place where military and government and humanitarian actors all work together and present a united front and go out together and do things together, and it has led to a disastrous blurring of the boundaries, with military personnel, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not, doing distributions and contributing to the rebuilding of schools, et cetera, all of which are thoroughly worthy things but it does mean that there is now huge confusion in communities' minds about who is doing what work and one understands why those members of the community who are forming guerrilla forces or dissident military forces if they see anybody involved in this community see them as a military target.

Mr Burch: We would absolutely second that. My experience as we went into the Iraq invasion in early 2003 is that NGOs were being invited to take part in a combined military/political operation and they would be an integral component, together with military communications, logistics, civil affairs, humanitarian, psychological operations, all locked together. This completely ignores the mandates of humanitarian organisations to be neutral and impartial. We did want to take part but we were not able in the case of Iraq to define that line and I think humanitarian organisations have paid for it. It is not a new principle. It is something that we have been experiencing since the Balkans, through Afghanistan, but I think Iraq is the most extreme example. If I could just give one case of the kind of thing that we are very, very worried about and that is the recent operation in Fallujah, that we are all familiar with, where we had a situation where the Iraqi Red Crescent tried constantly to send aid into a situation where the town was blockaded but it was prevented from doing so by the military forces carrying out the operation. At the end the Coalition military forces did humanitarian aid of their own, effectively saying if you will not co‑operate with us in the humanitarian operations, we can do this component ourselves. We had a situation at the end ‑ and this has been recorded by a respected journalist ‑ where families were invited to send one man each to the mosque to collect an aid packet and when they got there they found themselves forensically checked to see if they had fired a weapon or not and those who had were arrested, the use of perfidy in other words. One point is that it is against the Geneva Convention, but think where it puts the humanitarian organisations in that area, so we find it very, very hard to work with this sort of thing going on.

Q94 Chairman: Do NGOs have a point of reference at DFID? Explain to the Committee so we can understand and the House can understand what happens? Do you get a telephone call from someone in DFID saying, "Can you help with this particular humanitarian situation?", or do you see a humanitarian situation developing and get in touch with DFID? What are the mechanics for this?

Mr Burch: From our point of view, what I have just described and what Ken has described we are not specifically blaming DFID for this situation, we think this is a military doctrine. As far as Christian Aid is concerned, we have DFID funding currently and we had it in the past.

Q95 Chairman: I am sorry, I did not explain myself clearly enough. I am talking in general terms now because I am trying to sort out in our minds this whole question of how NGOs and humanitarian organisations work with the military.

Mr Caldwell: There are two situations in the way it would occur on the ground. We would identify a need, either directly or through our local partners, and in seeking to respond to that need we may need the permission of the military forces on the ground, whether they are legitimately recognised by international law or not, and that may lead to a situation where we enter a negotiation with them about what we can do and who can do what. The other situation we may face is as a result of civil/military liaison at governmental level we are then invited to respond to a need, and in that situation if that legitimate request comes from a legitimate civil authority on the ground and we believe that we can respond to that in an impartial and neutral manner then we would do that. If it involves us being mixed up in the military operation where the criteria for distribution will be "hearts and minds" or some other political motive that is where we have to stand back from it.

Mr Burch: It is a very difficult matter to manage. We tend to refer to something called the SCHR - the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response - Guidelines which go into these matters quite closely and the Guidelines form a very good basis for trying to decide what is a neutral action and what might be implied to be a political and military action.

Q96 Chairman: In both Afghanistan and Iraq, for humanitarian aid workers to operate there is presumably a need for security, indeed everyone we saw in Kabul from whom we took evidence on the Afghanistan inquiry said that security is pre-eminent and security usually implies troops being able to deliver security, so how do you see the ideal way for humanitarian officials and humanitarian NGOs to be able to access security without a sense that the military is invading the humanitarian space?

Mr Burch: Two things. What we really look for from the military is an umbrella of security for everybody ‑ freedom of movement for the civilian population, et cetera - under which we can operate, and that is fine. In other situations where the conflict is worse, NGOs in many parts of the world are able to operate quite successfully without security being supplied by anybody directly to them on the basis of their visibility and their reputation for being neutral and impartial and the value of the programme. That works quite well. Once you become associated with a military force which is regarded as a faction in the conflict ‑ and I think that is the case in Iraq today ‑ then effectively you are tainted and you do not have that freedom of movement and it is the beneficiaries that suffer.

Q97 Tony Worthington: I would like you to confirm whether my memory is correct or not about Iraq. My memory of the situation is that what made Iraq unique in this respect was that the Pentagon issued invitations to humanitarian organisations to take part under General Garner in the humanitarian efforts and that the lines of accountability of the whole operation were through the Pentagon and to the President and that that, in my view, to my memory, is unprecedented, that you would have the humanitarian space obliterated at the start. Is that correct?

Mr Caldwell: That is accurate. I am not sure it is entirely unique in our experience. It may be more blatant in the Iraq situation than it has been in others but there are other situations, notably relating to Afghanistan, where some elements of that would apply. It is also worth noting that virtually every reputable humanitarian NGO in the world refused to do business on those terms because we felt it was a situation we could not engage in. It does reflect the degree of lack of understanding between the military and the leadership and the humanitarian community about these sorts of principles. There is still a big gulf.

Mr Burch: General Powell described the NGOs as the "best force multipliers you could have" in a speech about a year ago. Andrew Natsios at USAID, talking to US NGOs, said "you are either with us or against us". This is very much the attitude. I recall a telephone call I made in 2003 to the newly operating Humanitarian Operations Centre with the US military in Kuwait. I asked some questions about accessing Iraq and I was immediately told, "Come straight down here, we will get you your papers and get you cashed up with US AID into Iraq very quickly." They obviously did not know we had funding of our own but that is the kind attitude and operation that was going on on the ground in Iraq from the beginning.

Q98 Hugh Bayley: To move on to a related but different subject, are there lessons that can be learned about capacity building from the work that your two agencies have done and which DFID have done in Northern Iraq, lessons particularly in relation to the autonomy of local self‑government which could be drawn upon in other regions of Iraq, like Central Iraq or Southern Iraq?

Mr Caldwell: Absolutely. One of the very striking things that is different about the Kurdish-controlled governorates in Iraq is that civil society is much more developed and much stronger than it is in other parts of Iraq. That reflects the amount of effort in which DFID can claim a recent credit over the last 13 years since 1991 through investing in developing Kurdish civil society. We are now in a situation where it is much easier for us to find strong Iraqi local partners in those areas than it is as yet in other parts of Iraq. One of the crucial roles we believe DFID and the British Government is uniquely well‑placed to play in Iraq is the strengthening of civil society. Why are we uniquely well‑placed? Because anything associated with the Americans, frankly, in the Iraqi context is seen as tainted and it is quite risky both in political and security terms for Iraqi NGOs to be taking funding or being co‑ordinated by the Americans, and while the risks are not entirely absent for British funding it is certainly dramatically better than elsewhere. One of our concerns about the DFID programme in Iraq at the moment is that it is not giving sufficient priority to the strengthening of Iraqi civil society. A relatively small proportion of resources is going in that direction and we would like to see a specific earmarking of the DFID budget for Iraq for the strengthening of Iraqi civil society, maybe 10 % or something like that.

Mr Burch: We also think it is very important. It is remarkable what our partners tell us when we are trying to work in fields like education or health and trying to relate to the local branches of the ministry who have little contact with Baghdad and have no idea of what their strategy is. It makes it very, very hard in this situation to support them. We do have some support from DFID in this field of developing civil society and developing the capacity of local departments of Iraqi ministries and indeed encouraging communities to be demanding from their service providers. It is a very good concept but they should do more of it, I agree.

Q99 Ann Clwyd: On that particular point, it is the Americans in fact who have been doing the building of civic society, the building of good governance, of democracy programmes, and working in building Baghdad City Council for example. It really is the Americans who are mainly associated with that. I have been to Iraq and it is some time since the end of the war and I think there was some regret amongst some of the Iraqis that the British were not more involved. Certainly the Americans must be given credit, I think, for the work they have done on civil society. I think it has been very impressive.

Mr Caldwell: I may add, in agreeing with that that, as you will be aware, there is a department of civil society development which has just been created by the transitional government and the way in which that new department approaches its mandate is fairly critical to whether civil society genuinely develops independent of government and political parties in Iraq in the future, assuming we have some sort of stable government. This would be a very good moment in the coming months for the British Government, either through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's human rights programme or through DFID own civil society development work, to really invest in helping the civil society department to work out how best to undertake that mandate in a way that curbs the worst excesses of civil society, which inevitably in this situation we are seeing happening but at the same time does not seek to control or politically narrow down the space for civil society to operate.

Q100 Ann Clwyd: On health, I did not realise until I went to Amman recently that the World Health Organisation has been extremely active. I met the Director of the World Health Organisation and the head of the health administration in Iraq and they were very proud of the fact that they had managed to vaccinate 95 % of the children of Iraq. That included the children of Fallujah. That is something you never ever hear about it. I would not have heard about it unless I had gone to Amman and spoken to those people. The WHO has got quite an impressive record.

Mr Caldwell: Yes.

Q101 Tony Worthington: Can I ask about infrastructure. You read all sorts of stories about what the level of provision of water, electricity and other sanitation was before the war started and what it is like now. Can you give us a picture of your assessment of the basic infrastructure of Iraq and what it is like trying to repair it, what it is like trying to put it to rights?

Mr Caldwell: Our observation would be that this is a very widely varying picture across different communities in Iraq. There are some where the infrastructure now is significantly better than it was pre‑war. There are others where it is still not functioning.

Q102 Tony Worthington: Can you be specific about where it is better?

Mr Caldwell: I would not like to be specific because I do not have those to hand and our picture inevitably would be a patchy one rather than a comprehensive one. The UN is better‑placed to give you an overview of that situation than the NGOs would be. Our observations from the areas where we are either working directly or working with local NGOs are that in some situations the infrastructure has improved.

Q103 Tony Worthington: Where you have worked can you give us an example?

Mr Caldwell: Well, there has been quite significant investment in rehabilitating water services and we would observe that as a result of sanctions that many of the bits of infrastructure in Iraq had almost no investment between 1991 and 2002 and some of them were in a very decrepit state by the time the war happened. In some case those problems have been tackled; in some cases they have not and things have got worse. Our particular interest from Save the Children is not so much with the hard infrastructure but the soft infrastructure. For example, in schools we are seeing most schools up and running again now but there are real concerns about drop‑out rates. Most children are at least being enrolled in school now, although not all and not as high as it was before, but the drop‑out rates particularly of girls are still high and one of our top concerns at the moment is the drop‑out rate of girls from education, partly due to reasons of security and safety of girl children going to school.

Mr Burch: I have the impression that some progress is being made but the security situation and sabotage has obviously made that very slow. I think one point to make is the situation pre-war was rather politically distorted because the infrastructure was effectively good in areas that were loyal to the Ba'athist Party so, if you like, Baghdad had fairly good electricity before the war because other parts of the country were being starved of it. Now where supply has been spread more evenly Baghdadis are complaining and perhaps that is not totally reasonable. In the south, for example, we are involved in investing in some water supplies to different villages. These have been left disconnected for many years by the previous authorities because they were not politically on board with the Baathist line. So there is some element of correcting political distortion now with a fair approach to infrastructure which is probably making some Iraqis disappointed.

Q104 Tony Worthington: Yes, I can understand where the security situation is appalling that the contractors will not work and it is simply impossible to repair the infrastructure, but we are told that it is a very, very patchy situation, and that there are relatively safe parts of the country. For example, in the Kurdish area has there been a major step forward because no reports are coming from there of terrorism?

Mr Burch: The information I have is that is fairly good and the information I have about Basra is that it is improving, but if we are talking about the upper centre Sunni triangle areas there are some major problems.

Q105 Tony Worthington: But in terms of a judgment on the effects of the war and the invasion of the country, for people to believe that it was worthwhile, then what we are hearing is that what really annoys them is that there is an occupying power but that things have not improved. In areas where it has improved what has been the impact of that? Has that made the occupation seem more justified?

Mr Caldwell: As I am sure you will relate to from your own constituencies, in the parts of the country where it has improved people tend to be bit quieter than in the places whether it has gotten a bit worse, but our experience would be that even situations where things have improved there is still is a sense of injustice about the country being run from abroad and the desire given where things are now to see things move as fast as possible to a peaceful, Iraqi‑run government.

Q106 Tony Worthington: But is there delivery of that infrastructure, engineering, and all those other activities in the areas where it could be or is there a failure to deliver?

Mr Caldwell: Our observation would be that the investment in infrastructure has prioritised the major economic sectors. For example, if you contrast the amount of information that is available almost on a daily basis about the state of the oil infrastructure and the extent to which that has been rehabilitated and what sort of results it is producing in terms of the power it is producing, what effect that has had today or this week (with the almost total lack of meaningful social indicators today in Iraq) it is a very dramatic difference. There has have been very little investment in building up a real picture nationwide of what is really happening in schools, what is really happening in hospitals, what is really happening in health centres, and what is really happening with violence affecting ordinary communities. We would like to see ‑ and this is relevant to DFID's programme as well ‑ DFID giving higher priority to getting in place those mechanisms, both for its own programmes and for others, that will enable effective monitoring about whether all that investment is delivering results on the ground in terms of improved social development.

Q107 Ann Clwyd: You talked about 1991 as though that were the date that the improvements in infrastructure stopped. As you know, it went back 35 years, it was not 1991, it was further back than that and they are trying to repair 35 years of neglect, which is much more difficult. I do not know when you were both in Iraq last. Have you been recently?

Mr Caldwell: Not recently.

Mr Burch: We have not had anybody in for over a year.

Q108 Ann Clwyd: In Kurdistan of course they have had a head start on everybody else. It is about five years since I was there last and there have been tremendous changes there. Reconstruction has gone on apace and Turks are even coming across the border and building hotels in Kurdistan but the rest of the country, obviously for the reasons we all know, continues to limp.

Mr Caldwell: Indeed.

Q109 Mr Battle: I wonder if I could ask about the retention of international interest in Iraq particularly after the elections because already we know on the military front the Czechs are withdrawing and the Polish are withdrawing and others have set a timetable for withdrawing and by mid‑summer it will just be British and American troops. Is that being paralleled by the interest of the donors? There has been a great international reconstruction fund facility for Iraq that has been set up and we know it has hit the headlines but I am not sure when the money arrives that we have got the commitment. It is really to do with the commitment on the ground to co‑ordinating, organising and distributing it. Is it not the case that because of security that many in the UN and indeed other international NGOs are starting to withdraw so we could have less to co‑ordinate on the ground? What is your response to that? Are people's irons to the fire both on emergency aid and reconstruction for the long term? Is there a full range of NGOs and is there good donor co‑ordination to stick with it or like the military will they just withdraw?

Mr Burch: We do have a rather extraordinary situation where most international agencies are working by what we call remote control so in effect it is Amman in Jordan that is doing the job that would normally be done in Baghdad and a lot of things in Iraq are being decided there. I think some quite effective programmes are going on despite the security. We are managing to implement a small amount of programmes through our own partners at roughly the rate we hoped we would be able to. I am relieved to be able to say that. The impression I have on constraints is that the level of capacity of the government authorities and the ministries is so comparatively low that there is a limit to how much can be done at a certain speed. That is what is slowing down reconstruction, the organisation of the Iraqi ‑‑‑

Q110 Mr Battle: --- Even within the Interim Government there is not sufficient co‑ordination of the donors going on to actually make sure the funds to which DFID have contributed (£17 million, if I remember rightly) are distributed?

Mr Burch: I think they only have so much capacity and they realise it. Most of the ministries are present in Amman and they are trying to get as much support as possible from the relevant UN institutions to train their people and build their own capacity, but we have quite a long way to go, so I think in a way that is the main constraint to spending a lot of money quickly and effectively in Iraq today.

Q111 Mr Battle: Is that what you would expect or would you expect things to be further on in comparison with other international situations where we need co-ordination? Is it better or worse?

Mr Burch: I am not too surprised. I have worked in Afghanistan before and we are moving on slowly there.

Mr Caldwell: To take your broader question, I think there is always a situation that in a very high profile crisis, as we have had in Iraq over the last couple of years, a certain amount of the donor interest, a certain amount of the agency interest, relates to the profile that is going on at the time and there will be a more limited number of donors and agencies that are committed to the longer term whole in helping Iraq to build a new sort of society. In the international NGO community there is a smaller number of NGOs that, if security conditions permit, would like to play a part in supporting that development of a new Iraqi society, although I think the number of donors that are willing to fund that will be partly determined by the level of political profile in the international community and partly by whether the donors feel they can spend their money wisely in that situation. There is still understandable concern amongst many donors about "Can we be confident our money is being well spent in a situation where we are having to monitor it by remote control?".

Q112 Mr Battle: Could I pursue this? I know the situation in Afghanistan slightly better. I have been there since the conflict. It was the poorest country in the world, so you were starting from a long way back to build up the systems from the ground and integrate development, so the template there I find is quite encouraging even now, post-elections in Afghanistan. In Iraq my impression, and it is only an impression, is that we are starting with a country that is not the poorest in the world but is almost middle income. It certainly has capacity economically in terms of oil and the notion was that if we could sort out the politics and the conflicts could the oil money be coupled with a development strategy? I see it as potentially one of the most advanced approaches and that is aside from the "democratisation" programme. Do you see it that way at all?

Mr Burch: I think you are right.

Q113 Mr Battle: Or is it a mess really? There are fires on the oil lines again so the oil revenues are not there. Is there any time line and are the interim government even talking about the fact that perhaps we could get resources for education, health care, new businesses going again and the economy?

Mr Burch: I think it will happen. I do agree with what you said. We regard it as a country or a region which is potentially quite wealthy but which has been desperately neglected for 35 years. That is what you are dealing with and it is the psychological effect of those 35 years of neglect and misrule, if you like. The key issues we think in Iraq are governance and security. If those can be put right almost everything else will follow. It is not a Christian Aid focus country. It is not like Afghanistan or southern Africa.

Mr Caldwell: I would be more optimistic about Iraq than I would be about Afghanistan in that if we can sort out those issues that Oliver is describing there is an educated population in Iraq, there is a large amount of oil and it should be the case that within five to ten years there will not be a need for international assistance to Iraq. In Afghanistan they are building from a much lower base. The government is in control of even less of the country than the Iraqi interim government is and they are having to learn from scratch how to run a pluralistic society and that will be a long haul.

Q114 Mr Battle: If I can go right back to my first question, how much can donor intervention or encouragement or co-operation be part of the process to go along that development road or are the donors waiting around for a lead from the interim government that is not quite there?

Mr Caldwell: The solution to Iraq is primarily political and military in our view but the donors have an important role to play in the context of progress and the military issues in helping to build the sort of society in general and civil society in particular that enables there to be the checks and balances within future Iraqi society that stop the same thing happening again as has happened over the last 30 years.

Q115 Mr Davies: Mr Caldwell, I know that you criticise and Save the Children has criticised the extent of the funds being given by the government to the UN and their very limited role in Iraq. Seventy million has been allocated under the government's programme to the UN and to the International Construction Fund. No-one is quite clear what the UN themselves are likely to do with it. Can you expand on your concern about that?

Mr Caldwell: I hope it does not come across as explicit criticism. It is a concern more than criticism.

Q116 Mr Davies: I did use the word "concern", I think.

Mr Caldwell: Yes indeed. Our concern is that, given the very tight restrictions placed by UNSECOR, the UN security apparatus, on what UN people can do within Iraq, their ability to monitor and oversee the programmes they have been entrusted with is very limited. There are no other obvious options that resolve that issue, which is why we are putting our main emphasis not so much in the channels. We are just making the point that one should not rely on the UN, just because it is the UN, to be able to do this well. The important thing is to make sure that the work is happening, to track indicators on the ground as to whether it is actually working, and we are worried that the UN and other donors, including DFID, are placing too much reliance on inputs at the moment without the ability to monitor what is resulting.

Q117 Mr Davies: I think that is a very good point. You say there are no other options but maybe there are. Maybe some of that money should have gone to Iraqi indigenous organisations. Would that have been a better alternative?

Mr Caldwell: I have already made the point that we think a relatively modest share, maybe ten per cent, of donor money could go to building Iraqi civil society and be well invested.

Q118 Mr Davies: Not just building Iraqi civil society but helping other Iraqi institutions get off the ground, whether they are political or social; that is a good cause. Maybe some of this money could have gone to Iraqi NGOs who would have helped either with relief effort or with development programmes.

Mr Caldwell: Absolutely; I agree with you.

Q119 Mr Davies: So I think your criticism is first that half the money, £35 million, has gone to an organisation which has basically pulled out of Iraq and is not in a position to deliver or monitor programmes. It is up to us to check on how this money is being dispersed. Secondly, the issue is whether it could instead have gone to Iraqi NGOs. You are saying it might have done. That would have had the double effect of delivering the money to people who were on the spot and able prima facie to do something with it and to account for it, and would have contributed to building up those organisations as institutions in the new Iraq, so an opportunity may have been lost. Is that right?

Mr Caldwell: I think that is true to an extent, although I do not think it would be productive to imagine that all those resources could have been usefully channelled through Iraqi civil society. I think a proportion of them could be but part of the channelling will remain finding trustworthy Iraqi government structures, hopefully post election, that are committed to getting resources through and which are committed to a rights based approach which crosses the religious divide.

Mr Burch: Absolutely. The problem here is that there is not that much implementing capacity in Iraq on the ground. Christian Aid always works through local partners. All our work is done through Iraqi NGOs. I wish we could identify more, faster, but we can only go at a certain speed. They are starting to spring up now that the political climate has changed but most of these organisations are very inexperienced. They have to learn management and all sorts of skills. We are trying to promote that process but it is taking time.

Q120 Mr Davies: So really the key constraint on the aid and development over in Iraq is not that objectively there is not a need; it is not objectively that there are not resources available because the British Government and others have made them available; it is the absence on the ground of reliable competent organisations that are able to deliver and monitor those programmes. Is that what you are saying?

Mr Burch: That is fair to say.

Q121 Chairman: Oliver, when Christian Aid gave us written evidence in October of last year you lamented the lack of evidence of a co-ordinated strategy for long term development of Iraq. In particular you pointed to the uncertainty of external funding as well the lack of opportunities for civil society organisations to engage in shaping what you described as local development plans. Perhaps I could roll up a number of questions and ask you to comment on them in totality. Has the situation changed? How does Christian Aid go about co-ordinating with local civil society organisations? Do you think that this newly established Ministry of Civil Society Development is going to assist in the co-ordination and regulation process and, if not, why not? We are a little perplexed as to how an NGO organises itself to carry out activities in Iraq whilst based in Amman. Can one operate remote operations, whether by NGOs or by the UN agencies, and, lastly, how in the circumstances of Iraq does one ensure the accountability of these operations?

Mr Burch: The situation is improving slowly. New NGOs are appearing quite rapidly. They are not all very competent. They are not all entirely honest. There is certainly a need for a process not just to register NGOs in Iraq but try and regulate their activities. There seems to be a certain amount of competition at the moment between several ministries. We have a Minister of Planning who initially took the job over from the CPA but there is now a new Minister of NGOs and of course we have a ministry responsible for civil society and having asked our partners I do not think any of those are quite clear exactly which of those ministries is going to be responsible for what. Remote control operating from bases overseas or in Amman can work quite effectively. In Amman many of the local NGOs are now becoming represented and opening offices. Iraqi ministries are being more or less permanently represented there. Co-ordination meetings can be held safely there. We are meeting our partners several times a year. It works quite well. Of course, we are very disappointed at the end of a project that we cannot go off on the ground and evaluate in detail with the beneficiaries the true impact of it. Unless we can walk amongst the communities and talk to the beneficiaries there is not much purpose being in the country at all. We are taking a certain amount on trust and I guess any donor who is thinking of investing in Iraqi programmes or the country at all has to take that point on board. Progress is being made but it is slow. Co-ordination with the Iraqi interim government is a little bit irregular in the NGO field. As regards co-ordination with international organisations under NCCI, which is the umbrella organisation in Amman, I would say it is quite good.

Mr Caldwell: In relation to accountability issues, all of us who are involved in seeking to provide assistance to Iraq, be they donors or merely NGOs, are facing a greater challenge in accountability. It is much more difficult for us to work in Iraq than almost any other country in the world because of the explicit targeting of humanitarian workers, and therefore we can only continue to operate there if we have a belief that things are going to get better. If we ever saw a situation in Iraq where we saw no real prospect of things improving then we would ask ourselves some tough questions, if we did not think there was going to be a time in the next two or three years where we could get in there and find out whether they were being effective.

Q122 Mr Davies: Mr Burch, can I pick up on something you said so that we are absolutely clear on the evidence you are giving us? You said that you cannot in Iraq go and visit projects on the ground and walk about and talk to the community. That is the case absolutely, is it, everywhere you are, not just in dangerous areas like Falluja, and is it true whether or not you have a police or military escort, whether or not you have a white face or whether you are using Iraqi colleagues who are citizens of Iraq?

Mr Burch: Our evaluation, and this has been so for more than a year, is that in most parts of Iraq it is not safe to expose international assets, if you like, in that way, nor would our partners welcome hosting us. For the northern provinces, the Kurdish areas, you could make a case for that but unfortunately we do not think the biggest needs are there, and most of our projects these days are further south below the green line.

Q123 Mr Davies: So even in the Shi'ia south you cannot visit?

Mr Burch: No, we do not think, having had a number of security assessments, and this is revisited regularly, that it is a practical prospect. It is not much good to us, to be honest, to be in a hotel room in a guarded situation or heavily escorted. You do not see much that way. What we want to do is to talk to beneficiaries and move freely. If we cannot do that we might as well work from outside.

Q124 Mr Davies: And even your Iraq colleagues, because both Save the Children and Christian Aid I am sure have Iraqis on your staff as colleagues who have had the same training and background and who you trust as any other colleagues, cannot do this on-the-spot monitoring and evaluation?

Mr Burch: Not quite. In our case they are partners. We work through partners that we fund to do projects. Essentially we leave it to them to make the decision as to whether they are safe to go to work that day and where and how the programme can run, and so far they have been able to do so. The key point here is that they are working in a very discreet way, I might even say a clandestine way, so whereas in most parts of the world a humanitarian organisation gets its protection from working very visibly in the conflict with white vehicles and even the high frequency radio masts and the flag, and relying on its reputation for doing good work, in Iraq it is completely turned around; it is the opposite, so our people are not using white vehicles, they are using taxis and they are trying to look like ordinary people going about ordinary business and not internationally funded - this is the key adjective - humanitarian organisations because they are at risk.

Mr Caldwell: The situation for Save the Children is slightly different because we have had an established team in northern Iraq over the last 13 years and so our local staff are in certain circumstances able to travel in the sort of way that Oliver has described and see what is happening on the ground. In a public forum I prefer not to go more into the operational modalities of that for reasons of security but I am quite happy to -----

Q125 Mr Davies: But the results of that are reassuring to you. The money has not been wasted, things are happening, reasonable progress is being made and there are competent people delivering the programmes that you are supporting. That is a question. Is that the case?

Mr Caldwell: I do not want to convey an impression that they are working as normal. We are able to do a certain amount in these very tightly constrained circumstances but every time they travel they are facing security risks and they travel in a very low profile way in a way that makes it much more difficult. They are almost there asking questions like private citizens rather than representing Save the Children. That means we can get a certain amount of feedback and comfort from those visits but nothing like the standard we would normally expect in a more conventional situation.

Q126 Ann Clwyd: I agree with you: it is more difficult than it was immediately after the war. One of the greatest needs as far as indigenous NGOs and the newly emerging NGOs are concerned is the fact that they do not even know how to fill in forms. I have seen that time after time. They need somebody to sit down with them and help them to fill in an application form. That is such a basic necessity. I cannot understand why people have not understood that they have no experience of filling in application forms. There is one organisation that I visit every time I go which I think is well worth supporting but we had to put someone in the last time I was there to sit by the side of the man making the application to help him answer the questions. There are questions about bank accounts. Most of those NGOs do not have bank accounts. The needs are very basic to start with and I think that has to be factored into any consideration of how indigenous NGOs in Iraq should be helped. Secondly, I think it is possible to get people to come in and see you. I saw DFID being a bit slow in doing that, in calling people to see them at various places. If I could do it they could do it as well. The other thing is the ministries. I have got a friend who is a Water Minister in Iraq and he is constantly complaining that his own staff, the people who work in his private office, do not know how to do things like write a letter. As the chief man in the ministry he spends an enormous amount of time just correcting basic letters. Those kinds of skills are needed and they need to be assisted in all of that.

Mr Caldwell: I would agree with that. Both of us are regarding it as very high priority in our role in capacity building with local NGOs even on the basic stuff like filling in forms or keeping basic books of account that can be accountable for proper use of resources. Certainly within government ministries, as Oliver referred to earlier, there are different but significant capacity problems and an important part of supporting the new government, if one is successfully formed, will be capacity building work for government departments which is generally something that UNDP is known to take a lead role in more than it being NGO territory.

Mr Burch: There are a lot of seminars and courses in the region and certainly one of the things we do is send NGOs to Egypt or the Lebanon, for example, to go on courses. That is still going on now and the UN is doing similar things for the ministry staff.

Q127 Ann Clwyd: We have just held a three-day seminar in Amman for NGOs involved in human rights. Again, what was interesting was that people have never met one another. The Syrians have never met an Azidi, never met a Kurd. To get a grouping of various people to make up Iraq is also important for better understanding between the various factions. That is an ongoing thing. Security, of course, is the all-important factor. As you know, most of the reconstruction has been held up because money has been diverted to security. I imagine you would agree that that is necessary anyway but it must be very frustrating for somebody like the Water Minister, who has got all kinds of projects planed, who is engaged in reflooding marshes where the poorest people of Iraq live, not to be able to continue with that work. Therefore should some of the UN money be diverted into continuing to build the infrastructure rather than quite a lot of it, a point you were making, Quentin, sitting in a bank account somewhere?

Mr Burch: I understand that in the United States administration there has been a change of thought in this and that the thinking is that it has not been very productive to try to improve the infrastructure in their case in order to win hearts and minds with the very bad security and that money should be diverted instead to address the problem of unemployment. Therefore, labour creation schemes would be more useful at this stage. I am not quoting that as a recommendation but I understand that is the thinking in the US these days.

Q128 Ann Clwyd: The Water Ministry is employing tens of thousands of people in infrastructure projects.

Mr Burch: It does, yes.

Ann Clwyd: But if they are put on hold what happens to those people who did have employment and have now become unemployed? It is not quite that straightforward.

Q129 Mr Davies: It is a false analysis, is it not, because infrastructure development is very labour intensive?

Mr Caldwell: You make a very good point about human rights which is in a situation where, if we see an election successfully carried off, we are going to see still big religious and ethnic divides within Iraqi society and a rights based approach in that context, if we are going to see benefits getting through to ordinary people, is very important. While the Iraqi government in international law is signed up to all sorts of human rights conventions there is clearly a huge distance to travel, as you will know from your own experience, in terms of recognition of those. As one little example, we have been promoting the Convention on the Rights of the Child within Iraq but we heard a story the other day of a teacher that had been beating their children for not getting their Convention on the Rights of the Child sums right. Those are the sorts of basic things that still have to be dealt with.

Q130 Ann Clwyd: Given that the post-war humanitarian crisis was not as bad as was expected in that it was not of the kind that was predicted, was it right that aid agencies should have kept staff on the ground in view of the deteriorating security situation? Should they have withdrawn them sooner?

Mr Caldwell: It is one of the toughest calls that we face as international NGOs in a situation of the greatest humanitarian need. As we see in Darfur at the moment, very often there are situations where the security risks are at their greatest and every week we have to make tough judgment calls about what degree of risk we are prepared to carry in high risk situations, as Iraq obviously is, people will take those judgments in different places When to make that call to pull out is a very hard call to make.

Q131 Mr Battle: What about the differences in the guidelines, because there were guidelines? They are called the Good Humanitarian Donorship guidelines, and they are for the organisations interacting with the interim government and with the military as well, the security services. In Save the Children's evidence you said there were shortcomings in that; it was not quite working right. Would you like to say a little bit more about that and those guidelines and how they need to be sharpened up?

Mr Caldwell: Let me be clear. The Good Humanitarian Donorship guidelines are primarily about co-ordination between donors and with the government of the country. The guidelines for civil and military relations are those relating to the Steering Committee in Humanitarian Response.

Q132 Mr Battle: They are a separate set of guidelines?

Mr Caldwell: They are a separate set of guidelines drawn up in different structures. I am happy to talk about either of those.

Q133 Mr Battle: In a sense it is the interaction with the security services and the military. How is that working?

Mr Caldwell: As we discussed at the beginning of this evidence session, we see some really big holes in that. To date those guidelines have been primarily agreed within the humanitarian community and we do not see any evidence of them being signed up to and implemented by the military establishment of the key countries.

Q134 Mr Battle: I think it is what is on the paper. I am referring perhaps to my experience in Afghanistan. I am keen to see clarity rather than ambivalence and ambiguity in who does what because there is a danger that NGOs get tied in to military and security strategy. That is why they cannot use white vans and cars with a red cross on to move around if they are compromised because they are part of the security operation. Is it in that area where you need further clarity and guidance?

Mr Burch: From our point of view I think we do put our faith in the SCHR guidelines which say very clearly that humanitarian operations are a matter for independent and neutral humanitarian organisations and the military should do it only when there is no other alternative in a time-bound situation, ideally with some humanitarian civilian advice, so it should be an extraordinary rather than an ordinary situation. I still think that those guidelines are pretty good and I think you can apply them to Iraq but it gets very complex in some of these emergencies where a number of organisations are in the field together in some quite tense situations. I know that the UN, when they re-inserted into the country after the military operation of 2003, were very nervous about how they would be perceived by the local population and what their relationship with the military should be and I know that they wrote some very detailed instructions to all their staff about things like, "Should military officers be allowed to come to co-ordination meetings by invitation or regularly?" "Under what circumstances should we appear with a military officer in uniform?" "Should there be any guards near UN installations?". Despite all this care it seems to be clear that they did not make that separation and indeed they were attacked in the summer of that year. They knew what the risks were before that disaster, that is clear. Everybody is trying to get this right but unless the military side is prepared to co-operate and, as you say, sign up to these ideals, it is not much help.

Mr Caldwell: We would like to see the British Government promoting inter-governmental and military initiative to come to terms with these issues so it is not a debate in the humanitarian community; it is a debate in the military community we are engaging with. Possibly through NATO might be the best vehicle for doing it but we would like to see a military-led initiative to work out where the military should stop.

Q135 Mr Battle: And there is precedent for that. I am just calling to mind the conflict in the Balkans, in Kosovo, for example, where after the worst conflict and then the ceasefire was declared I visited and the Royal Engineers were doing work rebuilding water pumps and power stations but everyone knew what the guidelines were. They were moving into that reconstruction but it was accepted as the refugees were returning to Pristina that they knew what the rules of the game were and they could then work with the NGOs, but I get the impression there is not that kind of clarity in the guidelines. Am I right?

Mr Caldwell: I would hazard a guess that if you spoke to the top 30 people in the Pentagon and asked them if they followed the SCHR guidelines I know what the answer would be.

Mr Burch: I think possibly some wrong lessons were drawn from the Balkans experience. There were some examples in the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina where I have also worked in the past, where there has been some very fruitful co-operation in specific circumstances. If you have a situation where the local population does not regard the military as factional, in other words it regards it as neutral and an overall umbrella of security and its acceptance is quite good, they can do some quite good work and they have, of course, logistic capacity etc, but that is unusual.

Chairman: Thank you very much. You have been extremely helpful in the answers you have given and the clarity you have brought to some of the issues we are looking at.

Witness: Mr Yahia Said, Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics, examined.

Q136 Chairman: Mr Said, thank you very much for coming and giving evidence. Can you in two sentences tell us what is the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the LSE?

Mr Said: It is the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the LSE; it is a research centre attached to the London School of Economics. It looks at global issues and tries to explore global solutions for them. The programme I work for within that centre is the Global Civil Society Programme which looks at transnational networks of NGOs in civil society organisations working together to address certain issues, grievances and problems, whether it is human rights or cross-border construction or issues of free trade.

Q137 Hugh Bayley: I understand you have recently returned from Baghdad. We heard a lot in the previous session about the security problems in Iraq. I wondered if you could comment on DFID's suggestion recently that it is still possible to successfully engage in reconstruction activities outside the central zone. What is your view about that? Is it possible and, if so, how should one set about reconstruction in difficult areas?

Mr Said: I think the security situation and the prospects for reconstruction in various parts of Iraq are quite patchy. There are not such set rules that you can do reconstruction in the north as you can do it in the south or the centre. In Baghdad recently Sadr City, where two million out of five million Baghdadis live, has been the scene of quite successful reconstruction effort ongoing after the ceasefire was signed. Other parts of Baghdad of course are off limits for reconstruction effort, whether they are driven by DFID or whether they are driven by Iraqi ministries. The same could be said of other areas in Iraq. Areas in the south like Samawa are pretty safe for reconstruction efforts but they still carry the legacy of the fact that they were unsafe for some time last year and that somehow people have been slow to react to the improvements in the security situation in these areas. Generally the biggest security challenge in Iraq today are the roads. What you have is that millions or sometimes billions of dollars are spent, for example, fixing Baghdad Airport but the road to Baghdad Airport is unpassable and quite dangerous, which means that that investment lies almost dormant. It is the same with the billions being spent on the port facilities in the south. There is a very big capacity in the ports to import and export goods but the roads are quite unsafe. These are some of the challenges. There is the power, the electricity. Over the last month there have been about three or four hours of electricity in Baghdad, which is atrocious, although the generating capacity has been improved significantly and Iraq today has more generating capacity than it had before the war. The sabotage, both in terms of the power lines but also in terms of the fuel supplies to the power stations, has meant that this generating capacity is lying dormant.

Q138 Hugh Bayley: When you identify problem areas, and you have talked about roads and about a lack of security on the roads as being the problem, there is a chicken and egg situation, is there not? Where reconstruction makes a real difference to the quality of people's lives one would expect a greater sense of respect for the civil authorities, whoever they might be, but you need security to create conditions where that can happen. You seem to be suggesting that the priority is security and the free movement of people, and that that is the pre-condition without which reconstruction cannot take place. Am I right to draw that inference?

Mr Said: I think the priority area is security but within the security problem the priority area is politics, so as a matter of fact it goes even further than that. I think you need a political solution to address the security problem which will open the way for reconstruction. That said, I am not saying we have to wait for the reconstruction effort until then but maybe the direction of reconstruction investment has been misguided, for example, going into large projects. The bulk of the billion dollar, big tag investments, have gone into, for example, oil production and oil export. Iraq produces two to two and a half million barrels a day that it cannot move within the country, let alone outside the country. Creative approaches, that will shorten the supply routes, for example, of power, of oil, of food resources and so on so that they are less susceptible to insurgent activity, could have brought faster relief than large investments in big price tag projects. At the end of the day they are done and signed up for but they are not bringing Iraqis the benefits that could have come from smaller projects. Some of the most successful reconstruction work that has been done in Iraq over the last two years has been very small scale, direct, on-the-spot, sometimes financed directly by military commanders on the ground, such as fixing the local school, fixing the local clinic, just getting some through the military process, and in this I am contradicting my predecessors. Some of the military commanders on the ground have been very successful in directly addressing the needs of communities, whereas projects that have been designed far away, in Madrid or in Tokyo, with large investments and so on, have been very slow to trickle down through the process to the average Iraqi on the ground.

Q139 Hugh Bayley: Both the previous witnesses made the point powerfully that their safety and that of those who operate in Iraq has been compromised because of military activity invading humanitarian space. Where you have an international NGO that has worked on contract to the coalition provisional authority, for instance, one can see exactly why they are seen as collaborators with the occupation, but few of the internationally known NGOs have worked on that sort of basis. Do you think the security problems and risks they face have come as a result of the military invading humanitarian space or simply because they are soft targets, and if the insurgents' objective is to make Iraq as ungovernable as possible and to frighten foreigners away because they do not want the west to be seen as contributing to the solutions in the region, would it not be the case that international NGOs would have been targets even if the military had behaved more clearly to restrain themselves from invading humanitarian space?

Mr Said: I agree with where you are going with that question. The problem in Iraq is not the fact that the military invaded humanitarian space but the fact that the military is viewed as an invader. The problem is the fact that there is a significant portion of the Iraqi population, if not all Iraqis, who fear that their country is under occupation and that is where a lot of the violence is coming from. It has nothing to do with the fact that the military has been invading humanitarian space. As some of you suggested, in Yugoslavia where the military has not been viewed as an occupying force or as an invader, that issue did not arise, of them intermeshing with each other, and indeed in Iraq the attacks on the UN, the attacks on humanitarian organisations, have taken place and would have taken place, as I believe, regardless of their relationship with the United States military or with the British military. As you rightly suggested, the sorts of terrorists - and this is not necessarily representative of the entire insurgency in Iraq - who will attack the UN or attack the Red Cross or who kidnapped Margaret Hassan, are people who would not have been deterred. Margaret Hassan was the furthest from the coalition and from the military and from the invasion of humanitarian space as you can get and yet she was probably specifically targeted for that. The two Italian humanitarian workers were against the sanctions, against the invasion, and were quite strong in their positions in terms of their views about the occupation and the presence of foreign troops and yet they were kidnapped. The problem with the security in Iraq is with the whole perception of the occupation, with the social tensions that exist in the country with political backgrounds, with ethnic backgrounds, rather than the relationship between NGOs and the military. Of course, that relationship has to be redefined and there is a huge debate about that. Lots of people in the humanitarian community believe in that separation but there are other positions in that, both in academia and in the military, who say that that era is over. Now when you talk about human security you provide security solutions. The military or an invasion or an intervention have to provide a full human security solution that is not only about shooting and protecting but is also about feeding and giving jobs and providing humanitarian assistance. The development of the military side is about broadening the scope of their work when they are providing security solutions rather than limiting it and saying, "Okay, the military does the shooting and Christian Aid does the feeding". There is a move away from that. To go back to Iraq, I think you are right. I think the kinds of terrorists, that part of the insurgency that has been targeting humanitarian organisations, would have done so regardless of the issue of the blurring of the border between humanitarian and military space.

Q140 Chairman: There has been quite a lot of debate in the UK in the business pages about how much business UK companies are getting out of reconstruction as compared to how much business US companies are getting out of reconstruction. I suppose one of the issues we should be considering is to what extent is this an Iraqi-led reconstruction process. Do you get the impression that DFID is facilitating an Iraqi-led reconstruction process or is it simply that the coalition as occupiers are undertaking such reconstruction as they feel as occupiers is needing to be done?

Mr Said: There are several questions here that need to be addressed. First of all, it is not so much a real reconstruction effort that is going on. There is a patchwork of investment projects or activities that are taking place - an airport here, a sewer station there, a couple of electricity power stations over there. In all these areas there are certain works that cannot be done by Iraqis. Building a deepwater seaport is nothing that any construction company in Iraq can carry out and it is definitely where a lot of revenue will be acquired by foreign companies. Fixing up a school or resurfacing the road is something that Iraqi companies can do and are doing. The money for a lot of reconstruction effort, where it has been possible, has been primarily going to Iraqi companies simply because the foreign companies cannot bring people to Iraq to do that work. It is quite dangerous for them and it is more cost effective for Iraqi companies to do that. There is no impression in Iraq that there is a co-ordinated, coherent reconstruction programme that is taking place and many people argue in Iraq that it is not correct to have that because these are long term decisions that affect the long term future of Iraq and these decisions should be left to a government that is elected and seen as fully legitimate.

Q141 Chairman: Is there sufficient money for the reconstruction that needs to be done and, if there is sufficient money, is the difficulty just with dispersing it?

Mr Said: There is probably too much money going into reconstruction in Iraq. The problem is the following. The ministries spend the bulk of their money paying salaries and what has been happening with the Iraqi ministries is that they have, especially since June, re-hired all the people that had been fired during the Saddam years. At the same time they are keeping their own staff but sometimes they have been returning Ba'athists to office that they have fired over the last two years. What you have is that each ministry is re-hiring 2,000 or 3,000 people on top of the bureaucratic bloat that they already had during the Saddam years. Therefore, a significant portion of Iraqi budgetary resources have been tied up with paying salaries As a short term measure in a way it is good; it is keeping the peace, it is keeping lots of Iraqi families funded and supplied, although it is not necessarily a good thing in terms of institution building. On the other side of that you have the billions that have been earmarked by the international community for reconstruction and I do not think there is enough capacity within Iraq to absorb these billions, especially considering the security situation. In a way the solution at this moment is not by committing more resources, especially not committing more resources for large investment projects, but rather improving the absorption capacity in Iraq for these resources. That is not necessarily in terms of the capacity of ministries but is especially in terms of the institutional framework, the political framework and the security programme.

Q142 Ann Clwyd: Where were you in Iraq? Did you travel through Iraq?

Mr Said: I have been travelling to Iraq every three months since the war and during my first trip I went to the south, to Amara. Recently I have been only travelling to Baghdad, obviously, because of security and because the roads are the most dangerous part of Iraq.

Q143 Ann Clwyd: You gave a partial assessment of the security situation and you talked about Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad and other areas. Can you give us a global assessment of the security situation?

Mr Said: As you hear on the news, there is widespread violence in Iraq and it is for various reasons. There are many aspects to the violence. A big part of the violence is criminal. There are lots of highway robberies, murders, kidnapping for ransom, extortion. Then there are the terrorists that you hear about, the Al-qaeda types. Over the last months we have seen a coming together of people associated with Al-qaeda and some of the remnants of the regime. Part of the insurgency that is quite significant is nationalist Islamic, people who were against Saddam but who are very unhappy not only with the presence of foreign troops but also with the direction in which the new Iraqi government and the new Iraqi political system seem to be heading, people who are motivated by, for example, religious reasons because they feel that the new Iraqi government is too westernised, people who feel that exiles are playing too big a role in the country. There are people with personal reasons, people who have had someone killed by the Americans or who were mistreated at a checkpoint or who just feel unhappy about the Americans running around. There is a large number of grievances that are not finding political expression and are creating space where violence is thriving. These feed into each other so, for example, a lot of the criminal violence is piggy-backing on the insurgency. When I was in Baghdad a taxi driver had his car car-jacked by two persons who were pretending to be suicide bombers. They started to pray as if they were about to blow themselves up, so he jumped out of the car and they stole the car. What you have is different kinds of violence bolting on to the core of the insurgency and I believe at the end of the day that the core of the insurgency has a legitimate point to it which is the fact that they are people who are unhappy about the fact that is Iraq is occupied.

Q144 Ann Clwyd: What effect is that going to have on the elections and the legitimacy of the elections?

Mr Said: I am moderately optimistic about the elections. Many people in Baghdad, including people who are pro-insurgency, who think that a violent resistance to the occupation is justified, nonetheless intend to vote, to participate in the election. They think that the elections will be flawed, will be far short of what they view as the ideal, but nonetheless they think that the elections will be a step towards full independence, towards the return of self-determination to Iraqis. Literally there was a person who told me, "Maybe I will get one or two people who I believe in into parliament rather than a large faction but maybe in the next round we will get more people in". There is sufficient hope among Iraqis that despite all the problems with the elections they will be a step away from the current chaos. Also, although I have been describing a picture of the insurgency as quite widespread and strong, on the worst day you have in Iraq about 150 or 200 attacks. There are 6,000 or 7,000 polling stations, so even with all the efforts of the insurgents, they will not be able to attack a significant number of polling stations, enough to disrupt the elections in a serious way. That said, I am not listing all the other issues that are very well covered, like Sunni participation in elections. These are all issues that will still be there. I am just trying to describe the elements that make me a little optimistic. Despite the rhetoric people do believe that the Electoral Commission, which was entirely set up by the UN, enjoys a certain legitimacy, definitely more legitimacy than the interim government itself, and the fact that it is in control of the election process gives comfort to at least some of the sceptical among Iraqis about the elections, that at least that part of it will be legitimate. There are other concerns. I am sure you have heard the reports about Alawi's party giving $100 bills to journalists to give them positive coverage, that there are militias in the south that are trying to convince people to participate in the elections and so on. There will be all kinds of violations so it will be very far from an ideal process but many people in Iraq, including those who are opposed to the occupation and to the current government, believe they should participate just to get that step closer to the end goals.

Q145 Mr Battle: It is encouraging to hear what you say despite the fact that many candidates cannot reveal their names and that the positions of some polling stations are being kept secret because they might be bombed beforehand. What hope do you hold out after the elections that those Sunnis who refuse to participate will say, "We have had a vote That is democracy. We will now join in"? Do you see any signs of that at all? Will the elections be a healing or a dividing process?

Mr Said: I have been speaking to the Council of Muslim Clerics which is the most influential Sunni institution. It is not a political organisation. It is essentially just formed of the majority of the Sunni clerics in Iraq; it is almost like a trade union. Rhetorically they are quite vehemently opposed to the election; they describe them in the most negative terms, but I know that they quietly have been looking for ways to get back into the political process. I think they will stay out of the elections. I do not think they are campaigning energetically enough for their members not to vote, which is quite a positive sign. In a way it is almost like Hamas and the Palestinian Territories, which does not participate but does not call for a boycott. I think that although they explicitly did not say that, in practice on the ground this is what we are seeing. I think they will not vote. They do not want to be associated with the election, they think it will taint their patriotic Islamic credentials, but at the same time they are looking for ways back. Unfortunately, on the other side we do not see enough movement to meet them halfway. There are people who are currently involved in the political process who feel threatened by these forces that are outside and would rather have them stay outside. They would rather push them further and describe them as terrorists, as bitter-enders and so on for their own political benefit and this is definitely irresponsible. To go back to what will happen after the election, it will depend a lot on what the people in power, who are elected to the parliament, do to reach out to those who have been outside the political process. There is definitely a space for dialogue There is lots of rhetoric about national dialogue but unfortunately many of the mainstream political parties have been going in the opposite direction, have been going for sectarian and identity politics that are not helpful for resuming dialogue.

Q146 Tony Worthington: One of the consequences in the long lead-up to the elections is reports of criminality and corruption increasing. Is that your assessment, and that senior people in the government are rumoured to be involved in corruption as well?

Mr Said: I do not have any hard evidence of corruption on a significant scale in the government but if you speak to any Iraqi they are 100 per cent convinced that there is widespread corruption that goes to the highest places. The perception, if not the reality, is of widespread, endemic corruption. Many people that I spoke to in Iraq believe that corruption goes on not only in the government but also in the coalition, in the US and British governments, and with people who are involved in the distribution of funds. I have not seen any evidence of that but everybody I spoke to across the political spectrum strongly believe that there is such corruption. I have seen anecdotal evidence of corruption, such as a minister whose chief of staff is his cousin. The Minister of the Interior has hired about 200 of his relatives to high positions in the government. When he was questioned about it in parliament he said, "Because I trust them". There is anecdotal evidence that points in the direction of corruption. Baghdad and most of Iraq currently are currently suffering from a severe fuel shortage. There is no gas at the gas stations and there is no kerosene for heating. The Baghdad City Council have been accusing the Ministry of Oil that it is corruption at the Ministry of Oil that is causing the shortage, not a real shortage of oil supplies because Baghdad oil products come from a refinery within the city so there is no such thing as saying that there is sabotage on the roads to prevent these products from coming to the gas stations. I have not seen any evidence of that. One suspects that there is scope for corruption because gas in Baghdad filling stations is sold at half a cent a litre and given the lack of gas - Iraq imports a lot of it from Kuwait at what I suspect to be one dollar a litre - obviously there is a space for arbitrage and if there are any commercially-minded people within the Ministry of Oil or anywhere in Iraq, I am sure they will be trying to bridge that gap between the price at the gas station and the money Iraq has paid to buy gas. There are conditions for corruption and again billions of dollars are being spent. My colleagues before spoke about there not being sufficient funds for civil society. I think there is too much money being spent on Iraqi civil society. There is no way that Iraqi civil society can absorb the ten million pounds that the British Government, for example, has set aside for its development, let alone the $50 million that the US Government is spending. There are not enough NGOs in Iraq or people capable to work in NGOs that can absorb so much money. I do not know how much NGOs in Britain spend.

Q147 Tony Worthington: Let us be quite clear about this strange expression, that there is no way people can absorb so much money. I do not think people have any problem absorbing the money. What you are saying basically is that it is not going to the purpose it was intended for.

Mr Said: Yes. Civil society specifically is almost smoke and mirrors. It is about voluntarism, it is about a feeling of participation, it is about debate, it is about dialogue, it is about consensus. It is all these ephemeral things. If you speak about civil society in terms of distributing food and blankets, of course you can spend a lot more money on that, but if you talk about civil society in terms of Iraqi's engagement in shaping the future, it is something where you can spend £20 or £50 on water bottles and we have a debate and you achieve a lot more than when you spend, for example, and I am guilty of that, £20,000 or £30,000 getting ten Iraqis to Amman, putting them in a five-star hotel and giving them a lecture about fund-raising. There are ways and ways to spend money on developing civil society.

Q148 Tony Worthington: There is a sort of irony, when you mentioned the Iraq before, that the major centre of talk in terms of corruption was the oil-for-food programme but there is now no talk about corruption there. Is that just because everybody is being fed by it? How is it being done now? There is this extraordinary operation of the whole country being fed. Is it because everybody is being fed?

Mr Said: No. In the oil-for-food programme Iraq was exporting as much oil as it could but could only import food or there was a restricted list of where it could spend the money. What is now happening I think is that most of the Iraqi oil revenues are spent on salaries so there is no space for corruption there. There are monies coming in. Iraqi policemen used to earn two dollars a month. They now earn $200 a month and there is a lot more of them, so there is no space for that money to be diverted.

Q149 Tony Worthington: There is always space for something to be diverted.

Mr Said: I am sure there is some diversion but it is on a much smaller scale. In the oil-for-food programme the whole idea was that Saddam was trying to milk it for his own benefit. What I found out is that that very corruption that was inside Saddam's efforts to utilise the oil-for-food programme was destroying the regime because it turned the regime into gangs that were competing for these diverted funds and although Saddam thought that some of these funds were going towards his chemical and biological weapons programme, in reality they were all going into various pockets of his cronies who were fighting real wars with each other.

Q150 Tony Worthington: When you get a disruption and you cut people out of the food chain, you know, you have got gangs who are dependent on the income, where have they gone now because they have no longer got their income? Where are they getting their income from?

Mr Said: A lot of the people at the top of the food chain have left the country. A lot of the people who were involved in the billions of dollars that were being diverted are people sitting in Damascus and in Amman and there is a real-estate boom in those countries because of that. As for the minions, the henchmen, the people involved in that, as I have described, there are wide criminal networks involved in smuggling, in sabotage, in kidnapping people, in highway robberies and such activities, but the real big thieves, the big robber barons, are sitting in Damascus and Amman.

Q151 Tony Worthington: Let us go on to something different. In all these conflicts where there has been terrible oppression and massive abuse of human rights in a previous regime, it is always thought that there has somehow got to be closure at the end of it, there has to be some kind of reconciliation or a sense of justice. How do you assess the way in which the crimes of the former regime are going to be dealt with?

Mr Said: There is a semi-official process, which is the Memorial Foundation that is run by Kanan Makiya, which I think has received significant funds from the US administration and has also received access to almost all the documents that are being collected around the country and have been collected around the country about the regime. Unfortunately, this process, viewed from Baghdad, lacks transparency; it is not public enough and therefore is not serving its purpose. In a way, somebody sitting in New York and London collecting all these documents and analysing them, and I am sure they are making an admirable effort in that, is not giving Iraqis a sense of closure. This is one of the missed opportunities, I think, of the last two years, in other words, trying to develop a system for truth and reconciliation, a system of somehow holding the henchmen of the regime accountable without creating a whole group of Iraqis who feel targeted, without turning it into a witch-hunt. Now, unfortunately, because of the way the US has been using all the regime's crimes in its rhetoric, even that process has been discredited. Because it has been left, because every time you speak of grievances about what is going on today, the US Embassy answers you with quite correct stuff about mass graves and crimes against humanity committed by Saddam, somehow that noble memory is being tainted by the occupation. Somewhere down the road we will go back to these documents that are being collected now and this evidence and get it out into a transparent public process.

Q152 Tony Worthington: But you are not optimistic that that can be done now?

Mr Said: It is definitely not happening now. Unfortunately, the court for Saddam Hussein's henchmen has been quite disorganised and definitely lacks transparency, definitely lacks the legitimacy that one hopes for from such a court. I think it was a mistake not to set up an international court because Iraq definitely does not have the capacity to prosecute the crime of aggression, for example, as in the case of Kuwait, let alone other crimes that Saddam's henchmen are being prosecuted for. Unfortunately this is a missed opportunity and it will be doubly difficult to do it again correctly some time down the road than had it been done correctly from the beginning. This is a very important question because one of the main mistakes that everyone agrees has been committed by the Bremer government was, for example, the dissolution of the army, or the de-Ba'athification. These are both measures that have been taken because nobody had the patience to set up a truth and reconciliation process which would have been a lot better transitional justice process at weeding the criminals, the Ba'athists, out of the system than a blanket dismissal of the entire army or of the three top echelons of the Ba'ath party.

Q153 Ann Clwyd: It would have been better had the UN set up an international war crimes tribunal. I think that is the major mistake. The UN did not grasp that opportunity.

Mr Said: Unfortunately, I know that the UN was quite keen to do that and it was the US and some other countries that were in coalition with the US that were opposed to it. I made a mistake there.

Chairman: Thank you very much. My impression also was that the UN wanted to do it but was not allowed to by the US. Thank you very much for some really helpful insights, all the more helpful because you have recent experience of being in Iraq.