Europe, Headlines, Middle East & North Africa

IRAQ: A Presidential Kind of Visit to Europe

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Sep 3 2004 (IPS) - U.S.-appointed Iraqi president Ghazi al-Yawar begins a visit to Europe this week amidst uncertainty over the future of Iraq.

Yawar will arrive in Paris Sunday on a tour that will also take him also to Germany, Italy and Belgium.

Yawar, or Sheikh Yawar as he was better known before his appointment, is leader of the Shamar tribe, one of the largest in Iraq. He is an engineer educated in the United States.

He was appointed president, a largely symbolic post, after the first U.S. choice for the post, former Iraqi foreign minister Adnan Pachachi refused the job. Mortar attacks greeted the swearing-in of Yawar in a message of what Iraqi militants thought of a president of Iraq appointed by the Bush administration.

Yawar has not received unqualified support outside Iraq either. Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher said only that the region would like to see an Iraqi government that is sovereign and which represents the Iraqi people.

Yawar’s visit to Europe is a part of efforts by the appointed government to seek support and legitimacy.

Yawar will first meet French President Jacques Chirac, his counterpart in name only. Chirac was openly opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year. He will then travel to Germany to meet Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who had also opposed the invasion.

Yawar could find a more supportive leader in Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who backed the invasion. Italy has deployed about 3,000 troops in Iraq. Yawar will finally meet EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Brussels.

Yawar had said earlier this month that improving ties with the EU would be a priority. “The European Union has increasing power and is a key player in the future of the world,” he said.

The EU has formally welcomed the visit. “This shows the interest of both the EU and Iraq in working together and in particular it is a signal of support of the European institutions to the Iraqi interim government,” Solana’s spokeswoman Cristina Gallach said.

A spokesman for Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said both Yawar and the U.S. appointed Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi were “very interested” in cooperation with the bloc.

But doubts over this Iraqi government have surfaced within the EU establishment.

EU external relations commissioner Chris Patten said it was “difficult to know” what the future will bring for Iraq. “The sad truth is that whatever our views about the military intervention in Iraq we are all faced with the consequences,” he told the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee Wednesday.

“The security situation in Iraq is awful,” he said. “I’m not sure that anybody knows what Iraq will look like in a year’s time.”

The situation in Iraq will be discussed by EU foreign ministers at informal talks starting Friday (Sep. 3) in St. Gerlach in the south of the Netherlands.

Bot will brief ministers on preliminary findings of an official mission to Iraq Aug. 29 to explore EU support for democratisation, the development of civil society, the rule of law and protection of human rights.

Yawar’s visit follows the release of a report ‘Reconstructing Iraq’ by the Brussels- based International Crisis Group. The report says Iraq “desperately needs a genuine economic recovery strategy if it is to escape its vicious circle of hardship, discontent and violence.”

The ICG, an independent organisation that works to prevent and resolve conflict says Iraq’s interim government must devise ways to bring “immediate material improvement and set the stage” for longer-term rebuilding.

“This means protecting and creating jobs, decentralisation and far greater Iraqi involvement at both national and local levels, and structural steps to curtail corruption, including that which develops when positions are distributed along ethnic/sectarian lines – a trend unfortunately taking hold in Iraq,” the report says.

ICG Middle East analyst Reinoud Leenders says that until living conditions improve, nascent Iraqi institutions will continue to lose credibility, and the insurgency will gain momentum.

“There’s a misleading tendency today to look at Iraq’s instability and violence and somehow think the country’s economic problems are secondary and unrelated, but economic collapse, criminal activity and political violence are intertwined,” he said. “Unemployment feeds the insurgency, which in turn throttles development, economic growth and job creation.”