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IRAQ: Vulnerable Relief Agencies Ponder Presence

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2003 (IPS) - Last week’s deadly suicide bombing in the U.N. compound in Baghdad has forced international humanitarian organisations to reassess their presence in politically unstable Iraq.
   ”If the United Nations is no long sacred,” a spokesman for a U.S.-based group told IPS, ”we should all consider ourselves potential targets for future terrorist attacks”.

Last week’s deadly suicide bombing in the U.N. compound in Baghdad has forced international humanitarian organisations to reassess their presence in politically unstable Iraq.

”If the United Nations is no long sacred,” a spokesman for a U.S.-based group told IPS, ”we should all consider ourselves potential targets for future terrorist attacks”.

Several global relief agencies, including Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Oxfam America, have been considering whether to cut back or pull out of Iraq.

”Like everyone else, we are worried about the security situation in Iraq,” MSF Executive Director Nicolas De Torrente told IPS.

He said that MSF, which has already evacuated its staff from the city of Basra and relocated them to Kuwait, has no immediate plans to withdraw its 13 international and 28 local staff in other parts of Iraq. But it will continue to reassess the situation on the ground on a day-to-day basis.

Unlike most international organisations, U.S.-based relief agencies such as CARE and the International Rescue Committee are funded primarily by the U.S. government. And according to reports from Baghdad, some Iraqis view them as extensions of the U.S. military presence, despite their humanitarian work.

In May, Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) criticised U.S. non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and relief agencies for their failure to do public relations for the U.S. government.

But De Torrente says that extremist groups in Iraq do not distinguish between the two groups of NGOs. All of the organisations, he said, are seen as western surrogates inside Iraq.

Health workers have been increasingly targeted and threatened, and even abducted for ransom, he added. A few weeks ago, an international ICRC staff member was killed in an attack on a car.

”The developing insecurity and the increased number of attacks and threats against aid workers is a clear indication that the division between military and humanitarian action is not respected by the armed groups who are active in the country,” he noted.

Adrienne Leicester Smith, media director of Oxfam America, a major relief organisation, told IPS, ”Oxfam maintains, as a matter of the highest priority, the personal security of our national and international staff in Iraq”.

”We are constantly monitoring security developments in Baghdad and beyond. The status of our programme remains under constant review,” she added.

Any cutbacks, either by U.N. relief agencies or humanitarian workers, will have a severe impact on the health and well being of average Iraqis, organisations say.

According to De Torrente, a team from MSF alone has been supervising primary health care programmes and performing about 700-800 consultations per week at a clinic in Al Thawra hospital in Sadr City since May.

MSF also works at the Al Ma’amil Clinic in the same hospital, performing nearly 2,000 consultations a week for adults and children.

During June and July, he said, another medical team from MSF screened 1,343 children who were severely malnourished.

But the situation is sensitive. The ‘Washington Post’ quoted an unnamed official of a medical relief agency in Baghdad as saying: ”The aid community is reluctant to speak much about leaving or cutting back. No one wants to start a stampede.”

Despite last week’s tragedy, the United Nations and several of its relief agencies say they are determined to stay the course in Iraq – but on a reduced scale.

U.N. spokeswoman Hua Jiang told reporters Tuesday that the latest casualty toll of last week’s bombing was 23 dead, of which 19 were U.N. staffers. Of the 19, 11 were international employees and eight were Iraqis.

”The option of withdrawing (from Iraq) is not something we can consider,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters. ”The people of Iraq need us; they want us to stay.”

Annan said ”the fanatics and the violent people” who killed the U.N. workers in the car bombing ”are not going to dictate what happens in Iraq”.

But despite Annan’s determination, the United Nations and its relief agencies have cut their international staff in Iraq by about 50 percent. They continue to do core humanitarian work in the country, but non-essential staff who can perform administrative work outside the country will do so.

”That doesn’t mean we have stopped work,” Annan said, ”Our work is continuing and some of them will go back once the situation settles.”

Prior to the bombing, there were some 300 international staff in Baghdad, and about 646 in the whole of Iraq. They were working for 22 U.N. organisations, programmes and institutions.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has relocated virtually all of its staffers, about 120, to Jordan. Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were taking key roles in the reconstruction of Iraq, pulled out their staff from Baghdad immediately after the bombing.

Meanwhile, the committee on U.N. staff security has demanded a full and independent investigation to determine why adequate security was not in place in Baghdad.

It also says that since many organisations are leaving or scaling back in Iraq, there is no reason why the secretary-general should not suspend all operations in Iraq and withdraw staff ”until such time as measures are taken to improve security”.

”I won’t be surprised,” Guy Candusso of the committee told IPS, ”if everything is blamed on the dead”.