UN work slows to a crawl in Iraq

Published on Saturday 13 September 2003 01:00

THE blue flak jacket is heavy and cumbersome, and Roger Guarda frets uncomfortably as he pulls it off.

"It’s hot and I’m choking," grumbles the new head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Baghdad. "But because the UN is now a target in Iraq, we have to wear these things every time we leave the office."

Freed of his body armour, he gets down to business. But instead of heading out into the field and surveying the array of UN job programmes, park rehabilitations and electricity generation projects, he stays close to his desk, playing phone tag with colleagues in Jordan and beyond.

"The work I used to complete in one day, I now do in four days," he says with dismay. "Since I started this job, all I focus on is security."

The foreign ministers of the UN Security Council’s permanent members convene in Geneva this weekend to discuss United States proposals to expand the role of the UN under the US-led occupation of Iraq.

The Bush administration, faced with huge bills for rebuilding and the daunting challenge of securing the California-sized nation, wants more help from the international community and the UN.

But in the wake of the 19 August lorry bomb at the UN’s Canal Hotel headquarters -- which killed the UN’s Iraq envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and at least 22 others - giving Iraqis a hand has become a complicated affair. UN officials say safety precautions have begun to hamper their ability to deliver help to local people.

Although it vows it will never abandon Iraq, the UN has pulled out nearly 340 of its 400 international staff.

UN offices, once friendly and inviting compared to US military bases and quarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have become barricaded fortresses surrounded by concrete and security guards.

Plainclothes UN security officials, toting machine-guns, have been scouring the homes of UN employees, ordering the few remaining international staff to remain in their hotels at night and turning the once-coveted Baghdad assignment into a virtual house arrest. Several officials said a plan is being considered to move all UN staff out of hotels and into tents on the grounds of the Canal Hotel.

UN staffers complain that maintaining contact with and assessing the needs of the Iraqi population, much less delivering services, is much harder.

But Mr Guarda, 62, a Belgian of Italian descent, said it was important to keep a presence in Baghdad. "It is important that Iraqis do not feel abandoned. The UN is like a big brother to Iraq. It’s important that people don’t feel like the big brother is leaving them."

UN leaders often say that reducing and constraining international staff will not affect UN operations because the Iraqi staff can do their jobs.

But even Iraqi employees say new security rules complicate their tasks. Aziz Ahmad, an Iraqi UNDP engineer, used to hop into two-vehicle convoys and travel from his northern Iraq base in Erbil to the Baghdad office at will. Now, he says, he must find a rare UN flight between the two cities. "The road is regarded as too dangerous," Mr Ahmad says. "It’s very frustrating because our job is fieldwork."

Although it was the most spectacular of attacks against the UN, the still unsolved 19 August bombing was not the first and only time UN or UN-tied organisations have been attacked in Iraq. Assaults against the UN’s distinctive vehicles and installations had already forced more intensive security precautions.

But the 19 August attack - unprecedented in its carnage, audacity and impact - was on a wholly different scale.

Now, only the most dedicated UN veterans take on an Iraqi assignment. Mr Guarda, a UN globetrotter since he was 24, has worked in Cambodia, Panama, Malaysia, Zaire, Cuba, Burkina Faso and the Palestinian Territories.

Although past retirement age, he felt obligated to volunteer for Iraq after his predecessor and friend, Henrik Kolstrup, was seriously wounded in the attack. "I was shocked," said Mr Guarda, who was finishing an assignment in Erbil and about to head to New York. "I love the UN family."

A day in the work life of a UN worker has become longer and more dreary. Mr Guarda is spending this particular day setting up a "virtual office" so employees evacuated to Amman and Beirut can speak with those in the Baghdad office and those working from home.

"You try to work as if the team was complete, but obviously it’s a lot more complicated," Mr Guarda says.

UN involvement in Iraq intensified following the creation of the oil-for-food programme in the late 1990s. The program allowed Iraq, then under the strict sanctions, limited sales of oil to provide revenue for humanitarian needs.

Each Iraqi received a food ration. Iraq’s war-damaged infrastructure was patched up, but then the UN evacuated all of its international staff and curtailed operations before the bombing began.

UNDP projects launched or resumed since the UN’s return to Baghdad in May include rehabilitation of the power and water infrastructure, reforestation, school reconstruction and rubbish collection.

UN projects that do get off the ground can be of huge benefit to the people. In a park in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad, 30 workers pruned weeds and refurbished a statue of Antar Ben Shadat, a poet and pre-Islamic Iraqi hero.

Wasif Mohamad, a formerly unemployed blacksmith, is paid just under 5 a day under the programme. "It’s the most I’ve ever earned," said the young man with dirty, calloused hands. "It’s helping me put food on my family’s table."