This latest Iraq Health and Infrastructure Digest #11 is a compilation of 9 articles covering a wide range of issues facing people in Iraq. Summaries are given as well as the full, or relevant portion of the articles.

Digest by David Smith-Ferri, Voices in the Wilderness

Article Summaries

• Iraqi hospitals under strain: On an average day, between 20 and 50 people, injured in unrelenting violence, are treated in the emergency room at Yarmouk Hospital alone. Most have been hurt in insurgent bombs, doctors say. But there is also a steady flow of people coming into Iraqi hospitals who have been injured by US soldiers. [read article]

• Hospital waste raises public health concerns: Toxic hospital waste being released in residential areas in southern Iraq is causing a health and environmental hazard in the Basra area, despite repeated appeals for help to tackle the situation, according to local sources in both fields. “The waste usually consists of pharmaceutical, chemical, radioactive, infectious and other materials that should only be disposed of in incinerators, which burn the materials at high temperatures,” Hasan Sahib, an environmental activist, said. Mohamed Hasan aged 15, a waste collector, has contracted typhoid, a bacterial infection. Hasan has now been hospitalised. “Many people told me that my job is dangerous but my father died and my three brothers, my mother and I have to work,” he told IRIN. “We are obliged to work in this job to earn a living.” When asked if he would return to the job he said: “Yes, because I do not have any other work.” [read article]

• Security Costs Sap Iraq’s Rebuilding Funds: A tenuous security environment in Iraq has hindered reconstruction efforts there, with crude oil production and power generation still not reaching prewar levels of 2003 as of May, a report found. The Government Accountability Office also said $1.8 billion intended for major electricity and water projects during the 2004 fiscal year had to be shifted to cover urgent security and law enforcement needs. [read article]

• Salaries of private security guards in Iraq as much as $33,000 per month [read article]

• Mental illness in Iraq as a result of terror and war: The people of Baghdad do not need statistics to tell them that they are living through terror unimaginable in the West. “People are buckling under the anxieties of war and fear” (doctor at an Iraqi psychiatric hospital). At Ibn al-Rushud psychiatric hospital they have 74 beds and are receiving 250 patients a day. With limited medicines and little belief in the benefits of counselling, electro-convulsive therapy is the favoured treatment. [read article]

• Water plant sabotage adds to supply shortages: Only a month after the sabotage of water pipes in Baghdad, there has been a second attack. Officials estimate one million people are affected at the height of the summer. Desperate people are forced to draw water directly from the polluted Tigris River. [read article]

• Despite $2 Billion spent, Baghdad is crumbling: Electricity production is up to 16 hours a day in Iraqi homes according to U.S. military documents, but most Iraqis say they get eight hours of power a day on average, sometimes as many as 12. In poor areas such as New Baghdad, in the east of the capital, people go days without power, they said. With about $2 billion already invested, Baghdad should be sparkling, said its mayor, Alaa Mahmoud al Timimi. He hasn’t been consulted on American projects… [read article]

• Women alarmed at prospect of rights erosion, UNIFEM says: - Iraqi women, civil groups, and international groups are extremely concerned that the national assembly committee drafting the country’s new constitution is curbing women’s rights. The current draft of the constitution “subordinates guarantees of women’s human rights and international law to religious Shari’ah law and replaces one of the Middle East’s most progressive personal status laws with arbitrary interpretations of religious law,” according to the US-based international women’s human rights organisation MADRE. [read article]

• Beyond bombs, traffic causes despair in Baghdad: “Before the war, it used to take me not more than 15 or 20 minutes to get to work,” said Bashar Yassir, a 24-year-old businessman. “But nowadays I have to leave home a couple of hours before and I’m often still not on time.” “Fencing-off roads, blocking bridges and the inhuman treatment of Iraqis … must come to an end,” one member of parliament said. “You can’t treat every car on the road as if it is a bomb.” [read article]

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Articles

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Iraq’s hospitals under strain

19 Jul 2005
By Caroline Hawley BBC News, Baghdad

It is early afternoon in the emergency room of Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital.

Medics are on stand by for a big influx of casualties from a bomb south of Baghdad.

But right now they have a more pressing job.

Several doctors, blood spattered on their white coats, are calmly trying to save the life of a young man who has just been rushed in with a bullet-wound that has punctured his lung.

He appears to have been shot, by mistake, by US troops on the road to Baghdad airport.

On an average day, between 20 and 50 people, injured in unrelenting violence, are treated in the emergency room at Yarmouk alone.

Most have been hurt in insurgent bombs, doctors say. But there is also a steady flow of people coming into Iraqi hospitals who have been injured by US soldiers.

“It’s very sad,” says Dr Mohaned Rahe, “but things aren’t improving.”

Across town, in the brutal mid-day heat, simple wooden coffins are being strapped to cars outside Baghdad’s main morgue.

‘Getting worse’

The hospital’s director, Dr Faeq Baker, has a shocking statistic.

“On average we have 28 bodies turning up every day - 90% of them victims of violence,” he says.

“And we don’t even see the people killed by explosions because they don’t require autopsies.”

Last month, his teams had to deal with over 860 bodies, some of them bound and shot in the head.

A significant number, he believes, have been murdered for sectarian motives.

And several had been wearing handcuffs.

Baker thinks they may have been killed by the Iraqi police.

“From what we’re seeing, things are getting worse,” says Dr Baker, a forensic pathologist who has studied and worked in London, at Guy’s Hospital.

“There are mass killings going on. It is a mess. No-one knows who is killing who. Everything is out of control.”

‘Caught in the middle’

In the Yarmouk hospital men’s ward, a young bomb victim, Omar Attiya, lies beside a 50-year old man, Dhia Abbas, who has gunshots to his back and leg.

He says his car was peppered with bullets by US soldiers as he was driving home from visiting his daughter at 2230 local time (1830 GMT).

“I thought I was going to die, they just shot and shot and shot,” he says. “The roads were empty and maybe they suspected me of something, but there was no warning, they just opened fire.”

And there was no warning when Omar Attiya was hit by shrapnel from one of 10 suicide bombings in Baghdad alone last Friday.

In the ward next door, 30-year old Shia Nadhem Farhan is even more seriously injured, his spleen ruptured by gunfire.

He had been in a minibus driving from Najaf to Baghdad, to try to join up to the new Iraqi army.

“I was asleep when the bullets started to hit, but other passengers told me we were shot at by US troops, maybe for getting too close to their convoy”.

US convoys are frequently targeted, the soldiers travelling in them, many of whom have lost colleagues, are often jumpy and nervous.

Most Iraqis drive well back from them, for fear of being shot.

“When the Americans first came I was so happy that we were saved from Saddam Hussein,” says Farhan.

“Now I feel only hatred. The way things are now, you don’t know when you’re going to die and who will kill you, the Americans or the insurgents. And civilians, innocent people are being caught in the middle.”

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Hospital waste raises public health concerns

BASRA, 26 Jul 2005 (IRIN) - Toxic hospital waste being released in residential areas in southern Iraq is causing a health and environmental hazard in the Basra area, despite repeated appeals for help to tackle the situation, according to local sources in both fields.

“The waste usually consists of pharmaceutical, chemical, radioactive, infectious and other materials that should only be disposed of in incinerators, which burn the materials at high temperatures,” Hasan Sahib, an environmental activist, said.

Other sterilisation techniques, such as high-pressure steam treatment, are increasingly more important than incineration in the safe disposal of hospital waste in the developed world, but the treatment of pollutants and toxic waste is regarded as vital everywhere.

Liquid waste is going directly into sewers and rivers, and solid waste is being burned but not in an incinerator, according to Sahib. Vials, syringes and substances from intravenous (IV) units, and sometimes even body parts, are not being disposed of properly, health workers confirmed.

“We do not have waste treatment equipment to treat it before draining liquid into the sewage systems,” said Dr Ra’ad Salman, general director of Basra health department. “We only have old systems which are old fashioned and not sufficient.”

He estimates that Basra hospitals and clinics produce between 15 and 25 mt of waste daily.

“We have asked the US forces and many other organisations to build medical waste treatment units in Basra,” he said. “They promised us, but nothing has been done so far.”

The doctor explained that disease and illnesses have already increased by 10 percent due to an accumulation of health issues.

“We also suffer from the negligence of employees collecting waste,” Salman said. “They do not apply the techniques of waste - classifying and separation in medical bags that are distributed by the health directorate - although we have now sent some of them abroad to learn about techniques.”

Mohamed Hasan aged 15, a waste collector, has contracted typhoid, a bacterial infection of the intestines and occasionally the bloodstream, often associated with poor hygiene practices that cause the germs to spread through food and water. Hasan has now been hospitalised.

“Many people told me that my job is dangerous but my father died and my three brothers, my mother and I have to work,” he told IRIN. “We are obliged to work in this job to earn a living.”

When asked if he would return to the job he said: “Yes, because I do not have any other work.”

Rubbish accumulating in the streets has also led to children scavenging through the dumped material, looking for items to sell.

The medical waste processing units increasingly being used worldwide are known as autoclaving machines. Using steam at high pressure to sterilise objects used in medical operations, they are often used instead of hospital incinerators.

The technique dramatically reduces environmental pollutants, according to experts, but waste management is still an important concern.

Current hospital waste disposal practices in Basra, and the lack of treatment equipment, fall well shy of acceptable, and pose a considerable threat to health, according to Dr Salman.

“The current situation will lead to accumulating waste in the hospital and this is very dangerous,” he said.

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Security Costs Sap Iraq’s Rebuilding Funds

28 Jul 2005
By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A tenuous security environment in Iraq has hindered reconstruction efforts there, with crude oil production and power generation still not reaching prewar levels of 2003 as of May, a report released Thursday found. The Government Accountability Office also said $1.8 billion intended for major electricity and water projects during the 2004 fiscal year had to be shifted to cover urgent security and law enforcement needs.

In a separate report, the agency said the United States missed some reconstruction and economic objectives in Afghanistan during that same period because of security problems and the illicit drug industry.

“Deteriorating security in some regions rendered large areas effectively inaccessible to the assistance community; despite efforts by U.S., Afghan, and international forces, attacks against aid workers, Afghan security forces, and international forces increased,” the report said. “Further, a continued rise in opium production undermined legitimate economic activities and the establishment of the rule of law.”

It found the United States had planned to rehabilitate or build 286 schools in a year in Afghanistan but it completed only 8 new structures, while another 77 were refurbished. Likewise, despite a goal of 253 new health clinics, only 15 were built and none were refurbished.

In Iraq, insurgents fighting democratization have attacked oil, water and electric infrastructure, threatened workers, compromised the ability to safely transport materials and blocked access to work sites, the agency found.

“Reconstruction efforts continue to face challenges, such as rebuilding in an insecure environment, ensuring the sustainability of projects to be turned over to the Iraqis, and measuring program results,” the Iraq report said.

Since July 2004, about $4.7 billion of $18.4 billion in emergency money Congress provided for reconstruction in that fiscal year had been shifted from large utilities to other urgent needs, including economic development, that report found. Roughly $1.8 of the diverted money went to security and law enforcement needs.

The United States has provided about $24 billion for reconstruction efforts from 2003 through Sept. 30 of this year. Of that, $9 billion has been spent for specific projects, the agency said.

While progress has been made, the agency said, “Restoring and sustaining Iraq’s crude oil production and export capacity have been slower than originally planned.” Also below expectations was Iraq’s overall power generation. The agency noted that power generation exceeded prewar levels late last month. However, it said the U.S. and contractors are concerned about that level of generation being sustained.

In Afghanistan during fiscal year 2004, the agency said the United States spent about half of the $1.4 billion it had planned for nonsecurity-related assistance, with most of it going for reconstruction contracts.

The agency blamed security problems and bureaucratic delays in doling out money for the low numbers of schools and health clinics built and refurbished. It said most assistance funds were not made available to USAID until nearly 6 months into the 2004 fiscal year.

Referring specifically to health clinics, the report said Afghanistan’s insistence on new construction instead of refurbishment and poor contractor performance also caused problems.

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Salaries of private security guards in Iraq as much as $33,000 per month

28 Jul 2005

RAW STORY

A nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued Thursday reveals that the U.S. is spending as much as $33,000 per private security contractor per month — some $396,000 per year on individual guards, RAW STORY has learned.

The report, entitled Rebuilding Iraq: Actions Needed to Improve Use of Private Security Providers, examined contractors hired directly by federal agencies to provide security in Iraq, as well as security subcontractors hired by other contractors to protect their personnel and reconstruction projects, and is viewable in PDF format here. This summary was prepared by the ranking member of the Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA).

The GAO audit report includes troubling findings regarding high security costs in Iraq and dangerous conflicts between the military and private security contractors.

Friendly Fire Incidents: According to GAO, private security contractors have reported that “they are fired upon by U.S. forces so frequently that incident reports are not always filed.” Some contractors allege that they were fired upon “without provocation.” GAO described two incidents in which gunners in the middle of U.S. military convoys opened fire on passing private security convoys, even after the front of the military convoy had passed without incident.

High Security Costs: GAO found that security costs represented a significant portion of the total funds spent under major reconstruction contracts. Eight of the 15 reconstruction contracts examined by GAO had security costs in excess of 15% of the total contract billings. Security costs exceeded 25% under three of these contracts. These rates do not even reflect all of the security costs under these contracts because they largely exclude the security costs of subcontractors. Salaries for private security personnel are as high as $33,000 a month.

Reconstruction Projects Have Been Cancelled As a Result: Unexpectedly high security costs resulted in the cancellation or scaling-down of planned reconstruction projects. For example, in March 2005, USAID cancelled two electricity generation projects worth $15 million to help pay for the increased security costs of another electricity project.

Agencies Are Not Tracking Security Costs: GAO found that the Defense Department, State Department, and USAID were not adequately tracking security costs incurred under reconstruction contracts. According to GAO, “the agencies generally had only limited information readily available on the costs associated with private security providers.”

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Nerves stretched to breaking point as Baghdad clings to normal life

20 Jul 2005

By Oliver Poole in Baghdad Every two days for the past two years more civilians have died in Iraq than in the July 7 London bombings.

Just yesterday, 31 people lost their lives in several attacks across the country, which included gunmen shooting dead three Sunni Arab members of the team drafting Iraq’s new constitution; insurgents slaughtering 10 workers on a bus travelling to a US army base, and gunmen ambushing a police vehicle in northern Mosul, killing two.

Such incidents are so common they merit little attention in the world’s press.

In Baghdad, life has become a daily calculation of the best road routes or travel times to try to ensure survival. They know that it is in the early morning or evening that the dark clouds of smoke that mark another bombing are most commonly seen. The appearance of a military convoy brings traffic screeching to a halt in case a car is considered a potential threat and shot at.

Trips near government offices or police stations are avoided, the towering concrete blast walls that surround them testament to the lethal threat passing nearby can pose.

Many parents keep their children indoors for safety. It is rare to see the traditional game of tuki, an Arab version of hopscotch, on the streets. Men are now the majority at the local markets as they insist their wives stay away in case they are targeted by bombers.

The amazing realisation is that somehow normal life continues. Shops open, people go to work. Even the Crazy Frog mobile phone ring tone has become the latest fad in Baghdad.

But conversation in the city is dominated by the bombs left in cars near markets, the drive-by shootings, the kidnappings or even the water melon seller with the poisoned produce to be given for free to passing policemen.

And then there are the suicide bombs - around 130 of them across Iraq in the first six months of this year alone - fuelled by a seemingly endless procession of young men, drawn from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Syria.

Parents are alarmed not only for the children’s safety but the mental scars the violence will leave.

An English teacher, Ahmad Ali, said he had watched his two children playing in the garden, chasing each other between the gardenias.

“You die,” he said his four-year-daughter shouted and her cousin fell over on the grass. “I asked them what game it was. They told me they were playing American soldiers fighting criminals. I almost cried that this is their idea of making fun.”

In some quarters there is nostalgia for the old regime of Saddam Hussein.

“Under the tyrant at least I felt safe to walk or drive,” Munther, a 22-year-old car seller, said. “There is no comparison between life under Saddam and now. Now I never feel safe.”

A year ago there was hope that things would be better after the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis. Then people clung to the belief that January’s elections would mark the beginning of the end of insurgency.

This summer they thought a new government would make the army stronger and return life to normal. In the past six weeks there has just been despair. People are at breaking point. Doctors report a growing number of cases of mental illness.

With limited medicines and little belief in the benefits of counselling, electro-convulsive therapy is the favoured treatment. At Ibn al-Rushud psychiatric hospital they have 74 beds and are receiving 250 patients a day.

“People are buckling under the anxieties of war and fear,” a doctor said.

“Every human has their limit and of course many people have reached it.”

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Water plant sabotage adds to supply shortages

24 Jul 2005

BAGHDAD, 24 July (IRIN) - Only a month after the sabotage of water pipes in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, a second attack last week has again left thousands without mains water supplies, according to local officials.

An estimated one million people in the districts of al-Ubaidi, al-Khaleej and parts of Sadr City, to the east of Baghdad, and al-Jihad, al-Shurta, to the west of the capital, have been badly affected.

The water mains in Baghdad were first attacked by insurgents in mid-June. It took a week or so before the authorities were able to restore service to most of the affected areas, such as Mansoor, Yarmouk and Kadhimiya. Piped supplies were never resumed in some districts such as al-Jihad and al- Shurta, which have since been relying on tanker deliveries.

This time the power supply for al-Tarmia water plant, 60 km to the north of Baghdad, was targeted. The plant has been unable to pump water as a result.

“Our generators cannot provide enough power to run the water plant,” said Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the local municipality.

Although water shortages are common in Iraq during the summer, the plant sabotage has worsened the situation, according to local officials.

Haifa Fayyadh, a civil servant who lives in al-Jihad neighbourhood, said that residents were still suffering the effects of the first incident, and that there had been no piped water in the area for more than a month now.

“I have to bring the water from the old well in my neighbourhood,” he said. “We use it for washing and cleaning, and we buy bottled mineral water for drinking, which is expensive.”

In desperation, people across the capital have resorted to drawing water directly from the river, reusing old dilapidated wells and even digging their own wells in their gardens, giving rise to major health concerns.

Shop owners are taking advantage by increasing the cost of bottled water, local residents said. The average Iraqi is not able to afford this, in a country that has suffered from several conflicts and where the entire nation is dependent on food rations.

The price of water has risen from US $0.50 to $0.75 for a 1 litre bottle since the attack last week, according to local residents.

The Baghdad authorities are working on fixing the power cut at al-Tarmia and have started to truck in water supplies to some of the affected districts, but are not able to reach the entire affected population.

Even when functioning properly the water plant, located on the banks of the Tigris River, provides Baghdad with only 2.25 million gallons of pure water per day.

However, the city’s real need is 3.25 million gallons, officials said, pointing to another more long-term problem.

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Despite $2 billion spent, residents say Baghdad is crumbling

25 Jul 2005

By Leila Fadel, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Talib Abu Younes put his lips to a glass of tap water recently and watched worms swimming in the bottom. Electricity flickers on and off for two hours in Muthana Naim’s south Baghdad home then shuts off for four in boiling July heat that shoots above 120 degrees.

Fadhel Hussein boils buckets of sewage-contaminated water from the Tigris River to wash the family’s clothes.

The capital is crumbling around angry Baghdadis. Narrow concrete sewage pipes decay underground and water pipes leak out more than half the drinking water before it ever reaches a home, according to the U.S. military.

Over 18 months, American officials spent almost $2 billion to revive the capital ravaged by war and neglect, according to Army Gen. William G. Webster, who heads the 30,000 U.S. and foreign troops and 15,000 Iraqi soldiers known collectively as Task Force Baghdad. But the money goes for long-term projects that yield few visible results and for security to protect the construction sites from sabotage.

As a result, Iraqis have seen scant evidence of improvement in their homes, streets or neighborhoods. They blame American and Iraqi government corruption.

“We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day,” said Nadeem Haki, 39, an electric-goods shop owner in the upscale Karrada district in the east of the capital.

Of the major completed projects in Baghdad, more than $38 million went to sewage projects, $375,000 to a water main and $101.2 million to electricity generation and transmission.

Others are in the works. More than $792 million is being invested in water, sewage and electricity projects across the capital, according to U.S. military documents.

The progress is slow and the rewards incremental. Parts of the city - such as the impoverished Shiite Muslim neighborhood Sadr City, once flooded with green rivers of sewage - now have functioning sewer systems.

“The things that go below the ground and provide enough electricity are incredibly expensive, especially when you have to pay for security for that local job site,” Webster said.

As renovations are made, insurgent attacks often undermine the work, leaving the city’s residents frustrated that there are days they can’t flush their toilets. Over three weeks, three main water lines were attacked, leaving swaths of the city without water for days.

Power generation in the city has increased by about 232 megawatts but the demand has doubled, so the greater supply hasn’t resulted in many more hours of service. Three more electricity projects are expected to be complete by the end of the year, including the Dora Power Plant, a $101.5 million project that will supply 428 more megawatts to Iraqi homes, according to U.S. military documents.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars also have been spent to repair and install feeder lines to make sure all parts of the city receive electricity.

A public campaign began in June to build confidence in the Ministry of Electricity. On billboards, TV commercials and radio announcements reminiscent of American-produced public service announcements, messages read:

“Electricity is a blessing, help us protect it,”

“The demand for electricity is growing faster than we can supply it,”

“We ask for your support and understanding.”

But understanding wanes when the smell of sewage fills every other block, drinking water is often contaminated and Iraqis resort to sleeping on their roofs to take a break from the sauna-like heat inside their homes, waking up covered in dust.

Electricity production is up to 16 hours a day in Iraqi homes according to U.S. military documents, but most Iraqis say they get eight hours of power a day on average, sometimes as many as 12. In poor areas such as New Baghdad, in the east of the capital, people go days without power, they said.

With about $2 billion already invested, Baghdad should be sparkling, said its mayor, Alaa Mahmoud al Timimi. He hasn’t been consulted on American projects, besides signatures for completed developments, and has threatened to resign if he doesn’t get a larger budget to solve his city’s problems. The $85 million he was allocated can’t keep up with the city of 6.5 million, he said.

He’s already playing catch-up. Over 12 years the city was allocated about $3 per person per year, he said.

“Baghdad is an ignored city,” said Timimi, who’s a civil engineer. “The people, they blame me. I need money to rebuild the capacity of water (supply) and … (for) sewage, garbage collection, power.”

Electricity lines are tangled above the streets like strands of spaghetti, supply machinery dates to 1958 and fuse boxes have been ripped from the walls in electricity stations.

“It’s too slow. If I had $2 billion I would have done three to five times more,” Timimi said. “The Americans told me this is our money and we will spend it towards our plans. They do it their way.”

But rebuilding Baghdad can’t be done in a day or even two years, apparently. Oil refineries, electricity plants and water plants weren’t maintained under Saddam Hussein, and unforeseen expenses often hinder projects.

Sometimes the simple installation of an air conditioner at a school reveals that not enough electricity is being generated to make it work, said Lt. Col. William Duddleston, a spokesman for Task Force Baghdad’s Government Support Team.

“People in Baghdad don’t understand, because many of them had 24 hours of electricity while people in Basra had five,” he said, referring to Iraq’s southern port city. Electric power is now distributed more evenly around the country, so Baghdad has suffered.

The capital was ruled with both favoritism and neglect under the past regime, Webster said recently: Those in Saddam’s good graces had round-the-clock electricity while others had none.

Lt. Col. Vincent Quarles, the commander of the 4-3 Brigade Troops Battalion, oversees neighborhood reconstruction projects in about one-quarter of Baghdad. He looks at sites in the Karrada district. Some are almost done: Pipes have been renovated, holding tanks for purified water sealed and small water-purification pumps installed.

But it’s sometimes a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. At one sewage plant in east Baghdad, they’d almost finished renovations when a decaying pipe collapsed and the ground caved in. Now the work will begin again.

“It’s hard to see all the progress that’s been made, but things are getting better,” Quarles said.

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Women alarmed at prospect of rights erosion, UNIFEM says

24 Jul 2005

DUBAI, 24 July (IRIN) - Iraqi women are extremely concerned that the national assembly committee drafting the country’s new constitution is curbing women’s rights, established under the interim constitution and prior national laws, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) reported on Friday.

“As the committee continues in its drafting process, women are becoming increasingly alarmed at what they see as a curtailing of their rights,” UNIFEM said in a press statement.

Of particular concern to Iraqi women activists and civil society groups was a chapter of the constitution on duties and rights, which now refers to Shari’ah (Islamic law) as the “main source” for legislation in the new constitution, the UN body said.

In the earlier interim constitution, Shari’ah was referred to as an important source of legislation, rather than the main source.

A draft of the constitution, released to the press two weeks ago by a member of one of the sub-committees in the drafting process, also alarmed women’s groups because of weaker provisions on women’s representation in decision-making bodies, on men and women’s equality under law and international treaties, and also because of an apparent threat to Iraq’s long-standing and progressive Personal Status Law governing family matters.

In the draft, the clause requiring that women make up 25 percent of all decision-making bodies would only be followed the next two elections and could then be removed altogether, UNIFEM noted.

Meanwhile, issues such as marriage, divorce and inheritance would be judged according to the law as practised by a family’s own sect or religion, rather than the Personal Status Law, it added.

The current draft of the constitution “subordinates guarantees of women’s human rights and international law to religious Shari’ah law and replaces one of the Middle East’s most progressive personal status laws with arbitrary interpretations of religious law”, according to the US-based international women’s human rights organisation MADRE.

If the national assembly approves such a constitution, it said, “it could give self-appointed religious clerics the authority to inflict grave human rights violations on Iraqi women” in relation to freedom of movement, travel, property inheritance and custody of their children. Iraq, which had been overwhelmingly secular until the 1990s, was in danger of being “catapulted towards theocratic rule”, the group warned last week.

Iraqi women staged a “sit-in” demonstration in a large tent in Baghdad’s Firdaws Square last Tuesday against the draft constitution in circulation, and against a drafting process that they say marginalises women and civil society.

“Despite the fiery heat and the deteriorating security situation,” Hanaa Edwar, a prominent activist from the Iraqi Al-Amal association, said in a statement released by UNIFEM, “brave women from different governorates have taken the initiative to raise their voices demanding to ensure women’s rights and equality in the constitution and protesting against the attempt to marginalise the role of women and their human rights, as well as the role of civil society organisations”.

Iraqi women’s organisations recently released a joint memorandum demanding that the new Iraqi constitution must:

Recognise women’s human rights as mothers, workers and citizens and prevent all kind of violence and discrimination against women.

It also demands that the constitution ensures the quota of not less than 40 percent for women in all decision-making positions, and recognises international conventions and documents signed by Iraq as the source for Iraqi legislation and regulations.

On the same day as the sit-in, UNIFEM and the United Nations

Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) organised for a group of about 30 women to meet with members of the drafting su-bcommittee of the Chapter on Duties and Rights to articulate their concerns.

The meeting ended abruptly because of news of the assassination of two Sunni members of the drafting committee, but another is planned.

“Quick international actions” are needed to lobby the national assembly and the constitutional committee in support of Iraqi women “to ensure their equal rights, [which] are vital for building democracy and justice in Iraq,” Edwar said.

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Beyond bombs, traffic causes despair in Baghdad

26 Jul 2005
By Hiba Moussa

BAGHDAD, July 26 (Reuters) - Beyond the bombs, the shortages of power and water, and the constant threat of crime, there is another seemingly mundane affair that drives Baghdad residents closer to despair each day — the traffic.

A combination of more cars on the roads, concrete blast barriers that seem to block half the streets, and endless, sprawling petrol queues, has turned the Iraqi capital into one of the world’s great examples of gridlock.

What makes it worse at this time of the year is that temperatures are usually above 40 degrees (100 Fahrenheit) by 9 a.m., the height of the rush hour. Thick smog and dust storms clog the air. Tempers fray. Lots of Baghdadis carry guns.

“I feel like fainting whenever I get stuck in another lung-choking traffic jam,” said Abu Mohammed as he inched his taxi through the city this week. “Everybody here owns a car.”

That is, in fact, one of the main problems.

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Iraq immediately opened its borders to tariff-free trade, and one thing all Iraqis wanted to buy was imported cars.

The government estimates that around one million vehicles flooded into the country after the war, the majority ending up in Baghdad, home to five million of Iraq’s 25 million people.

Over the same period, the capital has been at the forefront of the battle between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi forces, with car bombings, shootings and other attacks going on daily.

The need to protect ministries, police stations, hotels, embassies and other sensitive locations from attack means the city is riddled with 14-foot (3 metre) concrete blast walls.

At the same time, many residents have blocked off streets in their own neighbourhoods with the trunks of palm trees and barbed wire to try to stop possible suicide bombers getting in.

Added to that, U.S. and Iraqi troops frequently impose impromptu roadblocks when they fear a possible attack, or when a senior official needs to move around the capital.

COMMUTER HELL

The overall effect is to force Baghdad’s drivers to take the same few routes around the city, creating monster tailbacks. For commuters, it’s a frustration that takes up much of the day.

“Before the war, it used to take me not more than 15 or 20 minutes to get to work,” said Bashar Yassir, a 24-year-old businessman. “But nowadays I have to leave home a couple of hours before and I’m often still not on time.”

Being desperate to get to work leads some to take short cuts or back roads, but that can be deadly in a city like Baghdad.

Yassir recounts how once, stuck in traffic for hours, he decided to try using a section of the road that links downtown with the airport, known to many as the “road of death”.

“While I was driving, a U.S. patrol was targeted by a roadside bomb,” Yassir said. “The Americans started to shoot randomly at all of us and most bullets went through my car.”

Rather than risk those routes, most wait it out in the traffic jams. All the while they fret that the vehicle next to them could be a car bomb. The pressure leads some to take it out on the beleaguered traffic police, who melt in the mayhem.

The mess has exasperated members of parliament.

At a recent meeting, several said they would boycott future meetings if the government didn’t put an end to the roadblocks.

“Fencing-off roads, blocking bridges and the inhuman treatment of Iraqis … must come to an end,” one deputy said. “You can’t treat every car on the road as if it is a bomb.”

As some Baghdadis worry about a psychological impact, and fear losing their jobs because of lateness for work, others look desperately for a silver lining to the traffic nightmare.

“I’ve started to explore other roads,” said Ammar Jaffar with a sarcastic laugh. “I’m getting to know my city better!”