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Monday May 5, 6:26 AM Iraq reconstruction inches forward, as humanitarian disaster looms Agence france Presse http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030504/1/3apko.html Efforts to refashion a government and restore basic services in Iraq inched forward here, amid warnings that the war-battered country was still ripe for a humanitarian disaster. Electricity remains largely off-line in Baghdad, fuelling local anger and frustration with the US forces. US engineers struggling to restore power in the capital were grappling with a bizarre power grid built to light Saddam's palaces rather than the capital at large, said US Captain Travis Morehead. Many in Baghdad are also without food and water, creating conditions for a possible catastrophe, the UN mission chief there warned. "We have not yet got over the hump. The conditions for the development of a humanitarian disaster still exist," said Ramiro Lopes da Silva. "It's (already) a humanitarian disaster in the sense basic services have collapsed or are at the risk of collapsing if we don't put them back into shape rather quickly." Without electricity, unrefrigerated food rotted and water and sewage treatment plants lay idle, threatening a massive disease outbreak. Robbers and looters roam the streets at night. In the United States, Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated his call to Damascus to react constructively to the new regional setup following the fall of Saddam in neighbouring Iraq. "There are consequences lurking in the background," Powell said in an interview with CBS television, the day after his return from a tour of Europe and the Middle East, including Syria. Powell's comments kept the pressure on Syria after weeks of US sabre-rattling since the fall of Saddam. US officials have repeatedly accused Damascus of aiding the former Iraqi dictator, of sponsoring terrorism, and of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that "time will tell" if Syria's attitude will now improve. "I think you need to let the dust settle on that," he said on CNN. Rumsfeld also told US television that Iraqi prisoners could help US forces hunt down the weapons of mass destruction that Washington accused Saddam of hiding and that it used to justify the war. "The intelligence shows that they (Saddam's regime) were systematically trying to prevent the inspectors from finding them," he said on Fox television. Meanwhile the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) again demanded access to all Iraqi prisoners of war in US and British custody. ICRC spokeswoman Nana Doumani said the US-led forces "must respect the Geneva Convention on prisoners (of war)." Nearly 3,600 Iraqis prisoners remain in detention according to US Central Command figures. Time magazine reported the US military may have downplayed the coalition's use of deadly cluster bombs during the campaign. While US officials claim that only 26 cluster bombs landed in civilian areas during the fighting, accounts from Iraqi hospitals, residents and civil defense officials indicate many more fired. Cluster bombs are designed to release hundreds of smaller bomblets that disperse over a wide area, but the bomblets often fall to the ground intact, sometimes killing and maiming the civilians who find them. The Karbala civil defense chief told Time his men were finding some 1,000 cluster bombs daily in places US officials said were not targets. The New Yorker magazine reported that US insistence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction was based on dubious intelligence from a shadowy Pentagon committee that now dominates US foreign policy. By late 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) had grown to become President George W. Bush's main intelligence source, particularly over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, the magazine reports in its May 12 edition. But the OSP relied on questionable intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. "The INC has a track record of manipulating intelligence because it has an agenda. It's a political unit, not an intelligence agency," a former senior Middle East expert with the CIA told reporter Seymour Hersh. Chalabi has taken possession of 25 TONNES OF DOCUMENTS from Saddam Hussein's secret police, some of them onerous for the Jordanian royal family, Newsweek reported. "Some of the files are very damning," Chalabi told Newsweek, implying that some of the most incriminating material concerned King Abdullah. The monarch, who has ruled Jordan since 1999, "is worried about his relationship with Saddam. He's worried about what might come out," Chalabi said, without providing further details. A former Iraqi foreign minister tipped to play a major role was expected in Baghdad, a source close to the ex-minister said Sunday. Octogenarian Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim, was expected to meet in Baghdad with five Iraqi political leaders who opposed Saddam's regime, who have been thrashing out rules for choosing an interim government. They include Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani; Ahmed Chalabi, an Shiite Iraqi expatriate who enjoys selective US backing; Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, deputy head of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), and Iyad Allawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord Movement, a secular group. The five have been holding talks in Baghdad as part of US-sponsored efforts to form an interim government. Pachachi met Sunday with Jordan's King Abdullah, who emphasized the importance of Iraqi solidarity, the official Petra news agency said. In Tashkent, Russian oil major LUKoil said that under no circumstances would it relinquish the Iraqi oil field of West Qurna-2. "The fact is that LUKoil's project at Western Qurna-2, Iraq, has proven oil reserves of one billion (metric tonnes), thus exceeding the remaining reserves of the legendary Surgut and Samotlor fields as a whole," said Azat Chamsouarov, vice-president of Lukoil Overseas Holding, referring to two Russian oil fields. In April, a top US energy expert close to the White House, Robert Ebel, warned that Russian companies had little hope of fulfilling contracts to develop Iraq's vast oil reserves because of Russia's fierce oppposition to the US-led war. pg _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk