[casi] News, 16-23/04/03 (2)

[Peter Brooke <pbrooke@DELETETHISukonline.co.uk>]

News, 16-23/04/03 (2)

OLD IRAQI ORDER

*  Former U.S. official says CIA aided Iraqi Baathists
*  Iraqi Jews Will Never Forget
*  Thousands of Iraqis Demand U.S. Departure
*  They came to Baghdad

REMNANTS OF THE LEGAL GOVERNMENT OF IRAQ

*  Saddam's half-brother captured
*  In the dock: justice and the day after
*  Saddam's top finance henchman captured
*  Saddam's son-in-law captured
*  'Shiite Thug' of Saddam captured

HUMANITARIAN PROBLEMS

*  Numbers of refugees stranded at Jordan-Iraq border nearly triples: UNHCR
*  Search for Water Continues in S. Iraq
*  Not a drop that's safe to drink


OLD IRAQI ORDER

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=834&ncid=731&e=10&u=/nm/200
30417/wl_india_nm/india_112455

*  FORMER U.S. OFFICIAL SAYS CIA AIDED IRAQI BAATHISTS
by David Morgan
Yahoo, 17th April

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - If the United States succeeds in shepherding the
creation of a postwar Iraqi government, it won't be the first time that
Washington has played a primary role in changing the country's rulers.

At least not according to Roger Morris, who says the CIA had a hand in two
coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968
putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.

"This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American
culpability," said Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer
who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson and Nixon
administrations.

In 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba
known as the Bay of Pigs, Morris says the CIA helped organize a bloody coup
in Iraq that deposed the Soviet leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim
Kassem.

"As in Iran in '53, it was mostly American money and even American
involvement on the ground," said Morris, referring to a U.S.-backed coup
that had brought the return of the shah to neighboring Iran.

Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in
his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the
hands of the Baath Party.

At the time, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the
venues the CIA chose to plan the coup, Morris says. In fact, he claims the
former Iraqi ruler castigated by U.S. President George W. Bush as one of
history's most "brutal dictators," was actually on the CIA payroll in those
days.

"There's no question," Morris told Reuters. "It was there in Cairo that
(Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."

Five years later, in 1968, Morris says the CIA encouraged a palace revolt
among Baath Party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan
al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protege in
1979.

"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and
the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris said.

His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about
Iraq -- a country that top U.S. officials say has been liberated from
decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future
without their making mention of America's own alleged role in giving birth
to the regime.

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on
Morris' claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said his assertion
that Saddam once received payments from the CIA was "utterly ridiculous."

Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 U.S. invasion of
Cambodia, says he learned the details of American covert involvement in Iraq
from ranking CIA officials of the day including President Teddy Roosevelt's
grandson Archibald Roosevelt.

Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently writing
a book about U.S. covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He regards Saddam as a deposed U.S. client in the mold of former Philippine
President Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

"We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about
their politics," Morris said in an interview from Seattle where he is
working on his book. "It's not unusual, of course, in American policy. We
tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them."

But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to
suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.

David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold
War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA group
known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate Kassem in
1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief.

"Clearly, they felt that Kassem was somebody who had to be eliminated," Wise
said.

Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi
coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in
the 1960s and most senior U.S. officials involved there at the time have
since died.

But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq's Baath
Party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended
consequences of former U.S. policies -- including those of Bush's father,
President George Bush, a former CIA director.

"There are always some unintended consequences. There were unintended
consequences in World War One that brought the rise of Hitler," said Helmut
Sonnenfeldt, guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institution and former NSC staffer.

The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam's regime during
the 1980 88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used chemical
weapons to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers in Halabja.

The 1988 atrocity recently was used by U.S. officials to justify the
toppling of Saddam's regime.

But Jon Alterman, Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, said he was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill at
the time and recalls Bush allies dismissing the Halabja issue as a ploy by
pro-Israel lobbyists to disrupt U.S.-Iraqi relations.

Before war broke out last month, a flurry of U.S. headlines also called
attention to reports that pathogens used by Iraq for its biological warfare
program came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
the private Manassas, Virginia-based biological samples repository called
the American Type Culture Collection.

Officials at the two institutions said shipments of anthrax, West Nile
virus, botulinum toxins and other pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s
with U.S. Commerce Department approval for medical research purposes.

Even Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, which U.S. officials said was
on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb last year, got under way with help
from a 1950s Eisenhower administration program to share the peaceful
benefits of nuclear energy called "Atoms for Peace."

That is according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based group
co-founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to reduce
the global threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

James Phillips, senior Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation,
disagrees that President Bush's war in Iraq is the result of CIA involvement
or U.S. policy.

But he said the United States did turn a blind eye to the chance to topple
Saddam during the 1991 Gulf War, just as it left Afghanistan to the mercy of
the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network after Soviet forces left
that country.

"I am reminded of the biblical expression about the sins of the father,"
Phillips said.

"The first Bush administration was the one that decided to cut off aid to
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and set them adrift. And they were also the
ones who decided not to go to Baghdad during the first Gulf War."


http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny
liiraq0418,0,3948413.story?coll=ny%2Dlinews%2Dheadlines

*  IRAQI JEWS WILL NEVER FORGET
by Bart Jones
Newsday, 18th April

The Iraqi government agents blindfolded Saeed Herdoon, shoved him and other
Jews into a bus with the windows covered, and raced off to the "Palace of
the End" -- an infamous prison outside Baghdad where many inmates never came
out alive.

For four months in 1969, Herdoon was confined to a 6- by 6-foot cell in
which he and two cellmates had to lie on their sides to sleep. He lost 33
pounds, could not talk, saw bloodied torture victims on stretchers, and was
allowed to shower just once -- on the day he was released.

A year later, Herdoon, now 66, sneaked into the northern Kurdish territory
and fled to Iran. Eventually, he made his way to Great Neck.

He's still surprised he is alive. "We were lucky because we were expecting
to be hanged or killed," said Herdoon, an office manager for an
import/export fabric company in Manhattan. "No one left that place."

Repression was hardly unusual in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and other
leaders. But the Jewish population was singled out for special punishment,
including the hanging in 1969 of nine Iraqi Jews on trumped-up spying
charges in Baghdad's "Liberation Square."

The persecution has taken its toll, and most Jews have fled Iraq. Their
numbers have plummeted from a high of 130,000 in 1948 to as few as 37 today,
all but one of them in Baghdad, said Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew
and Judaic Studies at New York University. In a country where dozens of
synagogues flourished decades ago, today just one survives.

Many of Iraq's Jews have landed in New York City and on Long Island, which
are home to probably the largest U.S. concentration of Iraqi Jews, Schiffman
said. Community members say up to 6,000 live in the tri-state area, with the
main concentration on Long Island in Great Neck.

"These people were persecuted ... and expelled en masse from their country,"
Schiffman said. "They lost their property, their money, their fortunes,
everything they owned. And some of them were killed."

To help cope with the dislocation, the exiles have founded temples in Great
Neck and Jamaica Estates that they say are the only purely Iraqi synagogues
in the United States. They've become unifying points for a community that is
on the verge of extinction in Iraq after a 2,700-year history.

"Before we had this synagogue I felt lost," said Albert Nassim, 67, a real
estate agency owner who is president of the Babylonian Jewish Center on
Great Neck Road. But the temple "gave me a sense of pride and belonging."

The synagogue in Great Neck is in a former bank branch that community
members bought in 1998. It has become a place where Iraqi Jews share stories
of atrocities suffered in their homeland.

Ruth Shashou, 52, said that three decades later, she is still traumatized by
the day Saddam Hussein's armed henchmen showed up at her family's home in
Baghdad and told her father they needed to talk to him privately. He
vanished into a prison for a year.

"We were crying hysterically when they took him," recalled Shashou, a real
estate agent who was then 16.

When her father was released, he had to give up his job in the international
electronics business because Jews were no longer permitted to work. Two
years later, the agents returned and took him away to torture him by
beating. Seven hours later, they dumped him back home, where he died within
30 minutes.

It was an increasingly common story in Iraq, where persecution of Jews
intensified in the late 1930s as anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda spread in the
country, Schiffman said.

After the state of Israel was created in 1948, Iraq temporarily let Jews
leave, although they were stripped of their citizenship and property. Some
104,000 Jews were evacuated to Israel in 1949-51. Another 20,000 fled to
neighboring Iran.

"It was very clear: This was your chance to get out or you're finished,"
Schiffman said.

The 6,000 or so who dared to stay met the next wave of repression in the
late 1960s, including the Baghdad hangings.

Maurice Shohet, who helped found the synagogue in Jamaica Estates, said he
was fired from his job as a transportation company clerk in the late 1960s
and barred from attending college. In addition, Jews could not travel more
than five miles outside Baghdad, own telephones or open bank accounts.

By 1970, Shohet escaped to Iran through the Kurdish territory, hiring
smugglers who sneaked him and some relatives over mountains at night.
Shohet, now 52 and a systems management analyst, moved to Israel and in 1981
came to the United States.

Today, he and others, while commiserating about their past suffering, also
are celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Herdoon said he will never forget how Hussein and his cronies brutalized
him. Prisoners were not given utensils, so guards poured hot porridge and
broth into their hands. They were allowed to use the bathroom once a day,
and walked atop bricks because the floors were full of human waste.

The toppling of Hussein has helped Herdoon close the worst chapter of his
life. "He tortured 24 million Iraqis for 30 years," Herdoon said. "It's a
nightmare that's gone forever."


http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-me/2003/apr/18/041808129.html

*  THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS DEMAND U.S. DEPARTURE
by David Espo
Las Vegas Sun (AP), 18th April

[.....]

At the same time, there were fresh reminders of the old regime, and the
airing of a new videotape rekindled debate about Saddam's fate. Australian
officials disclosed the discovery of dozens of Iraqi warplanes hidden at a
vast airbase west of the capital, and American troops took custody of
another leading figure from Saddam's inner circle.

Abu Dhabi television aired the videotape, said to show Saddam in Baghdad on
April 9, the day the city fell to American forces and his regime collapsed.

By contrast, a longtime Iraqi official said he believed Saddam had perished
in an American bombing on April 7. "He must have been killed or everything
would not have collapsed so quickly," said Sami Sadoun, who was most
recently Iraq's ambassador to Serbia Montenegro. He spoke in an interview
with The Associated Press.

[.....]

The emergence of the new videotape as well as an audiotape said to have been
made by Saddam added to the mystery surrounding his whereabouts. Abu Dhabi
television said both tapes were made on April 9, but there was no evidence
of that. Nor was there proof that the Iraqi leader - who was known to use
doubles as a security precaution - was involved in either production.

The videotape showed a man purported to be Saddam in the streets of Baghdad,
greeted by a wildly cheering crowd. The audiotape carried a speech that
appeared to acknowledge the American military triumph.

"Conquered people are the ones who eventually triumph over invaders. ...Your
leadership is unshaken," it said.

American officials said they could not immediately determine whether either
tape was authentic.

April 9 was also two days after American bombs destroyed a building in
Baghdad where Saddam and his two sons were believed to be meeting. "I did
not get any instructions, not even a single fax" after the bombing, said
Sadoun, the Iraqi ambassador and longtime regime figure.

[.....]


http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2003/634/bo1.htm

*  THEY CAME TO BAGHDAD
by Sinan Antoon
Al Ahram Weekly Online, 17th - 23rd April

945 Buwayhids; 1055 Seljuks; 1258 Mongols led by Hulagu; 1340 Jalayrs; 1393
& 1401 Mongols led by Tamerlane; 1411 Turkoman Black Sheep; 1469 Turkoman
White Sheep ; 1508 Safavids;1534 Ottomans under Sultan Sulayman the
Magnificent; 1623 Safavids; 1638 Ottomans under Sultan Murad IV; 1917
British; 1941 British again to depose pro-German government; 2003
Anglo-American invasion.

Sinan Antoon sifts through the rubble of his native Baghdad

It is agonisingly difficult to write about one's hometown as it drowns in
flames and suffocates with smoke. After tons of bombs and thousands of
liberating missiles, now many of Baghdad's own inhabitants are pillaging the
city under the encouraging and voyeuristic eyes of its latest invaders. This
is by no means the first time that Baghdad has fallen so violently, but in
the past its fall had always happened "before" or "back then". One needed to
plough through the many volumes of the city's history and poetry, or listen
to its elders, in order to learn more about those past falls. This time,
however, it is in the painfully present tense. A soft click on the remote
control is all you need to get variations on one theme: the fall and
destruction of Baghdad is live!

As if trying to enter through one of its remaining gates, I start to
approach Baghdad, or rather one of the many Baghdads I have carried about
with me for years, by measuring the extent to which its present reality
betrays the enchanting and idealised signifiers that have taken it in turns
to represent it. Or those which have tried to capture some of its magic. For
now it betrays, or is forced to betray, like never before all of the
accolades bestowed upon it by its numerous rulers, chroniclers and lovers.
It is no longer now the "Abode of Peace, Mother of the World, Abode of
Beauty, Gift of the Gods, Triumph of the Gods, Round City", etc.

Whichever way I choose to approach the city, I must tread warily, for its
streets are still littered with bodies, books and blood. Even the safe,
labyrinthine streets of my own memory are not free from the ghosts of wars,
but at least they cannot be destroyed, or looted and pillaged, except by
amnesia.

Built as the capital of the burgeoning empire of the Abbasids in 762,
Baghdad was to be repeatedly conquered and sacked by would-be emperors, some
local, many foreign. The ritual of imperial ascent dictates trampling on the
symbols of a glory as this is being at once eclipsed and emulated. And so
the city was conquered, sacked and rebuilt time and time again. In its
heyday, Baghdad was the heart of an empire, and its rulers, too, wrought
havoc on distant lands. But, most of its caliphs and sultans were also
patrons of art and knowledge, connoisseurs, and sometimes composers, of the
most beautiful poetry to have survived in the collective memory of the
Arabs. Now, it is Baghdad's ironic fate to have been subjugated by a
would-be emperor, who has yet to master his mother tongue. While he is fully
aware of the geo-strategic importance of Baghdad, Bush is probably the one
least aware, in the history of the city's conquerors, of the precious
symbolism and rich history of his booty. Does it matter to him?

Baghdad was for many years the enchanting "mother of the world", as the city
was once called. It was so sophisticated and elegant in its golden age that
an Arabic verb, yatabaghdadu, was derived from its name to signify how
people used to emulate the coveted styles and ways of Baghdad's elites.

Thousands of invisible umbilical chords still bind the city to many a soul.
With every bomb, missile and fire that has erupted over the last three weeks
in Baghdad, I have felt the pain of those chords being violently severed in
my heart. Now, alas, even some of those who are still in the city's womb are
unleashing decades of pain, violence and war upon its body and scarring its
memory, together with their own collective history, in a masochistic or
matricidal orgy.

I grew up in the Baghdad of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time the city's
many faces, like its history, were already being appropriated and changed by
Saddam and his regime to make it his Baghdad. His desire to inscribe his
name and face onto the city's history and streets was insatiable. He fancied
himself the descendent and natural heir to the likes of Abu-Ja'far Al
Mansur, the city's founder, and Haroun Al-Rasheed, its most illustrious
ruler. And so I witnessed his murals, monuments, statues and sayings
invading the city's space like rampant scars. By the time I left Baghdad in
1991, it had almost become a permanent exhibition of his likenesses. But,
for those who knew it well and looked hard enough, there were always spaces
to which one could escape and converse with the city, stealing a few kisses
away from his watchful eyes, at least until the early 1980s.

While at secondary school, I used to skip the classes of one boring teacher
to wander in Baghdad's old streets. I was not alone in committing this
"crime against our country", as the headteacher of our school called it when
he chastised us the next day. He thought that we were skipping school to go
to the movies, while Iraqi men were dying on the front in the war with Iran.
Little did he know that we were actually acquainting ourselves with our city
and its history without lethargic and dogmatic mediation.

My accomplice, a classmate, was obsessed with Baghdad's history, and he had
devoured his father's collection of history books. We used to take the bus
from our school in Al A'zamiyya to the heart of old Baghdad. We wandered in
Suq Al-Saray, sifting through used books and hunting for rare ones. We would
pass by the famous store of Al-Haydari and eat kahi, a delicious Baghdadi
pastry with cream and syrup. We would sit at one of the old cafes on
Al-Rasheed Street and sip cardamom tea and be subjected to suspicious looks
from the cafe's more regular and older customers before parting company. My
friend was the perfect guide, not just because of his vast knowledge of
every coup, cabinet and uprising in the country's history, but also because
I had no qualms about telling him to shut up when he went over the word
limit I had randomly set, or started to expound on what I deemed
uninteresting. There were many times when I wanted to hear the city speak on
its own.

In later, less innocent years, I would walk alone in Al-Karrada, starting
from Kahramana Square with its beautiful statue and fountains and making my
way to Abu-Nuwwas Street to meet companions at one of its many bars. The
last few years of the Iraq-Iran war (1980- 1988) haunted our youth and added
nihilism to our lives. During this period, the dark and dreary bars on
Abu-Nuwwas Street were our haven, and we remained true to the poet's spirit
and his wine songs expressing disillusionment with the here and now, but
also gaiety, lightheartedness and hedonism to combat its ephemera.

The dissident contemporary Iraqi poet Muzaffar Al-Nawwab was our guide on
our way back home at night. His fiery, banned poems were smuggled into Iraq
on cassettes and circulated secretly among friends. Some of those friends
stayed in Iraq, withering under the sanctions and now another war, while
many ended up in various exiles, in countries from Brazil to Australia.

A tear always wakes in my eye whenever I listen to the traditional Baghdadi
maqamat we used to sing together -- words that express a deep sorrow aged to
perfection and echoing Mesopotamia's painful history of floods, famines and
the fire of unrequited love. Arab friends always ask about the secret of the
excessive sadness of Iraqi songs. Now they know it and will have to cry
along.

Having a fascination with birds, I liked to go to Suq Al-Ghazl where birds
and animals of all kinds were sold on Fridays. I also liked to sit on our
roof and watch as the pigeons kept by our neighbour's son would take their
usual flight in the afternoon Baghdad sky. At times, these birds would
dodge, and compete with, the kites flown by kids. Sometimes I could spot a
flock of birds flying high above, en route to their breeding grounds in the
north. Perhaps I remember this now because of something I read a few days
before the US-led invasion. Reuters reported that these annual migration
routes could be disrupted when the war erupted. In the period between
mid-March and mid-April, one finds the greatest number of birds in Iraq.
Since many of these birds cannot make it to their breeding grounds in one
flight, they stop and "refuel" on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and
in the southern marshes drained by Saddam.

Every year around this time I would look for the one or two white storks
that used to nest on the dome of the old church in Bab Al- Mu'azzam. I
wonder if they have made it to Baghdad this year? I doubt it. I clipped that
Reuters article from Al-Hayat and left it lying around. When I read the
article again on the second day of the war, American B-52 bombers were
taking off from Fairfield Airbase in England and heading towards the skies
over Baghdad. Someone on Fox News described them as "beautiful birds", and
Rumsfeld spoke of "the humanity which went into the making of these
weapons".

If they don't perish first, the storks will try to return next year. Perhaps
many Baghdadis who have been forced to seek refuge away from Baghdad are now
also wondering how long it will be before the skies are clear, or how long
they will have to recite lines written by a fellow Baghdadi, Muzaffar
Al-Nawwab:

I have accepted that my fate Will be like that of a bird, And I have endured
everything Except humiliation, Or having my heart Caged up in the Sultan's
palace. But O dear God Even birds have homes to return to, Whereas I fly
across this homeland From sea to sea, And to jail after jail after jail, One
jailer hugging another.

I felt pangs of pain a week ago as I watched an American tank crawling
across Al- Jumhuriyya Bridge in the heart of Baghdad. I have crossed that
bridge hundreds of times, and I used to linger a bit half way along,
especially when walking alone, and look down at the river. The Tigris splits
Baghdad into two sections: Al-Karkh, on the western bank, and Al-Rusafah on
the eastern. I used to recite Ali Ibn Al- Jahm's famous line about the
enchanting, almond-shaped eyes of the Baghdadi women who used to cross from
one bank to the other in the nineth century. On a lucky day, I would
encounter a descendent or two of those women. Now the moon-like faces
celebrated in thousands of verses are hiding in houses on both banks, white
voyeuristic satellites are hovering above and scrutinising every inch of the
city's body.

It was also impossible, whenever I crossed any bridge over the Tigris, not
to remember Al Jawahiri's (1900- 1997) most famous poem about Baghdad,
written when he was in exile in Prague in the early 1960s. Although hailing
from Najaf, he, like many before and after, fell in love with Baghdad and
claimed it as his muse. In fact, every Arab poet considers Baghdad his home.
Al-Jawahiri's Baghdad was "Umm Al-Basatin" (the mother of orchards), and he
saluted its banks and embraced them from his exile. He reminisced about the
boats meandering along the Tigris and wished that their sails could form his
shroud the day he was laid to rest. Alas, Al-Jawahiri died in exile and was
buried in Damascus in 1997. Today, many parts of the "mother of orchards"
have been burnt by the mother of all bombs, or M O A B as it is termed by
the Pentagon.

In hoping to die in Baghdad, Al-Jawahiri was probably echoing one of his
poetic ancestors, the great poet Al-Ma'arri from the fourth century.
Abul-'Ala' Al-Ma'arri left his hometown in Syria and came to Baghdad, but he
was disappointed at the cold reception he received and yearned for his own
people, resolving never to return to Baghdad. However, as soon as he left,
he could not contain his desire to return:

Were it my choice I would have died among you. But, alas, that is beyond my
reach. Give me one last drink from the Tigris: If I could, I would drink the
whole river.

In 1991, the US bombed the bridge about which I am writing, slicing it in
two. The justification then, as for the other acts of destruction now, was
that it was part of the city's "command and control network". I rushed out
the next morning on my bike to see for myself. Hundreds of Baghdadis had
also come and were looking on in silence. Now unable to link Baghdad's two
banks, the bridge resembled a broken smile.

My best friend and I used to roam Baghdad, surveying the daily destruction
and checking on friends and relatives to see if they had been consigned to
the dubious category of "collateral damage". The bombing had severed all
communications in the first week, and the phones were dead. Now, tanks spit
their fire towards a row of houses on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and
blazes go up. A correspondent announces that Apaches are hovering over
Baghdad for the first time, but, alas, this is a familiar species in our
part of the world. They have come to make sure that Baghdad's residents join
the Palestinians as the fortunate recipients of the latest form of lethal
"liberation".

Rivers of blood are flowing along the Tigris as America tattoos its imperial
insignia into the bodies of Iraqi children, stamping their futures with its
corporate logos in order to "safeguard" it. There is an abyss in and around
Iraq, and it is widening by the moment. But one must look for, and cling to,
a bridge. And so I try. A few bridges north of Al-Jumhuriyya Bridge lies
Jisr Al-Shuhada' (Martyrs' Bridge). Throngs of Iraqis burst onto the streets
in January 1948 to express their rejection of the Portsmouth Treaty signed
between the despicable Iraqi government of the time and Great Britain. Some
of them were killed by the regime's bullets on that bridge, and Al-Jawahiri
commemorated the uprising with one of his powerful poems. It was an elegy
for his brother, Ja'far, who was one of those killed and had died in
Al-Jawahiri's arms.

Many Iraqis know the poem's opening lines by heart. Like many of
Al-Jawahiri's poems, this one has prophetic lines: "I see a horizon lit with
blood/And many a starless night./A generation comes and another goes/And the
fire keeps burning." Baghdadis and Iraqis have indeed lost their way, but
they have not lost their collective memory. The US tanks will have to go
soon, and so will the generals, the soldiers and their Iraqi informants. I
can already hear the chants of the demonstrators and read the signs. The
clock is ticking, and the message is simple enough for even Bush to
understand: Leave Iraq!

In The Thousand and One Nights, otherwise known as the Arabian Nights, that
great work that is eternally synonymous with Baghdad, when morning comes,
Sheherazad, mother of all narrators, must embrace silence and leave her
readers to wonder where the narrative will go next.

For me, it is mourning time, and Baghdad is now enveloped in a long, cruel
and starless night. But, just as she's done in the past, she will wake up
once more and try to forget. And I must tend to her scars, ward off her
future nightmares, and shower her with kisses and love from afar.


THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAQ

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/WireFeed/WireFeed&c
=WireFeed&cid=1048929865903&p=1014232938216

*  SADDAM'S HALF-BROTHER CAPTURED
by John Chalmers
Financial Times, 17th April

AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces searching for members of
Saddam Hussein's government have captured the ousted Iraqi leader's
half-brother and former head of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad.

"Early this morning, coalition special operations forces, supported by U.S.
Marines, captured Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al- Tikriti," U.S. Army Brigadier
General Vincent Brooks told a news conference at war headquarters in Qatar
on Thursday.

He said Barzan was captured alone based on a tip from Iraqis.

"Barzan is...an adviser to the former regime leader with extensive knowledge
of the regime's inner working. There were no friendly or enemy casualties.
The capture demonstrates the coalition's commitment to relentlessly pursuing
the scattered members of a fractured regime," Brooks said.

Barzan was No. 52 and the five of clubs in a U.S. pack of cards distributed
to U.S. troops featuring the 55 most-wanted Iraqis. Saddam and his two sons,
Qusay and Uday, are at the top of the list.

[.....]

Hoshiyar Zebari, spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), told a
news conference in Salahaddin in northern Iraq on Thursday: "Senior members
of the Iraqi leadership are still at large in western Mosul. Some have been
spotted a few days ago."

He said another Saddam half-brother, Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, was
captured in the western part of Mosul.

He was No. 51 on the wanted list, though he was apparently estranged from
Saddam. U.S. authorities on Monday confirmed Watban was in custody, but did
not say where he was apprehended.

"These efforts are continuing increasingly and we are working closely with
U.S. special forces to get those most wanted as soon as possible," Zebari
said.

The only other person on the list known to be in custody is Saddam's top
scientific adviser Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi -- No. 55. He surrendered to U.S.
troops in Baghdad last weekend.

Barzan ran Iraq's intelligence service from 1979 to 1983 and was Iraq's
ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1997.

His home, which was also an operations centre for the intelligence service,
was targeted by six U.S. "smart bombs" on April 11 and there had been
reports that he was killed.

A U.S. military official said the strike on Barzan's home near the city of
Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, was probably aimed at doing further harm
to the already battered command-and-control system for Iraq's fighting
forces.

Reputedly Saddam's "banker in the West" while in the diplomatic post in
Geneva, Barzan has rejected allegations that he helped kill rebellious Kurds
in the 1980s.

The London-based human rights group Indict seeks to have him tried for war
crimes against Iraqi Kurds.

Indict also says he personally participated in the murder of several
thousand men from one tribe in 1983 and, as intelligence chief, was
responsible for the forced deportation, disappearances and murder of ethnic
minorities. It also alleges he ordered the assassinations of Iraqi
dissidents abroad.


http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/19_04_03_e1.asp

*  IN THE DOCK: JUSTICE AND THE DAY AFTER
by Chibli Mallat
Lebanon Daily Star, 19th April

With the Iraqi regime disappearing into thin air, but none of its leaders
indicted, there is an urgent need to address the problem of what to do with
those responsible for serious violations of humanitarian law when they are
finally arrested. In the United States, the power behind the war and,
inevitably, the post-war opinion is divided, with some appearing to favor an
international tribunal and others a military court on US soil.

The oldest model of an international court for a special ad hoc tribunal for
Iraq would be that of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, modified by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the
Balkans. This seemed a few weeks ago to be favored by Ari Fleischer, the
White House's spokesman. While Nuremberg and Tokyo were created by the
Allies, the ICTY and its Rwandan counterpart, the ICTR, were established by
the UN Security Council. This was a blessed but fugitive moment of unity in
the United Nations that has never been seen again. While miracles cannot be
discounted - the United States seeing an ICTI as a way forward to legitimacy
at UN level - the likelihood of the Security Council acting is slim these
days. The other possibility is to reinforce the current International
Criminal Court, but this requires a leap of faith in Washington, which has
so far rejected the new global tribunal.

Because the Security Council route is unlikely at present, justice for the
people of Iraq may well fall back to national, or mixed, tribunals,
established by those who get hold of persons accused of massive crimes.

National tribunals are of two sorts: those in a relatively neutral forum, as
in Belgium, and those where the prosecution appears to be on the same side
as the victorious party - whether that victorious party is national, in this
case the "Iraqi opposition," or international, in this case the United
States and United Kingdom.

In all cases, another difficult question arises about the number of Iraqi
leaders, Baath Party or government officials who might be tried. The number
matters, and is an unsolved problem. The ICTY has tended to concentrate on
the top leaders, leaving small and medium fish free from prosecution. Two
tribunals were set up for the Rwandan genocide: The international one, which
concentrated on the prime movers of the genocide, has been notoriously
inefficient; the national one, which had a broader range, has a backlog of
several thousand cases.

It is difficult to see how justice can be obtained in Baghdad. A new
government might pursue criminal justice on a wide scale, or it might not
rally enough legitimacy to pursue justice in any convincing manner. Despite
the better efforts of a group within the Iraqi opposition to address this
problem in a long paper on transition, its report has a blind point: the
tragic record of the Kurdish leadership during internecine fighting that
took some 5,400 lives in northern Iraq in 1994-96. None of those who
committed these atrocities has been brought to justice.

Justice for all, and not just for victims of Saddam's regime, is imperative
if Iraq is to begin closing the most recent chapter of its tragic history.
Even more problematic would be finding Iraqi judges who would be up to the
task in a country where the rule of law has been undermined for half a
century.

The US could institute a Guantanamo Bay-like process, or even military
courts on US soil or possibly in Iraq, and recent reports have suggested
this is now the preferred way forward for the US State Department. As in
Guantanamo Bay, many questions would be raised. But a British court has
already underlined Guantanamo Bay's violations of international humanitarian
law, and one hopes that a British presence would deter the United States
from a course that is universally perceived as failed justice.

It is possible to conceive of a mixed international tribunal drawn from the
countries belonging to "the coalition of the willing." This would lessen,
but not entirely do away with, the negative image of victors' justice.

My own preference would be for the United States to reconsider seriously the
value of the International Criminal Court. Despite the administration's
reservations, this is the best way to vindicate its war in Iraq in the
context of "liberating Iraqis from dictatorship." It would open the files of
one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century to the widest audience
possible, as presently embodied in the ICC.

If an ICC route is not possible, then a special ad hoc tribunal could be set
up on the Yugoslav model for Iraq (or even better, for the Middle East as a
whole), if the UN can be so persuaded. Alternatively, the Belgian route -
and other jurisdictions capable of trying those responsible for atrocities -
could proceed.

With the case against Saddam Hussein and his aides getting tried in parallel
with the case already underway in Belgium, where Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon is accused of war crimes in Beirut's Palestinian camps in 1982,
the acute double standards which have plagued the Middle East for a century
might start being challenged to see not only that justice is done, but is
seen to be done.

Chibli Mallat, EU Jean Monnet chair in European law at Lebanon's Saint
Joseph Universite, founded Indict in 1996 and brought the case against Ariel
Sharon in Belgium in June 2001. This article, the second in a two-part
series, is published courtesy of the London-based Institute for War and
Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net)


http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/20/1050777152290.html

*  SADDAM'S TOP FINANCE HENCHMAN CAPTURED
Sydney Morning Herald, from AP, 20th April

Baghdad: Saddam Hussein's finance minister was arrested and a top scientist
turned himself in, US officials said today, raising hopes of a breakthrough
in the search for the toppled regime's wealth as well as any biological and
chemical weapons.

[.....]

US Central Command said today that members of the newly revived Iraqi police
force arrested Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim al-Azzawi, who was Saddam's finance
chief and a deputy prime minister, in Baghdad yesterday and turned him over
to US troops. He is among the 55 ex-Iraqi leaders on the US most-wanted
list.

A Central Command spokesman, Marine Captain Stewart Upton, said al-Azzawi's
arrest showed that the new Iraqi police force was working well and "going
after regime leaders".

Upton suggested that al-Azzawi should know where the regime kept its wealth
hidden. "It's money for the people of Iraq, and we seek to have that for the
building of the future of Iraq," he said.

Also yesterday, Emad Husayn Abdullah al-Ani - depicted as the mastermind of
Iraq's nerve agent program - turned himself in to the Americans. Al-Ani may
be able to provide information on any chemical or biological weapons in
Iraq, or evidence of links between Saddam's regime and the al-Qaeda
terrorist group.

US officials say he was involved in Iraq's development of the deadly nerve
agent VX. He was also accused by US officials in 1998 of involvement with a
chemical plant in Sudan linked to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The Central Command also said that Khala Khader al-Salahat, a member of the
Abu Nidal terrorist organisation, had surrendered to Marines in Baghdad. Abu
Nidal, who died in Baghdad last year under murky circumstances, led a terror
campaign blamed for more than 275 deaths on several continents.

[.....]


http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/21/1050777196422.html

*  SADDAM'S SON-IN-LAW CAPTURED
The Age (Australia), 21st April

Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Jamal Mustafa Abdullah Sultan, one of the 55
Iraqi leaders most wanted by the United States, had been apprehended, Iraqi
National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi said today.

Sultan, the nine of clubs in the "most wanted" deck of cards issued by the
US military, is married to Saddam's youngest daughter and had a significant
political and intelligence role in his regime, Chalabi told the Fox News
channel.

The long-exiled Iraqi National Congress said Sultan, Saddam Hussein's only
surviving son in-law, had surrendered to them after returning from Syria and
would be handed over to US forces within hours.

"Jamal Mustafa Sultan al-Tikriti is the first close member of the family to
be detained," INC spokesman Zaab Sethna told Reuters by telephone, saying
that Jamal had served as Saddam's private secretary right up till the end.

"He is currently in the custody of the INC but will shortly be placed into
the custody of US forces," he said.

He said Jamal had fled to Syria but the INC had persuaded him to come back
to Baghdad - along with a senior Iraqi intelligence official, Khaled
Abdallah - and give himself up.

Syria's role in any return was unclear, but US President George W. Bush said
before the news of Jamal that he thought Damascus was responding to US
demands that it deny sanctuary to fleeing members of Saddam's
administration.

"There's some positive signs. They're getting the message that they should
not harbour Baath Party officials, high ranking Iraqi officials," Bush said
today.

Jamal is number 40, or the nine of clubs, on the US list of 55 top Iraqi
officials wanted dead or alive. He is the sixth on the list to be detained.

"We had been in touch with members of his circle before the war for some
time," Sethna said. "We contacted them again in Syria recently and convinced
him the best course of action was to return to Baghdad and surrender to us."

Jamal returned by road today. His brother Kamal Mustafa Sultan al-Tikriti,
the head of Saddam's personal presidential guard defenders, was still in
Syria, he said.

Kamal ranks high on the US wanted list, in eighth place.

Two of Saddam's half brothers have already been detained but Sethna, adviser
to INC leader Ahmad Chalabi, said they were estranged from Saddam, making
Jamal the biggest catch.

He said Jamal also served as deputy to Saddam's son Qusay in the Special
Security Organisation, SSO.

Jamal - also the deputy minister for tribal affairs - was married to
Saddam's youngest daughter, Hella.

"He was the last remaining son-in-law - Saddam killed the other two," Sethna
said.

They had defected in the mid-1990s after the Gulf War, but were persuaded to
come home - and were then executed.

[.....]


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/1877296

*  'SHIITE THUG' OF SADDAM CAPTURED
Houston Chronicle, 21st April

Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, known as Saddam Hussein's "Shiite Thug" for his
role in Iraq's bloody suppression of the Shiite Muslim uprising of 1991, was
arrested Monday, the U.S. Central Command said.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the retired lieutenant general the Bush
administration appointed to run Iraq, Jay Garner, arrived Monday to a muted
reception, promising to restore services as fast as possible and not to
overstay his welcome.

Bush administration officials have identified al-Zubaydi as one of nine
Iraqis -- including Saddam himself -- sought for trial on charges of war
crimes or crimes against humanity.

A nurse by training and former member of Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Command
Council and regional commander of the central Euphrates district, al-Zubaydi
was No. 18 on a list of the 55 most-wanted figures from Saddam's regime.
Iraqi opposition groups have accused him of the 1999 assassination of a top
Shiite cleric.

"This is very significant -- he is one of the most hated men in the former
regime," said Haider Ahmad, a London-based spokesman for the Iraqi National
Congress, the leading anti Saddam organization that had opposed the regime
in exile.

Al-Zubaydi was an associate of Saddam since the early 1960s and had been
retired from a public role in the leadership for about two years.

Central Command gave no further details on his arrest. The Iraqi National
Congress said its forces arrested al-Zubaydi in Al Hillah, about 60 miles
south of Baghdad, and turned him over to U.S. forces.

Ahmad said local people tipped forces to where al-Zubaydi was hiding with
his son, and that the two were caught together.

"He was hiding in an abandoned, derelict area, not a built-up area," he
said.

With Monday's capture, eight of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam's
regime are now in custody, though none of them is from the very top of the
list. A ninth figure, Ali Hassan al-Majid -- a top adviser to Saddam and
known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of poison gas against Iraq's Kurdish
minority -- is believed to have been killed in an airstrike.

Al-Zubaydi, a former prime minister and deputy prime minister, was one of
the key figures in suppressing the uprising of Iraq's Shiite majority that
followed Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Tens of thousands of
people died.

Al-Zubaydi was considered one of the most brutal members of Saddam's regime
and was listed in a U.S. State Department report "Iraq: Crimes against
Humanity, Leaders as Executioners." He was once featured in an Iraqi
videotape brutalizing Shiite dissidents as a display of authority and
encouragement to soldiers to be tough.

A Shiite himself, al-Zubaydi also presided over the destruction of the
southern marshes in the 1990s, an action aimed against Shiite "Marsh Arabs"
living there.

Iraqi opposition groups have accused him of assassinating Grand Ayatollah
Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr and his two sons in the holy city of Najaf in 1999.

Al-Zubaydi is the queen of spades in the deck of Saddam's henchmen
distributed to U.S. forces. Saddam tops the list and was designated the ace
of spades.

It was the second time in as many days the Iraqi National Congress took
credit for the capture of most-wanted figures.

[.....]


HUMANITARIAN PROBLEMS

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030420/wl_mideast_afp/i
raq_jordan_iran&cid=1514&ncid=1478

*  NUMBERS OF REFUGEES STRANDED AT JORDAN-IRAQ BORDER NEARLY TRIPLES: UNHCR
Yahoo, 20th April

AMMAN (AFP) - The number of refugees stranded in no-man's land on the
Jordanian-Iraqi border waiting for permission to enter Jordan has more than
tripled over the past 48 hours to over 600 people, the UN's refugee agency
said.

"As of Sunday morning there are more than 600 people, mostly Iranian
refugees of Kurdish ethnicity, who have fled the Al Tash refugee camp", west
of Baghdad, UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler told AFP.

"There are also more and more Palestinians coming in. They said they have
been told by local Iraqi host communities that they are no longer welcome in
Iraq," he said.

The UNHCR says these refugees include Iranians of Kurdish origin who have
fled Al Tash camp, as well as a group of 60 elderly Iranians "previously
recognised as refugees" by some European and North American countries.

International aid officials said last week that some of the Iranians are
members of the opposition People's Muhajedeen, while French diplomats in
Jordan said they were trying to confirm the validity of the refugees'
documents.

"Out of 37 Iranians with French refugee documents, only four or five hold
valid documents while the rest are out of date," one diplomat said, adding
that the documents were sent to Paris for evaluation.

On Friday the UNHCR reported that more than 250 people, mostly Iranians,
were stranded in the no-man's land, most of them for a week, including some
Iraqis and Palestinians who have been there for nearly a fortnight.

UNHCR representative in Jordan, Sten Bronee met Saturday with the Minister
of State for Foreign Affairs Shaher Bak to discuss the plight of the
refugees and seek their transfer to a transit camp inside Jordanian
territory.

"The refugee camp in Ruweished is empty and ready to receive these people,"
Kessler said, referring to one of two temporary camps set up by Jordan near
the border to receive Iraqis and third-country nationals.

"The border is no place for anyone," he added.

The desolate and windswept region offers scant accomodation for refugee
waiting in transit to be processed into Jordan, a procedure which according
to aid workers should last hours rather than days.

"There are some basic tents and some water gets trucked in but there is no
electricity, except for some lights that have been set up around the
perimeter -- and they survive off canned food," Kessler said.

On Wednesday the UNHCR complained that Jordanian border officials were still
denying entry to those stranded on the border, but said it hoped a letter of
understanding signed between Bronee and Interior Minister Qaftan Majali
would enable the refugees to be admitted.

Jordan has limited the admission of refugees into its territory.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer/ap.asp?category=1107&slug=Iraq%20Seeki
ng%20Water

*  Search for Water Continues in S. Iraq
by Tini Tran
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 22nd April

BASRA, Iraq (AP) They crowd by the hundreds along the muddy banks of a
sludge-colored canal, hands outstretched to fill containers with
foul-smelling water gushing from a broken pipe.

All day comes the parade: old men pushing carts piled high with metal tins,
women carrying plastic washtubs, and children on rickety bicycles loaded
with barrels.

Two weeks after British forces took control of Iraq's second-largest city,
water still remains out of reach for many of Basra's 1.3 million residents,
forcing some to resort to desperate measures.

In some cases, people take home water straight from the murky Shatt Al-Arab
River. In another central neighborhood, residents used Kalashnikovs and
hammers to break fist-sized holes in a drainage pipe that led from a
hospital.

"Of course we worry that the water is dirty, but we have no other choice,"
said Fadila Mahmoud, her black chador flapping in the breeze as she trudged
down the dirt lane carrying two plastic jugs brimming with water. "We have
had no running water since the war started."

The already aging water-treatment system shut down last month after
coalition air attacks knocked out power to the city. Technicians from the
International Committee of the Red Cross succeeded in repairing back-up
generators for the plant as a stopgap measure.

But in the past week, British engineers have only been partially successful
in restoring the city's electricity, because looters have continued
vandalizing power substations.

About 60 percent to 70 percent of the city's water system is now
operational, said Andres Kreusi, head of the ICRC delegation in Basra. That
still leaves tens of thousands of residents without an adequate supply of
water.

"The prewar situation in Iraq was far from good. You had 40 percent of the
population, mostly in rural areas, who never had access to water," he said.
"But the war has only aggravated this."

Every day, British forces have been sending out water trucks - guarded by
tanks - that fan out into Basra and nearby towns. Throngs of people swarm
around them.

Relief agencies have also begun sending small shipments of water across the
border from Kuwait, but the demand has outstripped the supply, straining a
system greatly weakened by more than a decade of sanctions.

"This is a problem that is 12 years in the making. The water situation
cannot be solved with just the tankers. You need to deal with the long-term
infrastructure needs," Kreusi said.

Hospital officials worry that the desperate consumption of dirty water could
start epidemics of cholera or other diseases.

So far, there have been no confirmed reports of such diseases, but doctors
at Basra General Hospital say they are getting increasing numbers of
patients complaining of diarrhea and gastrointestinal problems.

"We have already begun seeing many cases of diarrhea and there are other
symptoms that suggest cholera, but here we don't have a way to test that,"
said Dr. Nadeem Rahim.

In the short term, for those with enough money to buy it, bottled water is
now available in the market, but prices have skyrocketed - from about eight
cents to $2.40 for a 1 1/2-quart bottle.

With no paying jobs left in the city, most people cannot afford that, which
means a daily, often frustrating, search for free water. A drive around the
city quickly shows hundreds of people crouching along trash-strewn river
banks, waiting for their turn.

"Sometimes, you can see dead bodies of dogs in the water. But when you are
desperate, what else can you do?" said Sajda Ma'atuq, 57, a former
kindergarten administrator, as she stood near one makeshift watering hole.

Her family of seven takes turns going in search of water. Ma'atuq has the
morning shift, heading out with a giant metal washtub on her head.

When she is lucky, she finds a water tanker parked alongside the dirt roads.
Otherwise, she heads toward one of the broken pipes that her entire
neighborhood gets water from. Jutting out of a brick wall just inches above
a filthy brown river, the metal length of pipe has small holes where the
water gushes out.

Standing alongside her 18-year-old son, Ma'atuq hands her tub to several
boys standing waist-deep in the water.

"We hate doing this, but we have no choice. The war has left us like
beggars," she said.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2969283.stm

*  NOT A DROP THAT'S SAFE TO DRINK
by Jonathan Duffy
BBC News Online, in Nasiriya, 23rd April

War-ravaged Nasiriya is caught in a deadly cycle: with no electricity to
pump water, locals are breaking into the underground pipes, allowing raw
sewage to seep into the system. The danger of a cholera outbreak is a real
one.

It is a cycle repeated across Iraq

Eight-month-old Ali Hussein is too young to know anything about the war, but
he is feeling the effects now, in his stomach.

For the past week, Ali has suffered from vomiting and diarrhoea, leaving him
badly dehydrated. Now doctors have prescribed him a simple antibiotic and
his mother, Zahra, hopes he will soon be on the mend. For Ali has been
diagnosed with gastroenteritis, cases of which have risen sharply in
Nasiriya in recent days.

Since the third day of the war, the city's electricity supply has been out
of action. The combination of bombing raids by the coalition forces and the
counterattack by the Iraqi army destroyed Nasiriya's infrastructure.

Without power there is nothing to pump the water. And without running water,
the locals are turning to untreated supplies which they can't afford to boil
because of the soaring price of fuel.

The electricity shutdown has also brought the sewage pumps to a halt, so
that much of this city of half a million people is sitting on a bed of stale
human waste. In places it has started to seep up to ground level.

Outside the clinic where Ali had been taken for treatment, the sewage has
settled into a pool which runs the length of the dusty street before
spreading out over a traffic junction. It's hard to sidestep and impossible
to avoid getting a sniff of it.

The big fear is the two problems will combine into a single, lethal one.
Across the city, locals desperate to tap into a ready water source have
split open the municipal pipes.

Now sewage is seeping through the punctured holes of those pipes, so that
even when the electricity is restarted, and water begins to flow freely
again, it will carry potentially deadly bacteria.

With temperatures rising as summer approaches, Nasiriya could find a cholera
epidemic on its hands, says one highly experienced aid worker.

Clean water, or the lack of it, is more of a problem than anything else in
Nasiriya. There is no shortage of food. The central distribution system set
up under the Oil for Food programme ensured everyone here had enough rations
to last them through to August.

In some medical practices, 80% of patients seen are suffering from some sort
of water infection. Dr Abdul Al-Shadood says his Al-Meelad clinic is seeing
an average of 22 gastroenteritis cases a day, compared to one or two before
the war.

"If this is not diagnosed and treated quickly in children, they will die,"
says the doctor. That has already started to happen. The doctor refers
severe cases to the city's children's hospital - itself working at only half
capacity after a stray missile attack - and says the illness has claimed
young lives.

Another worry is the lack of medicine available to treat these relatively
simple maladies. The central medicine store that used to serve all medical
practices in the area was seized by the Iraqi army as a battlement and
subsequently wiped out in bombing raids.

Dr Shadood's clinic has run out of the most basic treatment - oral
rehydration solution. Instead, he is prescribing an antibiotic called
Flagyl. But he has only a few days' stock left and no deliveries are
scheduled.

Again there are complications. Like many western countries, Iraq's fondness
for handing out simple antibiotics to treat sickness has raised resistance
among many locals.

Only now are humanitarian relief agencies starting to get a handle on what
help they can offer. The Irish humanitarian agency Goal arrived in Nasiriya
last week and is one of only a small group of aid organisations here.

Field worker Mary McLoughlin says it's "no exaggeration" that if the water
and sewage situation is not mended soon, Nasiriya will see a "major
humanitarian crisis".

"Cholera is endemic in southern Iraq, but we are in grave danger of a
cholera epidemic by the summer. That will sweep through the population and
kill thousands," she says.

"The water and sewage pipes were already crumbling before the war, because
of years of neglect. But now people are breaking holes in them to get the
water, the real danger is of cross contamination between sewage and water.

"It's such a massive construction task to repair the years of neglect, I
doubt whether they can fix the pipes by the time the really high
temperatures come, which is when cholera becomes a real fear."




_______________________________________________
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