Extract from Member of EU Parliament, Paulo CASACA’s (*) book:
“The Hidden Invasion of Iraq”.
Regarding the Funds the EU allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq and the Iraqi Electoral Process
Page 182 to page 187
QUOTE:
Being the spokesperson for the socialists of the Budgetary Control Committee, this is my most important responsibility within the European Parliament. I was particularly interested to know the whereabouts of the 800 plus million Euro that had been approved within the European Budget for the Iraqi reconstruction in the first five years of the post-Saddam era, and I was puzzled to realised that none of my Iraqi friends, members of the Parliament, Governors or former ministers, had ever heard of any European cooperation effort to Iraq.
Although modest in comparison with the bilateral budgetary efforts of the main Allied forces, the European budget is indeed the largest contributor to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI) and this should be visible somehow.
This was my starting point for a query to the European Commission on what has happened with the European budget for Iraqi reconstruction. This would prove to be an exhausting and time-consuming task, but in the end rewarding. The Commission took several months ignoring my questions before answering with an eight-page summary made in partnership with the Iraqi Government. I found this partnership rather awkward.
There I learned that the European Commission had hired a consultant who claimed to be an international organisation as a “global facility” for organising its action in Iraq, without tendering procedures with the argument of urgency (although the contract was established by the end of 2006, more than three years after the invasion).
I learned afterwards that contracts had been established with the very same company for similar tasks in Palestine and Lebanon, always without public tendering procedures.
The bulk of the European funds was attributed to the IRFFI and was managed by the UN and the World Bank. As for the rest, the Commission had made some bilateral contracts with UN agencies and with the Iraqi authorities and substantially financed the Iraqi electoral process.
I could hardly believe that the European Commission had spent all this money on the Iraqi elections and would not even have invited the European Parliament to monitor the elections. Actually, the Commission did not make any thorough public appraisal of the electoral process and did not respond to the generalised criticism of the electoral failures. Given the general attitude of the Commission I would not have been surprised if they had not even bothered to make any sort of observation in spite of the 136 Million they invested in the electoral process.
The answers we received from the UN or the World Bank regarding the funds used in a multilateral way were far from satisfactory, to say the least, and we decided to ask for on the spot controls of a least some of the huge numbers of schools, hospitals and all sorts of infrastructure that the European funds had presumably helped to build or rehabilitate.
The answers seemed confused and elusive and always hard to obtain. I asked to accompany the Commission in a mission to Baghdad to get a glimpse of what was going on over there, but the Commission turned down my request since it would not respect the independence of the institutions. Surprisingly, this explanation came from the very same European executive that answered the Parliamentary Budget Controls’ queries in joint papers with the Iraqi Government.
Evidence on the lack of reliability of the Iraqi authorities regarding public funds was everywhere and could be seen in the main European as well as American media. Iraq was indeed classified as the second most corrupt country in the World, only bypassed by Haiti. Anyway, I did my best to ensure the Commission could not argue with lack of information and handed them extensive media reports on the general Iraqi mismanagement.
Finally, the European Commission proposed the participation of COCOBU in an observation mission that would be organised by the World Bank. The World Bank duly met with COCOBU. By this time many of my colleagues were also very curious to find out what had happened to EU funds in Iraq.
A mission was organised to Nasyriah. The meeting point was at a hotel in Abu Dhabi, early in the morning of 18 May 2008. After we were supplied with helmets and bullet proof vests, we embarked in a military Italian aircraft to Tallil, the airfield of an enormous military complex in the Southern flank of Nasyriah.
As we got there, we were told that there would be no visits to the famous projects we had been so curious to see for security reasons. Actually, we never left the military compound during our stay, although it was huge and comprised, among other things, the ancient ruins of Ur with its famous Ziguratt.
The World Bank, which was supposed to have had the idea of the mission and which had prepared the participation of our committee for quite some time did not bother to show up or to give us an explanation in advance of its absence.
The team leader of the Dhi Qar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT)/ Reconstruction Support Unit (RSU), Anna Prouse, a bright and active Italian lady, showed us a mobile surgery hospital offered by the Italian cooperation performing eye surgeries. This was our only chance to get in touch with common Iraqi citizens and with something that was really working for the benefit of Iraqis (although not financed by our European budget).
For the rest, we had the opportunity to hear the political speech of the local Governor as well as the speech of the Iraqi general in command plus theatrical performances, music and the rest of entertaining activities, the whole of it amounting to a typical tourist political act with the main difference that all of it was performed in a heavily guarded security perimeter.
So, although the visit was of little use to learn about the real Iraq, it was very useful to understand the logic of the main actors in the financial cooperation effort. With the exception of the World Bank and some embassies, all the main financial actors in this reconstruction effort were over there, namely representatives of several UN agencies.
The UN people included two Iraqi refugees who were hired in Amman to help the reconstruction effort. One of them was an Armenian doctor from Basra and the other a Baghdad Kurdish engineer. I found the UN agencies’ idea brilliant, although very telling on the political solution to the problem: to allow refugees, for the most part professionals, to come back and help their country out of the problems of “capacity building” (using the Euro-jargon in the meantime fully absorbed by the local Iraqi Governor).
Otherwise the UN teams were made of people – interesting, kind and humble for the most part – who really reflected an idea of trans-national commitment for human values that you normally associate with the UN.
The presentation of the work of the several UN agencies was not outstanding, and one got the idea that the several agencies were basically doing the same sort of things using the same sort of opaque wording to describe what they were doing. The Iraqi people, however, conveyed the image of being actively engaged in real productive work on behalf of Iraq.
UNQUOTE
(*)Mr Paulo Casaca, MEP, Member of the Socialist Party, has been an elected member of the Azorean Regional Parliament, of the Portuguese Parliament and of the European Parliament, where he has been representing Azores since 1999.
He was born in Lisbon in 1957.
He is a founding member and co-president of the “Friends of a Free Iran” and a founding member of “European Friends of Israel”, the former being an EP-wide initiative and latter being a European and National European Parliaments wide initiative. Along with the late Mohammad Al-Ahwad, he founded the “EURO-IRAQI” parliamentary dialogue platform, “IRAQ WITH A FUTURE” (IF).
“The Hidden Invasion of Iraq”.
Regarding the Funds the EU allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq and the Iraqi Electoral Process
Page 182 to page 187
QUOTE:
Being the spokesperson for the socialists of the Budgetary Control Committee, this is my most important responsibility within the European Parliament. I was particularly interested to know the whereabouts of the 800 plus million Euro that had been approved within the European Budget for the Iraqi reconstruction in the first five years of the post-Saddam era, and I was puzzled to realised that none of my Iraqi friends, members of the Parliament, Governors or former ministers, had ever heard of any European cooperation effort to Iraq.
Although modest in comparison with the bilateral budgetary efforts of the main Allied forces, the European budget is indeed the largest contributor to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI) and this should be visible somehow.
This was my starting point for a query to the European Commission on what has happened with the European budget for Iraqi reconstruction. This would prove to be an exhausting and time-consuming task, but in the end rewarding. The Commission took several months ignoring my questions before answering with an eight-page summary made in partnership with the Iraqi Government. I found this partnership rather awkward.
There I learned that the European Commission had hired a consultant who claimed to be an international organisation as a “global facility” for organising its action in Iraq, without tendering procedures with the argument of urgency (although the contract was established by the end of 2006, more than three years after the invasion).
I learned afterwards that contracts had been established with the very same company for similar tasks in Palestine and Lebanon, always without public tendering procedures.
The bulk of the European funds was attributed to the IRFFI and was managed by the UN and the World Bank. As for the rest, the Commission had made some bilateral contracts with UN agencies and with the Iraqi authorities and substantially financed the Iraqi electoral process.
I could hardly believe that the European Commission had spent all this money on the Iraqi elections and would not even have invited the European Parliament to monitor the elections. Actually, the Commission did not make any thorough public appraisal of the electoral process and did not respond to the generalised criticism of the electoral failures. Given the general attitude of the Commission I would not have been surprised if they had not even bothered to make any sort of observation in spite of the 136 Million they invested in the electoral process.
The answers we received from the UN or the World Bank regarding the funds used in a multilateral way were far from satisfactory, to say the least, and we decided to ask for on the spot controls of a least some of the huge numbers of schools, hospitals and all sorts of infrastructure that the European funds had presumably helped to build or rehabilitate.
The answers seemed confused and elusive and always hard to obtain. I asked to accompany the Commission in a mission to Baghdad to get a glimpse of what was going on over there, but the Commission turned down my request since it would not respect the independence of the institutions. Surprisingly, this explanation came from the very same European executive that answered the Parliamentary Budget Controls’ queries in joint papers with the Iraqi Government.
Evidence on the lack of reliability of the Iraqi authorities regarding public funds was everywhere and could be seen in the main European as well as American media. Iraq was indeed classified as the second most corrupt country in the World, only bypassed by Haiti. Anyway, I did my best to ensure the Commission could not argue with lack of information and handed them extensive media reports on the general Iraqi mismanagement.
Finally, the European Commission proposed the participation of COCOBU in an observation mission that would be organised by the World Bank. The World Bank duly met with COCOBU. By this time many of my colleagues were also very curious to find out what had happened to EU funds in Iraq.
A mission was organised to Nasyriah. The meeting point was at a hotel in Abu Dhabi, early in the morning of 18 May 2008. After we were supplied with helmets and bullet proof vests, we embarked in a military Italian aircraft to Tallil, the airfield of an enormous military complex in the Southern flank of Nasyriah.
As we got there, we were told that there would be no visits to the famous projects we had been so curious to see for security reasons. Actually, we never left the military compound during our stay, although it was huge and comprised, among other things, the ancient ruins of Ur with its famous Ziguratt.
The World Bank, which was supposed to have had the idea of the mission and which had prepared the participation of our committee for quite some time did not bother to show up or to give us an explanation in advance of its absence.
The team leader of the Dhi Qar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT)/ Reconstruction Support Unit (RSU), Anna Prouse, a bright and active Italian lady, showed us a mobile surgery hospital offered by the Italian cooperation performing eye surgeries. This was our only chance to get in touch with common Iraqi citizens and with something that was really working for the benefit of Iraqis (although not financed by our European budget).
For the rest, we had the opportunity to hear the political speech of the local Governor as well as the speech of the Iraqi general in command plus theatrical performances, music and the rest of entertaining activities, the whole of it amounting to a typical tourist political act with the main difference that all of it was performed in a heavily guarded security perimeter.
So, although the visit was of little use to learn about the real Iraq, it was very useful to understand the logic of the main actors in the financial cooperation effort. With the exception of the World Bank and some embassies, all the main financial actors in this reconstruction effort were over there, namely representatives of several UN agencies.
The UN people included two Iraqi refugees who were hired in Amman to help the reconstruction effort. One of them was an Armenian doctor from Basra and the other a Baghdad Kurdish engineer. I found the UN agencies’ idea brilliant, although very telling on the political solution to the problem: to allow refugees, for the most part professionals, to come back and help their country out of the problems of “capacity building” (using the Euro-jargon in the meantime fully absorbed by the local Iraqi Governor).
Otherwise the UN teams were made of people – interesting, kind and humble for the most part – who really reflected an idea of trans-national commitment for human values that you normally associate with the UN.
The presentation of the work of the several UN agencies was not outstanding, and one got the idea that the several agencies were basically doing the same sort of things using the same sort of opaque wording to describe what they were doing. The Iraqi people, however, conveyed the image of being actively engaged in real productive work on behalf of Iraq.
UNQUOTE
(*)Mr Paulo Casaca, MEP, Member of the Socialist Party, has been an elected member of the Azorean Regional Parliament, of the Portuguese Parliament and of the European Parliament, where he has been representing Azores since 1999.
He was born in Lisbon in 1957.
He is a founding member and co-president of the “Friends of a Free Iran” and a founding member of “European Friends of Israel”, the former being an EP-wide initiative and latter being a European and National European Parliaments wide initiative. Along with the late Mohammad Al-Ahwad, he founded the “EURO-IRAQI” parliamentary dialogue platform, “IRAQ WITH A FUTURE” (IF).
No comments:
Post a Comment