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IRAQ: IRAQ CRISIS: Weekly Round-up Number 10 for 17 - 23 May, 2003 - OCHA IRIN

Saturday 22 January 2005


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Middle East

IRAQ CRISIS: Weekly Round-up Number 10 for 17 - 23 May, 2003

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Key humanitarian developments:

While the lifting of United Nations economic sanctions is expected to bring long-term relief to Iraq, current aid efforts continue to be hampered by the precarious security situation in many parts of the country.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette this week told the Security Council that although a major humanitarian disaster had been averted, the civilian population, especially children, remained at risk if security did not improve soon.

But while initial steps to re-establish the police force in some of the major cities was seen as positive development in restoring law and order, it was broadly agreed that it would take some time before such a force was fully functional. Moreover, the resourcing and training was seen as critical if they are to be effective.

Following Thursday's resolution to end sanctions, nearly US $1 billion worth of priority humanitarian supplies can now be shipped to Iraq by 3 June, Frechette told the Council.

Meanwhile, full food distribution to the entire population of Iraq will begin on 1 June, through 44,000 food agents in place across the country, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) James T. Morris announced on Thursday. Having so far delivered over 200,000 mt of food aid to Iraqis since 3 April, the UN food agency plans to make 480,000 mt of food available every month between June and September.

The WFP chief added that another challenge was the procurement of Iraq's wheat harvest this year. WFP has already undertaken to purchase up to 1.2 million mt of grain from the harvest, using funds from the UN Oil-for-Food Programme.

Although food assistance remains a critical component of the recovery operation in Iraq, aid officials this week also underscored the need to restore vital services to the public.

In the southern city of Basra, UN-HABITAT estimates that in two of the city's poorest districts alone, Hayaniah and Al Qubla, 132 mt of household rubbish are being dumped every day by a population of 300,000 people. Although hardly ideal before the war started, the city's rubbish collection system has now completely collapsed. Coupled with security concerns, the lack of funds is seen as a major obstacle to kick starting the public sector.

World Health Organisation (WHO) senior policy adviser David Nabbaro said: "The absolute lack of cash to meet the running costs of services and to enable critical personnel to receive remuneration is undermining the capacity of all institutions to offer essential services."

It estimated that the total cost of reactivating the health-care system and sustaining it for six months to be between US $20 million and US $30 million per month. Some 38 cases of cholera have now been confirmed in Basra, the WHO official said, adding the UN health agency was worried about the intensity of the outbreak.

To combat the dramatic increase of diarrhoea among Iraqi children, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has also started encouraging the removal of breast milk substitutes from food donation packages, since they are often mixed with contaminated water. A recent UNICEF survey carried out in Baghdad on 960 children under five, indicates that 7.7 percent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, compared with 4 percent in 2002.

Meanwhile, the exact number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) continues to elude aid workers, This week, however, a clearer picture of the situation in southern and central Iraq shed some light on the scope of the problem.

Chris Petch, the deputy programme manager for IDPs in Iraq for the International Organisation for Migration said
initial reports from 12 of the 92 southern and central districts identified 58,000 IDPs, but other unconfirmed reports could mean that this number was actually over 80,000. Those IDPs who had been identified were in real need of assistance, he added.

Ongoing uncertainty over the number and needs of the IDP population have been attributed to ongoing displacement in some places and confusion among the local population of what constituted an IDP.

CONTENTS:

IRAQ: Mental hospital forced to start rebuilding
IRAQ: Household waste causing health hazard
IRAQ: UN Security Council lifts sanctions
IRAQ: Fayli Kurds face difficult return
IRAQ: Focus on orphans
IRAQ: UXOs injure 350 in Kirkuk
IRAQ: Vaccination situation critical

IRAQ: Mental hospital forced to start rebuilding

Baghdad's only public mental hospital is struggling to operate in the wake of the country’s recent war. Soon after American troops entered Baghdad, the Al-Rashad Teaching Mental Hospital in the south of the city was invaded by looters, who stripped the complex and allowed more than half the 1,020 patients to escape. Its director, Dr Amir Hilw, said Al-Rashad was the only hospital in Iraq for chronic mentally ill patients. In the last four years it had undergone extensive improvements and was up to Western standards. But on the evening of 8 April all that changed when looters with knives and sticks forced their way past guards and began taking anything they could move.

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IRAQ: Household waste causing health hazard

Solid waste found all over Iraq's southern city of Basra is causing a mounting public health hazard. UN-HABITAT estimates that in two of the city's poorest districts alone, Hayaniah and Al Qubla, 132 mt of household rubbish are being dumped every
day by a population of 300,000 people. Experts can only guess at the total amount produced each day by the city's 1,300,000 inhabitants. Even before the war, rubbish collection systems in the city were struggling to cope. With a lack of resources, trucks and management, people often had to make their own arrangements. "Even when Saddam Hussein was in power, they were paid to take away the rubbish but they didn't bother," Majed Hassan, who lives in the Al-Jamhoriyah district, told IRIN.

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IRAQ: UN Security Council lifts sanctions

The United Nations Security Council on Thursday adopted a new resolution on Iraq lifting sanctions imposed almost 13 years ago following the invasion of Kuwait. The resolution – co-sponsored by the United States, United Kingdom and Spain - also allows for full resumption of oil sales in order to restore economic activity for reconstruction, sets up a government infrastructure under the new US-controlled Authority, and calls on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint a Special Representative. Today's resolution includes among the UN Special Representative's duties "working intensively with the Authority, the people of Iraq, and others concerned to advance efforts to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance, including by working together to facilitate a process leading to an internationally recognised, representative government of Iraq."

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IRAQ: Fayli Kurds face difficult return

"The house returned to its owner. The rights returned to its holder," two sentences written along the streets in and around the Utayfiyah area of western Baghdad, where a community of Fayli Kurds, once estimated at one million, used to live. Though Iraqi citizens, many of whom were earlier exiled to Iran, the group faces immense challenges in their struggle to return. "I remember when Abd al-Rahim's family had to leave from the house next door," said Umm Diya, a neighbour to the Fayli family who had been exiled by Saddam's government in 1982, recalling how they used to live side by side like one family before the government seized their home. "My son was a good friend of their son. We still miss them very much, but we're hoping they will come back soon."

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IRAQ: Focus on orphans

Disney cartoon characters smile and play on the walls of the al-Wazeria Orphanage in Baghdad's Adhamiya district. But the bright world of make believe is in clear contrast to the real life traumas many of the orphanage’s residents have just been through in recent weeks. For days, fighting raged around the orphanage its director, Amira al-Saraf, said. “We were terrified. There were so many different sounds - bombs, missiles, tanks, rockets. There was no electricity and then looters.”

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IRAQ: UXOs injure 350 in Kirkuk

Unexploded ordnance (UXOs), left by Iraqi forces fighting around Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, was injuring an average of 25 people per day following the fall of the city to coalition forces on 10 April, according to an international NGO working on UXO and mine clearance in the region. "Fifty-two people were killed in the first week but deaths and injuries have reduced significantly as UXOs are identified and destroyed," Sean Sutton of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) said from the city of Sulemaniye. There were about 350 UXO and mine-related injuries in and around Kirkuk since the fighting began but accurate figures were very difficult to compile, Sutton added. "MAG knows of 47 deaths going unrecorded in Kirkuk. There is no death

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IRAQ: Vaccination situation critical

The locks were shot off the doors. Then the looters turned over the shelves and boxes, spilling their precious contents across the floors of the building and the concrete courtyard outside. And then they ripped the vital refrigeration units from the cool stores, and with them the defence for millions of Iraqi children against a host of fatal diseases. This is the scene at Baghdad’s Vaccine and Serum Institute, where looters have destroyed a large part of the country’s vaccination supplies. A series of cool rooms packed with vaccines against such diseases as meningitis, measles, hepatitis, polio, tetanus and yellow fever were wrecked in the attack on what was the country’s main vaccination store.

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[ENDS]

Other recent IRAQ reports:

Juvenile drug abuse on the rise, 20/Jan/05

Heavy security for election day, 19/Jan/05

Southerners expect peaceful poll, 17/Jan/05

Fallujah residents angry at city's devastation, 13/Jan/05

Interview with the vice-president of the Higher Independent Election Commission (HIEC), Farid Ayar, 12/Jan/05

Other recent reports:

SOUTHERN AFRICA: IRIN-SA Weekly Round-up 214 for 15-21 January 2005, 21/Jan/05

WEST AFRICA: IRIN-WA Weekly 260 covering 15-21 January 2005, 21/Jan/05

MIDDLE EAST: Weekly round-up Number 5 for 15-21 January 2005, 21/Jan/05

ETHIOPIA: Marley event to highlight HIV/AIDS, war and poverty, 21/Jan/05

HORN OF AFRICA: IRIN-HOA Weekly Round-up 227 for 15-21 January 2005, 21/Jan/05

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