Inching Toward Relief

Security and other concerns hamper the rebuilding of Iraq

About 20 miles south of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, the landscape changes from dense, lush palm groves

and brackish canals to vast expanses of sand interrupted only by an occasional small village. With the ocher-colored sun sagging just below the horizon, Marc Nosbach, a Save the Children worker, knows it is time to wrap up his visit to the summer camp his organization is running and get back to the city before dark.

The camp provides recreational activities to soothe the psychological traumas of war that have scarred many young Iraqis. But it also has a second purpose: to introduce Save the Children to the Iraqis and to build the charity’s image as a group that can be trusted — an increasingly important goal given the tensions that led to bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last month.

Relief work in post-conflict zones has never been easy, but few places have been more difficult for international organizations than Iraq. Instead of the typical relief situation, where security gradually improves, roads and bridges get rebuilt, electricity is restored to enable development, and clean drinking water is available, the situation has been deteriorating in the five months since the United States ended major combat operations. Lack of basic services last week prompted President Bush to ask Congress to provide $20-billion for rebuilding efforts in Iraq, and his administration has made clear it will cost at least $75-billion to rebuild the country.

Burden on Charities

While more than 160 American charities have been collecting money to aid Iraq, according to InterAction, a Washington nonprofit coalition, many have curtailed their efforts since the bombing of the U.N. headquarters. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, and Save the Children have evacuated some of their expatriate staff members, as have the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

The decision by international groups to remove staff members has delayed vital development work in Iraq and placed a larger burden on the remaining organizations.

“The fact that a lot of the other humanitarian organizations have withdrawn their staff makes the overall humanitarian situation worse,” says Andres Kruesi, the Basra director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who has stayed in the country despite the U.N. bombing.

Beyond security concerns, international-relief groups face other challenges. Many say that fund raising in the United States has been slow, as Americans are reluctant to support a rebuilding effort they believe the U.S. government is handling. What’s more, charities must battle a lack of awareness among Iraqis about how independent nonprofit groups operate. Under President Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government kept tight control over what types of institutions it allowed to function, and few, if any, of them — outside of religious organizations, which were infiltrated by the intelligence services — emerged or were able to establish services independent of the eye of a watchful government.

“The concept of nongovernmental organizations is rather new in rural areas and even in the cities,” says Mr. Nosbach, a German national who is Save the Children’s deputy director for programs in Basra. “One of the pillars of our work is to cooperate with local NGO’s, but there are hardly any here so we’ve had to mobilize the community and ask them what they need.” He and his colleagues have been handing out photocopied pamphlets to Iraqis to educate them about the work of Save the Children specifically and the nature of charity work in general.

Kaleidoscope of Chaos

Throughout the southern part of the country, gunfire can be heard most evenings as the city turns midnight black with little power for streetlights. Even with a countrywide 11 p.m. curfew, crime is still prevalent, especially carjackings and kidnappings for ransom.

Charity relief workers never venture outside their walled and guarded compounds or hotels past dark. Even before the bombing, they were forbidden to walk even one city block between the hotels where they were staying. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were dispatched to shuttle staff members short distances, and all trips outside of Basra required convoys to guard against attacks.

“We need security, but through these strict measures we’re becoming isolated from the people we are supposed to be here helping,” says a U.N. humanitarian worker who asked not to be identified.

Save the Children, which has 20 international staff members in Iraq, is one of the few charities that decided to allow most of its non-Iraqi workers to stay in the country even after the bombing.

“It’s important for us to continue to operate here at this time,” says David Bourns, the organization’s country director.

For people like Mr. Nosbach, 29, who has spent seven years working for nongovernmental organizations in Albania, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and Kosovo, Iraq is in a different league — it is a kaleidoscope of chaos.

“There are few worldwide operations where we have a full-time international security manager like we do here,” he says. “We always travel in convoys outside the city, and even then there are threats of banditry,” he adds, noting that on at least one occasion he and his colleagues have been threatened by gun-toting thugs.

To avoid trouble, he travels in a white Toyota Land Cruiser that is custom fitted to handle emergencies. It has full-frame internal roll bars designed to protect occupants from being crushed in a high-speed rollover, a backup high-power emergency radio that can reach to Baghdad five hours north, and anti-mine blankets that insulate the vehicle’s floorboards.

Despite the danger, neither he nor his guards carry weapons in their vehicles, upholding a longstanding policy of Save the Children.

“If we carried guns it would make us more of a target, and we don’t want to be confused with combatants,” says Malcolm Nance, the organization’s security manager. “It’s one of those things all NGO’s here in Iraq agree upon.”

Incremental Steps

Even with the persistent safety concerns, efforts to alleviate human suffering inch forward in Basra. By 10:30 one recent morning, with the temperature already well past 100 degrees, Ali Nasir is doused with sweat as he navigates the crush of flesh at the al-Razi Health Center, where hundreds of destitute Shiite widows and new mothers cloaked in black abayas have brought their children for the basic immunizations the clinic provides free.

Dr. Nasir, who spent six years living and practicing medicine in an Iraqi refugee camp across the border in neighboring Iran, is now back in Iraq and working for Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees, a British charity that aids the traditional inhabitants of the marshlands of southern Iraq.

The al-Razi Health Center, with its five doctors, treats about 300 people per day, teaching them about nutrition and hygiene and offering a variety of basic medical treatments. The clinic was badly looted following the war, with many of its medical books callously torn and tossed into the street, but much of its equipment has been replaced by the World Health Organization and AMAR. The clinic still has no functioning power generator, but it has been able to cope by using special kerosene-burning refrigerators to keep medicines from spoiling

“Step by step we’re getting what we need,” says Dr. Nasir, an Iraqi and former refugee himself. “Still, though, the people of the south are struggling. There is a sense that the U.S. entered Iraq without a postwar plan.”

Lack of Communication

While security is the biggest problem facing nonprofit groups, charity officials are also concerned about their ability to do their jobs effectively and without duplicating the work of giant American contractors who have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal but thus far have not been adept at sharing information about their projects or intentions, aid workers say.

“We don’t want to fight for humanitarian territory,” says Nathalie Couget, who oversees relief operations in southern Iraq for the French charity Première Urgence.

Ms. Couget’s agency, which is partially financed by the European Commission, is primarily concerned with providing clean water and health care. The breakdown in communications among contractors, the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which is governing Iraq, and nonprofit groups is so poor that Première Urgence and other charities working in Basra have stopped attending the weekly humanitarian coordination meetings because they say no information is being shared.

“There has been a lot of frustration,” Mr. Nosbach says. “Some contractors don’t even attend the meetings so there was no way for us to find out what specific tasks they were working on. In other countries we’ve been in, lists were generated of who was doing what and where, but that hasn’t happened here.”

With the vast sums of money already allotted to contractors like Bechtel, which was awarded a $680-million contract to get the rebuilding of Iraq started, humanitarian charities say they are having difficulty winning donations from the public because Americans and others believe that relief work is being handled through the military and businesses that win government contracts.

“Our donors have the perception that contractors were doing all of the schools and health-care facilities, and that has had an impact on our fund raising,” Mr. Nosbach says.

Save the Children hoped to raise several million dollars from private sources but has taken in less than $500,000.

“We’re accepting donations, but we’re not actively campaigning,” says Rudy von Bernuth, who oversees emergency programs for the group. “In fact, we shifted our focus rather deliberately several months ago from private fund raising for Iraq to the Ethiopia famine.”

Mr. von Bernuth says donors have steered clear because “there is not the perception that this is a classic humanitarian crisis, but that is not to say that we don’t have a lot of very real needs that are not being met by the U.S. government or other official donors, most specifically in areas like child protection and child education.”

No Budget Process

American foundations that have historically supported development in the Middle East are also reluctant to pour significant sums into Iraq.

“The Coalition Provisional Authority is facing staggering problems with reconstruction,” says Anthony Richter, a program director at the Soros Foundation. “The U.S. would like the international community to put more money in, but there isn’t really a satisfactory and transparent budget process in place in Iraq yet that would give either the international community or donor governments or other donors a whole lot of clarity about how decisions are being made.”

The Soros Foundation is granting money largely to organizations that monitor how money from the sale of Iraqi oil is used to rebuild the country.

“If we can help Iraqi people play a meaningful role in their own budgeting process,” Mr. Richter says, “and let their voices be heard, then we will have a better indication of how the international community and private donors ought to be allocating their resources.”

Clarifying the Roles

Many humanitarian charities have a tenuous relationship with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the British army in control of the south.

Working under military occupation presents ethical quandaries about the level of cooperation nonprofit groups should exercise with military occupiers. Humanitarian groups typically want to do all they can to act as a neutral provider of services and not align with any governmental entity.

“NGO’s represent in a more direct and compassionate way the connection between the American people and the people of Iraq,” says Kevin Henry, the advocacy director of Care USA, which is one of a few charities in Iraq that still have a full contingent of international staff members. “What our government does in the humanitarian sphere will always be colored in the minds of many by the decision to go to war and all of its consequences. There is a need for a direct people-to-people kind of a system so the people of Iraq know that ordinary Americans actually want them to be able to achieve a better life.”

The line between aid charities and the military is not as clearly delineated as humanitarian workers would like. During the summer, Mr. Nosbach and his security manager, Mr. Nance, say they saw American military personnel driving around Basra in white civilian vehicles of the type commonly driven by aid workers. Mr. Nosbach was so concerned about the implications of his staff members being mistaken for military personnel he contacted the military; it turned out to have been an isolated incident.

Still, Mr. Nosbach and his colleagues fear that Iraqis could easily mistake their vehicles for military convoys, so they are considering emblazoning them with brightly painted children’s artwork rather than keeping the traditional, arms-raised figurative image of a child. However, they worry that even that won’t solve the problem because so many Iraqis have no context to understand the charity’s role in helping the needy.

Even if the security concerns are eased, veteran aid workers say the task of rebuilding Iraq is daunting.

“This isn’t just an emergency scenario, this is a protracted acute emergency that has been ongoing for the last 10 to 20 years,” Mr. Nosbach says.

Some humanitarian workers are concerned that charities and other aid organizations don’t have the financial muscle to provide the effective long-term services that Iraqis require.

“What Iraq needs is lasting institutional development,” says Mr. Kruesi of the International Red Cross.