CAIRO, 5 April 2003 — Nations as diverse as Australia and Bangladesh committed funds this week to provide humanitarian relief to the people of Iraq, but little aid has been delivered due to the ongoing fighting. The United Nations said it had received up until Thursday pledges totaling $1.2 billion in response to its $2.2-billion aid appeal for Iraq.
According to UN official statements, the United States and the European Union have so far committed $435 million and $305 million, respectively, for food and humanitarian efforts. Aid is coming in from everywhere, including poor nations that depend themselves on assistance such as Bangladesh, which announced last Saturday it would send two million dollars of food, medicine, tea, biscuits, drinking water and saline.
But the humanitarian supplies are proving difficult to ferry into Iraq where the food rations, according to the World Food Program, will run out by May unless they are replenished. The Food and Agriculture Organization FAO warned Thursday that war could devastate the rural economy of Iraq at a time when 60 percent of the 25-million population rely entirely on food aid.
The British supply ship Sir Galahad was able to enter Iraq’s only deep water port of Umm Qasr last week, but two Australian ships each carrying 50,000 tons of wheat were still held up outside waiting for mines to be cleared. The UN children’s fund UNICEF said Wednesday it sent a five-truck convoy carrying humanitarian assistance to Safwan, near the border with Kuwait.
However, a giant container ship carrying Australian wheat to Iraq will dock today in Kuwait where its cargo will be discharged and delivered to Iraq as soon as possible, the Australian government said. The freighter, chartered by the Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd., is one of two carrying a total 100,000 tons of wheat supplied by Australia for the humanitarian aid effort in Iraq.
Australia’s parliamentary secretary for aid, Chris Gallus, told AFP Canberra had been liaising with WFP to get the milled wheat into Iraq. One of the ships had been diverted to Kuwait City to allow the earliest possible delivery to Iraq by road.
Gallus said the Australian-chartered ships, whose names have not yet been released, are much bigger and fears remained that there may not yet be adequate deep water clearance for such large vessels at Umm Qasr.
“They are very big ships and although the Sir Galahad could get in, they are a bit concerned about the big ships, about whether the channel has been cleared enough for the big ships,” she said. “They also have to get a pilot, a tug and insurance which I understand has been a great difficulty.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday a convoy carrying medical supplies and water left Kuwait yesterday in an attempt to enter the embattled southern Iraqi city of Basra for the first time. An 11-member team for WFP and UNICEF also entered Iraq yesterday from Kuwait, for the first time since the withdrawal of UN international humanitarian staff, days before the war began on March 20.
The team will assess humanitarian needs in Umm Qasr, the WFP’s emergency coordinator for Iraq Russell Ulrey told AFP in Kuwait City. The move comes as the United Nations reactivated last week the “oil for food” humanitarian program, suspended with the withdrawal of its staff. But the diplomatic wrangling continued over the contentious issue of rebuilding Iraq, and indirectly managing its oil wealth.
The EU and Russia are seeking a greater role for the United Nations than Washington is ready to allow. The EU would only give its full backing to the postwar reconstruction of Iraq if the process was authorized by a UN resolution, Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou, whose country holds the revolving European presidency, said Thursday in Brussels after talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an article published Sunday in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that the United States and Britain will place Iraq’s future oil revenue in a UN-supervised account. He did not elaborate but his comments seemed to indicate that the coalition will be in charge of the Iraqi oil sector at least for an interim period.
Meanwhile, aid groups keen to guard their neutrality said yesterday they had accepted identity cards from a Kuwait-based relief body linked to the US military to enable them to enter Iraq, after agreeing a compromise on their design. The cards will not be required for UN staff or the ICRC but will be for non-governmental organizations wanting to cross from Kuwait to Iraq, an official of the body told Reuters in Kuwait.
The card issued by the Humanitarian Operations Center (HOC) says “Humanitarian Aid Worker” and is white, a change from an original proposal that the card be yellow and green like the HOC cards issued to its own mainly military staffers. “Initially there was tremendous resistance to this idea. We were concerned that that badge would make it look like we work for the US military. But the card we’ve settled on is white and is tied to our individual passport numbers and not tied to the military in any way,” an aid worker said.
