DEAD SEA, Jordan, 20 July 2005 — Iraq urged the international community yesterday to deliver immediately on its aid pledges and warned more delays would further destabilize the troubled country and threaten global security. The international community has pledged billions of dollars to help rebuild Iraq but only a small amount of that has actually been spent.
Concerns about the sustainability of the post-Saddam Hussein political system, violence and widespread corruption have led donors to be cautious about implementing their pledges. “Unless we move fast and effectively in the next few months we will have very serious problems on our hands,” Planning Minister Barham Salih told Reuters.
“Failure is not an option because it will have dire consequences for the Iraqi people and for the region and for world security.” Salih was speaking on the second day of a meeting of 60 countries and international organizations, to follow up on conferences in Madrid and Tokyo over the last two years at which they pledged $14 billion.
The meeting includes countries such as Germany and France that opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq that removed Saddam and his Baath Party from power. Iraqi and US officials say donors are concerned about graft and mismanagement and disruption from anti-US insurgents targeting efforts to revive the economy.
The United States has separately allocated more than $18 billion, but progress on American funded projects in Iraq has been also slow with money being diverted to security. “While we remain grateful to the United States for what it has done by way of helping Iraqis, but Iraq must move beyond an American project and become an international project to help the people of Iraq overcome the challenge,” Salih said.
The Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank has signed a $500-million loan and grant agreement with Iraq to help reconstruction, Jordan’s state-run Petra news agency reported. The agreement was signed Monday on the sidelines of the meeting. Iraqi and IDB officials said the deal would be a bilateral agreement not included in the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI) which is chaired by Canada.
Christiaan Poortman, the World Bank’s vice president for the Middle East, said a monitoring and evaluation system was being set up to help channel larger aid volumes. “The international community is perhaps even more aware now than it was two years ago that we need to show results on the ground and that the hearts and minds of the people need to be satisfied,” Poortman said.
Iraq’s economy continues to suffer in the meantime. Iraq’s central bank chief economist Mudhir Salih Kasim says basic services, such as water and electricity, are in their worst state in decades. The World Bank has extended a $500 million soft loan for Iraqi infrastructure projects with an interest-free grace period of more than 10 years.
Meanwhile, interior ministers from Iraq and its neighbors met in Istanbul yesterday to discuss ways of preventing the infiltration of insurgents into the war-torn country and a possible regional security cooperation pact. “The most urgent issue we face is probably border controls,” Turkey’s Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu told the opening session.
“We may have differing opinions on the scope of foreign involvement in the bloodshed and chaos in Iraq, but none of us can deny the existence of foreign links to the terrorism there,” he said. Baghdad has long complained of its neighbors tolerating Islamic militants infiltrating Iraq to join the insurgency against Iraqi forces and the US-led occupation, which has led to numerous civilian deaths as well.
