BAGHDAD/GENEVA, 10 July 2003 — The global anti-war movement announced yesterday it had established a center in Baghdad to monitor abuses by the US-led coalition forces occupying Iraq.
The “International Occupation Watch Center” will investigate and report on abuses such as “illegal detentions, the dismissal of more than 100,000 employees, improper searches, illegal seizures of properties,” according to Ted Lewis of non-governmental organization Global Exchange.
“There were 40 million people in the streets against the war,” said Medea Benjamin of United for Peace and Justice, an organization that groups some 600 anti-war non-governmental organizations. “This is a reorganization of the anti-war movement to say ‘no’ to the occupation,” she told AFP.
Coalition forces “must provide basic security and deliver basic services,” Lewis of Global Exchange added. On the political level, Benjamin said the 25-member “transitory governing council” which US overseer of Iraq Paul Bremer said he will unveil in the next two weeks would be nothing more than a “puppet government.”
“A government selected by the coalition in a totally secretive process (is) a puppet government,” she said, lamenting the lack of transparency that was also applied to business contracts to help rebuild Iraq. “They give the contracts to US corporations with close ties with the Bush administration,” she said.
Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency yesterday said that it was ruling out the mass repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees this year because of growing insecurity in the country.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will put the priority on small scale returns this year aimed mainly at relieving the refugee burden in neighboring countries, UNHCR Iraq envoy Dennis McNamara said after his second mission to Iraq in a month. He will urge Britain, France, Germany and other European countries, which want to start the repatriation of tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers they host, to be patient at a meeting in Geneva next Monday.
“I don’t think refugee returns to Iraq are going to be a massive, large scale exercise this year, it is I hope a process where we’ll lay the ground work in 2003 for larger scale returns in 2004,” McNamara said.
He highlighted worsening security in Iraq, particularly around Baghdad, disputes over property in northern Kurdish areas, poor services and the country’s dependency on aid, as well as the destabilizing impact of returns on the volatile political situation.
The situation is “highly tense, volatile and dangerous” McNamara said after his second two week trip around the country, and meetings with the US-led provisional authority, its head Paul Bremer, as well as neighboring countries.
With attacks on US and British troops, sabotage of water and electricity supplies and travel restrictions, “Iraq is not post-conflict, it is a continuing conflict at low level,” McNamara insisted. “We must make the first returns work, because if the first ones come unstuck then the whole return movement, as we have learned over many decades, will likely be blocked,” he added.
