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Iraqi reconstruction frustration boils
over
By Charles Recknagel
This weekend's rioting in Iraq's second city of
Basra underlines how frustrated Iraqis have grown over
the fuel and electricity shortages that continue to
plague much of the country. That frustration was evident
in the shouts of a crowd of several thousand people who
burned tires and hurled rocks at British troops over the
weekend.
British officials who administer Basra,
a city of half a million people, say the two days of
protests and rock-throwing began when customers turned
violent over prices at a local gasoline station. The
customers, who had been waiting for hours in a
kilometers-long queue, accused the station's owner of
charging exorbitant prices.
But when coalition
troops arrived to quell the situation, the violence
quickly spread to other fuel stations and then across
the city. British troops responded by firing rubber
bullets to disperse the crowds.
Behind the gap
between popular frustration and official optimism lies a
complicated reconstruction task in which progress is
being continually hampered by Iraq's poor security
situation. In Basra, energy production has been hit hard
by theft at every stage of the process of refining crude
oil into consumer fuels. The thefts have combined with
periodic deliberate acts of sabotage by anti-occupation
forces to render Iraq unable to meet its domestic energy
needs, even though Iraq's oil fields are now producing
enough surplus for exports.
Certainly, the
sabotage has kept the situation boiling. On Sunday, a
Nepalese security guard in Basra delivering mail for the
United Nations was killed by a mob that stopped his car.
Two Iraqis were also reported killed by gunfire during
rioting, though it is not clear who fired the shots.
The violence, now subsided, was some of the
worst to hit an Iraqi city since coalition forces
toppled Saddam Hussein in April. But, unlike earlier
incidents in Baghdad and some northern cities - where
groups opposed to the occupation have often organized
protests - it seems to have had no political overtones.
Many protesters told reporters they were not supporters
of Saddam but ordinary Iraqis fed up with persistent
shortages of fuel, electricity and other basic supplies.
The shortages of gasoline have forced people in
Basra and many other parts of Iraq to choose between
waiting at a gas station for as long as 24 hours or
buying fuel on the black market. On the black market, a
liter of gasoline can cost up to 50 times the usual
price.
At the same time, shortages of cooking
gas (liquefied petroleum gas) have caused the price of a
canister to soar on the black market to 16 times the
normal rate. The prices of kerosene and diesel have also
jumped.
Iraqis widely blame shortages on what
they say is the US-led coalition's failure to deliver on
promises to revive the country's economy. The economy,
reduced to subsistence levels by more than a decade of
United Nations sanctions, was further weakened by the
three-week-long war and subsequent looting.
But
US officials say they are making progress as fast as is
possible under difficult conditions. Secretary of State
Colin Powell summed up the progress for reporters last
month by saying: "There are a lot of good things that
are happening. Children are going back to schools. All
the hospitals are open. No one is starving. Slowly but
surely the infrastructure is being put back in place."
One problem is the tapping of oilfield pipelines
by criminal gangs. Taking advantage of the coalition
forces' inability to patrol hundreds of kilometers of
pipelines, the gangs routinely drill holes in pipes to
siphon off crude by the truckload. The trucks then drive
across the desert into Kuwait or Jordan, where the oil
is sold.
In one measure of the scale of such
operations, US troops recently confiscated a dozen fuel
trucks assembled on the Iraqi side of the Jordanian
border. This month, US authorities announced they had
detained about 150 people and seized some 100 fuel
trucks in a two-week period.
At the same time,
gangs have taken advantage of the poor security
situation to resume smuggling oil by sea down the
Persian Gulf. Such smuggling was rampant under Saddam
Hussein's regime, which organized the activity to break
UN sanctions on sales outside of the oil-for-food
program and earn additional revenue.
Two days
ago, British naval forces patrolling the waters off
Iraq's southern port of Umm Qasr said they had
intercepted a boat smuggling 1,100 tons of oil - the
largest seizure since the end of the war. The boat, the
Navstar, was registered in Panama and had a Ukrainian
crew.
The commander of the warship that made the
seizure, Commander Graeme Mackay, said the crew had been
arrested and sent to Umm Qasr. "The boarding team went
on board and arrested the crew and master, and that crew
- along with our coalition partners - has now been
diverted back to Umm Qasr," Mackay said. "That very much
demonstrates the coalition's resolve to ensure that the
Iraqi oil is there for the Iraqi people, that it is not
taken illegally from Iraq. "
The British officer
left unexplained how the Navstar, a boat that previously
had been caught smuggling oil during the Hussein era,
was able to load the crude in coalition-controlled Iraq.
Beyond the smuggling of oil - which reduces
supplies to refineries - thieves also frequently pull
down electric power lines to sell the copper wiring as
scrap. Coalition officials say power lines are also a
favorite target for saboteurs intent on shutting down
the electrical grid to bring refining and other
activities to a halt.
The New York Times reports
that theft, sabotage, and the poor condition of
equipment is limiting Iraq's three major refineries - at
Basra, Bayji, and Baghdad - to producing just 18 million
to 22 million liters a day of gasoline, kerosene and
diesel fuel, combined. To meet consumer demand, the
paper says, the refineries would need to produce 37
million to 40 million liters a day. To offset the
gasoline shortfall, the coalition currently imports
about 6 million liters daily.
After this
weekend's fuel riots in Basra, reconstruction officials
said they were working to install new generators for the
city's refinery and to repair damaged power lines.
One unidentified official also told the Times
that if shortages persist, the officials "would consider
increasing gasoline imports and beginning significant
imports of kerosene and diesel".
Copyright
2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,
1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC
20036.
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