By Jeremy Lovell
AlerlnetMarch 18, 2003
Two of the leading aid and human rights agencies insisted on Tuesday that the United Nations take over interim administration of Iraq from the United States after a war expected to start within hours. Oxfam and Amnesty International, urging that protection of the civilian population be put at the heart of military planning, said it would be bad for peace and the safety of aid workers if the U.S. remained in control.
"We are particularly concerned that the United Nations takes over the civilian administration as soon as possible. It is very important for regional stability," Oxfam director Barbara Stocking told reporters. The Bush administration has taken some bipartisan congressional criticism over the secrecy of its postwar plans for Iraq.
The Pentagon said earlier this month that the United States plans to use the Iraqi regular army to help rebuild a postwar Iraq and is recruiting and hiring Iraqis living in America and Europe to play a key temporary role in the reconstruction.
Stocking said vital delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of Iraqi civilians also had to be run under the mantle of the United Nations rather than the U.S. Army because aid agencies had to be seen to be neutral. "We have to work under the auspices of the U.N. not U.S. military command," she said. "We cannot be seen to be under the control of the military or even closely connected with it."
The United States and Britain are expected to attack Iraq within days after abandoning diplomacy in the face of a French refusal to agree to any U.N. resolution that contained an ultimatum for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm. Stocking, whose organisation is preparing a refugee camp in neighbouring Syria capable immediately of taking up to 20,000 people and another in Jordan for 10,000, said no one knew just how many might flee Iraq as fighting erupted.
She said Oxfam, which in the specialised era of modern day aid concentrates on water and sanitation, had water equipment for up to one million people which could be moved within 48 hours from its Oxfordshire depot in central England.
Amnesty International U.K. director Kate Allen said the United Nations had calculated that the conflict could produce up to two million refugees and 10 million people in need of humanitarian aid. As many as 16 million Iraqis rely on food handouts for survival.
Although some were known to have stocked up on supplies, others had not been able to and the longer the fighting lasted the greater would be the urgency to get food, water and medical supplies to them, Stocking said. "There could be extremely large numbers, but we really don't know," she added, noting that matters would be further complicated if, as expected, bridges, roads and power stations were destroyed during the anticipated attack.
Stocking urged the allied forces massed on the Iraqi border to abide by the Geneva Convention and avoid hitting power plants which could both cut supplies of water and lead to the creation of disease-ridden sewage lakes because pumps no longer worked. Aid workers said matter were made worse by reports that many Iraqis had stockpiled fuel in their homes. If bombing started fires and cut water supplies there could be a disaster.
Amnesty's Allen called on the allies to hold back from using cluster bombs, for fear that many of the powerful bomblets dispersed by them would fail to explode on impact and would then lay around for years.
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