The province that aid forgot

Helicopter trip from Baghdad to Diwaniyah

Diwaniyah - In one word, it’s- underdeveloped.

Diwaniyah, in the center of the agrarian Al Qadisiyah province, is irrigated by the Euphrates river and from the air looks like a lush patchwork of green and brown farmlands. But it hasn't received much developmental assistance from either Iraqi or USG agencies. It hasn't brought enough attention to itself get the flood of agencies that follow in the wake of Army brigades. There are no vast oil reserves here; there hasn’t been a lot insurgent activity; there’s no ground swell of separatist movements. As a result, Diwaniyah has not received as much aid as anyone would like, a local Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) representative said.

Diwaniyah’s main economy is agricultural, primarily rice and wheat, and it has suffered from the same challenges as most of Iraq’s agricultural sector- a country-wide drought, a lack of application of irrigation technology and prices undercut by imported produce. One report said more than 80 percent of wholesale produce comes from Iran or Syria. Wheat and rice farming are still heavily subsidized by the central government.

Local Provincial Reconstruction Teams based out of the Forward Operating Base reported many challenges, among them, the remnants of a centralized economy that has slowed agricultural development, and a mentality among young people that the only good jobs are in the government.

They reported a widening gulf between the “haves and have not’s” that can’t be closed without solid public administration improvements. But, “How can you have private sector development without rule of law regarding land use and land rights?” one PRT team member asked. In other words, how can you convince a company to build a factory here, if they're not sure how they will legally retain rights to the land it's built on?

“We’re on the cusp of progress,” one team member said. “Diwaniyah was the last province to get a PRT, and now the PRT has been on the ground for a little less than a year. We’ve made great strides in public diplomacy, establishing good connections with the local government. We would like to get out into the private sector.”

Translation- The newly elected local government realizes they'd be foolish not to at least pretend to cooperate with the Americans to get some free project money. They are now making the effort, instead of taking directions from Iranian clerics like the last governor, but so far we've had a lot of meetings, drank a lot of Chai and shook hands and no substatantial projects have been completed.

The Deputy DG for electricity distribution in the province explained a situation with an electrical substation that had been built with US Gov't. funding but the Ministry had not yet connected the lines. In other words, another multi-million dollar project left stranded by a lack of continuity between the US agency which built it, and the Iraqi one set to administer it.

The Deputy DG reported that Diwaniyah gets an average of about eight to 10 hours of electricity per day. He said he gets a daily call from the central ministry when to cut the power. Sometimes the call time varies slightly. But it always comes. “Life without electricity is so bad; poor people can’t afford it,” he said.

The Deputy DG also reported that there are approximately 100,000 registered electricity consumers in the province who pay an electric bill, but he couldn't say how many more users tap directly into the lines and don’t pay for electricity. He said sometimes the ministry goes around and cuts the pirate lines, but they always reappear because there's not enough availability.
Local staff of the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works listed many challenges affecting their work. Corruption is a serious issue here- contractors pay government officials for first-class bid status and when they get the contract they sell it to subcontractors who implement a poorer quality project. Engineers in local government who own construction companies bid on projects and award themselves the contracts. Oversight engineers are often bribed by contractors in exchange for favorable reviews.

Due to a lack of oversight the city council members will often decide to approve funding for each others projects, an example of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, not based on actual project worth or benefit. As a result there’s no connection between the projects approved and the quality of the projects, and there’s no incentive for supervising engineers to report on low-quality projects, when they fear punishment from the integrity committee for making a bad report.

Contractors experiencing some of same mental health problems as soldiers in Iraq

Baghdad- The ratio of soldiers to contractors in Iraq is one-to-one. Since the beginning of Iraq war it's been widely reported that the Defense and State Departments have hired contractors, deployed and billed by contracting companies, to do everything from wash soldiers clothes to advising senior level Iraqi ministry officials.

It's estimated that 126,000 contractors are now working in Iraq. A new study found that given the approximately 13% soldiers returning from Iraq who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it's likely that many contractors will also be experiencing combat-related mental health problems.

Part of me says, Who cares? Contractors make at least three times as much as soldiers do, and even though many contractors are former soldiers, who've already done their time in Iraq, and have, "wised up" to the game, they still arrive in country by choice and are not putting their life on the line like the average 20-year old soldier is.

The other part of me says, these guys, and they're overwhelmingly guys, and older, the average age of respondant to the study was 43, are the untold story. The study, completed On-line by seventy-nine contractors, showed a third of contractors had post-traumatic stress disorder in the moderate to severe range. There were high levels of depression, psychological distress and excessive weekly alcohol consumption. No kidding.

The problem, in this analysis, is the category of contractors here is too broad and actually spans categories from mechanic to international lawyer. While the average blue collar contractor, probably works on a U.S. military base and has been more exposed to combat-related stresses, the average white collar contractor, maybe a former officer, more likely a career international development professional, is more likely to suffer from too many drinks or missing the wife and kids and eating too many desserts.

I'm not trying to downplay the stresses of living and working in Iraq. There are some challenges all contractors have in common- very little personal space, chronic absences causing family problems and huge disparities in the men to women ration, causing frustrations and sexual harassment issues. Contractors have less access to psychological counseling and other mental health resources than soldiers because their for-profit-companies, unlike the U.S. Military, aren't anywhere near as under the public/ media microscope.

As a contractor myself, looking out from inside the fishbowl, I see people slowly becoming alcoholics and more confessing to being on the precipice of divorce. The confinement behind T-walls and having to be escorted outside by personal security creates a sort of regressive, co-dependent clientele. Many would like to do more to interact directly with Iraqis. But very competent people are also freaked out by the ever-changing winds of violence here.

In May there were several devastating IED attacks outside of Hillah and Fallaujah. The Hillah attack killed three private security contractors and the one in Fallaujah, which supposedly struck a reconstruction team, killed at least one U.S. Army officer and a prominent State Department official who once headed the Illinois Commerce Commission. These attacks combined with the latest news that an American construction contractor was found with his throat slit inside the International Zone, have fanned the already enclosed paranoia that Iraq is sliding into sectarian chaos.

I recently met a freelance journalist who has been in Iraq on and off since 2003. He has never travelled with personal security, and although he admits to being scared out of his mind a few times, he's still a working journalist who says Baghdad is his home. And he's not talking about living in a compound. Yes, he's probably lucky. He was once taken by the Mahdi militia in for questioning. They let him go probably because he had no military/ U.S. gov't. ID. It makes me think the rest of us contractors represent US foreign policy, whether we like it or not. That makes us a target and also a large set of tools whose utility is very hard to measure from inside these walls.