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Iraqis suffer from contaminated drinking water, inadequate hospitals,power cuts and funding shortage

by Open-Publishing - Monday 18 April 2005
42 comments

Edito Water Wars and conflicts Environment

Iraqis suffer from contaminated drinking water, inadequate hospitals, power cuts and funding shortage, meanwhile the US is building itself permanent bases and ignoring billions of missing Iraqi money.

Iraq blighted by poor services

Two years since the fall of Baghdad, there is deep frustration among Iraqis at the state of public services.

Stagnant water and litter on the streets of Baghdad
Stagnant water lies on the street in Baghdad’s Sadr city
There are continuing power cuts in much of the country and hospitals struggle to provide adequate treatment.

Sewage often pours untreated into rivers which many Iraqis have to drink from.

Look around the Iraqi capital, and the most obvious change over the past two years has been the mushrooming of concrete anti-blast barriers.

In most areas there is little visible sign of reconstruction and residents across the city have power for half the day at most.

Funding shortage

Electricity workers recently held a demonstration to denounce violence and sabotage.

Even the so-called treated water or clean water is not actually clean - it is contaminated with sewage water
Humam Misocni

Guide to life in Iraq
There have been repeated insurgent attacks on power stations and pylons.

Insecurity has been a major hindrance to the reconstruction effort, but speak to Iraqi officials and they say they have another major problem - money.

Humam Misocni of the public works ministry likens it to a piece of ice in the hot summer sun.

"We are crippled because we don’t have enough funding. Last year we started 15 new water treatment plants all over Iraq. This year we don’t have the funds to build new ones," he says.

The Americans have allocated $18.4bn dollars for reconstruction in Iraq, but Mr Misocni says more than 70% of the money his ministry was originally granted has now been reallocated to spending on defence and security.

And so dozens of much-needed projects have had to be scrapped.

Preventable disease

Iraq can’t now produce all of the drinking water it needs.

"Our people are drinking water either directly from rivers or wells, even the so-called treated water or clean water is not actually clean," says Mr Misocni.

"It is contaminated with sewage water."

And that means children, in particular, are getting sick.

Preventable diseases are killing people here, two years since the war.

Statistics are hard to come by, but one official told the BBC that more than one in 10 babies born here will die before they are five.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mi...

Forum posts

  • GOD BLESS THE IRAQI’S!! They are great people and don’t deserve the wrath of the Americans.

    • I guess this is the good news that is coming out of Iraq that Fox News keeps telling us about. Everyday Fox says how wonderful things are over there, of course they never let any Iraqis talk on camera about how things are there, so I guess this is the GOOD news. I would really hate to think about what they consider BAD news.

    • "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"

  • "Iraqis suffer from contaminated drinking water, inadequate hospitals,power cuts and funding shortage."

    That’s been the case for 30 years. At least things now have a chance of getting better, if the jihadists will stop cutting the heads off of anyone who tries to turn on the lights and install modern plumbing. Bloody barbarians.

    Keep cheering for the makers of internet snuff-flicks, you sorry lot.

    • In reading reports of Iraq before the war, it seems that they did have power, water, fully functioning hospitals.(Of course US sanctions were destroying many lives, you know the inhumane sanctions placed on Iraq to prevent them from building weapons which incidentally worked so we didn’t need to attack them) Also before the war the Iraqis still had their homes, gardens,schools...they weren’t being bombed or shot while driving past 7pm so I believe the vast majority do not feel their lives are getting better.

      You seem to have the idea that Iraqis can’t have these things without US. Actually Iraq is full of professionals perfectly capable of rebuilding Iraq themselves. We should pay for the damage and leave.

    • The minute we leave, those professionals will be murdered by the Taliban-style "courts" the jihadists set up in Fallujah before the battle. Right now, those professionals ARE risking—and losing—their lives to rebuild Iraq, even with US troops trying to guard them. How long would they last without Coalition forces? Have you forgotten Zarkawi’s pledge to kill anyone associated with democracy in Iraq? Where does that leave the 8,000,000 Iraqis who voted?

      Do you really believe press reports on how swell life was in Iraq before the invasion? Did you know that CNN admitted to withholding stories of torture and summary executions for a decade so that Saddam would let them broadcast with a view of Baghdad behind them? (Their editor admitted as much in the NY Times.)

      It’s good to rely on press stories cleared by Mohammed Sayeed Al-Sahaf. (see www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com--it’s hilarious.)

      We can’t cut and run now any more than we could in Germany and Japan in 1946.

    • We never should have went there in the first place.

    • We don’t know that, and we couldn’t believe one word from Bush/Cheney/Condi liars that they are. So why don’t we just try it, and let them live their lives without our keeping things aggitated. It wouldn’t be any worse, and would likely be a lot better.

    • Better to the the Taliban Jihadist Courts do the murdering than the U.S. military which should never have gone there in the first place. We should admit our sins and ask for forgiveness.

  • "Genocide accomplished" mein Fuehrer. Heil Bush!

    • Before the US sponsored sanctions in 1991. Iraq was one of the most developed nations in the middle East, if not the world. It had a first rate education system, superb utilities, and a health service that was the envy of many a nation.

      When the present occupants descendants of the US were running around in cloths and living in mud huts in squalor in Europe, Iraq was the cradle of civilisation. They invented mathmatics, astronomy and the shopping mall to name but a few.

    • no argument with your second paragraph, but so what?

    • You sure love Nazi imagery. It’s pretty creepy. You should get yourself checked out.

    • Just highlighting the tragedy of a relatively new nation with hardly any history or culture, killing and maiming its way through a beautiful country in pursuit of materialistic gain for a few ignorant draft dodging billionaires. Thats all.

    • I think what this message says is that Iraq was doing just fine until America came along.

    • Americans have always been bad imperialists, not in the markets that they run, but in the countries that they leave in desolation. Look at America’s involvement in the Phillipines over a century ago, and then in Cuba. The government of the United States loves a good dictator. Do you really think that Iraq will be any different, if, and when we leave? Of course, what we leave behind, the mess and the poverty, will be largely ignored once our glorious storm troopers leave.

    • USA = longest running democracy in the world. Not bad for an upstart. I guess that’s why people like you insist the USA is a fascist state.

      What will you do when Bush leaves the office per the Constitution, and you are proven wrong?

    • Yeah, except for 300,000 souls in mass graves, secret police, rape rooms, etc., Iraq was doing great before the invasion.

      America always leaves countries in ruins? Really? I thought Germany and Japan were doing okay.

    • Do you have any facts to back up your claims, or are you just a parrot for Bushco? For your information, the C.I.A. was in the same adventures with every Saddam atrocity they worked hand-in-hand any we drove the get-away-car. You do not want to know that, tuff. And Saddam is in prison, so what the hell are we still doing there? You’re a moron, go troll your missinformation somewhere else.

    • What will you do when you get a brain. You’ll have to quit your day job being a stooge for Bush.

    • boy, you really skewered me on your rapier-sharp wit, there. Do you have a substantive response, too?

    • facts? How about this:

      http://massgraves.info/

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2930739.stm

      http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1565608,00.html

      etc. etc.

      "C.I.A. was in the same adventures with every Saddam atrocity they worked hand-in-hand any we drove the get-away-car"

      Do YOU have any evidence to support this?

    • It is well known history, I am not going to try to teach you the facts anymore than I would try to re-invent the wheel, but if you really want to KNOW the TRUTH, you can go to Google and do a Saddam Hussein search and you will have to do a little reading but link to the ones that mention his partnership with the C.I.A., Rumsfeld, Bush I, Baker, etc. any others in the present Bush cabinet. It will take some of your time to gleen the facts, but Fox news can do without you for a day.

      The British parliment, before the Iraq war, cited documents about the U.S. and Britian supplying Saddam with the weapons he used against the Kurds and how it exposed their secret involvement along with the U.S. in years of supporting Saddam. For a democratic government, it is shameful what they really are up to and really have done. If it were right or moral, why is it all hidden from the American people?

    • Right wing morons love to point out WWII and Japan and Germany. What they don’t understand is that those countries were given massive support for rebuilding, including a complete revamping of the governmental systems of both countries. In Japan, for example, MacArthur started a process of returning land ownership back to the peasants. We also recognized that the former regimes of both countries could serve their countries well. We didn’t depose the emperor in Japan. We worked with him. Likewise, in Germany, we often found ourselves working with former Nazis. We understood the benefit of socialism to devastated economies. After all, after WWII it was with the Roosevelt administration—even after he had died—that we were able to build these countries again—a government that iniitiated a series of reforms that Republicans have systematically attempted to dismantle over the years. We had more boots on the ground in those countries. We were able to secure the peace. All of this is so obvious to anyone who has read Machiavelli’s The Prince, for example. Every mistake that could be made in Iraq has been made. Read the first few chapters of The Prince and you will understand this for yourself. The war in Iraq is not Germany or Japan. It is a colonial war with a religion and culture that we have little understanding or tolerance for. The problem with Republicans these days is that they have abandoned reason for belief. You can hope that Iraq turns out the way you want all you want, but the reality in Iraq is quite different from your set of beliefs. The right wing just may devastate this earth in the pursuit of their wild hopes.

    • I don’t deny the connections between the US and Saddam. I also don’t deny the connections between the US and Stalin’s USSR, especially around the early 40’s. International politics make for stange bedfellows. What’s your point? Hypocrisy? I can think of worse sins. If a convicted murderer writes a book explaining how horrible a crime murder is, should we tar him as a hypocrite?

      Do you have any evidence that the US helped Saddam AFTER he gassed the Kurds? A lot of countries have helped a lot of other countries get WMD, but WMD has actually been used very seldom. For example, as France’s asst. defense minister, Chirac played a big role in promoting France’s sale to Saddam of a nuclear reactor. Since the no-blood-for-oil crowd is eager to stipulate that Iraq is one big oil pump, what do you suppose Saddam wanted with that reactor? Are we to believe that Chirac’s a good enough salesman to sell ice to the Eskimos? At least, around the time the Kurds got gassed, the US and Britain got the memo that Saddam’s not a good guy. Chirac protected him to the end.

    • Yeah, I know about the Marshall Plan. I also know that people in your camp whine about every reconstruction dollar spent in Iraq, saying it could be better used to buy free false teeth for everybody in America, or whatever. You can’t have it both ways.

      Iraq is not Germany or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or Grenada or Lebanon or Panama. I was responding to someone who set up the premise that America oppresses and exploits every country it defeats, remember? I just knocked that premise down, that’s all. (The person to whom I responded said "Americans have always been bad imperialists . . . in the countries that they leave in desolation.")

      I’ve read my Machi. My favorite point he makes is the one about how its best to avoid making enemies, but if you do make enemies, you damned well better treat those enemies like enemies.

      You missed one huge difference between post-war Iraq and post-war Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan were totally, completely, and utterly destroyed. Germany was cut in half. 16 million Germans fled eastern Germany to get behind US/UK lines, the largest mass-migration in history. American and Brit bombers had flattened every city in Germany, and the Red Army burned whatever was left. Japan got double-nuked, for God’s sake, but actually lost far more people to firebombing campaigns. Hysterical rhetoric about Fallujah = Dresden notwithstanding, nothing like that happened in Iraq. (You may have noticed that on the day Baghdad fell, there was still a Baghdad for lots of people to be driving around gawking at film crews. Compare to newsreel footage of Berlin after V-E day.) I’m sure we could rebuild Iraq more efficiently if we had waged total war against it first, but I’m not for that. It’s not necessary in this case.

    • Read Iraqgate its all in there......

    • Are you really so immature in your mind that you think the illegal attack on Iraq should be compared to WWII??? You are comparing apples and oranges. Supposedly our reason to go to Iraq was to change the government, not to wipe out the country as a huge enemy of the U.S., or don’t you remember??? To proclaim that we are doing such a good job at not wiping them off the face of the earth is just stupid along with the rest of your argument that goes along with it. Come down out of the clouds, try to follow along in truth based reality. I know it is hard for someone with your particular condition, but it is so boring for the rest of us to hear you rant on about bullshit.

      IF you want to know some history on Iraq and the US involvement there read the article on Iraqgate, it is all documented and factually correct, it is a bit lengthy but if you really care about the truth (?) it will help you with your further arguments in the future, and spare us your uninformed rant.

    • Another myopic statement from the poorly U.S. educated. Greece and Roman democracies lasted far longer than this "upstart" (what a term) nation has even existed. Greece alone had nearly one thousand years of democratic rule. So as usual you think ignorant doctrine learned in a backward educational system in a "Republic" that has never until recent times used the term "democracy" to describe our form of government. You need to go somewhere an get some education, and then you will know that our’s is a republic.

    • You’re trying to argue that I’m stupid and don’t know history, but in doing so, you apparently failed to notice that I used the present tense. "Longest running" is present tense. I wasn’t talking about Greece and Rome. My point stands, unless you can think of a longer-running representative democracy in the world today.

    • Its not a democracy though is it ? I mean, when less than 15% of the population vote for Bush, who is then fraudulently given office.
      I’m sure the US populace would like a say in whether they want to become future targets,just because an unelected half wit goes round the world bombing countries ?

    • Number one fact USA is not the longest running democracy in the world, you dolt. Try Iceland for a kick off. Typical of the bloody americans to rewrite history as per usual.

    • Yes and you’re still wrong. Iceland has a democracy older than yours, you muppet.

    • Actually, you might have me on Iceland. I know they’ve had an elected government for a long time. I’ll check on that.

      So you think everything was peace and love in Iraq before the US-imposed sanctions. How do the 1,000,000+ people who died in the Iraq/Iran war in the 80’s tie into this? What about the rape rooms and torture chambers? Abu Ghraib is now a symbol of American abuse of prisoners, but the reason the place literally stinks is because the drains in the concrete floors are stopped up with decades of clotted, rotting blood. Any comment?

    • See above post re: Iceland. Maybe I’ll eat a little crow. It’s good for me, very lean. ;> Still, before bashing America outright, you might ask yourself why so many people are willing to risk their lives to get here.

      I’m using "democracy" as shorthand for "republic," but you know what I mean.

      You can continue to nurse conspiracy theories about unelected presidents all day, but that doesn’t change the fact that Bush got more votes in the last election than Kerry, Gore, Clinton, or Bush (41) ever did. Much is made on this site about Ohio, but consider Kerry’s margins in these states: New Hampshire (9,274), Wisconsin (11,384), and Oregon (76,232). These three razor-thin wins gave Kerry 21 electoral votes. If they had gone for Bush, he would have won the electoral college vote by a landslide. The election was that close. See these sites:

      http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

      http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/scorecard/

      One of the major flaws of the logic here on Bellaciao is the assumption that only the insidious forces that back Bush steal votes when they can. Traditionally, both of our mainstream parties have done as much as they could possibly get away with. (Remember VP Gore collecting $5,000 checks from a bunch of Buddhist monks who had all taken a vow of poverty? Anything fishy there? What about the affidavit in St. Louis that a federal judge used to grant an emergency injunction to keep a pro-Gore district’s polls open 4 hours late during the 2000 election, and then it turns out that the affidavit was signed by a guy who was—oops—dead?) Vote fraud is bad, but it happens. Touch-screen voting is a terrible idea, even if only because it makes people like me who don’t know much about computers suspicious.

      People are free to choose not to vote, and many don’t vote, but turnout was actually up a little this past election. The election was very close, but Kerry lost. Statisticians nerd-wrestling the numbers can’t change that. All they "prove" is that Kerry "should" have won, but y’all believe that already.

      Maybe the reason y’all are so bent on discrediting America’s democracy is because otherwise, you’d have to hate the American public who elected Bush, and you’re reluctant to do that. If you conclude that we’re a bunch of duped fools living in a blissful Matrix, at least maybe we’re not as evil as you think Bush is. (I’m trying to be charitable, here.) Ultimately, you may have to face the unpleasant reality that at least some non-diabolical Americans voted for Bush because we weighed the merits of the two candidates and concluded that he was a better choice between the two. God forbid, you may even ask yourselves why we might think that.

      See ya,

      MTT

    • Iceland doesn’t have a democracy older than the US. Iceland does have the oldest functioning legislative assembly. There’s a difference.

    • Yes I have. There were many tales of torture chambers and rape rooms and also the fantastic legend (much repeated here if not in the US) of a giant shredding machine that Saddam’s sons fed dissidents in to legs first so as to cause maximum pain and terror before death. The politicians don’t talk about this so much anymore as it was proved to be more Chalabi lies. I’m sure Saddam was a tyrant by any measure but the world is full of tyrants supported by the west so what made him different? Oil perhaps? It’s also amazing how all these people survived torture rape and murder in order to tell us how bad it was..... I thought that once you were murdered that was pretty much it. As for the million deaths in the Iraq / Iran war. Well that was a war almost entirely sponsored by the west in order to curb the ambition of the Iranian Islamic revolution. We then provided weapons and on the ground logistical support for Saddam and weapons for Iran.... so our hands aren’t exactly clean on that either.
      And...... the mass grave stories have turned out to be, well frankly, not quite as advertised.

    • All a matter of understanding.... but then what isn’t?

    • I disagree. Saddam was especially horrible, even by the standards of dictators. Yes, the West backs dictators. My "favorite" at the moment is Musharraf. (He can’t spell my name, either.) If his government falls, it’ll be replaced by a taliban-style gov, which will be much worse. I also recognize that the West’s hands are not clean in the Iraq/Iran war. I disagree about the mass-graves. They are extensive, and filled with the bodies of men, women, children, even babies.

      Saddam’s hero and mentor was Stalin. Like Stalin, he created a web of murder, deceit, and crime that protected him. As people advanced in his government, their loyalty would be tested continuously. Sometimes they were required to shoot their best friends, things like that. Have you seen the photo of Saddam having his hand kissed by the father who, moments before, had been forced to shoot his own draft-dodging son in order to save the rest of his family? This photo was published not by Saddam’s enemies, but by Saddam himself. He wanted everyone to know what happens to people who defy him. As free citizens, it’s hard for us to understand such a reality, and so many simply dismiss it as incredible, or say "all dictators are equally bad".

      By the way, I hadn’t heard that the plastic-shredder story had been discredited. (Please post a link if you have one handy.) To the contrary, I seem to recall reading in the Wall Street Journal an article by a journalist who actually saw the tape. My recollection is that that particular act was carried out by Uday, who was the worst sadist of the bunch and made movies of his crimes for his private enjoyment. He also made movies of his romantic rivals getting mauled to death by his pet lions. Some things are too fantastic for fiction. Other things seem too out-there for reality, but they happened.

      Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil. I understand why you would think that’s all it’s about, but I simply defer to the obvious point that there are much, much, much easier ways of getting oil (or money).

    • The shredding machine story was discredited very early after the invasion. As for the source, I cannot recall exactly but it was mainstream media in the UK - probably The Guardian or Independent. I agree with you on several things but the too far fetched for fiction is a bit rich. Don’t you remember the babies thrown out of their incubators during Gulf I? A story fabricated by the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and then delivered as tearful, eye witness testimony by his own daughter who hadn’t been within three thousand miles of the country for months. The US media and public bought that one as well. I will look back and find the links to the shredding story but eye witness testimony from within Abu Ghraib was absolute about it and pointed out that such a machine would have to be fabricated inside the building as there was no room to take it. The testimony came from Doctors at the hospital who were at pains to point out that the only forms of execution at the prison were hanging (often used) and very occasional shootings. The doctors at that point had nothing to hide and nothing to fear so they may have been expected to turn on Saddam. They also found it quite a surprising story as none of them had ever heard of such a thing before being told about it by western journalists.
      If you check photos of the ’mass graves’ you will find an awful lot of military uniform among the dead. And I can assure you, from Government figures (hardly understated as they have a serious interest in demonising Saddam) the current total of bodies recovered is less than 5,000. His sons do seem to have been maniacs but once again all we have is hearsay to go on. I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt but you may have to accept as I do that the truth will only come with the history and we will write that so whatever is said will be filtered through the politics of the time and, what may become a desperate need, to pretend that we actually had a valid reason for invading in the first place. As our politicians couldn’t even tell the truth about the invasion in the first place (See the UK memo for that one, and the lies told to the security council, congress, parliament etc) then I find it hard to accept their subsequent claims. Don’t forget that we invavded Yugoslavia a few years ago because of a supposed ’massacre’. The figures for that rose from three to four thousand to a final "accurate" estimate of 70,000. The actual death toll was subsequently revealed to be 200. So maybe you should take a little more salt whenever trying to assess the words of our leaders.

    • The incubator story is bunk, I know.

      As for mass-graves filled with men in uniform, many of those would presumably be the Shi’ite soldiers who revolted against Saddam after Gulf War I. It’s still mass-murder of prisoners.

      I hadn’t heard the 5k figure.

      Turning to Yugoslavia, you’re saying the Serbs murdered only 200 people? What about Srebrenica?

    • That was Srebrenica. That’s my point, you don’t get within a mile of the truth until it’s way too late. You cannot afford to believe these people. "A lie will be half way around the world before the truth get’s its boots on."