iraqi Corruption? You must be kidding!
On second thought, as the NEW YORK TIMES indicates, there is no reason given the nature of the Bush administration, to expect anything different….
Note the word “quietly” in the headline……
November 18, 2008
Iraq Quietly Dismisses Its Anticorruption Officials
By JAMES GLANZ and RIYADH MOHAMMED
BAGHDAD — The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing oversight officials who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here.
The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption soar. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States has been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
The moves have not been publicly announced by Mr. Maliki’s government, but word of them has begun to circulate through the layers of Iraqi bureaucracy as Parliament prepares to vote on the long-awaited security agreement. That pact sets the terms for continued American presence here after the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31, but also amounts to a framework for a steady reduction in the scale of that presence. Such a change will undoubtedly lessen American oversight of Iraqi institutions.
Each of Iraq’s 30 cabinet-level ministries has one inspector general, supported by varying budgets and staffing.
How many of the ministries have received orders to dismiss their inspectors is a matter of disagreement among Iraqi governmental officials, but their estimates range from a handful to as high as 17. Several senior Iraqi and American officials agreed that 7 to 9 inspectors have already been fired or forced into retirement. In one case, at the Ministry of Education, the post became vacant when the inspector general died.
Senior Iraqi officials and a number of the dismissed officials, many of whom asked not to be named for fear of government reprisals, said inspectors have already fired in the Ministries of Water Resources; Culture, Youth and Sport; and Trade. In addition, the inspectors have been removed from the cabinet-level Central Bank of Iraq, and from two religious offices, the Sunni and Christian Endowments, whose leaders carry the rank of deputy minister.
One senior Iraqi official said that the list also included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but the ministry’s public affairs office denied that on Monday.
Three senior advisers to Mr. Maliki declined to comment substantively when contacted about the dismissals. “Definitely I know about it, all the details,” said Yasseen Majid, a press adviser to the prime minister. “But you know all the story, so why are you asking me? It’s not my specialty, it’s an administrative issue.”
But Dr. Adel Muhsin, Mr. Maliki’s coordinator of anticorruption organizations and himself the inspector general at the Health Ministry, said any suggestion that there was political motivation for the dismissals was false.
“This is absolutely completely nonsense,” Dr. Muhsin said. The cabinet committee that recommended the changes, he said, “are mainly professional people, not political people. Therefore the selections, it is 100 percent based on professionalism.”
The United States Embassy in Baghdad did not respond to a request for comment on the dismissals on Monday.
But Stuart Bowen, who leads an independent oversight office in Washington, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and who is currently working in Iraq, said he knew of six of the dismissals. He said the inspectors general were vulnerable because once they were created, the United States provided little support and training for what was a startling concept for a bureaucracy shaped by the secrecy and corruption of the Saddam Hussein era.
Whatever the precise tally, the steps are provoking charges that Mr. Maliki, who has never been an advocate of having his government’s inner workings scrutinized, will either leave the posts vacant or stack them with supporters of his party, Dawa. The secrecy surrounding the moves has only magnified suspicions that the government aims to cripple the oversight mechanisms put in place after the invasion.
“The government put a publicity blackout on it so they can do anything they like,” said Sheik Sabah al-Saeidi, a Shiite lawmaker with the Fadhila party who heads the Integrity Committee in the Iraqi Parliament.
When Parliament recently proposed a law formalizing the professional requirements that must be met by a candidate for inspector general, Mr. Saeidi said, Mr. Maliki’s cabinet strongly opposed it.
“They want it to become a political appointment,” Mr. Saeidi said of the oversight position. “They are trying to restrict anticorruption efforts all over the country.”
At least two of the officials who were forced out are Christian women, Hana Shakuri of the Ministry of Culture and Samia Youssef Sha’ia of the Christian Endowment. But most are simply senior Sunni and Shiite technocrats who have been at their posts for years and in several cases were originally appointed in 2004 by Paul Bremer, the top administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Hassan al-Safi, who was forced out of his position in the Ministry of Youth and Sport, said that he has degrees in law, economics and auditing and was involved in the earliest anticorruption efforts in Iraq after the invasion. “If I am not competent, prove it,” said Mr. Safi, who said that he had already filed a lawsuit to force the government to renounce its assertion that he was not performing his job properly.
Mr. Maliki’s stance on oversight was most vividly illustrated by his long-running feud with Judge Rathi al-Rathi, the former head of the Commission on Public Integrity, an oversight agency created by the Coalition Provisional Authority. After Mr. Rathi’s corruption investigations repeatedly embarrassed the Maliki government, the prime minister’s office supported corruption charges against Mr. Rathi himself. Mr. Rathi’s backers considered the charges trumped-up.
Ultimately Mr. Rathi was forced out and fled Iraq in the summer of 2007, saying he had received numerous threats to his life. He was recently granted asylum in the United States, said Chris King, a former United States Embassy official who was a senior adviser to the integrity commission.
Mr. King said there had been continual political interference in Mr. Rasthi’s investigations. When the commission or an inspector general built a case against an official, Mr. King said, it was frequent “that member of the Iraqi government would then go lobby the American ambassador and the prime minister.”
The prime minister eventually replaced Mr. Rathi with Judge Rahim al-Ogaili, who Mr. Muhsin said was one of three cabinet-level officials on the committee that recommended dismissing the inspectors general. The others were Mr. Maliki’s chief of staff and the head of Iraq’s Board of Supreme Audit. None of the three officials responded to requests for comment on Monday.
It was Mr. Rathi’s former chief investigator, Salam Adhoob, who testified before the Congress in September that a previously undisclosed report by the Board of Supreme Audit had concluded that $13 billion in American reconstruction funds had been squandered through corruption.
Tariq Majer and Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company