Doug Lorimer
Eleven months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the electricity supply in the country's two largest cities — Baghdad and Basra — has still not been fully restored. By contrast, it took Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime only three months to restore the electricity supply after the 1991 Gulf War had left the country's electrical power stations in ruins.
Today, each district in Baghdad is without electricity for up to 10 hours a day. In Basra, electricity is on for about 12 hours each day in three-hour stretches. Outside of the cities it is much worse — in many rural towns and villages, the power is off for longer periods than it is on, making it impossible to refrigerate food and heat homes.
Lack of reliable electricity supply means that most factories are closed — as a result, 60-70% of the Iraqi work force are unemployed.
Ziad Hathal, an Iraqi who owns several businesses in Baghdad and the United Arab Emirates, told the Dubai-based Al Jazeera television network on February 3: "I had to buy a generator for each factory I own in Iraq, but that did not help. Generators need gasoline, and gasoline is rare in Iraq. The price of gasoline went up from 3000 Iraqi dinars per litre [prior to the US invasion] to 130,000 Iraqi dinars per litre."
On January 7, the California-based Bechtel engineering and construction corporation was awarded a US$1.8 billion contract to fix Iraq's electric power stations and water infrastructure. This came on top of nearly $1.5 billion paid by the US government to Bechtel last year to restore Iraq's electricity and water services, and rebuild roads, bridges and schools.
Bechtel the obstacle
"There are actually many obstacles" to the restoration of electricity supplies, Iraqi nuclear scientist Imam Khaduri told Al Jazeera. "First of all, Iraqi power plants are German, Russian, and French made, but the US are insisting on assigning technicians from Bechtel to assess Iraq's electrical power stations. Second, they are insisting on buying equipment from Bechtel, while the main stations in Iraq are not made in the USA."
Furthermore, Bechtel is "not making use of the experience that Iraqi technicians possess in their own country's infrastructure", Khaduri said. "[The company is] neglecting them and bringing in foreign labour. It costs a lot of money and wastes time in training them to understand the nature of Iraqi electrical power stations."
Al Jazeera reported that maintenance work on the Dura power plant, Baghdad's main electricity supplier, was halted when the US invasion of Iraq began on March 20 and has not been resumed. "There is equipment which was imported before the war, it is already in the Dura electrical power station in Baghdad, but the Americans want a fresh bidder for the rehabilitation of the station", an Iraqi engineer told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena reported in the Winter 2003-04 Southern Exposure magazine that Yaruub Jasim, the general director of electricity for the southern region of Iraq, begged Bechtel for months to deliver vital spare parts to repair the turbines at Basra's Soviet-built Najibiya power plant. Instead, Bechtel finally delivered giant new air conditioning units, unrequested by the plant manager and useless until next summer.
The story is the same in Baghdad. "We, the Iraqi engineers, can repair anything", Mohsen Hassan, the technical director for power generation in Baghdad, told Chatterjee and Docena. "But we need money and spare parts and so far Bechtel has provided us with neither. The only thing that the company has given us so far is promises.
"We have brought the power generation up to 400 megawatts without any spare parts, but we will need something more than words if we want to provide this city with the 2800 megawatts that it demands."
Shoddy school repairs
The problems are not limited to restoring the electricity supply. Last April, Bechtel was handed a no-bid contract that included $50 million to repair 1500 Iraqi primary and secondary schools. But Iraqi school principals say they have gotten only superficial repairs, using cheap materials, leaving major problems — like sewage pipes — untouched.
On December 14, the US Cox News Service reported: "Major Linda Scharf, a [US Army] civil affairs officer, ordered a survey of 20 Bechtel-repaired schools in her area and found dangerous debris left in playgrounds, sloppy paint jobs and broken toilets. 'The work was horrible', she said."
Chatterjee and Docena visited Al Harthia, an elementary school in Baghdad with 570 pupils. "Here we meet Huda Sabah Abdurasiq, who loses no time in showing us all that is wrong", they reported in their Southern Exposure article. "The rain leaks through the ceiling, shorting out the power. The new paint is peeling and the floor has not been completely repaired, she says.
"Most shocking to Huda is the price tag: 'I could fix everything here for just $1000. Mr Jeff [a Bechtel sub-contractor] spent $20,000!' she fumes."
KBR racketeering
Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) — a subsidiary of US Vice-President Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton and no-bid contractor for rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure — is also angering Iraqis by its failure to fully repair the country's oil refineries. Instead, KBR has concentrated on restoring the extraction of crude oil.
According to Robert McKee, the senior US "adviser" at the Iraqi oil ministry, the country is producing 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, just short of the 2.5 million barrels a day pumped before the US invasion.
Nearly all of the crude oil produced since the US invasion has been exported. McKee told the February 4 San Francisco Chronicle that since June, Iraq has exported 220 million barrels, earning $5 billion. The money goes to a fund controlled by the occupation authorities, which use it to pay KBR for its oil industry reconstruction work.
With Iraq's oil refineries only meeting about half the country's fuel needs, the Pentagon has paid KBR to import fuel from Turkey and Kuwait.
In December, Pentagon auditors found that KBR overcharged the government by $61 million for fuel it imported from Kuwait. But immediately after that was reported, the head of the US Army Corps of Engineers allowed KBR to continue to buy fuel from Kuwait without submitting cost and price information required by US government contracting rules.
The February 2 Wall Street Journal reported that another Pentagon audit has found that Halliburton overcharged $27.4 million for meals served to US troops at five military bases in Iraq and Kuwait last year. Pentagon auditors have started a review of the 53 remaining dining facilities in Kuwait and Iraq operated by KBR for the US military.
KBR runs dining facilities for US soldiers and civilians under a Pentagon contract it won in 2001 to provide food, shelter and other logistical support to the US military throughout the world. The company has been awarded $3.8 billion in work under the contract.
In their Southern Exposure article, Chatterjee and Docena observed: "To date, Halliburton has made over $2.2 billion from the war in Iraq but, unlike Bechtel, most of this money is not for fixing Iraq's destroyed and crumbling infrastructure. Some 42% is spent on combating oil fires and fixing oil pipelines, 48% is for supporting the needs of the occupying army (such as housing and transportation for troops), leaving just 10% for meeting community needs in Iraq.
"Breaking down the numbers reveals some startling details: Halliburton has spent $40 million to support the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction — enough to support 6600 families in Iraq for a year (at $500 a month, the number cited by many Iraqis as necessary for a decent standard of living).
"Other numbers are just as startling — Halliburton's net profit for the second quarter of 2003 was $26 million, which contrasts markedly with the company's net loss of $498 million in the same quarter of 2002. Most of its new income is from the contracts in Iraq. 'Iraq was a very nice boost' for the company, an analyst told the Wall Street Journal."
From Green Left Weekly, February 11, 2004.
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