We, the Iraqi engineers, can repair anything, 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.
– Mohsen Hassan, Iraqi Ministry of Electricity57
The Occupying Power is under an explicit duty to meet the population’s basic needs by maintaining electricity, water, transportation, and other vital services. These services—upon which many Iraqis depend to work, eat, and survive—were already badly damaged due to 12 years of war and sanctions.58 Yet despite the lifting of sanctions and the awarding of billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts to (mostly) U.S. companies,59 vital services remain in disrepair, often worse than before the occupation. Iraqi companies and experts with ability to repair these facilities at low cost have been excluded from the reconstruction process.60 Although Russian, German and French companies built much of Iraq’s infrastructure, the U.S. refuses to import spare parts from these countries, instead contracting with American companies to rebuild entire facilities.61
According to the UN, at the current rate of repair it will take another four to five years before 90% of the population has electricity.62 Lack of electricity damages health and sanitation systems and undermines overall economic development. The failure of U.S. occupation authorities to respect the legal obligation to maintain public services stands in stark contrast to the successful rebuilding effort undertaken with very limited resources by the Iraqi government after the 1991 Gulf War.
57 Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena, “Occupation, Inc.,” The Institute for Southern Studies, Winter 2003/2004. http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/OccupationInc.htm.
58 Center for Economic and Social Rights, The Human Cost of War in Iraq, February 2003. http://www.cesr.org.
59 See http://www.publicintegrity.org/wow/resources.aspx?act=resources and http://www.iraqrevenuewatch.org/.
60 Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Iraqi Experts Tossed With The Water Workers Ineligible To Fix Polluted Systems,” Washington Post, February 27, 2004. Available at http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=3307.
61 Antonia Juhasz, “The Economic Colonization of Iraq: Illegal and Immoral,” Testimony before the World Tribunal on Iraq, May 8, 2004. http://www.worldtribunal-nyc.org/Document/Case_3_Juhasz.pdf.
62 “In pictures: Living conditions and reconstruction in Iraq,” BBC News, April 10, 2004.