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Leaders of the new Iraq and the international community have now joined together to begin the long and painful process of accounting for the dead. In order for all Iraqis to move into their new democratic future, there must be an accurate accounting of these past atrocities. How many died in these mass murders? Some say 300,000, some say 400,000. There are estimates of upwards of a million. We are helping the Iraqis as they begin the terrible task of counting. The killings of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis, the killings of foreigners from Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran took place in waves, over a 25-year period. Methodically, Saddam's forces destroyed villages, transferred women and children to detention camps and took away the men in trucks, some of them barefooted and naked, never to be seen again. Tens of thousands of people were taken far from their homes to distant camps in the deserts where they were killed, buried by bulldozers under tons of sand. This is not some random violence by out of control troops. This was systematic mass murder. The death tolls rival the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot. The new Iraqi leaders in Al Hillah, Karbala, Najaf and other Iraqi cities are working with USAID, the CPA, British, Polish, Italian and other coalition military and civilian experts to try to protect and forensically analyze some of the mass graves for potential use in trials for crimes against humanity. USAID is funding Iraqi humans rights groups, 30 of them, and assisting people to record the names of those being exhumed and describe the circumstances in which they were seized and shot. USAID provided the Free Prisoners Association, the Iraqi Lawyers Association and other groups around Iraq that have newly formed with computers, tools, office space and experts to protect the mass grave sites and begin to exhume them in a scientific and forensically safe way. An international effort has begun to help Iraqis prepare forensic evidence for the trials. For example, there are experts from Finland, Denmark, Britain and Ireland that are testing and confirming gravesites and training the Iraqis in this new science of part anthropology, part criminology. As Iraqi women and children, husbands and brothers streamed into the once forbidden military bases where the worst mass killings and burials took place, a handful of survivors came forward to tell their stories. We have a brochure in Arabic and there's also copies in English -- I think they should have been passed out by now -- and they describe what happened over a period of years; and then there are three cases studies of people who were shot, who fell into the pits of bodies, and then crawled out and survived. And it described -- this is their story. We actually took recorded testimony and transcribed it into this brochure, so the people's own story of what they went through and what they've been through since. Because if people think that the terror of this ends with the actual killing, they're wrong. The scars of any mass atrocities -- and I was in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide; I worked as an executive, an NGO, and I went in just after the massacre started there; I've been to the killing fields; I've interviewed rape victims in the Bosnian civil war; I've been through other mass atrocities around the world -- the scars do not heal easily, sometimes decades later they come out in very, very disturbing ways. Above all, the people in Iraq and around the world must learn from the crimes of the past so that they will not be allowed to occur in the future. When I was there in June for a week, and then in November for a week, what the Iraqis said is they want to build a rich civil society of private organizations, human rights organizations, lawyers' organizations, women's groups, as a constraint on the power of the state so the state will never be allowed to tyrannize their society again. That is why the mass graves in Iraq must be documented, reported and never forgotten. Memorials have already been built in some cities to the massacres. The USAID booklet is a small, early marker on that path. Another step is the film Saddam's Mass Graves, produced by an independent Iraqi filmmaker, Jana Rosbiani (ph), with a small grant from USAID. We will now show a short excerpt from the 58-minute film, and I'd encourage anybody here from a television station to take the film. We encourage you to broadcast the entire thing on your stations. It is the story of Iraqis speaking to Iraqis and we are listening in on their conversation. This was done in some ways as a therapy for the Iraqis to begin to deal with these atrocities. This has been played repeatedly on Iraqi national TV and it is one way, from a psychiatric and psychological point of view of getting what happened out so that people can begin to deal with the emotion of it and the wounds, many of which, are still open to deal with from a clinical point of view. Copies of the movie will be available following today's press conference. Would you -- were we going to show it? (A video clip of Saddam's Mass Graves is shown.) ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: When the lady spoke about the starvation deaths, apparently about 50 percent of the 172,000 Kurds that were massacred during the Anfal campaign died of starvation. What the Fedeyeen would do is take the women and children, put them in a camp, and then cut off all food and water into the camp and simply let everyone die. So a very large number of the casualties were simply deliberate, organized mass starvation. These abuses are in the past. The last uprising, I think, among the Shia in the south, was in 1999, that we have record of. So these took place over a period of years. That is in the past now, but these issues need to be dealt with. Dealing with the scars of these past atrocities though, are an important part of having a stable society in the future. Life, however, is improving for the great majority of people. A new poll released yesterday by ABC News done by Oxford Research, which is a very reputable British research company, shows that a majority of Iraqis say their lives are better now than before the war -- 56 percent said their life is better now than before the war; 23 percent said it was the same; 19 percent said things were worse. So by a factor of three to one, people believe things have improved; 71 percent said they expect their lives to get better over the next year. In part, we think that this confidence has been produced by the elimination of the terror of the regime, but also, in part, certainly by the assistance programs being carried out by the CPA and by the ministries. In the year since USAID's Iraq aid teams mobilized on March 16th, 2003, exactly a year ago, to head into Iraq, they've carried out the agency's largest reconstruction efforts since our predecessor agency undertook the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe under the Marshall Plan. In fact, a Kennedy School professor did an article -- I think it was for the Financial Times in Britain, which was that per capita we are actually spending more in Iraq than we did in Europe, if you adjust for inflation at the end of World War II. In the last six months alone, AID spent $2 billion of assistance in Iraq. Perhaps the greatest achievement or accomplishment in the first year is that our troops and our foreign assistance have brought some sense of normalcy to the great majority of Iraqis. That's not in every single area, but in much of the country. By repairing, reopening thousands of schools and by getting teachers paid and students back in school within six weeks, by holding the matriculation exams which take place at the end of each year, and by printing 8.7 million new math and science textbooks, Iraqi children did not suffer a disruption from their education. There is, we might note, a 10 percent increase in school attendance, mainly because the schools that we chose to repair the 2,300 to be renovated were among the worst in the country. Many parents would not send their kids to those schools because they were in such deplorable condition. We always, in the aftermath of a war, try to get the children back into school, not just for educational purposes but also for psychological purposes and for public safety purposes. If they're in the school -- if they're not in school, they are frequently on the streets and they could get into trouble and get hurt. And so one of the early efforts was in the education area. The recent signing of the transitional administrative law, the TAL, is evidence of the sense of hope for the future, we believe. Here are some of the achievements that USAID has accomplished working with the CPA over the past year: First, establishing the democratic governance at the local level. We set up USAID's local governance assistance program in Iraqi cities and 18 governance, in cooperation with civil -- U.S. Army civil affairs teams. More than 90 percent of the Iraqi population is now covered by these local government institutions. I might add that in almost all countries that AID has worked in in the last 40 years, in new democracies that have no history of elections or candidate recruitment or parties, local government is the schoolhouse of democracy. As Alexis Datoko (ph) says in his work of American democracy in the 1830s, "It is recruitment mechanism that people, even today, are recruited for higher officer in the United States." Two-thirds of our state legislators -- at least a few years ago -- I don't know what the statistic is now. I was in the state legislature in Massachusetts. I was a former local official -- but two-thirds of the state legislatures are typically former local officials, and half of the U.S. Congress are typically former state legislators. So the way in which most democratic systems work, in terms of recruitment, is to begin at the local level, and that's where we began when we started our program a year ago. We are seeing now the emergence of local, democratic governance in these cities and towns across the country in the neighborhoods. And what's happening is people are seeing who has leadership skills and who does not. And you will see many of the people who are on these local councils elected later to parliament, I predict, because that's the typical pattern that takes place in most countries. What we do, once we set up the councils, are then we give grants of 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars to the councils after they have made a decision on a project to undertake in the village. We are also training them across the country in uniform systems of transparency, in terms of accounting, budgeting, public hearings, democratic decision-making process, and that is allowing us to teach them the basic values of democratic governance. We did begin the reconstruction of schools, as I mentioned earlier. We did do -- we produced 1.5 million secondary school bags, and we've trained now over -- through training of the trainer process -- is 32,000 teachers; UNESCO, with grants from AID, has printed 8.7 million textbooks in Arabic and Kurdish. A third area we have worked in is in the Iraqi ministries. We have now established a national accounting system and budgeting system that's transparent and public, that will be consistent that they did not have before, so that the new government when it takes office June 30th, will have a system so that the parliament, when it's finally elected, or the Congress, whatever they choose in their constitution, will be able to see what public expenditures look like. That's a weakness in many emerging democracies and Iraq will have this tool at their disposal. We did ministries-in-a-box because many of the -- several dozen of the ministries were destroyed during looting after the war. And so now we set up a system where we would have enough desks, chairs, phones, computers, and basic materials in each of the ministries, so at least 100 civil servants could go back, and now the rest of the ministries are being repaired. There was no big issue about food -- the food security system in the country. So what we did was work with the United States prior to the war to plan for a contingency. We've shipped 500,000 tons of grain into the country. By the way, none of the U.S. assistance, none of the U.S. assistance is in loans. It's all grant money from the U.S. Treasury. It is voluntarily given. There is no expectation of any -- anything being paid back. We've provided over $104 million in humanitarian assistance for nutrition, health and shelter in the immediate aftermath of the war. But the food distribution system that existed before the war and has now been cleaned up, we thought it was an efficient system until we found out that in some cities upwards of 10 to 20 percent of the population had been taken off the rolls because they were regarded as suspect by the regime. And so the food distribution system was not only a ration system, it was also a weapon of politics, and it was used to reward people who were supporters of the regime and to punish people who were suspect, whose loyalty were suspect. Everybody has been restored to the ration system, so they get the same ration across the country. The restoration of electricity now is back to pre-war levels, and by June, our goal is to get up to 6,000 megawatts for the summer months. We do know that a lot more air conditioners have been bought and we're a little concerned about how much electricity we'll be needing next summer, in the hot summer months. Basra, which had two hours of power per day, now has 23 hours per day. There has been a massive repair of the water and sewerage systems, which should come online by June. There are 22 sewerage treatment plants, even before the war were not functioning, and they all now will be functioning. We've stabilized the provision of health services through the training of Ministry of Health and Clinic employees -- nurses, doctors. Working with the Ministry of Health, WHO and UNICEF, we've vaccinated more than 3 million children under the age of five. We have equipped more than 600 primary care facilities and we are rehabilitating 60 primary healthcare centers. We've opened 17 women's centers to provide job training and combat violence against women. We had a women's council group here from Iraq, and they were telling us how useful those are to them. We've also set up a financial stabilization plan for the country. A new currency exchange program was put in place through technical assistance through our partner organization, Bearing Point, a contractor of ours. The old currency has been collected and destroyed, and the value, which is very important in currency exchanges. We did the same thing in the Balkans. We've done the same thing in Afghanistan. What tells you whether the people are accepting the new currency is whether the value goes up, and the value of the new Iraqi currency has been increasing, which is a very good sign. We've put the Central Bank back on its feet and set up, as I mentioned earlier, uniformed financial management systems. We've repaired three major bridges linking their countries highways. The telecommunication system has now been reestablished; local phone service was restored and international calling has been reopened for the first time since the conflict, and 13 new telecommunication switches were installed, new fiber optic cable has been installed, and 20 Iraqi cities are now reconnected to Baghdad. We've opened the port. I opened it last summer when I was there, but now the port has been completely modernized. The country's port is now in better shape than it's been in 25 years; 50 ocean-going ships a month docked there. But prior to the war, the way that big ships would go in, is they would wait for the tide to go up. They'd push the ships over, let the tide go out and the ships would literally sit in the mud, and that's how they would offload them, because the port had not had the silt removed, which is a very important thing because of the Tigris Euphrates River, you've got to keep doing this or the port gets filled up. We also took out a huge amount of unexploded ordinance from -- even going back as far as the early 1980s with the Iraq-Iran war. We believe there is a lot of hope. The Iraqis are indicating that in this very extensive poll, the most extensive poll that's been done thus far, and AID will be there far beyond June 30th. And we intend to work with the ministries, as we do in other transition and developing countries. If there are any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. MR. DENIG: Okay. Let me remind you to please use the microphone, identify yourself and your news organization. Let's start with the gentleman up here please. QUESTION: John Leyre, BBC. Regarding these atrocities, human rights groups were trying to draw attention to them for years. What was the United States Government saying when these things were happening? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, I was in the NGO community in the 1990s, and I have to say I was a little troubled that the whole question of the sanctions regimes were being completely disconnected by the atrocities committed by the regime. The fact of the matter is that Saddam has been a menace for a long time. We knew it. We talked about it, but I have to say there was not a lot of interest in either the news media or governments, and it was very troubling to me that -- the continuing massacres in the 1990s were -- got very little coverage, very little interest. There were people in the Congress who cared about it and you could find people in different governments that would follow this and care about it. But the question, of course, always came as, what to do about it? What do you do to stop it other than putting light on it? And the fact of the matter is we have now done something about it. MR. DENIG: Okay. Let's take the gentleman up front here. Just a minute. Speak into your microphone please? QUESTION: Excuse me. Ignaz Staub for the Zurich paper, Tages Anzeiger. Could you tell us how much the situation of the Marsh Arabs have improved? Because they've been persecuted quite heavily, too, under Saddam's regime? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: They have, yes. If all of you could come to my office, you would see the wall full of pictures of the marshes. We sent teams of hydrologists, environmental scientists from AID and our university systems in to do the first detailed assessment of the marshes, and the results were quite interesting. First, we discovered that while some of the desiccated marsh areas were beyond -- they could not be restored, because the salinization of the soil is so huge that if you free-flooded it, it would be a dead-water area. No plants would grow in it, and fresh-water fish could not grow in it or be raised in it. But we were surprised by the very large amount of land that is not damaged, that has very low salt content in it and can be restored. The problem for the marshes is that the water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers because of damming upstream in Syria, Turkey, and to a little smaller extent in Iran, have reduced the water flow so we don't have enough water to restore the marshes. We will be able to restore 30 to 40 percent. Now we have sent teams out. There's a coalition now of the Japanese, the Italians, the British, the Dutch, and the United States and the Canadians. All -- it's a technical team, my colleagues in the AID agencies of those countries working with the ministries in Baghdad and the universities. There's a lot of very fine Iraqi scientists who are appalled by what Saddam did. We now have 76 Iraqi scientists on our payroll to help do the restoration of the marshes, and we've done extensive interviews among the Marsh Arabs. They do not want all of the areas reflooded. Many of them have become wheat farmers, and they've made the adjustment and they've said, "Look, just -- we want some of the marshes restored so we can go back to doing our fishing and our water buffalo herds. We want to restore those. But we want to do some of the wheat growing that we're doing now." And so there isn't enough water to restore them anyway, so we may actually have a good solution to the problem. We have begun to do some very interesting work to immunize the existing animal herds because the largest source of milk in southern Iraq, and protein, were the marshes. Much of the fish supply for Iraq was from the Marsh Arab fishing fleet, and the milk from the buffalo herds was the major source of child milk for the southern part of the Shia population in the south. And that has been one of the reasons why the malnutrition rates and protein deficiency is seen all over the south, is because of the destruction of the marshes. So the restoration of the marshes is not just an environmental issue. It is a humanitarian issue, it is a nutritional issue and it is an economic issue. I might add, when I went to visit the marshes in June, I asked the Marsh Arabs, because I've been deeply interested in this for many years, I said, "You know, I understood the wild boar was a major predator for the Marsh Arabs. Do you still have wild boar here?" And one of the marsh men raised his hands, showed that they still have their sense of humor, and he said, "No, we had the last wild boar and the Americans killed him." This was in June. And I said, "We did?" And they said, "Yes, you killed Saddam Hussein. He was the last wild boar, and he's gone now, we have no more predators." They all started laughing. Of course, this was before when we thought Saddam was dead. And so the marsh people are trying to put their lives back together. They have extremely high child mortality rates, so we're building a chain of health clinics, schools. And we've been doing renovations of the water system, which is one of the reasons the child mortality rates are so high, the water is terrible. So there's a whole international project for the restoration of the marshes now that we're working on. Yes, sir. MR. DENIG: Okay, let's take the man in the middle there. QUESTION: It's John Decker from Reuters Television. I have two questions for you, Mr. Natsios: The first has to do with just whether you've met your goals so far, a year later, in terms of reconstruction efforts? And the second question has to do with the contracting process. How would you rate the contracting process? Of course, Halliburton has come under a lot of attention over the past few months, specifically, at the Defense Department where it's being investigated for over billing. Would you rate the contracting process well or have there been some problems over the course of the past year? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Let me answer the last question first. You'll have to remind me what the first one is. Steve Schooner served in the Clinton Administration in the Office of Procurement at OMB. He's a Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He recently gave a speech on procurement reform, and his superior, the Director of Procurement, is another professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Steve Kelman. I know Steve Kelman. I do not know Steve Schooner. Steve Schooner said in his speech that the AID contracting system in Iraq is "a model of transparency and good governance." And I would -- we put his speech, obviously, on our website and I urge you to read it. It's by a Democrat who served in the Clinton Administration, who was actually responsible for many of the reforms that we use in our contracting process, because the Clinton people reformed the federal procurement system under the FARS. We followed the system -- if you (inaudible) carefully, the audits that were done -- which I commissioned by the way -- the auditors didn't come in and say, "Can we do this?" I called them in to say, "I don't any questions about our work." I can't tell you what happened in the Pentagon. That's not my responsibility. But what happened in AID, I'm very proud of. Did we have certain issues? Yes, we did. But they were very small and if you read the audits carefully, you will see that we complied with the rules of the Federal Regulatory System and the federal statutes. There are no audits going on and no investigations and I am very proud of what we did. What was the first question? QUESTION: Yeah, the first question just had to do with how you would assess - ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Oh, the goals. Yeah. How we've done? QUESTION: -- the reconstruction efforts over the past year. ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, there are two kinds of reconstruction. I'll tell a little story, a very moving story. Sloan Mann was sent in as the head of the Abuse Prevention Unit, which is human rights, operational human rights unit that we sent into Iraq on May 16th -- on March 16th, when the war started. And Sloan was walking -- I think it probably was in May or June after the war was over -- down the street in Baghdad. And he saw a long line of Iraqis in the hot sun. And he went up and went into the building and he said, "What is this building?" And a young man said, "This is the new Iraqi lawyers association." And he said, "What are those people out there?" He said, "They are survivors of the massacres, and they are here to find out whether there are any records of their relatives." And the young man looked at Sloan and he said, "We appreciate the help you are giving us in reconstructing our infrastructure, and it's important to us, and we want help. But you know, what we really want your help doing is reconstructing our souls after the last 25 years of tyranny." And that was a very moving story. Sloan tells the story often. And I would like to divide our programming into the things you see, which is electricity, water, sewerage, the building of buildings -- infrastructure like the port and the bridges, which I -- it's easy to use the metrics on that because the buildings are done or they're not done. The port's either functional or it's not functional. It's easy to see that. How do you, other than doing polls, judge whether or not democratic values are beginning to be part of the culture of the society? The polling data we have now that I read -- it is a very extensive poll. It's not a short poll, and I would urge anybody interested to get the whole thing. I read it last night. It was quite fascinating. There were earlier polls done that were not as extensive, but they do indicate the Iraqis are beginning to get it in terms of what this is all about. I met, in November, with a group of students and -- when I was in Baghdad, university students and there were 11 of them. It was a very interesting conversation. And one young man, he's a 28-year-old Fine Arts student from Fallujah, which is not exactly a center of support for the coalition, and he said, "You know, we all respect the United States system of democratic governance and the system in western Europe, but we don't really understand what that means. All we know is, you treat your people differently than we were treated here. And it worked there. We want to know why it worked and how we can replicate it here. But we don't understand what democracy is. We support it, theoretically, because the western Europeans and the Americans and the Japanese and the Canadians have it, and we think of them as a model, but we need you to tell us what this is all about." And it was a very moving little -- I don't think he planned to give the speech, but we're now planning with Larry Diamond, who's one of our two greatest democracy scholars in the United States; he teaches at Stanford. And he's planned a series of two-dozen weekly lectures and courses for the entire country on different aspects of democratic governance: What is an election? I mean, what's a political party? How do they function? Because their experience with democracy is -- it just doesn't exist. What's a Bill of Rights? What are minority rights? How are votes taken in a parliament -- that kind of thing -- how do you run for office? And we're going to begin doing this leading up to the turn over of authority on June 30th, so that the country gets a better sense on a systematic basis, and we will do polling at the end of that to see whether or not this is taking hold. So to answer your QUESTION: In the infrastructure, we had a slower start mainly because we thought we were dealing with, basically, a minimal amount of damage from the war, and damage, certainly. The war damaged very little. The larger damage was from the looting, which is a serious problem, but the biggest problem was the lack of maintenance over the last 20 years. Since the Iran-Iraq War, there was no investment made in preventive maintenance in any of their infrastructures. Everything simply deteriorated. And as a result of that, systems were almost completely dysfunctional, like the sewerage treatment plants -- which is one of the reasons the child mortality rates are where they are, only one reason. I think now, the infrastructure projects are at a very high level of activity, and by the summertime, we should see dramatic improvements in water, sewerage and electricity. And of course, we've met the goals in terms of reconstructing the schools, the health clinics and all of that. The larger question for me is not the infrastructure, because for me, the most important thing for the Iraqis are the things they cannot do for themselves because they don't have the experience with it, which is democratic governance. The local government effort is the most important thing AID has done in Iraq, because it is teaching democracy at a grassroots level. It is recruiting a new crop of leaders to run the new Iraq, and that's very, very important, and it is beginning, beginning to take hold. We've had a lot of very entertaining or heartwarming stories in some of the villages. One village one of our democracy officers from AID went into, and an old man said -- we asked him to come to elect the town council, the new town council. And he -- after we asked him to go to the meeting and they elected the council, some old man in his 80's went up to one of our officers and said, "You know, the last time we were asked politely, voluntarily to go to a meeting in this village was in 1949. Even the British didn't ask us politely. And you asked us to go. You didn't threaten anybody and there are no guns here telling us we have to vote for certain people. If this is what democracy is, we like it." It's a nice story. MR. DENIG: Sir, on the front here. QUESTION: Hisham Boyrar, Al Hurra Television. Could I ask you (inaudible) about the -- if you could you elaborate a little bit about the local government program? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Yes. QUESTION: And to what extent you have been able to notice people getting over their differences, ethnic or religious? And how realistic could that be reflected on a central government with elections and democratic institutions? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: There is a book by Robert Dahl, who is one of our most prominent scholars, political scientists in the '70s and '80s. I think he may still be alive now, but he'd be very old. And he wrote a book called Polyarchy, some years ago. And what he said was, the best place to, in a culture with high levels of tension between ethnic and religious groups, the best way to begin democracy is at the grassroots level because the problems are very practical. If you want the water system to work, it's not a matter of political ideology or religious theology or -- it is simply a matter: Does the water system work or doesn't it? Is the water clean? Does the pump get turned off all the time? And it forces people to work in a very operational way on concrete problems that have a direct benefit to people in the village. And people start working together when their public services aren't being delivered properly. And when they are delivered properly, it encourages people to continue to work together. So one of the reasons we're doing this at the local level is we are noticing that people from Shia, Sunni or Kurdish traditions, or Christian tradition -- there are many Catholics and Nestorian Christians in Iraq -- who are working together on a very practical level to get the local well functional or the generating plant working, and it's having a very good effect. So we're hoping that the people who learn to work together at the local level cross ethnic lines, will run for the parliament, and do the same thing at the national level. QUESTION: (Inaudible.) ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, because this was done very early on, very quickly, at first what we would simply do is we would call the people in the village into a meeting and say, "Choose the people now." We didn't have a ballot where you nominated because there were no parties and there was -- we didn't have time to do ballots. So very early on, it was simply a community meeting and they would choose people. Now, what is happening in many areas is now they are going to formal local elections with ballots. And people put their candidacies forward, their names are on the ballot and they actually vote. And they've had elections in many areas to choose the follow-on town councils and city councils. What we expect is that once sovereignty is returned to Iraq, they will have a national government -- we will help them, give them alternate ways of organizing local government. They can choose which model they want to choose. There are different ways to do this all over the world. We'll tell them how different countries have approached this and they will decide how to do this; and then we'll have to have formal elections at some point at the local level and a national sense. But that has not happened yet in a -- we want the new government to do that. MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to Finland in the back, please. QUESTION: Thanks. Petri Sarvamaa, Finish Broadcasting. You said AID will be in Iraq far beyond June 30th. ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Yes. QUESTION: And you emphasized "teaching democracy," if I may put it like that. Give us your estimate. It's going to be one generation? Two generations? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, the example I use is eastern Europe and the choice the Iraqis -- I've told the Iraqis this and I've said it on national television and on their radio stations. They have a choice between using the Polish model, which is a rapid transformation of the country; the Poles did it in six to eight years. That was the fastest in -- the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Balkans have taken much longer and they went through a civil war that was quite bloody, as you know, in the former Yugoslavia. There's still unrest in some areas of the Balkans, but the Balkans is now beginning -- Bulgaria, Romania, even in Serbia, Albania, the growth rate is very high -- they're beginning to move into the same place that Poland's at. So the Balkans took twice as long, but it's beginning to happen. So it's 12, 14 years in the Balkans. I'm hoping the Iraqis -- because there's a high level of education and the Iraqi people, because of the past, really want this to work. That's the real sense you get is they want peace and stability in their society. The polling data shows that 50 percent of the people want a functioning democracy, 21 percent want a Islamic form of government and 28 percent want a strong leader, mainly to restore order. That's what they're worried about -- which you typically see this data after a period of dictatorship when the dictatorship is gone. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, the same sort of pattern of activity. So my guess is, my hope is, that it will be more like the Polish model, which means maybe by the end of this decade, Iraq will begin to show signs of being a functioning, parliamentary market economy and democratic political system. There would be bumps here and there, but it will happen. It's beginning to happen now. But people who want this to happen in six months or a year just don't understand development. It just doesn't work that way. You don't transform a society. And the Iraqis are going to be transforming their own society. The only purpose of any of the aid agencies being there, whether it's DIFID in Britain or the Finnish aid agency or DTZ, the Germany aid agency or AID or CIDA in Canada, is to assist them, to give them options and provide technical assistance, like how to design a national accounting system that's transparent in public. But it's their decision. It's their country. They're going to have to rebuild it, but we can help them do that. Any other questions? I'll try to make the answer shorter. MR. DENIG: Okay. Let's go up front again, please. QUESTION: Yeah, can I ask you, again, going back to one question that's been asked before, how much damage does the -- did the controversies around Halliburton and the contract procedures did to your work and your credibility in Iraq, and the pace with which you are going in Iraq? ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: I don't think it had any effect on us. You'll have to ask people because I was really not involved in that. That's a Pentagon thing and I don't come from the Pentagon, I come from AID. I, frankly, think the most important thing for the people of Iraq is results, and oil revenues last year, I think, were 6.5 billion. It will be probably 12 billion this year, and they may be triple that next year. So there's been a substantial improvement in the area that Halliburton's working on, which is the oil wells. And the new government's going to need oil revenues to run the country and to finish the rebuilding process. So, ultimately, what the Iraqis care about are results, particularly in the infrastructure area. Are there any other questions? MR. DENIG: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Natsios. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. |
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