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Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

26 March 2003

Natsios Says Food For Southern Iraq Prepositioned in the Region

(USAID, ICRC and others preparing to address humanitarian needs) (6440)
To meet the potential humanitarian emergencies in southern Iraq, the
United States has pre-positioned food, equipment and personnel in
nearby countries, waiting only for the area to be declared safe before
commencing relief activities, said Andrew Natsios, the administrator
of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Once the British military forces operating around the southern city of
Umm Qasr declare the port safe for shipping, "we can act within a day"
to move supplies which are currently warehoused in nearby Qatar and
Kuwait City, said Natsios, speaking at the State Department in
Washington March 25.
On March 24, the Seattle, Washington-based Stevedoring Services of
America was contracted by USAID to manage the Umm Qasr port in
southern Iraq which will serve as the delivery point for food and
other humanitarian and reconstruction materials for the Iraqi people.
Approximately 130,000 tons of food have been pre-positioned in the
region through the World Food Program (WFP), and the United States has
so far committed 610,000 tons in total. The WFP and Australia are also
contributing to the food resources, he said.
"Our teams are in place. They have been there for a couple of weeks.
The Disaster Assistance Response Team has 40 people now on it, and the
rest of the team is heading for the region. The team is operational,"
he said.
However, Natsios expressed concern over the availability of potable
water for the population. "In many cases," he said, "the people are
basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been
for some years."
The USAID administrator blamed the Iraqi government for the crisis,
saying it had not repaired water systems or replaced old equipment for
the people. The Iraqi elite, he said, were drinking imported bottled
water.
"Water and sanitation are the principal reasons children have died at
higher rates than they should of for a middle income country. Child
mortality rates for Iraq are not a function of the absence of food,"
said Natsios.
With 70 percent of the population living in urban areas, "public
services like sewer and water systems make a great deal of
difference," he said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been "working
overtime" in the southern Iraqi city of Basra since March 23 to ease
the crisis, said Natsios. With the help of $10 million given by the
State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, "they
have restored water to 40 percent of the population and they are
working to restore it to the rest."
Once the area is more secure, water experts from the ICRC and USAID
will test local water supplies to see if they meet "the minimum
requirement for human consumption," and determine the need to add
chlorination or supply new equipment or electric generators to restore
the service, he said.
Natsios said the Bush administration has requested Congress to
allocate $2.4 billion for relief and reconstruction of Iraq. He said
USAID is preparing to award contracts for relief and reconstruction
projects according to federal procurement procedures established by
law.
Following is the transcript of Natsios' briefing:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
March 26, 2003
ON-THE-RECORD BRIEFING
U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew S.
Natsios On U.S. Humanitarian Relief and Reconstruction Efforts
March 25, 2003
Washington, D.C.
(3:00 p.m. EST)
MODERATOR: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the
State Department.
As you know, we have a special briefing for you this afternoon on the
subject of humanitarian relief and reconstruction efforts for Iraq. We
have the director -- the Administrator, pardon me, of the U.S. Agency
for International Development, Andrew Natsios, whom you are familiar
with. We also have the Assistant Administrator from USAID for Asia and
the Near East Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, as well as the Director of
the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID Mr. Bernd
McConnell, and the State Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Population, Refugees and Migration Issues. That's Rich
Greene.
All of these officials and experts are here to answer your questions,
but we'll begin by asking Administrator Natsios to give you a brief
introduction and then we'll go ahead and take your questions. We've
got about 35 minutes this afternoon to go through this. Thanks very
much, and I'll turn it over to Andrew.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Thank you very much. I'd like to talk just a
couple of minutes before we answer questions about what the current
situation is in terms of humanitarian response.
As I'm sure you know, the focus is in the southern region of the
country right now. Our teams are in place. They have been there for a
couple of weeks. The Disaster Assistance Response Team has 40 people
now on it, and the rest of the team is heading for the region. The
team is operational. They have done some assessments in the port
region. The port seems to be in very good condition physically.
We have, through the World Food Program, pre-positioned 130,000 tons
of food. The United States now has made commitments of 610,000 tons of
food: 500,000 tons from the Emerson Trust of wheat and rice; and
110,000 that we ordered a couple of months ago that is on its way to
the region. The Australians just announced 100,000 tons last week of
wheat. So we think we have the food situation between the U.S.
Government, which is the bulk of the commodities, WFP's own resources,
and then the Australians.
In terms of the water situation, we have in the region equipment, in
terms of reverse osmosis devices, that will provide water to upwards
of a million people if we should see internal displacement. At this
point, we don't see any large-scale refugee movements or internally
displaced people yet.
Now, Saddam Hussein has a history of attacking his own people. Of
course, he has used chemical and biological weapons against the Kurds
in the emphasis 1988 Adfal campaign, and then against the Shias when
there was a revolt in the south after the Gulf War. So we do know he
will do that. He has done it before to the two populations that are
not particularly strong supporters of his.
The second concern we have had all along is that there would be
population displacements. We are seeing a few thousand here and there,
maybe up in the north in some of the Kurdish areas, but no large-scale
movements at this point.
There has been a water issue, and I am not sure everybody entirely
understands this. It predates the war. Water and sanitation are the
principal reasons children have died at higher rates than they should
have for a middle-income country. The child mortality rates for Iraq
are not a function of an absence of food. The food distribution system
provides enough food for the population.
Generally, it is not a function of food. It is a function of a
deliberate decision by the regime not to repair the water system or
replace old equipment with new equipment, so in many cases people are
basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been
for some years.
Most people in the elite drink water from Jordan that is bottled. And
in fact, we have a large contract that is about to be granted to bring
in bottled water for the whole population while we repair, after the
war is over, the water and sanitation systems of the country.
Seventy percent of the population of the country is urbanized. This is
not a rural population primarily, and so public services like sewer
and water systems make a great deal of difference. People were
particularly destitute in the Shia areas of the south. The Kurds,
because they have been relatively independent in the north, have
actually built a robust market economy, and their agricultural system
produces so much in terms of surpluses that they can export it.
The real poverty, the most severe poverty is in the south, in the Shia
areas along the border with Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. So we are
certainly concerned about those people because they were vulnerable
prior to the beginning of the conflict.
We have between 20 and 30 NGO grants that we have received for
humanitarian relief. Within the next week, we will be awarding $30
million worth of grant proposals.
Now that the President has submitted the supplemental budget to the
Congress we have, potentially a large pool of money: $2.4 billion both
for the relief and the reconstruction of the country. We have awarded
as of yesterday the contract for the management of the port, and four
people have headed out this weekend from that company to set up shop
and begin to recruit people in order to manage the port when the
British military turns it over to us for civilian purposes.
If anybody has any questions, we would be glad to answer them.
QUESTION:  Hi, good afternoon.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  How are you?
QUESTION:  Very well.  How are you doing?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Good.
QUESTION:  A couple of questions.
First, how much is in the supplemental for food specifically? And in
your plans for post-Saddam Iraq and managing the country and so on,
have you hired any people who are experienced in managing cities, any
city planners? Or are they mostly retired military, retired diplomats?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: The Civil Administration side of this -- in
other words, the people who will coordinate with the Ministry -- are
managed by Jay Garner; you would have to ask him that. Lew Lucke is
the Mission Director of the USAID mission. They are out in the field
right now. They are actually managing the program side of it, but the
civil administration side of it is something you should talk to Jay
Garner about.
In terms of the food, there are two pots of resources we look for in
terms of food. The 500,000 tons of food that we announced late last
week is not in the supplemental. That is in the Emerson Trust, a trust
fund that was created in the 1990's for major unforeseen emergencies
that are outside of the budget process. So that's one pot of money.
The second is in the budget itself, and there is $60 million that we
have provided to WFP for fuel, trucks, logistical support and
warehousing. In other words, it's not food, but it's all you need to
do to get the food to where it belongs. We have asked WFP to run the
food system of the country, the public distribution system, and they
have been working on this since December. We have been cooperating
with them, along with other donor governments. So this is not just an
American effort; I want to emphasize that. Other donors are working on
this. We are the largest donor by far; but I have been in extensive
contact with the British aid agency and with other donor governments,
with the embassies and the Development Ministers in other countries.
In addition to the $60 million to the WFP for logistics, there is
another $320 million for food purchases that is in the supplemental -
in addition to the money to WFP and in addition to the Emerson Trust.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) award the capital construction contract, and
would that be awarded to a team of engineering firms or to one
individual firm?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: I don't actually know, and I'm not supposed to
know who the companies are that are in the final - because there were
I think seven companies in the initial list, and then it's reduced to
a couple. I don't know what they are; I'm not supposed to under
federal procurement law. We stay out of that. The people conducting
that are career officers in AID who do this and have been for many
years. We're taking a hands-off - the senior people in the Agency are
leaving the career people to make those decisions based on the merits
and based on the federal procurement law that we operate under.
We expect the engineering and construction contract will be awarded
later this week or early next week.
QUESTION: Mr. Natsios, you said that your team has already made an
assessment of the port.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Yes. Not an in-depth assessment because the
question is how safe it is in that area for relief workers. Our people
are not soldiers, as you know.
QUESTION: Can you give any idea - I know you can't say how battles
will turn out, but once you get the go-ahead, how quickly would -- I
believe it's the Sir Galahad off port -- how quickly can you start to
unload the ships and start sending the food out?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: If the population is safe and it's safe to work
in Basra and in Umm Qasr, then we can act within a day. We are in
Kuwait City right now and in Qatar, and we have people in Jordan as
well, and in Cyprus, where the UN headquarters is. So we can act
almost immediately.
Our relief commodities are warehoused in Qatar and in Kuwait City, so
they are there already; and we are working very closely with the
British Government and the Australian Government on this.
QUESTION: Immediately meaning, how much could you then unload? Enough
to feed "x" number of Iraqis for --?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Let me focus for just a second on the question
of food. I have seen some comments in the newspaper.
The fact is that the people have been getting a double ration since
last October. So there is more than enough food in people's homes, we
believe, to last about a month if there are no food distributions at
all.
Now there may be some very poor people in some areas who sold all
their food. Some people sold their food, took the cash, and are hiding
it because they thought they might have to move and it's easier to
walk with cash than it is with food. In either case, they have
resources. So we're not worried that the food situation is serious.
The most serious situation right now in Basra is the conflict itself,
and the water situation.
QUESTION:  What are you doing about the water situation?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: The International Committee of the Red Cross is
working overtime. We are, by the way, and have always been the largest
donor government to the ICRC -- I think over 60 or 70 years as a
matter of fact - and we are in this emergency as well. The PRM office,
the refugee office in the State Department, has already awarded $10
million to the ICRC. They have been in there the last two days. They
have restored water to 40 percent of the population, and they are
working to restore it to the rest.
It is interesting that the electricity, which is the problem - the
water system is okay, it's just there's not enough electricity - the
Republican Guard or the Iraqi military headquarters which is next door
has electricity, but the water plant does not. The reporting we're
getting is they shut off the water deliberately for the city, the
Iraqi military did. This is a very calculated thing to increase the
suffering of the population by the Iraqi military, who are obviously
turning in a subtle way against their population already.
QUESTION: The $320 million in the supplemental, what would that buy,
and would that be U.S.-source food, or bought more locally?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: We are working with WFP now to determine what
their needs are. We will have to do some purchases of pulses, which is
for protein, and oil, which is for fat. To have a complete food
basket, you have to have cereals, which is about 85 percent of your
caloric intake, about 10 percent protein, and 5 percent you require
fat from oil.
We will work with them. To the extent that we can use American
commodities, we will do it. But if we have to do local purchases in
the region through WFP -- I think all of the donor governments have
agreed we need maximum flexibility -- we will do that. But ships are
on the way now.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Some American-based NGOs have been saying they have been
having trouble getting relief over there due to regulatory burdens
from sanctions previously imposed against Iraq. Is going through this
DART team going to alleviate those kinds of burdens, and how is that
going to shake out?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: A blanket OFAC license was granted to all NGOs
that have grants with the U.S. Government, and they are now able to
function. The DART teams, part of their function is to facilitate
humanitarian aid organizations' activities, whether they are a UN
agency or whether they are an NGO. One of their functions, if there
are any continuing problems of any kind -- there were some initial
problems with the Kuwaiti government, which I believe have been
cleared up now -- but that is one of their functions.
QUESTION:  When was that one granted?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  I think it was a month ago.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Could you give us a sense -- there has been much attention
is paid to the aid contracts that are out there now, and the fact that
they are going primarily --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Do you mean reconstruction contracts?
QUESTION:  Reconstruction contracts.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: That's different than the relief. They are two
separate things.
QUESTION: Right. Is there some way that you could describe what
portion of the actual work that's likely to happen, say, in the first
year, would be accounted for by those participants? For instance, the
electricity work isn't included in there. And I think there is a lot
of things --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: No, it is included in there, as a matter of
fact.
QUESTION:  Oh, it is?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Yes, it is.
Let me just sort of explain the Federal Procurement Law. We operate on
not -- there is no separate law for AID. There is a Federal
Procurement Law that has been on the books for many years. We must
comply with that law, and we are doing that. There is a shortened
process in order to do procurements more rapidly. A normal procurement
for a contract would take six months. We were told in January, "You
have two months."
And so we used the national security provisions of the existing
Federal Procurement Law in order to speed this process up so we could
support the President's decision, whatever that decision was going to
be. In January we frankly, other than the British, did not know who
was going to join us. We did not know what UN agencies were going to
be involved in this and which not. In some ways, some of the NGOs were
not clear as to whether they were going to act or not. We had to act
early.
So we had a process that took about two months. The federal law
requires us to source our contracts through American companies. That's
a federal statute, Congressional law. There is a provision in the law
that allows us to waive the provisions in the national security
interest of the United States. So in January, we decided to waive the
law, particularly for subcontracts. More than 50 percent of the money
that goes to the contracts will, in fact, go through subcontracts
because these projects are so big and the time that they have to carry
out the requirements of the contract is so short -- a 12-month period
is the planning period for what we are doing here - that they have to
hire subcontractors.
In any country that is not on the terrorist list -- I mean Libyan
companies and North Korean companies are not going to be bidding as
subcontractors, I can assure you -- any country that's competitive
that wants to bid can bid, regardless of whether they are British or
European or what.
Now, let me just - fine, last question.
The companies that bid are companies that had security clearances
because the information that they had to have to make judgments was
classified information. Companies do get security clearances, and we
couldn't - this is not like rebuilding Mozambique after the civil war
because there was not a security issue that involved American troops
or American diplomatic personnel or AID officials.
There is a lot of security information that is classified. These
companies have to deal with it. It takes a while to get a security
classification, so we asked for companies that had security
classifications already, that knew how to bid federal contracts, work
through the existing accounting system for the federal government, so
we could move this very rapidly. Speed is of the essence in this whole
thing.
QUESTION:  My question was a little bit different.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  I'm sorry.
QUESTION: It was more, if the pie of what there is to be done is like
this, when you look at reconstruction in Iraq over the next year, what
portion of it might conceivably fall within these contracts?
I mean, there is the impression out there that all work will be
accounted for by these American companies doing this work when there
is obviously much other kind of work that might have to --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, other countries will be contributing. I
can tell you that my European counterparts and the Japanese and
Canadians are talking privately now about what they will contribute,
and many of those countries also have laws that say you can only hire
companies that are from their countries. It's not just the United
States that has these statutes. Many of these countries that
contribute toward the reconstruction will be providing contracts to
companies from their countries. Is that the question you're asking?
QUESTION: Yeah, I'm just curious. What's left over to do? What else
might these companies --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Oh, I see what you mean. A lot of work to be
done.
We're covering a broad array because we have a large amount of money,
but the construction contracts are not going to rebuild the whole
country. I can tell you $600 million is not going to rebuild the whole
infrastructure of the country, much of which has deteriorated over a
10-year period and has had no preventive maintenance at all over a
very long period of time.
QUESTION: On this very early release date, I wonder if you could lead
us through how you see the first few days developing once you're
cleared to go in and once you've got some supplies, what sort of
projects you'll be looking to do, where you hope to be operating, what
you think the needs are?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, the first thing we do is we send in a
rapid assessment team and we work with the NGOs on this. There is a
standard format we use.
Everybody uses the same format, whether they are private NGOs , UN
agencies, or AID, and so we speak a common language and we can
understand that we are comparing applies to apples in our assessments.
We've done a lot of planning based on secondhand information,
intelligence information of what the conditions are in the country. It
may turn out that things are worse than we expected or better than we
expected, and that happens frequently in these emergencies.
So we have to check what the reality is on the ground because you
don't want to design a project for something that you had wrong
intelligence on.
The second thing you do -- and you have to do this very rapidly, this
will happen over a matter of a couple of days in the case of the south
- the second thing you do is you look at those things that are most
immediate threats to human life. Water, in my view, is one of the most
serious.
And so we would look at the quality. We have people from the Centers
for Disease Control on the Disaster Assistance Response Team. We have
water experts. They will test the water to determine, probably with
the ICRC who have the same kind of technicians on their teams, to see
whether the water supply in Basra meets the minimum requirements for
human consumption. If they don't, then we have to go in and either
chlorinate the water to a greater degree, or we install new equipment,
which we have on reserve. We may need more electricity. There may be
no generators; we have a stock of generators that we can install very
rapidly that are in warehouses in Kuwait City. That is the kind of
thing we will do.
In terms of food, there is an existing food distribution system;
55,000 agents distribute food. They are basically local grocery
stores. They have commercial stuff they sell, but they also distribute
the government's ration to the population, which a hundred percent of
the people get; 60 percent are entirely dependent on the ration system
for survival. Many of those people are Shias in the south, where the
poorest populations tend to be.
We need to stand up that system rapidly. WFP will do that. They know
where all of these shops are that do the distribution, for example, in
Basra. They will go there. There is a computerized list of everybody
in the country of who gets what kind of rations. They will go back to
the system that operated just a couple of weeks ago.
QUESTION: Just to follow up. You mentioned Basra. Do you see that as
being the focus of your attention, or do you imagine Basra will be one
of several places --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Oh, it will be one of several places.
QUESTION:  In the early days?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Yes.
QUESTION: And then to follow up, can I ask how much of an impediment
is the current debate at the UN over whether to give authority over
Oil-for-Food to the Secretary General? Is this going to hold you up in
any way in terms of immediate relief?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: No, it's not. That debate is over the
intermediate term.
QUESTION: When would you need access to that escrow account and the
materials that are in the pipeline?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Four months from now, three months from now. We
need it now because when you order food or other supplies it takes two
months to deliver, two to three months. So we need the Security
Council to make a decision on the humanitarian side of it.
The reconstruction issue is more complex, and I am not an expert in
that at all.
On the Oil-for-Food and for medical supplies, the decision needs to be
made in the next few days, the next week, because in order for us to
order food and supplies, it will be available in two or three months.
But we have enough to supply the population between now and the time
those supplies arrive.
QUESTION: Are you concerned that politics are getting in the way of
this decision being made?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, I have read some stuff in the newspapers
that was a little concerning. We are pushing very hard. There is
unanimity of opinion on that resolution among the allies, but
everybody in the UN is not an ally, so.
QUESTION: Can you straighten out something that I am still, at least,
unclear of?
Your DART team, you say, were there now. Are you talking about in
Kuwait City, or are you talking about in Umm Qasr, or with the
military?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  In Kuwait City,
QUESTION:  So you are not in Iraq yet?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Bear, come on up.
Bernd is the Director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, of
which the DART team came out of operation.
MR. MCCONNELL: The core of the DART -- and there are 47 people there
right now - is in Kuwait City. We have field offices initially in
Amman. We have people in Ankara. We have another floater team still in
Kuwait, as well as some liaison people in Doha with the Central
Command.
To be precise, the assessment that has been done at Umm Qasr has been
done by military. We are not yet in Iraq. We will rely upon a military
assessment of security, which we expect quite soon in the port, to let
us know when it is time to go in and do our own assessment.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Mr. Natsios, what you were saying about security clearances
for contractors and speeded-up awarding of contracts would ring alarm
bells I know in Britain and in probably many other countries. They
would see this as some kind of carve-up for U.S. companies. What
assurances can you give them that that is not the case?
And in a related question, how do you see the UN's role in the
reconstruction process?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: We have waived the Federal law, the procurement
laws, to my knowledge, three times in the last ten years. One was in
Bosnia, in the reconstruction of Bosnia. I waived it for the
reconstruction of Afghanistan. There are a number of British firms
actually working for AID in Afghanistan right now. And we waived it in
January for Iraq.
So, I gave actually the two British Ministers who called, Mike O'Brien
and Patricia Hewett, both British Ministers -- I think they are
Secretaries of State in the Foreign Office; one for Economic Affairs,
and one is Jack Straw's deputy I guess. One came to visit, and one --
we talked over the phone. I provided them actually with a document
showing that we had waived the law January -- I think January 17.
We don't do this very often. Normally, we source American companies
because it's American taxpayers' money. However, in this case we
decided we would do it differently to speed up the process and
increase the competition, particularly for subcontractors.
The prime contractors will be American companies. But let me just give
you an example of how we're doing the road in Afghanistan, this famous
road, you know, that goes from Kabul to Kandahar. The prime contractor
is Louis Berger Company. It's an engineering company. They're not
doing any construction work. The construction work is being done by an
Afghan-Turkish Company, which is clearly not American. They are doing
all of the construction work at the local level as subcontractors to
Louis Berger.
Louis Berger knows what our accounting requirements are, they know
what the audit requirements are, they know what Federal law is and how
to report to us, and they could do it, and they won the prime
contract. But they're not going to do any construction work. It's
local contractors that are primarily from the region that will
actually do the work.
We expect the same sort of thing will happen. We are using Crown
Agents right now in the Gulf to do our purchasing for us, which is, I
believe, a British company. And we are using, as I said, a bunch of
private sector British companies in Afghanistan right now to do work.
We expect the same template to obtain in Iraq.
QUESTION: Could you explain to us what your position is on who should
arrange the oil sale contracts during this interim period before Iraq
has a recognized government?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, that is a question, it would seem to us,
that would not be in the resolution on humanitarian assistance. That
would be the resolution on reconstruction, and I'm not an expert in
that. I've been following it from our staff's perspective, but that is
under discussion now and negotiation.
The question before us, this very immediate -- this is a resolution we
would like in the next few days, in the next week - is there's already
$8 billion in the UN trust fund that could be used to purchase food
and medical supplies for immediate use in Iraq. So you don't buy or
sell anything because the oil was already sold and the money is in the
account. We can't have access to that account without a resolution
because the consignee of that account had been, through the UN, the
Iraqi Government. Kofi Anan declared that null and void Monday of last
week, and so the Oil-for-Food Program basically stopped functioning
about ten days ago.
QUESTION: One point of clarification. I was told there's $2.5 billion
in the escrow account.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: No, that's how much is needed to pay for food
for a year. The escrow account has $8 billion in it.
I think there are different pots in it.
QUESTION: I was told that $8.5 billion has been contracted for in some
form or fashion and --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Yes, but the money has not been disbursed.
QUESTION:  But there are contracts that have been signed?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, the contracts -- some of the contracts
have been signed for three or four years and never executed, so a
signed contract is somewhat irrelevant unless there is money that has
changed hands. We have actually billions of dollars worth of food
contracts, but no one has paid the money out of that fund for them,
and that is why the food hasn't arrived. So you have to make a
distinction between payment and contract.
QUESTION: Mr. Natsios, following up on a previous question, can you
say what role you think the UN or other multilateral institutions
would have in the reconstruction of Iraq?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: The UN will clearly have a role. The question
is what the role will be, and that is what's being discussed. I'm not
going to go into the details of the nuances in that discussion, but
they are already involved. At least four or five agencies of the
United Nations are involved, and they've got pre-positioned people in
the area.
We have given grants going back to December to some UN agencies. Some
of them have been nervous about mentioning their names publicly
because they have local staff who are Iraqis who still live in the
country, and there is a fear of retribution by the Iraqi regime
against international staff or NGO staff in the country, so we have
been very reluctant, even though we've been criticized for being
anti-internationalist or the NGOs say we're not working with them,
when the fact of the matter is they asked us, the ones who are active
inside the country asked us to say nothing specifically because they
didn't want to put their staffs at risk
QUESTION: Well, just to follow up, I mean, can you give us a better
sense of how many, of what kind of number you're talking about, or can
you go into any more --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  For what?
QUESTION:  For these NGOs that you're --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: There are 20 to 30 NGO grant proposals we have
before us right now that we are reviewing and we expect within the
next week to make $30 million worth of humanitarian relief grants.
QUESTION: And you can't say anything more about the UN or other
multilateral - I mean, you said that the question is what the role
will be and you don't want to get into it at this point.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: That's for reconstruction, not for the relief.
QUESTION: Okay, well fair enough. That's my original question for
reconstruction. Can you say anything just in terms of -- as the
Administrator for USAID --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Let me also say something, though. If you look
at how the UN has worked in reconstruction efforts, it is not
primarily UN agencies that do reconstruction work. UNDP does some
work, but the major UN agencies that you know so well, the World Food
Program, they do not do reconstruction work. They're a food agency.
UNICEF does primary schools and they do children's and women's health.
That's what their mandate is.
But in terms of reconstruction of port facilities and airports, that's
the banks, the international banks, and it's big donor contracts - the
EU, the United States, the Japanese. That's who's doing it.
The UN is not doing any large-scale reconstruction in Afghanistan
right now. They are coordinating efforts, but the banks do the
infrastructure, and many of the actual social services in terms of
standing up a ministry so it's functional, like the finance ministry,
the UN is not involved in building up the capacity of the finance
ministry. It's the Treasury Department of the United States, the State
Department, and AID that are funding the contractors to help them put
that together, along with the EU and the Japanese.
So this is a complex system we use to do this work in the aftermath of
a conflict. But we should not get carried away with the UN running
everything. It seldom runs everything, and certainly doesn't have the
capacity to do it in some sectors like infrastructure.
QUESTION: Some of the biggest NGOs that are going to help with this
effort are complaining that you've actually wasted six months, that
they could have been well prepared, much better organized, and
recruited Iraqi staff and so on, but that they didn't get any money
and they didn't get the licenses from the Treasury. How do you respond
to that?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, if we had given them grants of $30-or-40
million for a conflict that no one had decided was going to take
place, I would be dragged before the IG and asked why I wasted
$30-or-40 million, since we didn't know last September. Maybe someone
knew. I certainly didn't know, and I don't think the President made
any decision last year.
It would also have had political implications. It would have implied
that decisions had already been made. We had to be very careful that
what we did in our preparatory work for this emergency did not appear
to be an endorsement or that a decision had already been made, because
it hadn't been made. We didn't want to politicize our relief and
reconstruction activities because it would have appeared something had
been decided when it really hadn't.
MODERATOR: I think we have to wrap this up now, to get you to your
next appointment.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS:  Thank you all very much.
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)



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