ShareThisBy JAY PRICE
Friday, November 03, 2006
With U.S. reconstruction money dwindling, RTI International is spreading an unpopular message through the Iraqi government officials it tutors: It will be years before citizens can expect basic services such as clean water or 24-hour-a-day electricity.
"We need to help them redefine their 'hope horizon,' " said Jeevan Campos of Houston, the company's regional program director in the city of Hillah, where an office serves five of the nation's 18 provinces. "Right now for Iraqis, it's today and tomorrow, and both are equally bleak."
RTI, which is one of America's primary agents in rebuilding the shattered country, is charged with showing Iraqis how to provide basic government services, such as delivering clean water, collecting garbage and treating sewage. But three years into its work, it is hampered by the country's endemic violence and the broad perception that America is powerless to improve the country's lot.
As of September, about three-quarters of the $20.9 billion set aside by Congress for Iraqi relief and reconstruction had already been spent, according to a Brookings Institution report.
And yet electricity is available less than 11 hours a day on average, according to Brookings. Only about 50 percent of Iraqi citizens had a reliable source of clean water in 2004, said Campos, who noted it will take another nine years to get clean water to 75 percent of people.
RTI won its first contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development to strengthen local governments and solve such problems about a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
RTI's contracts with the agency total nearly $400 million. Its initial contract in Iraq in 2003 was the biggest since the nonprofit company was created in 1958.
Early on, RTI had a staff that included nearly 6,000 Iraqis able to move around much of Iraq. It now employs about 65 non-Iraqis in the country and about 600 locals. Security has worsened so much that RTI's non-Iraqi staff stays almost entirely on U.S. military bases or heavily guarded compounds and provides training there.
Early on, RTI worked primarily to start elected councils in neighborhoods, towns and provinces, which are roughly equivalent to American states. Now it concentrates on three things:
_ Helping elected councils and governors do their jobs.
_ Improving the handling of government money.
_ Improving services such as drinking water and wastewater treatment.
"The electricity, the water, the sewage situation is dire," Ron Johnson, the North Carolina-based executive vice president of RTI's international development group, said last week. "We all see that."
Despite that, Johnson describes RTI's work as a success. "The whole process transforms more and more from the U.S. doing things to the Iraqis doing things," he said.
In Hillah, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, RTI's main function is teaching elected leaders and government staff about things such as budgeting, using computers and strategic planning. That training has been vital, said several local leaders who came to the RTI office last week to meet with reporters.
It would be difficult for governments in the province to function without it, said the Babil Provincial Council chairman, Mohammed Ali Hussein. More training is needed, particularly for department heads and professionals outside government, he said.
The U.S. military took reporters to RTI's offices in Hillah while showing off the work of the Babil Provincial Reconstruction Team.
The PRTs, as they're widely called, are a relatively new tool for the United States in Iraq. They are to Iraqi civilians what U.S. military trainers are to the Iraqi army. There are seven such teams across the country and plans to add three more soon.
They are run by the U.S. State Department but also include representatives of various agencies, including the Department of Justice, military civil-affairs troops, Army Corps of Engineers, representatives from the Iraqi government's Reconstruction Management Office and, in most cases, RTI workers.
It was clear from comments that reconstruction-team officials got from Iraqi journalists that the "hope horizon" was indeed a problem. "The citizens are still suffering from a lack of basic services, and there is a loss of trust for government because the citizen sees no changes in his basic life," said Riyad Al-Ghareeb, a reporter for Babil Radio.
Al-Ghareeb said that he had seen running water reach some rural residents for the first time, and they were overjoyed. But he said that didn't make up for shortages of medicine and medical care, the fact that power was still out more than 10 hours a day, or the high unemployment that leads to crime.
The PRT's deputy leader, Lt. Col. Kirk A. Stemple, replied that the situation was largely created by Saddam Hussein's decades of disregard.
"Many of the things you speak of were things that were systems that were neglected for many, many years, and improvements to them don't come overnight," Stemple said. "They come after many years and much patience."
(Staff writer Sarah Ovaska contributed to this report.)
