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UN staff continue to flee Baghdad violence
Jordan Times, Sunday, September 28, 2003
BAGHDAD (AFP) — UN staff continued Saturday their exodus from Iraq as a Baghdad hotel housing US officials came under fire, while Washington agreed to a six-month target to draw up a new constitution. Twenty-six international aid workers, including an unknown number of UN personnel, were expected to cross the border into Jordan following on the heels of 12 UN staffers who departed late Friday, a spokesman said.
A third of the United Nations 86 international staff remaining in Iraq are being pulled out in line with a decision Thursday by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The United Nations kept about 650 international personnel in Iraq before an Aug. 19 bombing killed 22 people, including Annan's top envoy to Baghdad. A second bombing Monday killed an Iraqi security guard.
Major UN aid agencies said their emergency operations will continue in the war-torn country, but some admitted the exodus would hamper delivery of essential aid.
The moves come as foreign civilians were again the target of a new attack.
Two or three rockets or mortars were launched against the landmark Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad but little damage and no casualties were reported.
"This is the first coordinated, intentional, targeted attack against the Rashid Hotel," said military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Gainer.
The hotel houses many US and occupation officials and is next to the Baghdad convention centre which has been turned into the press offices of the military forces occupying Iraq since April.
The attack came two days after a small bomb at a hotel housing the Baghdad offices of the US television network NBC killed a maintenance man in the first such assault aimed at foreign journalists here.
The US military said Saturday its troops shot dead two Iraqis and wounded four when their car ran a checkpoint in the flashpoint town of Fallujah, 50 kilometres west of Baghdad.
Witnesses and hospital officials put the death toll at four in Fallujah, a hotbed of support for ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the site of frequent clashes.
On the political front, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he wanted Iraq's interim Governing Council to prepare a constitution within six months and hold elections next year.
"You have to have some sense of time on this and so six months is a good date to put out there," Powell told reporters in New York Friday after a meeting of the so-called international diplomatic "Quartet" on the Middle East.
At the United Nations on Friday, Powell stressed that missing the six-month timeframe would not destroy plans for returning Iraq to self-rule.
"The term deadline suggests that something awful happens at the end of the six months, and I wouldn't want to convey the impression that it falls off the end of the earth at the end of six months," he said.
Powell has also raised the possibility the Iraqis themselves could soon set a timetable, adding that the US government has asked Iraqi leaders to estimate how long it would take them to write a constitution and conduct elections.
In an interview with the New York Times, he said the constitution would spell out whether Iraq would be governed by a presidential or parliamentary system, clearing the way for elections and a new government in 2004.
Not until then, he insisted, would the United States transfer authority from the US-led occupation forces to Iraq itself.
In Washington, after long insisting no more US soldiers were required to secure Iraq, the Pentagon said it had mobilised 10,000 troops in two national guard brigades and put 5,000 more on standby as US calls for international troop contributions go unheeded.
The 30th Infantry Brigade from North Carolina and the 39th Infantry Brigade from Arkansas — 10,000 soldiers in total — will mobilise Oct. 1 and Oct. 12, respectively, the department of defence said.
Meanwhile in the streets of Europe, thousands of people turned out to protest against the war, including in some of the countries that supported the US-led coalition.
The largest rally took place in London, where the police counted 10,000 demonstrators, among them London's high-profile mayor and Labour dissident Ken Livingstone, but the organisers' tally was ten times higher.
In Paris, 3,000 people (8,000 according to organisers) took to the streets to protest US policy, police said.
In Warsaw, another 100 demonstrators marched to protest US occupation of Iraq and call for Poland's 2,400-strong contingent in the country to be brought home.
Some 3,000 demonstrators gathered in central Athens and another 500 in the eastern city of Salonika, the country's second largest.
Finally in Istanbul, Turkey's economic capital, close to 3,000 protested the occupation of neighbouring Iraq and Israel's policies against the Palestinians, while an unspecified number of protesters also gathered in Ankara.
No incidents were reported at any of the demonstrations.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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