EU diplomats join Iraq’s firing line

By Andrew Beatty

Date: 16/06/05

Within a month the European Union could have a diplomatic representation up and running in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

According to External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner who visited Iraq last week with a group of EU representatives, the security situation now allows the Commission to open a representation in what is regarded as one of the most dangerous cities on earth.

But Ferrero-Waldner will have seen little to indicate that Baghdad is now a safe place to put staff during her one-day visit with foreign policy chief Javier Solana, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn.

According to estimates compiled by the Brookings Institution, a US-based think-tank, 270 Iraqi police and security officials were killed last month, compared with 109 in January.

The number of car bombs in the same period jumped from 18 to 135. Baghdad continues to take the brunt of the attacks. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, another US institute, the city still suffers 20-40 attacks per week.

Although statistics can be misleading, there is little doubt that Iraq is still a very dangerous place.

Memories of the fate of UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in Baghdad in August 2003 along with 16 others, when a truck bomb rammed the UN headquarters, are still a warning that not belonging to the occupation forces is no security guarantee. The Iraqi people know it well, too.

Representations are still packed into the so-called Green Zone, flanked by the river Tigris and blast proof concrete.

But security assessments, like statistics, often have a political edge.

A year ago security was a useful, although embarrassingly transparent, cover for papering over the cracks that emerged in Europe over the Iraq war, cracks which made a collective action in the country impossible.

France, Germany and other opponents of the US-led invasion cited the security situation in the country as the primary reason for the EU's conspicuous lack of presence in the Iraqi capital.

Since January things have changed and the interim Iraqi government is now in charge, at least on paper.

Adherence to what former US secretary of state Colin Powell called the pottery-barn rule, 'you break it you pay for it' no longer holds.

Now that an elected Iraqi national assembly is in place, unlike the country's US occupiers, an ill-equipped government cannot be asked to pick up the cost. The EU is starting to engage, with trepidation.

According to Ferrero-Waldner, the delegation is unlikely to be staffed at first by more than a couple of officials, but it is an important political signal.

Coupled with the visit to Iraq this week, which Ferrero-Waldner described as marking "the beginning of a new political relationship with Iraq", the desire to open a delegation is meant as a signal that the EU wants to play a more important role.

Next week they will go a step further when the EU co-hosts a high-level conference on Iraq with the United States.

The conference was meant as a way of putting EU-US ties back on track, a process that started last February during President George W. Bush's visit to Brussels.

But grand symbolic gestures aside, some say the EU is doing little to help in Iraq and looks set to continue to do so.

According to Gareth Stansfield of the London-based think-tank Chatham House, the EU "is simply not a player" as far as Iraq is concerned.

In the area that perhaps matters most, security, the EU, says Stansfield, has not engaged meaningfully.

So far the Union has committed itself to training 700 Iraqi police and judges, with most of the training taking place outside the country.

Against a well-organised insurgency of perhaps 12,000, this is a drop in the ocean.

Aside from the suffering it has caused, the insurgency has undermined trust in Iraq's armed forces, who have proven unable to cope without US assistance.

At the conference next week the EU may offer new commitments to engage in the political process, where it could play an important role, according to Stansfield.

"The EU could actually be quite useful in delivering a message of how to govern a deeply divided society," he said, adding that without security, the political process cannot succeed.

Article says that according to the EU's External Relations Commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who visited Iraq in mid-June 2005 with a group of EU representatives, the security situation allowed the European Commission to open a representation in Baghdad.