US reshuffle Iraq reconstruction team

THE US official sent in to oversee Baghdad and a large swath of its surrounding territory is leaving her position immediately after less than a month, a spokesman for the postwar American administration said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the top civilian administrator, retired Lt Gen Jay Garner, is expected to leave his post shortly after the appointment of his superior, L Paul Bremer, a longtime State Department official.

Barbara Bodine, the coordinator for central Iraq, planned to depart Baghdad yesterday, according to US Army Maj John Cornelio, a spokesman for the US Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the reconstruction effort’s civilian wing.

No replacement has been named yet, Cornelio said in an interview. Bodine has been in Iraq for less than three weeks.

Cornelio could not say what the next assignment might be for Bodine, a former American ambassador to Yemen.

“I’m not leaving with the sense that we’ve done everything we could have done, but I’m also not leaving with the sense that it’s been a failure,” Bodine said in a Washington Post interview.

Bodine’s departure comes in the midst of an apparent shake-up of the civilian reconstruction force assigned to oversee postwar Iraq and help it move toward an inclusive post-Saddam interim government.

Garner’s exact departure date has not been announced. He remained active during appearances this weekend and said the plan for him to leave in such a short time frame has been in place all along.

Some Iraqis have complained bitterly of the slow pace of the US reconstruction efforts and say that such basic services as electricity and running water remain widely unrepaired a month after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

Bremer was expected in Iraq later this week, Cornelio said.

The 61-year-old Bremer was an assistant to former Secretaries of State William P Rogers and Henry Kissinger.

He was also ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism from 1986 to 1989 and served as ambassador to the Netherlands. Meanwhile yesterday hundreds of Iraqi Foreign Ministry employees returned to the ministry compound in central Baghdad to collect a one-time, emergency payment of $20 decreed by ORHA.

Ministry officials said employees, including diplomats and administrative staff, were last paid March 16, four days before the US-led war on Iraq began.

“We came here hoping to receive our salaries, but instead we got the $20 we heard about,” said Lobna Mohammed, a ministry translator.

“It’s not enough, because we need so many things and we are suffering too much. We just came out of a war.”

Odai Abdel-Sattar, a Baghdad University law graduate who joined the diplomatic service in 2001, said the money would come in handy.

“Everything has become so expensive and this money will help,” he said.

David Dunford, a retired career US diplomat who is now the senior ORHA adviser at the Foreign Ministry, said $20 might be a trivial sum to some of the ministry’s employees, but the payment would help the economy.

“It’s an effort to get money to people and to get them to putting money in the economy to help the economy get restarted,” Dunford said.