90% of Iraq 'calm, in peace'
2003-11-19 16:14
Rome - Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator in Iraq, insisted in an interview published here on Wednesday the situation in Iraq had been "normalised" in about 90% of the country, despite daily attacks on coalition forces.
"Around 90% of Iraq is calm, normalised, in peace," Bremer told the Corriere della Sera in the interview, published the day after Italy buried its 19 nationals killed in the bombing of its military base in southern Iraq, which also killed nine Iraqis.
Bremer said the Nasiriyah bombing "was a red alert for everybody. No international contingent can have any illusions, nobody can feel immune to terrorism. Everyone has become a potential target."
He flatly rejected allegations by Italy's representative to his Coalition Provisional Council, Marco Calamai, who resigned this week in protest at the way the US-dominated council was running the country and called for the operation to be handed over to the United Nations.
"I really don't know what he's talking about," said Bremer.
"Calamai says that we don't know how to manage the $400 000 a month allocated to the Nasiriyah region. But I can show him that from last May until now we spent more than $20m in this area alone."
"He says we need the UN here? Well, we want them here too. But it was they who left Iraq, refusing our protection," added Bremer, a former US ambassador to the Netherlands who has headed the council since May.
"Two weeks ago in Madrid I met Kofi Annan and tried to convince him to return. Even if, I have to tell you, the UN is certainly not a model of efficiency, thrift and dynamism."
"I categorically refute the accusation that we Americans want to isolate the other 17 national groups who are working with us," as Calamai had suggested.
Bremer said the Nasiriyah attack, claimed by al-Qaeda, "reminded me of those against the American embassies in East Africa in the 1990s and that suggest that it could have been carried out by al-Qaeda, or even Iraqis linked to the former regime who studied the modus operandi of the network."
Bremer's comments in the newspaper appear to run counter to those of US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said on Tuesday that there was currently no-one in Iraq to whom power could be transferred.