Worldview

Iraq isn’t the only place ‘coalition’ forces are causing civilian deaths, albeit unintentionally. The US army killed 11 Afghan civilians, seven of them women, last Wednesday when a bomb landed on a house on the outskirts of Shkin in Paktika province, near the Pakistan border. Paktika governor Mohammad Ali Jalali told Reuters: "We’ve told them repeatedly that they need to try to be precise when they target something." There is apparent unhappiness in southern and eastern Afghanistan against the presence of US troops and the way civilians often get killed in coalition operations. In February, at least 17 were killed in Helmand province when a mountain base believed to be sheltering Taliban fighters was bombed. The Taliban itself shows signs of becoming active, having launched a series of attacks on US and government targets.

Over a thousand people have been killed in fresh ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN said last week. The massacres took place in the northeastern region of Ituri, a day after an accord was signed (on April 2) to end over four years of war in this Central African country. "Witness accounts" of the massacres, which took place in the Drodo parish and 14 neighbouring areas, say 966 people were "summarily executed" in three hours. The unrest in Congo, formerly Zaire, broke out in 1998, a year after the fall of Mobuto Seke Seso. Over two million have died since as a result of disease and starvation alone. So shouldn’t Washington turn its attention to those trouble spots where oil doesn’t gush?<>p>

Baghdad has been ‘liberated’ and Iraq will be administered by Jay Garner (above), a retired three-star general pulled out of Florida by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to run the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHE). As innocuous sounding as the East India Company, orhe will rule Iraq directly. How quickly Iraq will go back to the Iraqis depends partially on how effectively Garner, till recently a defence contractor in a firm that specialised in guidance systems, brings about a pacification that will lead to democratic political activity from bottom up.

Garner will be adopting a non-military profile this time. He had been in Iraq in 1991 when he oversaw relief efforts (Operation Provide Comfort) to the Kurds after a Kurdish revolt against the Iraqi government failed, and about 1.5 million refugees fled to the mountains along the border with Turkey and Iran. He’s hoping the transition will be a short one, which might be misplaced optimism given the challenges of social re-tooling in Iraq that the defence department seems to have undertaken. It’s unclear the kind of democratic role Iraqis will have. Nor is much known about the UN’s "vital role", as George Bush promised this week. In recent days, Garner has been to Umm Qasr to laud the role of British troops. He now waits in Kuwait along with a council of advisors and other interim figures, waiting for a propitious time to enter Iraq and rule the country.