This week we have been forcefully reminded how easy it is to forget reality and believe the spin. On Thursday IMF made optimistic noises about Iraq’s economy, pointing to rises in oil export figures and a 7% growth in the economy. US President Bush was in the region promoting the very real decrease in violence associated with the surge but suggesting that it was a sign of hope for the future.
The picture though from those NGOs and UN agencies who work inside Iraq is very different. Their assessment is of a country moving inexorably towards a failed state. One in which, for the people living there, the crisis is one of fear and violence, and increasingly criminal violence, leading to an inexorable decline in access to the most basic of supplies, services, and the very right to move beyond the confines of ones home.
The data on what is actually happening across Iraq is hopelessly inadequate. The truth is that we really do not have anything more than a rudimentary guess of how much people are suffering, where the worst suffering is and how it is evolving.
And what we do know often goes untold. There are many humanitarian agencies working in Iraq. A few international NGOs, more local NGOs, courageous local individuals, UN agencies and the Red Cross. Seasoned workers for instance say that, compared with the Balkans, there is not the blind hatred expressed between the ethnic groupings we have become familiar with. They tell of a yearning on the part of most youth people to enter the 21st century, to have access to the internet, to education to good jobs, music and films.
Someone needs to tell this story, with a rigorous and honest portrait of the suffering, with a balanced portrayal of Iraqis and Iraq society, a story to counter the spin of the military and oil interests, and in my view that someone can only be the UN. Granted the resources the world’s community has made available to the UN are a fraction of those available to the Iraqi government or its US partner. Granted the UN has so far been given precious little space, but knowledge and truth do not have to be expensive, yet the story told loudly could be a powerful force for hope in Iraq and if there is one thing Iraqis desperately need, it is hope