Thread: Archive Latest News - Think Tank - 15/04/08 - 26/08/08

US plays down expectations for Iraq meeting in Sweden

The United States on Tuesday played down expectations for an international conference in Sweden aimed at bolstering Iraq's economic and political stability.

"We'll see. We'll see," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters who asked if the world community might provide Iraq more relief for debts accrued under Saddam Hussein before US troops deposed him in 2003.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are around 100 delegations expected Thursday in Stockholm for the so-called Iraq Compact Annual Review Conference.

The International Compact with Iraq, or ICI, is a five-year peace and economic development plan for the war-torn country, adopted at the May 2007 international conference at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

At that meeting senior officials from more than 60 countries and organizations promised to cancel 30 billion dollars of Iraqi debt.

The Stockholm meeting is the first follow-up conference since Sharm el-Sheikh and will be hosted jointly by Iraq and the United Nations.

During a visit to Bahrain and Kuwait last month, Rice failed to persuade Iraq's Sunni-led Arab neighbors to make any concrete commitments on debt relief or diplomatic presence in Baghdad.

Arab countries -- which are mostly led by Sunni Muslims like the late Saddam Hussein -- have been reluctant to support the new Shiite Muslim leadership in Baghad because of its perceived ties to Shiite Iran.

McCormack admitted progress was slow but said it was happening.

"It moves. It moves, sometimes at a slow pace, but it moves in its own way and according to the diplomacy of the region," McCormack said.

"I think two years ago, you couldn't have even imagined Iraq being invited to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting," he said.

"This last time around, just when the secretary was in Kuwait, they attended at the invitation of the Gulf Cooperation Council. So, it was the GCC plus Egypt and Jordan and Iraq," he said.

"And they're going to be attending all of those meetings in the future," McCormack said.

"That signals, to me, a different kind of relationship and growing bonds between this Iraqi government and the rest of the Arab world," he added.

But he added "of course, we're always looking for substantial achievements, whether it's in the area of debt relief or embassies opening or ambassadors being appointed or meetings being held."

Iraq Energy Expo=

Maliki, Rice, 100 Countries Meet to Help Iraq Economy, Security

Representatives from about 100 countries will meet tomorrow in Stockholm to discuss Iraq's economic and political stability as provincial elections threaten to undermine security gains.

In talks with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will emphasize economic achievements, steps toward national reconciliation and improved security, his government said in an e-mailed statement.

Since the United Nations and Iraq agreed to a five-year stability plan a year ago, violence has dropped and oil exports have increased.

Provincial elections planned in the fall may reverse some of the security gains, said Gareth Stansfield, an analyst at Chatham House, a London-based foreign policy consultant to European governments. The government has cracked down on fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who likely will make gains in the vote and who opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq.

``We've seen some very worrying signs coming out of Iraq about what the future will hold,'' Stansfield said.

Sunni tribal groups have been armed and financed by the U.S. to combat Islamic terrorists in Iraq and may pose a future threat to the Shiite-dominated central government, Stansfield said. And the government has little influence in the oil-rich northern Kurdish region, which is semi-autonomous.

The one-day meeting of as many as 600 delegates and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon follows a meeting of the ``International Compact with Iraq'' in May 2007 in Sharm el- Sheikh, Egypt, which paved the way for debt relief for Iraq.


Political Gains

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, told Congress May 22 that he is likely to recommend further withdrawals of troops from the current 155,000, after violence dropped to a four-month low. Petraeus, 55, said progress was due to the government's improved ability to carry out security operations.

The Iraqi army now stands at 320,000, according to the Iraqi Defense Ministry. Petraeus also praised al-Maliki for his military offensive against fighters loyal to al-Sadr in Basra and Baghdad.

``You cannot expect to have a major breakthrough from one day to another, but the conference will start a process toward stability and progress and pave the way towards normalization,'' Frank Belfrage, Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs, told journalists in Stockholm on May 26.
Budget Agreed The Iraqi parliament in February approved a budget, enacted a law allowing former Baath Party members back into politics and set Oct. 1 as the provincial election date. The vote, which may be important for increasing political participation by the Sunni Muslim minority, will probably be delayed a month, Petraeus said.

``It's very hard to be bullish,'' said Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at International Crisis Group in Istanbul, Turkey. ``The recent period has shown that progress with the current political setup is impossible.''
Oil production has increased to its highest level since 2004, with revenue of up to $70 billion expected this year, the government said in a report published before the meeting. A law mapping out an oil revenue-sharing system and improving the environment for foreign investment has yet to be completed.


`Not a Poor Country'

``The high-level meeting in Stockholm is not a pledging conference -- Iraq is not a poor country,'' the Iraqi government said in the report. The country wants ``partnership, technical assistance, and economic exchange,'' to unlock the country's resources.

At last year's meeting in Egypt, officials from around 50 countries promised to cancel $32 billion of Iraq's foreign debt.

The U.S., commercial creditors and countries in the Paris Club of creditor nations including Japan and the U.K. have canceled $66.5 billion of Iraq's debt in the past three years.

The Iraqi government has agreed on debt-relief arrangements with all 18 Paris Club members and with 37 other countries, according to its report. Most private sector debt has been settled, according to the report.

Iraq is still in talks with the Gulf states to reach an agreement on outstanding payments, the government said. The U.S. has been pushing the Arab states to cancel outstanding debt.

The number of Iraqis seeking asylum in industrialized countries almost doubled to about 45,200 last year, with the majority seeking refuge in one of the 37 European countries. Sweden received 41 percent of the claims, United Nations figures show. The U.S. had 734 applications last year.

Iraq Energy Expo=

Controversial Contractor’s Iraq Work Is Split Up

Sometime soon, a group of American corporate ****utives and military leaders will quietly sit down and divide Iraq into three parts.

Their meeting will not have anything to do with Iraq’s national sovereignty, but instead will involve slicing up billions of dollars in work for the defense contractors that support the American military’s presence in the country.

For the first time since the war began, the largest single Pentagon contract in Iraq is being divided among three companies, ending the monopoly held by KBR, the Houston-based corporation that has been accused of wasteful spending and mismanagement and of exploiting its political ties to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yet even as the Pentagon begins to pull apart the enormous KBR contract, critics warn that the new three-company deal could actually result in higher costs for American taxpayers and weak oversight by the military. In fact, under the new deal, KBR and the two other companies could actually make more than three times as much as KBR has been paid each year since the war began.

Last month the Pentagon awarded the companies pieces of a new contract to provide food, shelter and basic services for American soldiers, a 10-year, $150 billion deal that stretches far beyond the final days of the Bush administration. KBR will still get a sizable chunk of the business, but now it will have to share the work with Fluor Corporation and DynCorp International.

Army officials and ****utives of the three companies are planning to meet in the next few weeks to start the complex process of breaking up KBR’s sprawling operations in Iraq.

KBR, previously a subsidiary of Halliburton, once headed by Mr. Cheney, has collected more than $24 billion since the war began. It has 40,000 employees in Iraq and 28,000 more in Afghanistan and Kuwait.

But KBR has come under fire from Congress and Pentagon auditors for complaints ranging from making more than $200 million in excessive charges, including meals never served to soldiers, to delivering unsafe water to American troops to doing little to prevent sexual assaults of its female employees, often by their KBR co-workers.

Army officials acknowledge that they were under intense pressure from Capitol Hill to give KBR some competition, yet leading Democratic lawmakers and other critics say the new contract will merely paper over the fundamental problems that stem from the Pentagon’s heavy dependence on outside contractors in Iraq.

“This is just another verse in the same old song,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota who is one of the leading Congressional critics of KBR and other major defense contractors. “It appears to me that this is a broken process.”
Critics also say they doubt that the new contract will result in significant cost savings or better services for soldiers in Iraq. The Army has built into the deal the potential for larger profits for the contractors than existed under the prior contract, and it plans to outsource much of the management and oversight of the contractors to yet another company, Serco Inc., for $59 million.

“This new contract sounds good, they are splitting it up, but there are serious flaws, including what looks like outsourcing oversight,” said Dina Rasor, an investigator and co-author of a book about contracting in Iraq. “And the size of the contract is enormous. When you think of these big, multibillion-dollar defense contracts and contractors, you think of companies like Lockheed, and you can see their big airplane plants. But what is KBR doing for all this money? They are slinging hash, washing laundry.”

Army officials said that they would not be able to actually shift work from KBR to the other companies until late this year, meaning that the change would be under way just as Americans are choosing a new president. The Army officials said the huge new multiyear contract for Iraq would not commit any new presidential administration to paying billions of dollars to defense contractors for services in Iraq if the new president decided to withdraw American troops.

It is not clear how the Pentagon will try to untangle KBR’s operations in Iraq to share them with DynCorp and Fluor. Lee Thompson, the ****utive director of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, as the program is called, said the Army would first try to split work in Kuwait among the three companies, and would then move on to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even if the United States remains in Iraq long term, the contract could ultimately cost much less than $150 billion over 10 years, Mr. Thompson said. But after being caught off guard by the scale of the spending at the start of the war, the Army is building in a cushion this time, he said.

Army officials have been working for two years to undo KBR’s monopoly on business in Iraq.

As the war dragged on much longer than anticipated, the Army’s initial, pre-invasion decision to grant Halliburton a no-bid contract for Iraq emerged as a sensitive political issue for the Bush administration because of Mr. Cheney’s connections to the company. Army officials realized they had to bring in some other companies. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out we were getting beat up by the Hill,” Mr. Thompson said.

Five companies submitted bids (primarily covering work in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan), and the Army initially awarded contracts to KBR, Fluor and DynCorp last June. But the two losing companies protested, and the Government Accountability Office upheld their protests in October, ruling that the Army had given preferential treatment to the winning companies. The Army then made some adjustments in the contract and announced in April that the same three companies had won again.

Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR, defended the company’s performance. “When issues have been raised, KBR has fully cooperated by providing information requested of us,” she said. “We remain committed to ethics and integrity and work daily to provide quality services to our customer, the U.S. military.”

Like KBR, DynCorp, based in Falls Church, Va., has had serious problems in past contracting work, including allegations that its employees engaged in sex trafficking in Bosnia while working on a police training contract there in the late 1990s. In addition, government auditors concluded last year that the State Department’s $1.2 billion contract with DynCorp for police training in Iraq was so badly managed that they could not determine exactly what was done for the money. Just last week, DynCorp lost a racial discrimination and breach-of-contract lawsuit in Virginia when a jury found in favor of a minority subcontractor that had done work in Iraq and Afghanistan. A DynCorp spokesman said the company would appeal the $15 million judgment.

DynCorp officials said they recognized that taking over part of KBR’s work on such a highly controversial — and politically sensitive — contract in Iraq could lead to even greater public scrutiny of the company. “We understand what we are getting into here, there’s no question about it,” said Greg Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman. “But we think we can really do well at it.”

A spokesman for Irving, Tex.-based Fluor declined to discuss in detail the company’s involvement in the Iraq contract. In a prepared statement, a company official said, “We look forward to providing the personnel and equipment to sustain our troops across the globe.”

While the Army hopes to inject some competition into its Iraq contracting by splitting it three ways and requiring the companies to bid against one another for individual pieces of the work, it is also sweetening the incentives by offering much higher rewards than in the earlier contract.
Until now, KBR has been paid on a “cost-plus” basis, meaning that all of its costs are reimbursed by the Army, as long as the company can convince the government that they are reasonable. On top of that, KBR has been awarded fees, including a base fee equal to 1 percent of costs and a performance fee of an additional 2 percent of costs.

Under the new contract, the three companies will be eligible to get base fees worth up to 3 percent of the costs of the contract, and award fees that could raise the total fees up to 10 percent of costs.

“There will be higher fees than in the last contract, but we are trying to incentivize them to compete,” Mr. Thompson said.

But such high fees on cost-plus contracts require oversight, and the Army has decided to bring in Serco, a Reston, Va.-based division of a British company, to do that. It will help manage the other three contractors and perform cost and price analysis of them.
Mr. Thompson said the Army would remain in charge of judging the contractors’ performance, and a spokeswoman for the United States Army Sustainment Command, which is in charge of the contract, said that an Army inquiry found no conflicts of interest between Serco and the three other contractors.

Steve McCarney, a Serco spokesman, added that the company had performed independent assessments of government operations in the past, including several for the Navy. “We don’t have any relationships with the other contractors, and all of our assessments will be independent,” he said.

But Congressional leaders and other critics say that having an outside contractor manage the others and analyze their prices and costs means that there will be little real government oversight to maintain spending discipline.

“The Army can say that they are retaining the final say, but when they outsource this much work on contract management, they really are outsourcing oversight,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating defense contractors in Iraq.

Iraq Energy Expo=

President Talabani Expresses Iraq’s Willingness to Reinforce Relations with Russia

The Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, met with a delegation from the LUKOIL oil company in Baghdad on Wednesday.

President Talabani expressed Iraq’s willing to reinforce bilateral relations with the Russian federation in all aspects particularly the oil aspect since it is considered as the main gate toward promoting these relations.

Talabani reiterated that the Iraqi leaders perceive the significance of promoting relations with Russia and that they are persisting to develop friendly bilateral ties.

The possibility of the Russian oil companies’ participation in Iraq’s oil investment and the need for removing the obstacles which hinders their participation were discussed during the meeting.

The Russian delegation on their part, stressed that Russia is hoping to invest in Iraq, particularly in the oil business, appreciating President Talabani’s support for promoting bilateral relation between both countries.

PUKmedia :: English - President Talabani Expresses Iraq’s Willingness to Reinforce Relations with Russia

The Stockholm Conference and Conditionality in Iraq

As international experts prepare for the 29 May conference in Stockholm on development aid and debt relief for Iraq under the Iraq Compact scheme, the picture of US policy-making in this area is depressing. Despite a declared intention of pursuing a unifying policy, through its peculiar choice of Iraqi allies the Bush administration is in fact contributing to fragmentation. Whereas the formula of a tripartite federal state based on “Shiite”, “Sunni” and “Kurdish” regions enjoys only limited popular support in Iraq outside Kurdistan, it is being pursued very determinedly by Washington’s Iraqi partners: the two biggest Kurdish parties (KDP and PUK) and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) – the only Shiite party that supports a federal arrangement based on sectarian identities, and also historically the Shiite party with the closest and most long-standing ties to Iran. Even Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who used to criticise the notion of strong federal regions, may have become increasingly dependent on ISCI and the Kurds after his latest moves against the Sadrists. Whilst he theoretically maintains the position that the demarcation of new federal entities is the constitutional prerogative of the Iraqi people, the current machinations by his government to influence this autumn’s provincial elections could serve as a forewarning about what kind of methods it may choose to employ in the federalisation process later on.

Moreover, despite a façade of rhetorical disagreement in the US policy debate, both Democrats and Republicans are in practice giving in to Iran when it comes to Iraq. The Bush administration has chosen to promote Tehran’s friends in ISCI (and at the same time uses much of its resources to weaken Iran’s historical enemy in the country, the Sadrists, thereby leaving them with no other option than rapprochement with Iran); the Democrats, for their part, insist on a narrative of an “irreversible Iranian victory in Iraq due to the follies of the 2003 invasion”, where, it is maintained, a certain level of Iranian influence must simply be accepted as a given. And because the rest of the world is doing precious little to influence these patterns, the nationalist majority of Iraqis – Shiites and Sunnis who want no role for Iran in Iraq whatsoever and who consider tripartite division an “Iranian plot” – are left with no outside support.

There is one exception to the generally disheartening picture of US policy-making for Iraq. During the Crocker & Petraeus hearings in the US Congress last April, individual representatives repeatedly raised useful questions that related to conditionality and leverage. For example, Senator John W. Warner (R.) of Virginia asked whether the fact that the United States is concluding a new security arrangement with Iraq in 2008 might perhaps provide a good opportunity for Washington to make use of its leverage and thereby push the Maliki government into doing something about long-delayed legislative projects related to the fundamental question of national reconciliation. Similar suggestions have been heard from time to time by Democratic representatives who are not attracted to Joe Biden’s “alternative policy” of actively supporting additional federal regions south of Kurdistan.

Unfortunately, however, “conditionality” seems to be a foreign term to the Bush administration. Ryan Crocker’s bland response to Warner suggested that he had not given much thought to any such idea. Weeks later, during visits by US officials to the Gulf countries, Washington’s remarkable unwillingness to use leverage for political ends once more asserted itself: “Arab countries should move to re-open embassies in Baghdad as soon as possible”. Full stop, no caveats.

Should the Arab countries really open embassies in Baghdad and unconditionally cancel all debts? In the current situation, that would in practice mean bankrolling a system of government in Iraq based on ethno-sectarian regions which few Iraqis are asking for. In fact, Arab reluctance to make friends with the Maliki government could be one of the last sources of external support for those Iraqis who remain deeply unhappy with the way in which a small, foreign-sponsored parliamentary elite is ramming through a state model in Iraq that may well turn the country into an orifice of institutionalised sectarianism instead of a beacon of democracy in the region. Only a week ago, developments in Basra underlined just how much opposition to the Maliki line can be found outside the Green Zone, even in core Shiite areas. A vote by the Basra provincial council – reportedly by consensus, and thus conceivably even involving some “defections” from the local ISCI branch – protested against the central government’s decision to remove the head of the Southern Oil Company. The initiative was headed by Fadila, an Iraqi Shiite Islamist party which enjoys considerable sympathy in other Arab countries thanks not least to its outspoken criticism of Iran, but which symptomatically has received scant attention from the US.

Today, the latest phase in the forced ethno-federalisation of Iraq is being played out as the Kurdish–ISCI ruling minority tries to fashion a provincial elections law that can suit its strategy of minimising popular impact on the elections results. Open lists that would give voters the opportunity of overruling party elites in their choice of candidates have been discussed in Iraq recently, but the KDP-appointed president of the “independent” electoral commission, Faraj al-Haydari, has already deemed this “impracticable”. Similarly, the idea of smaller electoral districts is being dismissed because of Kurdish concerns over Kirkuk. This all echoes the December 2005 parliamentary elections, in which no less than one third of ISCI’s members of parliament were “elected” not on the basis of the popular vote but rather were promoted as a result of party manipulations of the list after the ballots had been cast. But then again it is only two months since the Kurds and ISCI fought tooth and nail to avoid any timeline for elections; it would be naïve to expect a sudden change of priorities just because the provincial powers law has been adopted by parliament.

In Stockholm, the Iraq Compact will come up for discussion. As the compact currently stands, it is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq: open-ended commitment and no substantial demands for political reform. In the annual report by the Iraqi government to the compact organisers, a prominent item under the “national reconciliation” heading is the “expectation” that the Tawafuq bloc will soon rejoin the Maliki government! In fact, forthcoming changes to the Maliki government have been announced regularly ever since the summer of 2006 without any real change actually taking place, but Western governments have been amazingly persistent in taking these optimistic prophecies at face value. At the same time they have remained acquiescent when faced with equally determined efforts by Maliki to avoid any robust checks and balances being introduced to the revision of the hyper-decentralised 2005 constitution.

Stockholm could be an opportunity for a fresh discussion of to what extent the Maliki government’s line is truly representative of Iraqi public opinion and really constitutes a sound basis for a new political system in Iraq. Arab states could try to find a constructive position between full boycott and unconditional surrender to the ISCI-Kurdish blueprint for the new Iraq. More likely, however, the conference will play out as a polite gathering of diplomats that will fail to ask critical questions about the overall direction of Iraqi politics, thereby perpetuating the West’s abandonment of the Iraqi people.

By Reider Visser

The Stockholm Conference and Conditionality in Iraq

Officials: Iraq to be ready for security handover by 2009

Iraqi forces will be ready to take over security responsibilities in Baghdad from the Multi-National Force by 2009, a senior official said Wednesday. "Interior Ministry forces are almost self-sufficient in both weapons and training," Adnan al-Asadi, under-secretary at the Ministry of Interior said during a press conference in Baghdad.

Some political powers in the Interior and Defense ministries have called for merging Awakening Council fighters with security forces, Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported.

Awakening Councils are US-backed tribal police squads established in Iraq's Sunni-dominated areas to fight Sunni extremist groups loyal to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

"Next year, Interior Ministry forces will be fully prepared to take over the security file in the capital Baghdad," al-Asadi said in discussing the possibility of a merger between the Awakening Councils and security forces.

Meanwhile in Falluja, 70 kilometers west of Baghdad, Iraqi security forces found a mass grave, two tons of chemicals and 44 rockets, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, 11 wanted people were captured in Basra, 550 kilometers south of the Iraqi capital, in connection with criminal and terrorism cases during security operations in different parts of the southern province, VOI reported.

Iraqi security forces have conducted several raid-and-search operations in Basra with the aim of tracking down gunmen and outlaws, after the violent clashes that broke out between government forces and Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia groups in late March.

EXTRA: Officials: Iraq to be ready for security handover by 2009 : Middle East World

Iraq's deputy PM says renewed will to finish Oil Law

There is fresh political will to complete a long-awaited oil law designed to pave the way for international investment in Iraq's oil sector, Iraq's deputy prime minister said on Thursday.

Investment, crucial to developing Iraq's oil resources, has been held back by repeated delays to the law. The draft being negotiated was first agreed by the Cabinet in February 2007.

"There is now renewed political will to bring the negotiations on the legislation to closure," Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said.
The proposed law would create a framework for investment, Salih said in a speech to a conference in Stockholm, but he said it could not be hurried.

"Despite the need for the legislation, this is not a matter that can be rushed. Iraq will need space and time to resolve those issues on the basis of consensus," he said.

Even without the law, Iraq has begun the process of luring in international oil firms and its output has begun to recover.

A senior Iraqi oil official said earlier this month, Iraq was on course to lift shipments to a post-war record above 2 million barrels per day (bpd).

"Pending the adoption of the legislation, we should work hard to continue to increase output and exports and negotiate various forms of cooperation with our partners," Salih said.

Over the next three-to-four years, he said Iraq planned to develop its capacity to at least 6 million bpd.

Iraq's deputy PM says renewed will to finish oil law | Markets | Reuters

PM calls world to cancel debts, compensations

PM Noori Maliki and UN Secretary General Ban Key Moon would open tomorrow 2nd conference of International Covenant in Sweden.

Iraqi delegation, headed by PM and includes his deputy Barham Saleh, would call the international community for more support, particularly at write down debts and cancel compensations on Iraq.

Sweden hosts first review of the International Covenant document with Iraq that signed with UN in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt on May 2007, and considered start point of new relation between Iraq and the world after Saddam's regime toppled in 2003.

PM calls world to cancel debts, compensations | Iraq Updates

Iraq’s International Compact Conference Starts its Work in Stockholm

World leaders were meeting in Sweden on Thursday to consider Iraq's progress on reconciliation and development.

More than 500 delegates from dozens of countries and international organizations attended the conference outside Stockholm, including Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon were among the leaders expected to address the one-day conference.

Delegates were to review progress on the country's reconciliation and nation-building.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt were also expected to address the summit which was taking place amid tight security.

The conference is a follow-up meeting to the so-called International Compact for Iraq launched a year ago at a summit in Egypt. Iraq and the UN are hosting the meeting.

"The Iraqis don't need large sums of money," Rice told reporters before the conference. "They do need large infusions of technical assistance (and) project support."

"I would hope that the international community would accelerate its efforts to help make Iraq a capable state," she said.

Ban said there was new hope for the Iraqi people "to rebuild their country after years of war, dictatorship and neglect" and called for reconciliation among the country's Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds.

"I urge Iraqi communities to work together in a spirit of national unity to resolve fundamental issues that continue to divide them," Ban told the conference. "These include the federal structure of Iraq and the sharing of the country's wealth and natural resources."

Iraq's prime minister called on his neighbours to forgive his country's debts, saying they impede development. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also praised his country's security and economic progress. He said his government had kept Iraq from descending into the "abyss of civil war."

"Iraq has achieved major success in the battle against terrorism with the support of the international community," al-Maliki told the conference through a translator.

Iraq has at least $67 billion in foreign debt — most of it owed to fellow Arab countries Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Al-Maliki said Iraq needs to get rid of the burden of war reparations from Saddam Hussein's regime and debt which he called "an impediment against reconstruction and development."

There is fresh political will to complete a long-awaited oil law designed to pave the way for international investment in Iraq's oil sector, Iraq's deputy prime minister said.

Investment, crucial to developing Iraq's oil resources, has been held back by repeated delays to the law. The draft being negotiated was first agreed by the Cabinet in February 2007.

"There is now renewed political will to bring the negotiations on the legislation to closure," Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said.

The proposed law would create a framework for investment, Salih said in a speech to a conference in Stockholm, but he said it could not be hurried.

"Despite the need for the legislation, this is not a matter that can be rushed. Iraq will need space and time to resolve those issues on the basis of consensus," he said.

"Pending the adoption of the legislation, we should work hard to continue to increase output and exports and negotiate various forms of cooperation with our partners," Salih said.

PUKmedia :: English - Iraq’s International Compact Conference Starts its Work in Stockholm

Demand for the dollar lower at daily auction

Demand for the dollar was lower in the Iraqi Central Bank's auction on Thursday, reaching $ 64.845 million compared to $ 83.980 million on Wednesday.

"The demand hit $4.395 million in cash and $60.450 million in foreign transfers outside the country, all covered by the bank at a stable exchange rate of 1,198 Iraqi dinars per dollar," according to the central bank's daily bulletin which was received by Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI).

The 13 banks that participated in the auction offered to sell $100,000, which the bank bought all at an exchange rate of 1,196 dinars per dollar.

The Iraqi Central Bank runs a daily auction from Sunday to Thursday.

Aswat Aliraq