Security requirements slow development work

BAGHDAD — The blue flak jacket is heavy and cumbersome, and Roger Guarda frets uncomfortably as he pulls it off his torso. “It’s hot and I’m choking,” grumbles the new head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Baghdad.

“But because the U.N. is now a target in Iraq, we have to wear these things every time we leave the office.”

Freed of his body armor, Mr. Guarda gets down to business. But instead of heading into the field to survey the array of job programs, park rehabilitation and electricity generation projects that the UNDP oversees, he stays close to his desk, playing “phone tag” with colleagues in Jordan and beyond.

“The work I used to complete in one day, I now do in four days,” he says. “Since I started this job, all I focus on is security.”

The foreign ministers of the U.N. Security Council’s permanent meeting in Geneva fell short of resolving differences over the U.N. role in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

The Bush administration, faced with the huge bills for rebuilding and the daunting challenge of securing the California-sized nation, wants more help from the international community and the United Nations.

But in the wake of the Aug. 19 truck-bomb blast at the U.N. headquarters at the Canal Hotel — an explosion that killed U.N. Iraq envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and at least 22 others — giving Iraqis a hand has become a much more dangerous affair.

Though it vows publicly that it never will abandon Iraq, the United Nations has pulled nearly 340 its of its 400 international staffers out of the country, U.N. officials say.

U.N. offices, once friendly and inviting compared with U.S. military bases and quarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have become barricaded fortresses surrounded by concrete and security guards.

Plainclothes U.N. security officials, toting machine guns, have been scouring the residences of U.N. employees, ordering the few remaining staffers to remain in their hotels at night and turning the once-coveted Baghdad assignment into virtual house arrest.

Several officials requesting anonymity say a plan under discussion would move all of the U.N. staffers out of their hotels and into tents on the grounds of the Canal Hotel.

U.N. staffers complain that maintaining contact with and assessing the needs of the Iraqi population, much less delivering services, have become increasingly difficult.

But Mr. Guarda, 62, a Belgian of Italian descent, deems it important to keep some presence in Baghdad, even if just to lift the people’s spirits.

“It is important that Iraqis do not feel abandoned,” he says. “The U.N. is like a big brother to Iraq. It’s important that people don’t feel like the big brother is leaving them.”

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