Man who needs £106m for the children of Iraq
<a href=www.dailytelegraph.co.uk>By Alice Thomson (Filed: 29/03/2003)
It's 3.30pm at Terminal 2, Heathrow. The arrivals lounge is full of rugby players, businessmen, a stag party, the traffic of a Friday afternoon. In the middle stands a man with ruddy cheeks and gnarled hands, looking like a Dutch bulb grower in his crumpled suit.
He may look innocuous but, in the next week, Carel de Rooy will be meeting presidents, prime ministers, ministers, princes and paupers in his quest to raise £106 million. As Unicef's representative for Iraq, he will be flying on to Brussels, Geneva, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and France to plead for money for Iraq's 12 million children in the charity's largest ever emergency appeal.
"The Irish," he says, "have been fantastic in their support. The French are the least interested." London, where he is meeting Clare Short, is his second stop.
"Less than a week ago I was in Baghdad's marketplace searching for bread," he says. "I don't know when I'll go back. I've left 200 of my staff there, delivering babies, trying to keep water flowing, building latrines in camps, distributing £2 million of high-protein biscuits and milk formula, inoculating as many children as we can."
The remaining staff, all Iraqis, are trying to ignore the war as they check the orphanages and the generators that they have installed in the water treatment plants. Meanwhile, Mr de Rooy has flown to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iran and Kuwait in the last four days, setting up camps in case refugees flee over the borders.
"If the support doesn't come we'll have a catastrophe of unforeseeable dimensions," says the Dutchman. "Nearly 1.7 million people have been without water for four days in Basra and we're already seeing a thin column of refugees crossing the river. It's like watching a colony of ants on the move after someone has stepped on their nest: weary but determined. I get that sickening feeling . . . here we go again."
Mr de Rooy, who is 51, has worked in Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Brazil and Ivory Coast. "Iraq is different," he says. "Seventy per cent of the population is urban. They don't have a plot of land to grow tomatoes or keep chickens. They are used to a higher level of comfort - running water and electricity. There are few wells to keep them going.
"Almost all of them have become reliant on state hand-outs to eat; now they are stuck. There is five weeks of food left in the country. This is not about the reconstruction of Iraq - it's about survival."
Nearly 80 per cent of Iraqis are partly dependent on the oil-for-food programme; more than 60 per cent receive all their food from the state. "Twenty-three per cent of children are chronically malnourished already. If they get diarrhoea, they may die."
Mr de Rooy has spent two years in Baghdad. "There's been a crisis here since 1985, with the Iran/Iraq war. Then, there was the invasion of Kuwait that sucked the country dry, and after that sanctions.
"In the mid-1980s a professional would earn about 120 dinar a month, and about three per cent of that would be spent on protein. Now they earn 1,500 dinar but two chickens cost almost that much. That means instead of eating protein every day, they may have it three times a year. So 60 per cent of the women now have anaemia, half of all newborn babies have a low birth rate, 20 per cent of pregnancies go wrong."
The statistics are reeled off with dizzying speed. "Only countries such as Mozambique have worse rates of respiratory infections and chronic malnutrition among small children - and they have to contend with Aids. Over the last 10 years alone child mortality in this country has risen by 160 per cent - the biggest leap in the world. One in eight under-fives now dies. Yet Iraq is the second largest oil producer in the world. It's ludicrous."
The education system has fallen apart. "Each school," says Mr de Rooy, "has three shifts, so children are taught for only two hours a day. Teachers earn $5 a month and 25 per cent of children never go to school at all. Instead, they start working at the age of five in factories or as apprentices. For girls, it is worse - more than 33 per cent of girls stay at home to help their mothers."
It makes him want to shout: "It doesn't have to be like this!" Twenty years ago, Iraq had the third highest standard of living in the Middle East, out of 16 countries. Now, it has dropped to the bottom of the league.
But Mr de Rooy insists that he is still optimistic. "Iraq is a very secular state, and quite tolerant. These used to be educated, sophisticated people with a cosmopolitan view of the world. There is still a large middle class, even if they are starving.
"I have great friends in Baghdad - engineers, architects, bankers - all desperate to work. Some of the four million who emigrated might return. Iraq has the money from oil. It has a chance."
Baghdad, he says, may now be a dilapidated city, but it still has a sense of dignity. "You see that picture on television of the ragged skyline but you don't see the people below, desperately trying to keep their rooms clean and their families washed. There are few cafes left, but they are amazingly hospitable on their small piece of floor."
Iraqis, he says, are not corrupt. "They were called the Germans of the Arab world - they are naturally very straight and strict. I grew up in Latin America, so I know all about corruption. In Iraq, they don't steal the rations we supply. The country can recover quickly: it's got good people, spirit and resources."
He is too nervous to comment about the war in case it jeopardises the work of his team still in Baghdad, but he was in New York on September 11 and as soon as the war against terrorism began, he thought: Saddam's had it.
"My family were in Iraq but I got them out last year. My 15-year-old wasn't frightened but he wasn't learning anything with only two hours of school a day, so I sent them back to Brazil where I grew up. I saw my wife and my children at the beginning of January, but I'm not sure if I'll see them again this year.
"After this fund-raising, I'll go straight back to Iraq. I do feel bad that my family takes second priority but the Iraqi children have to come first."
His nightmare is that if the war intensifies, not only will he be unable to return but children will start dying from malnutrition and diarrhoea. "Then, there will be no point in discussing a future for Iraq. The oil-for-food programme has got to be reinstated. It was a disaster because it made the people dependent on Saddam but now it is all they have."
Both his parents fled Rotterdam after being bombed during the war. "My parents came from relatively privileged backgrounds but I have enormous sympathy for refugees," he says. "If possible, it is always better to help them remain in their own homes; otherwise, they will never feel they belong anywhere."
At university, he studied geology and specialised in water treatment, which led him to Unicef. "I found myself in remote villages, building wells in Africa. I became hooked on helping the vulnerable."
Working with Unicef after the earthquake in Colombia, the floods in Venezuela, the famine in Ivory Coast and the earthquake in El Salvador must have prepared him well for any disaster.
"They were all natural disasters - we just got on with it," he points out. "This is far more tortuous - it's a man-made hell. It is hundreds of earthquakes, thousands of volcanoes.
"This is like watching an earthquake and then being forced to sit on your hands while children and women are slowly, silently smothered to death over a decade."
Donations can be made by phone (08457 312312) or online at www.unicef.org.uk
28 March 2003: Attempts to deliver aid 'a disaster' 28 March 2003: Thousands flee from Basra 26 March 2003: UN wrangles halt aid appeal as Iraqis' food stocks dwindle 26 February 2003: Two million Iraqis could become refugees, says US 26 March 2003: UN wrangles halt aid appeal as Iraqis' food stocks dwindle 25 March 2003: UN ready to heal rifts with vote on oil-for-food aid External links Unicef