<a href=www.nytimes.com>NYTimes.com Iraq-United States International Relations Politics and Government Elections By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It isn't often you get to see a live political science experiment, but that is what we're about to witness in Iraq as the first interim Iraqi government is formed from the different factional leaders in the country. What American advisers and this Iraqi interim government will attempt to answer is the most fundamental question facing the Arab world and many developing countries: How do you get from here to there? How do you go from a brutal authoritarian regime to a decent, accountable, democratizing society, without ending up with an Iranian-style theocracy or chaos?

Interestingly enough, what the smartest experts in the democracy field all seem to agree on is that this interim Iraqi authority should not focus on holding national elections — the hardware of democracy. Elections should come last. Instead, it must start with the software — building, brick by brick, the institutions of a free society — so that when people do get to vote, when national power is up for grabs, they have a range of choices and can be assured that there will be a rotation of power.

"The heart of building liberal democracy is building the institutions of liberty, not holding a quick election," observes Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, whose smart and timely new best seller, "The Future of Freedom," addresses this exact problem. "Building the institutions of democracy is not 50 percent of the job. It is 90 percent of the job. It was in Western history. It was for East Asia, and it will be so for Iraq."

This means, argues Mr. Zakaria, concentrating first and foremost on building the "institutions of liberty": a functioning judicial system, a free press, free speech, economic reform, civic institutions and multiple political parties, all anchored in a constitution that has the support, and input, of the main political forces in the nation.

"Elections are an important virtue of governance," notes Mr. Zakaria, "but they are not the only virtue. . . . Economic, civil and religious liberties are at the core of human autonomy and dignity. If a government with limited democracy steadily expands these freedoms, it should not be branded a dictatorship." A decent, gradually democratizing government in Iraq, concludes Mr. Zakaria, could "provide a better environment for life, liberty and happiness" for Iraqis than the more-hardware-than-software illiberal democracies, like Venezuela or Russia, do for their people.

The challenge for the U.S. will be to build such a foundation of liberty in a country with virtually no legacy of it at all. Under ideal conditions that will take years — and it is not clear the Bush team is ready to invest that degree of time, money and people.

Staying power is essential because Iraq under Saddam exhibited the same "distorted political landscape" of so many of its Arab neighbors, says Larry Diamond, the noted democracy specialist at Stanford's Hoover Institution: that is, a voiceless, disempowered, moderate political center — both secular and religious — squeezed between the iron fist of the patriarchal state and the grass-roots alternative of illiberal, intolerant Muslim fundamentalists.

With Saddam's iron fist now removed, the U.S. must help an authentically Iraqi moderate center emerge and sink roots, and not just allow illiberal Islamists to fill the void. This means, Mr. Diamond says, "bringing in the technical advisers and recruiting Iraqis committed to the rule of law, who can gradually build the software of democracy" — from independent courts to countercorruption and audit agencies to an independent press to independent parties — and then giving Iraqis time to learn how to use such tools, while slowly working up from local to national elections.

And don't kid yourself: some kind of multinational peacekeeping force (a NATO-Arab force?) will have to be present for years, while a new Iraqi military, able to defend Iraq's new institutions, is constructed.

"It is possible — just possible — that Iraq could gradually develop into a democracy," argues Mr. Diamond. "It will require [though] a prolonged and internationalized engagement with Iraq, costing billions of dollars over a number of years. We must not repeat the mistakes of our postwar engagement with Afghanistan, which has been ad hoc, haphazard, inadequately funded, tardy in reconstruction and utterly unwilling to deploy and utilize the military force necessary to secure the new political order."  

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May 03, 2003: The PINR website should be running in a matter of weeks. We will let you know when it is up.

"Iraq's greatest challenge is an old one" Drafted by Matthew Riemer on May 03, 2003

One of the greatest obstacles facing those attempting to introduce the concept of democracy to Iraq is a problem that is actually centuries old: the complexities of the nation-state. Unlike the fledgling United States and many European regions during the 17th and 18th centuries, the geographical puzzle and political, religious and ethnic arrangement now referred to as Iraq is not -- and really never was -- conducive to the coherent formation of a modern day Western-inspired nation-state.

Not widely discussed is that Iraq is a fusion of three former Ottoman provinces -- Basra, Baghdad and Mosul -- devised by the British in the inter-war period last century. While many regions within modern day Iraq have cultural and historical homogeny, Iraq, unlike, say, Iran, has no distinct history, ethnicity, or language with which to create a national identity in the modern sense. The people who happened to be living in the Ottoman provinces at the time of the British demarcation were many: Arabs and Kurds; Muslims, Christians, and Jews; Shi'a and Sunni.

The events in Iraq over the last three-quarters of a century since its inception as a nation-state have reflected this diversity and the inherent conflict it presents -- a host of coups took place in the late '30s and early '40s and then in 1958 King Faisal II was ousted by army officers; and today, following the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party -- pervasive and almost ancient institutions in a country so young -- major political groups within Iraq are moving in disparate ideological directions. The various visions espoused by the different groups follow the traditional lines of religion, ethnicity, geography and occasionally doses of sectarianism.

The Kurds live in the northern part of the country and consider the lands inhabited by their people in Iraq and three bordering countries -- Turkey, Iran, and Syria -- Kurdistan. This de facto ethnic-state, representing a splotch on an ethnographical map, has been the region the Kurds have fought for and from for centuries as a distinct people.

In more recent decades, the Kurds have fought for their own nation-state -- one that would surely exclude most of current day Iraq -- insofar as they desire complete independence and absolute self-rule. The Kurds are primarily interested in their own sovereignty and any commitment to a greater Iraq is secondary. Because of this, the greater Kurdish movement, outside of its many parties, is fundamentally one aimed at an ethnic-state -- not one that is ethnically exclusive but simply with a single ethnicity as its defining quality.   The only appeal for the Kurds of a "democratic Iraq" -- aside from the fact that such a situation precludes the existence of Saddam Hussein -- is an increase in regional independence and, perhaps, power, not necessarily an integrated Kurd-Arab political entity called Iraq, which would surely contain many elements competitive with if not hostile to Kurdish interests.

The Shi'a Muslims, on the other hand, seek political legitimacy through their religion, Shi'a Islam, and its tenets. The Shi'a, though Muslims like the Kurds, conceptualize a religious-state rather than one based on ethnicity. This subtle yet significance difference is manifest in the desire for an Islamic Republic by many Shi'a, which -- depending on one's view -- the Iranian revolution of 1979 establishes both an inspirational and frightening precedent for. An Islamic Republic founded within Iraq would symbolize the aspirations of the religion-state, one where religious affiliation is the primary defining characteristic and form of identity.

The Shi'a Muslims of central and southern Iraq are also spiritually aligned with Iran. The United States has already warned of "outsiders" interfering with Iraq's political rebirth and has directly mentioned Iran regarding the matter; the Ayatollah Khomeini also spent time in Iraq at Najaf during his exile under Iranian dictator Mohammad Reza Shah. Washington has now commented on the fact that they underestimated the organizational skills of the Shi'a and are wary of what may arise.

Sheikh Abd-Jabbur Manhell, head of the Baghdad office of the Society of Honorable Scholars of Najaf, a Shi'a group, is quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as saying: "We won't rush to declare a Jihad against Americans; we'll wait and see if the U.S. sincerely wants a free and democratic Iraq. If it's up to the Iraqi people to choose their own government, I'm sure that up to 70 percent of the Iraqi population will want an Islamic state."

Secular Arabs and Western administrators represent a third stream that seeks to reconcile the many differences and create an integrated government in which all interested parties are fairly represented. This approach, however, sometimes ignores the fact that many Iraqis don't primarily think of themselves as "Iraqis" and that Iraq itself contains the perfect elements for the emergence of competing regional powers.

Many of these individuals are aligned with the United States and are intimate with the concept of the nation-state as perceived by Washington policy makers. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is one of these people. His group has received tens of millions of dollars in funds from the United States and is enthusiastically approved of by the Pentagon. Because of this relationship, many Iraqis are suspicious of the Western educated Chalabi and his intentions now that he's returned to Iraq after a decades-long absence. On April 28th, RFE/RL described Chalabi's organization's offices: "The INC occupies an impressive building of the Iraqi Hunting Club in Baghdad's prestigious Mansur neighborhood, once favored by top members of the former regime. Now, hundreds of the INC's camouflaged men, called the Free Iraqi Forces, stand at checkpoints around Baghdad."

Jay Garner, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, is also a key political figure in the proceedings. Garner, with his Western background, is also a member of this third group that has the most unified vision for Iraq -- one based upon neither ethnicity nor religious affiliation but upon a political, administrative, and economic whole. Garner recently said, "The reason I am here and General Tim Cross, my deputy, is here is to create an environment in Iraq which will give us a process to start a democratic government, which represents all people, all religions, all tribes, all the ethnics, all professions, and to begin that process so that we can have a government that represents the freely elected will of the people."

So there are three very different, powerful groups within Iraq all pulling the country in politically dissimilar directions. Members of each at times will seemingly reconcile their differences, but the fundamental schisms between the various ideologies are great. It is these conditions, the same ones that have prevented Iraq from becoming a coherent nation-state, that will be the same ones encountered and indeed that may prevent the infusion of Iraq with some kind of Jeffersonian Democracy. Religion, race, and idealistic integration are all still battling each other in the philosophies and hearts of the new and old Iraqi policy makers.

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. PINR seeks to inform rather than persuade. This report may be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, www.pinr.com. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com.

April 27, 2003 by Irwin Stelzer of TimesOnline.com-The Sunday Times

WHEN coalition forces found that Iraq’s technicians had refused to torch their oilfields, buyers looked forward to falling crude prices. But analysts who had predicted that the liberation of Iraq would quickly increase the volume of crude oil coming onto world markets received a bit of a shock.

First, the Opec cartel agreed to cut output by 2m barrels a day, or at least seemed to do so. Then, technicians found that Iraqi oilfields had been more starved of investment than anyone had thought, and that the looting of everything from tools and equipment to the buses needed to get workers to the fields, will slow efforts to restore production to the 2m-barrel-a-day level before liberation.

Equally annoying, the UN Security Council refuses to end its oil-for-food programme by dropping its sanctions — no surprise since the 2.5% it gets on all sales is used to feed the 3,000-person bureaucracy that administers the programme, and Russia and France want to control the awarding of reconstruction contracts.

That places a legal cloud over the title to Iraq’s oil, with the right to sell it claimed by the coalition; the UN; Mohammed Mohsen al- Zubaidi, an exile returned to Iraq to proclaim himself governor of Baghdad; and the several Shi’ite clerics who are using the freedom won for them by the American military to cry “Yankee go home” at rallies attended by the millions of their co-religionists who constitute 60% of the Iraqi population.

Some of these problems can be solved. America can simply ignore the UN, and start selling Iraq’s oil. Buyers who are nervous about receiving clean title to the oil can be reassured by American guarantees or some form of insurance. Or America can simply buy the oil on its account, and pay money into a trust fund for the Iraqi people.

But adding Iraqi oil to world markets might still prove to be no easy thing. When the Americans promised to create a democracy in Iraq they didn’t consider the possibility that Iraq’s 100 billion barrels of oil reserves (9% or more of the world’s total) might end up in the hands of an Islamic regime similar to that in Iran. If the behaviour of Iran (almost 9% of world reserves) is any guide, Iraq’s new clerics-turned-oil-moguls will be price hawks — a voice for the low- output, high-price scenario that analysts were hoping a democratic Iraq would end.

There is worse. In Russia (which has almost 5% of world reserves), Yukos’s acquisition of Sibneft creates a $35 billion company, the seventh-largest oil group in the world, measured by market value. That behemoth is unlikely to be a price-cutting scrambler for short-term revenue. Besides, the pipelines and ports needed to bring more Russian oil to market will cost some $5 billion and be completed no earlier than 2007. So don’t look to Russia for near-term price relief.

Or to Nigeria, America’s fourth-largest source of imports. With opposition parties threatening disruption to protest the apparently fraudulent re-election of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the African nation is unlikely to be a totally reliable supplier. Venezuela, another important American supplier, sits on 7% of world reserves and is controlled by a pro-Castro president who has precipitated a supply- disrupting strike by politicising the industry’s management, and is running the fields so badly that productive capacity has fallen. Mexico shows no sign of expanding capacity by dropping its ban on foreign investment in its oil business. And petroleum inventories in America are at the lowest level in 30 years.

True, oil markets have recently eased a bit. Petrol prices are down 14 cents from their mid-March peak of $1.73 a gallon, as additional crude produced by Saudi Arabia before the war reaches our shores, along with record imports of petroleum products. And demand is being further dampened by the slowing of Asian growth caused by the Sars outbreak, continued recession in Germany and France, and reduced air travel everywhere.

So we have two conflicting signals. On the supply side, there are constraints both political and economic: unstable regimes, a cartel that is threatening to cut back output, and shortages of infrastructure investment. That should mean higher prices. But on the demand side, we have Sars, the collapse of air travel, and slow growth. That should mean lower prices.

Steve Strongin, director of commodity research at Goldman Sachs, has balanced these conflicting pulls on price and decided that crude will likely jump into the low $30s when America’s holiday driving season starts in June. But when Iraq’s oil hits the market in significant quantities, a downward move to Opec’s preferred range of $22-$28 a barrel is likely.

In the end, oil prices may depend on the willingness of Opec to cut output from 26m barrels a day to the quota level of 24.5m, and eventually to trim back even further to make room for Iraq to re-enter the market. The biggest reductions will have to be taken by the Saudis.

And there’s the rub. If George Bush is serious about waging war on terrorism, he will have to put pressure on the Saudis to stop funding the spread of the creed that underlies it. But the president needs the Saudis. Since he cannot persuade Congress to give him the tax cuts he has asked for, he needs a different stimulus — oil prices low enough to keep consumers in the malls, car showrooms and estate agents’ offices.

And here is the ultimate irony: the elder Bush was disliked by many of the younger Bush’s ardent supporters for kow-towing to the Saudi royal family. These folks now find themselves serving a president whose re-election might depend on the favour of those very same royals. That is the price America pays for its inability to develop a policy for reducing its dependence on Saudi oil.

• Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of regulatory policy studies at the Hudson Institute

Mike Meyers, Star Tribune National Economics Correspondent Published April 27, 2003 ECON27

Clifford Anderson is eager to invade Iraq.

But he's worried about the cost of the campaign, how many people he would have to muster and whether they could be assured of coming back alive. Anderson wants to be certain he can prevail -- and reap the rewards of triumph.

As chief executive officer of Roseville-based Crown Iron Works Co., Anderson is accustomed to deploying workers to far-away places -- to fight for commerce.

Crown, started 125 years ago as a maker of decorative iron ornaments, today designs and installs equipment to transform soybeans into oil and animal feed. The company, with 70 employees in Minnesota, has worked at more than 500 locations, on all seven continents, practically every place soybeans are used. In the Middle East, it has customers in Egypt, Dubai and Israel.

What happens next in Iraq matters more than a hill of beans, both to the people of that country and to international companies such as Crown. Now that the battle of Baghdad is over, the struggle has begun to transform Iraq's economy, plagued by war, trade sanctions and a quarter century of mismanagement.

"If it were not for the fact that we had problems for the last many years in Iraq, we'd have been doing some business there now," Anderson said. "There's a market there and we've been locked out."

What Anderson needs to fulfill his ambitions for entering Iraq reads like a checklist of what economists say is required for that nation to rebuild its economy, one step at a time.

• Iraq will have to rid its streets of marauders. Few foreign companies will want to send workers to a country that's known to be hazardous.

• It must restore and modernize water, electricity and other public works. Nobody can run a soybean processing plant -- or just about any enterprise -- without water and power.

• It must replace its worthless currency and revive its faltering banks. A 100-dinar note of Iraqi currency is worth pennies. The inflation rate in Iraq was estimated to be in triple digits before the chaos of war, according to the World Bank. A home-grown banking system provides the cash to finance new business ventures.

• It must see an end to United Nations trade sanctions. Companies are less likely to trade with and invest in Iraq until they can be sure that it's legal.

• It must establish laws -- and law enforcement -- to protect private property and ensure that foreign investors can take home profits.

A big job

In the 1970s, Iraq nationalized foreign oil companies, discouraging foreign investment over the decades that followed.

"Who knows what's going to happen there next?" Anderson said. "It's going to have to smooth out there before we go there."

Some of the tasks needed to fashion a healthy Iraqi economy may take weeks or months, while many others could take years.

"It's a big, big job," said Harvard University economist Richard Cooper.

To be sure, Iraq has more going for it than Afghanistan, Bosnia and East Timor, all countries with economies ravaged by recent wars.

Said Anderson: "They've got water. They've got oil. Until Saddam Hussein messed it up, Iraq was one of the most viable economies in the Middle East."

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers run through Iraq, promising a bounty in agriculture since ancient times when the region was called the "fertile crescent." Although three-quarters of Iraq's 24 million people live in cities, food production was a thriving industry until a few years ago, when the nation's economy began to unravel. From 1990 to 2000, the output of Iraq's food chain fell by nearly 50 percent, by the estimate of the World Bank.

Yet Iraq has something that most countries do not. It has oil and lots of it -- the world's second-largest reserve, after Saudi Arabia.

"It's very rich in resources and presumably will want to use those resources for reconstruction," Cooper said.

But oil riches are a mixed blessing.

"They've got a huge asset if they can be persuaded to look on it as being simply money," said Morris Adelman, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Unfortunately, oil is not usually seen that way," he said. Oil often is viewed as "the blood of the people, the symbol of a nation's vitality."

Oil politics

Iraq, by the count of the World Bank, has 112 billion barrels in oil reserves. But no oil company would pay the current world rate of $25 for a barrel of crude for rights to drill in Iraq, Adelman said.

Typically, oil rights go for about a third of the world price of oil -- or about $8 for a barrel of oil in the ground, at present values.

"Actually, [in Iraq] it's worth a lot less because there's a lot of risk involved,' Adelman said.

"If they said they were going to get the highest price offered, and if foreign companies really trust Iraqi determination to enforce ownership and property rights, they'll get perhaps half of that $8 and it will go up" over time, he said.

Much of that potential revenue already is claimed, however.

Iraq owes huge amounts of money to other countries, including France, Germany, Russia and the United States, for exports made to that country as long ago as the 1970s. In addition, Iraq owes war reparations to Iran and Kuwait for past wars.

Exactly how much money is owed is in dispute. Estimates range from $60 billion to as much as $400 billion. Much of that debt, almost certainly, will be repaid far more slowly than originally anticipated, but economists say Iraq will be forced to repay much of the debt. The reason: It must convince foreigners that their future investments in Iraq will be safe.

"One strategy is to get foreign capital, to bring in money and managerial know-how," Cooper said. "But, of course, it's politically sensitive."

With Iraq's colonial history -- the country was in the hands of the British for much of the first half of the 20th century -- many in Iraq will see foreigners as potential threats, as well as potential saviors, Cooper said.

But any country with major oil reserves has another problem -- the threat of the "Dutch disease." It's a story of the few prospering at the expense of the many.

After valuable natural gas deposits were discovered in the Netherlands a half century ago, energy became the dominant industry in that country. No other enterprise, from agriculture to manufacturing, could keep pace. The outcome was a period of inflation, job stagnation and economic setbacks for anyone without links to the energy industry.

Unhappy history

In 2000, revenues from oil exports represented 83 percent of the value of all goods and services produced in Iraq, by the estimate of the World Bank.

"Most countries that have oil revenues do not have a happy history of using those assets for the benefits of all of the people," said Steve Davis, a University of Chicago economist. "Over the longer term, the political and economic success of the Iraqi people will depend on how those oil sources are treated."

International economists have written many a treatise on the same phenomenon in energy-rich countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia.

"To avoid such a situation to occur in the middle of a resource boom, the country must make some tough decisions on consumption, savings and investment," economist Moazzem Hossain wrote in one such study at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

"If the country has not been preparing itself properly before the boom takes place, this will at the end bring unprecedented political chaos and even disintegration and civil unrest," he said.

Economists agree that Iraq will have to rely on advice from institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to keep its economy from reeling.

"Saddam expropriated much of the wealth for himself, his family and his cronies,' said Davis, at the University of Chicago. "You could end up with another regime doing the same or a regime where the oil revenues are squandered in an inappropriate way.

"There's no panacea to ensure this won't happen. But transparency and international oversight would be a useful institution to put in place for several years," he said.

Davis said he's concerned the U.S. government may not be willing to stay to see the job done, however.

"I'm a bit concerned that many Americans, including many who supported the invasion, have the view that we should get out of there as soon as they've established some semblance of a democracy," Davis said.

As for Crown, Anderson said he's not likely to look for business in Iraq soon. But he can't speak for his British affiliate, where globe-trotting dealmakers seem to have a different assessment of risk.

"The English office is pretty aggressive," Anderson said. "I may get a call tomorrow saying, 'I just got back from Baghdad and everything is cool.' "

Mike Meyers is at meyers@startribune.com.

Guardian Unlimited Saturday April 19, 2003

The struggle to get help to Iraq has put aid workers on the front pages. But it's a competitive business which demands practical skills and experience as well as qualifications, reports Nic Paton

As the humanitarian crisis in Iraq deepens, the work of the world's aid agencies has come centre stage. But while television pictures of front-line aid workers bringing food, water, medical and other relief to people in desperate need have become all too familiar from crises around the world, it is just one small part of a much bigger picture.

Relief work is the public, indeed glamourous, face of the aid business, but the vast majority of aid and development agency work is, in fact, the job quietly of improving lives and battered environments.

Aid agencies rely on a vast array of support staff, such as political lobbyists and fundraisers, IT, finance and logistics specialists, media and policy experts, managers and administrators and often, on high streets up and down the country, volunteers and employees in shops.

The first thing to realise if you fancy working for an aid agency is not to expect to find yourself doling out food in Um Qasr at any time in the immediate future, says Mark Goldring, chief executive of volunteering organisation VSO.

A former development worker with both the UN and Oxfam, Mr Goldring stresses that a burning commitment to do good, while warmly welcomed, is rarely enough. You need to be able to prove you have experience or skills that can be put to practical use.

"It could be something in your own profession or in international development, either paid or voluntary. But it needs to be more than travelling," he says.

Getting into aid and development work is extremely competitive, agrees Andrew Thompson, international HR director for Oxfam, and getting into overseas field work is even tougher - with good reason.

"We cannot just put keen but inexperienced people into situations where are beneficiaries are relying on them, because for them it is life or death," he says.

Perhaps one of the most popular routes into field work is through a job in a support role, adds Mr Thompson. "But you have to be patient, and you need to be committed. We look for people who can push things through and take decisions, but also work as part of a team."

At Oxfam, employees are drawn from many different sectors, says Mr Thompson. Within its regional management centres alone there will normally be senior managers, fund raisers, people doing media and advocacy work, policy researchers, health and education workers, economic and humanitarian crisis specialists, poverty specialists and so on.

Voluntary work is another good route. "A lot of our volunteers are graduates and a lot of them use it as a stepping stone to get into the development sector," says Nicola Jamie, advocacy co-ordinator with charity Students Partnership Worldwide.

Doing voluntary work in India gave Jenny Willott, head of advocacy at Unicef in the UK, a taste of development work, but it was through working in parliament that she honed her professional skills. Ms Willott, 28, worked in the office of Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik for two years.

After a stint with Barnardo's in Cardiff, she joined Unicef in November 2001. With a remit to lobby MPs and civil servants and generally raise awareness about Unicef's work, her knowledge of the corridors of Westminster has proved invaluable, and was a key reason for her getting the job.

None of the jobs on her team are "entry level", she admits. "You have to have quite a good level of knowledge of the political system or working with the press. We will not just take people because they have a degree in bright ideas."

Formal entry routes are few and far between, too. Oxfam runs a UK graduate entry scheme, which tends to be focused on administrative and support roles, and some organisations, such as the World Bank, the UN and the Department for International Development, have internship schemes, but these are almost always at degree or postgraduate level.

Aid work undoubtedly can be extremely dangerous, as the death in Iraq last week of Canadian aid worker Vatche Arslanian, shot in crossfire in Baghdad, has highlighted.

It can also be emotionally demanding but hugely rewarding, says Dereje Wordofa, head of Oxfam's regional policy team. Mr Wordofa, 37, has worked extensively in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.

"You have to have a lot of tenacity and personal strength. You are emotionally involved but you do not express it. It should not affect your rational thinking," he says.

Development work requires passion, commitment and multi-disciplinary skills but also an in-depth knowledge of the organisations and people you are dealing with, he argues.

"You need to know who you need to be changing in terms of behaviour and policies, and who are the allies you need to work with."

I am doing something worthwhile

Some 800 people applied for Arry Fraser's job as a policy researcher at Oxfam. But it was the skills she had picked up as an analyst at Business Monitor International, a specialist business and global markets publisher, that helped her to stand out from the crowd.

"It was a deliberate choice to go and work in the private sector to gain commercial expertise, I wanted to learn how financial markets work," says Ms Fraser, 25, who has been with Oxfam since January.

A Cambridge University social sciences graduate, she went to Venezuela for a year after graduating and then did a masters degree in politics and development at the London School of Economics.

"You really feel that you are doing something worthwhile, people are committed, professional and dedicated," she adds of working for Oxfam.

While very happy with her new role, Ms Fraser's long-term ambition is to gain more experience in development work in the field. And her advice for others wanting to work in aid agencies? "Be prepared to go into other sectors to build up skills. And just keep trying - perseverance helps."

Nursing skills were key to role in Brazil

Three years working as a volunteer on a leprosy programme in a remote village in the Amazon helped to convince nurse Jan Smith that aid and development work was what she wanted to devote her life to.

On her return she did a course in tropical medicine at London's St Pancras Hospital for Tropical Medicine, a degree in Latin American studies at Essex University and finally, in the summer of 1999, landed a job as programme officer for the Latin American section of CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development.

"It has been a perfect opportunity. You meet marvellously inspiring people who are absolutely and completely dedicated. Last year, I went back to Brazil twice, which is about average," says Ms Smith, 41. She believes her practical skills as a nurse, backed by her volunteering experience and her academic work, were the key to her getting her the job.

"People think just doing a degree in international development studies will get you a job, but it's not true," she says. "You need to have some skills and you need to know that you are good at it, because all you will be able to take with you is your ability to do the job - and even that is hard because you are in a different cultural context."

It's also essential to have "endless enthusiasm" and excellent communication skills, she believes. "I can one minute be talking to someone living in a shanty town in Brazil and the next someone at the Foreign Office," she says.