Challenges remain in north following transfer of power

In the month since the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) handed power over to Iraq's new transitional government, Younan Hozaya, minister of industry and energy for one of the parties controlling northern Iraq since 1991, still hasn't quite decided what to make of it. "Before 28 June, we talked to the CPA who talked to Baghdad, and vice versa," he told IRIN in Arbil, administrative capital of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) controlled area. "Theoretically, things should be more efficient now, because the middle man has gone." The reality is less clear cut. Of his office's three counterparts in Baghdad - the Ministries of Electricity, Industry and Petroleum, he said, only the first has made much effort to build up any form of dialogue. And even that has been patchy. "Too often, we hear about decisions not directly from our colleagues down south, but from the newspapers," he complained. "Just today, American officials in Mosul phoned the Energy Directorate in Dahuk [the northernmost of the three Kurdish-controlled governorates], and told them that Dahuk had been given no mention in Baghdad's new Electricity Plan." Fond of pointing out that their administration has been in place for more than a decade longer than Baghdad's, other Kurdish officials would have reacted furiously to such news. But Hozaya stressed that he didn't see it necessarily as proof of centralising tendencies on the part of Iraq's new leaders, something the Kurds have been fighting against for over 40 years. "It may be that individual ministers are not keen on the idea of the federalism their prime minister has formally agreed to uphold," he said. "But I think what we're seeing here are the effects of a lack of administrative clarity that existed long before the transfer of sovereignty." "We're not the only ones suffering," he added. "A Ministry of Governorates was recently opened in Baghdad, but I've seen no evidence of any change in the relations between central government and the regions. This must be clarified." Hozaya insists that his demand that every governorate in Iraq should be made capable of generating 50 percent of its own energy is not just a case of defending his own interests. "When terrorists sabotage an oil pipeline in the south, power plants in the centre suffer," he explained. "We are all interlinked, and we must all diversify our energy supplies." Dependent in large on electricity generated outside Kurdish controlled areas, Hozaya has far more opportunities than most of his colleagues in the north to cooperate with Baghdad. Almost unanimously, other senior Kurdish officials insist little has changed since 28 June. "We're working as we have done since 1992," KDP Deputy Communication Minister Rashad Hama Amin told IRIN in Arbil. "All our decisions are made with the Kurdistan Regional Government." A somewhat disingenuous statement, as the deputy finance minister for Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) controlled Sulaymaniyah pointed out. "Before the war, our budget came from local taxes and customs," Othman Ismail Shwani, told IRIN. "Now, we depend on Baghdad." After weeks of discussion, Shwani and his colleagues have already sent their demands for a portion of Iraq's 2005 budget to the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. They will hear how much they will actually get in September, when the national budget is presented for debate in the Council of Ministers. "Note that we sent our budget proposal to Baghdad on 15 June," he said. "Financial centralisation preceded the transfer of sovereignty, and has had immeasurably more effect on us." To find somebody sincerely convinced that the handover of sovereignty affected the relations between Baghdad and the north, you have to talk to a non-Iraqi. A senior adviser to the National Mine Action Authority (NMAA), Emmanuel Deisser came to Iraq last year as part of a US State Department-sponsored initiative to transform and expand mine clearance systems put in place - in the north at least - by the United Nations in the 1990s. "The most fundamental part of our job here is not to help with demining; it is to transfer technical and administrative skills to local bodies of authority," he told IRIN at the Regional Mine Action Centre in Arbil. "We have no intention of being here for years. On the contrary: we are programming ourselves out of this job." One of the problems NMAA has faced since it set up shop this January has been the vast disparity in experience between demining groups in the north and the rest of Iraq, and the differing local agendas that disparity has caused. But Deisser was optimistic that the handover could be a step towards raising levels of cooperation among administrators countrywide. Before the transfer of sovereignty, it was international advisers who called the shots. Now, the locals have taken control. This new direct contact between Iraqi administrators in different branches of NMAA, Deisser argued, "has created a much healthier atmosphere". "They always have thought hard about what they are doing, but to a degree their involvement was theoretical," he said. "Now that they formally run the programme, its success or failure depends on them. Their agendas may be different, but they only have one budget, and they must work together."