Elderly finally receive overdue payments

Elderly retired people in Iraq on government pensions have finally received money owed to them since April 2003. The Retirement General Authority, a state body under the former leadership of Saddam Hussein, which was guarded by US soldiers up until three months ago, opened up office once again on 5 February with business as usual and released payments for the first three months of 2004. "We will start paying the salaries for the military retired Iraqis, internal police forces and martyrs in March," Nuri al-Halfi, head of the Retirement General Authority, told IRIN in Baghdad. According to al-Halfi, the payment, administered by the Ministry of Finance under Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) auspices, is estimated at 125,000 dinars (US $92) for every three months for those who are retired and have worked for 25 year or more, the agency pays 110,000 dinars ($81) per quarter for those who worked 15 or more years. The payment, however, is not enough according to some. "This payment, though better than Saddam's time, is not enough with the increasing prices of everything," Ali Kazim, a retired guardsman who used to work for the Ministry of Education, told IRIN. "The money I receive altogether is not fair. It's less than the price of two meals in a hotel in Baghdad," he complained. Um Rida, a former government employee, agreed, saying she hadn't been paid for 10 months and had a big family to take care of. "We received what they called "emergency payment" which was $20. They gave it to us twice, but how can a family live on this amount of money and pay food costs, house rent, hospitals etc?" she said. Elderly people recently took to the streets of Baghdad calling on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the CPA to increase the payment for the estimated one and a half milion retired persons in Iraq. The newly established Humanitarian Organisation for Retired People (HORP), a local NGO, in Iraq organised a peaceful demonstration late in January to ask for the payments that had not been made since the end of the war. "We decided to set up this organisation earlier this year not only to press the IGC and the CPA to give us our payment and increase it, but also to fulfil the needs of the retired people and to help them to feel that they are still able to play a role in life," Aziz, a founding member of HORP, told IRIN in Baghdad. He added that Iraq's elderly population had never been able to establish an organisation during the former regime that could speak for them. Aziz had talked to the Ministry of Health and asked officials to help him support the organisation by subsidising treatment costs in hospitals for members in the organisation. "We are also working on establishing a fund to lend money to retired people without interests and they could pay it back gradually from their salaries," he added.