“Life for Iraqis is now more dangerous than under Saddam Hussein” says Annan

by admin
December 6th, 2006

Life for Iraqis is now more dangerous than under Saddam Hussein UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has said.In his hardest-hitting assessment yet, Annan said in an interview on Monday that Iraq was the toughest issue he had dealt with during his 10 years in office and that he believed “we could have stopped the war” if weapons inspectors had been given more time.

Annan told that if I was an average Iraqi, I would make the same comparison,” he told the BBC. “They had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets.“They could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying ‘Am I going to see my child again?’ A society needs minimum security and a secure environment for it to get on. Without security, not much can be done.”

Annan gave no statistics but the latest UN report on human rights in Iraq says that 3,000 civilians are dying every month. There is also an accelerating exodus of Iraqis, with some 100,000 leaving each month for the safety of Syria, Jordan, and the Gulf states.Annan, whose term ends on December 31, said he did “everything I could” to stop the war taking place in the first place and genuinely believed it could have been halted. He said he was not sure that Iraq could resolve its sectarian strife without international help. He said his biggest regret as secretarygeneral was that the war had claimed the lives of almost two dozen colleagues in a Baghdad bombing.

But Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwaffaq Al Rubaie, rebuked Annan’s suggestion and said the UN has shied away from its responsibility towards the Iraqi people. “Doesn’t Kofi Annan differentiate between the mass killing of Iraqis by the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein and the present indiscriminate killings of civilians, Iraqi civilians, by the Al Qaida terrorists in Iraq?” the BBC quoted Al Rubaie as saying. “I’m shocked and stunned by what Kofi Annan alluded to, that the condition was better under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.”