Democracy by the Dollars

What can a North Carolina firm teach Iraqis about democracy? Not much, as it turns out – not when it spends millions of dollars making life comfortable for its own staff rather than the Iraqis.

In March 2003, the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International of North Carolina a $167 million contract to help 180 Iraqi cities and towns "foster efficient, transparent, and accountable sub-national government that supports the country's transition to sovereignty."

More specifically, the RTI staff in Iraq were charged with setting up local neighborhood councils, providing technical advice for municipal services such as garbage collection and water supply, and funding new local community organizations and initiatives.

Little of the above was achieved in reality, however.

Three former RTI employees who worked on the project say that the company instead spent 90 percent of the money on expensive expatriate staff, gave out lots of advice and held lots of meetings, but did little to provide support for local community organizations or councils.

Services Not Elections

According to RTI Iraq chief Ronald Johnson, his company's mission was to teach Iraqis how to establish local governments that would eventually provide basic services to citizens. In an interview with Canadian reporter Naomi Klein, he explained that holding elections too early often lead to violence. Basic services were instead safer ground encourage civic participation.

"There really is not a Sunni way to pick up the garbage vs. a Shiite way vs. a Syrian way to pick up the garbage," said Johnson. "There's a lot of politics about how much you do, and there's certainly politics about picking up the garbage in one neighborhood and not picking it up in another neighborhood," he said.

To account for this, RTI held neighborhood meetings. According to Johnson, "Announcements are distributed, people are invited, they're urged to bring people and you have kind of a town meeting – only it's a town meeting that in a lot of cases covers a small geographic area. But its potential is for a lot of the adult residents of that neighborhood to actually physically come together in a meeting, in person."

According to RTI press releases, these initiatives were a tremendous success: "Throughout the first year, our in-country team of roughly 2,000 Iraqis and 200 international development specialists worked in 18 governorates on a wide range of locally selected priorities ranging from increasing access to basic utilities and healthcare to establishing and training local governing councils,"

Spending on the Good Life

But former RTI employees paint a very different picture of the institute's operations, which they say spent over 90 percent of its allocated funding on its own staff rather than the Iraqis. Despite all the meetings, there was little real funding for the local programs.

Three former RTI employees – Jabir Algarawi, an Iraqi-American from Arizona; Jerry Kuhaida, a former Tennessee mayor; and Jim Beaulieu, a former provincial deputy minister from Canada – all went to work with hopes of building democracy in Iraq.

Algarawi, a Shiite from Diwaniya, had fled Iraq in 1991 after taking part in an uprising to overthrow Saddam Hussein as called for by the first President Bush. Last December, Algarawi, who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, quit his job as executive director of the Arizona Refugee Community Center in Phoenix, and took a position with RTI, which flew him to Al Amarah, the capital of Maysan province in southeastern Iraq, to help Iraqis establish local governance.

At first, he says, "almost 95 percent of the people [in the south] supported us. Now there are only a few, and those who do don't have the courage to say it." He believes that the lack of tangible support for local communities is one of the principal reasons for the withdrawal of popular support.