www.interaction.org/newswire/detail.php?id=2131 -
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Published on: 9/10/2003
Last Visited: 3/4/2007
That's the message from Paul Dudley Hart, director-at-large of Mercy Corps, a Portland-based international aid organization that has been coordinating relief projects around Al Kut and Ad Diwaniyah in southern Iraq.Hart, who returned to Portland a week ago after a month in Iraq, said images of bombings and gunfire in Baghdad give a distorted impression of progress being made toward peace.
"I'm a lot more optimistic now than when I left" for Iraq, Hart said Monday.He welcomed President Bush's announcement Sunday that he would ask for $87 billion to help reshape Iraq, although Hart said he'd like to see details of how the money would be used.
Any strategy to help Iraq must rely heavily on bringing Iraqis into the decision-making process, he said.
The strategy of Mercy Corps and other nongovernmental organizations has been to use community meetings to find out from villagers what projects they would like to see.During community meetings, he said, "you can see the diversity of thought effervescing up. . . . It has never happened since anybody can remember."
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Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Hart said, "there's been a lot of creative thinking . . . into how to address some of these issues and how to get some improvements into these communities."
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Hart said he doesn't spend much time worrying about the conflict in Iraq's urban areas.
"Our job is to stick to our knitting, work with the cell-sized community and create change there," he said."That's how organic change happens."
As for such incidents as the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, he said, Iraqis he talked with indicated that "it was their profound belief that these actions did not represent the wishes of the majority of the Iraqi people."
Even during the month Hart visited Iraq, he said, "there was less AK-47 fire in the background. . . . You could sleep through a night without hearing anything."
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