BAGHDAD, Iraq – Each day hundreds of visitors fly into this war-ravaged capital aboard state-owned Iraqi Airways planes that Transportation Ministry officials claim were purchased for $3 million apiece.
Anti-corruption officials claim they should not have cost a cent more than $600,000 and wonder where the rest of the money went.
Inside the terminal, customs officials routinely hassle disembarking passengers for a “customs fee.” The price is often negotiable.
Outside, passengers can find a ride with a waiting taxi, many of them fueled with smuggled gasoline.
Beyond the airport, city streets teem with cars. A good portion of them, 17,000 claim anti-corruption officials, were stolen from the government following the 2003 invasion.
Corruption is among the most critical problems facing Iraq’s newly formed government, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. Moments after announcing most of his new Cabinet on Saturday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that fighting corruption would be one of his main priorities. U.S. and Iraqi officials say endemic bribery, graft and conflicts of interest will await al-Maliki everywhere he turns.
Iraqi government documents obtained by The Los Angeles Times reveal the breadth of corrupt crimes, from epic schemes involving hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts down to the more ordinary, including the hundreds of university students accused of buying better grades from their professors and the former Justice Ministry official who handed out U.S.-issue pistols to friends as party favors.
Corruption rampant across government
“We are seeing corruption everywhere in Iraq – in every ministry, in every governorate,” said Radhi Hamza Radhi, head of the Commission on Public Integrity, Iraq’s anti-corruption agency.
Defense Ministry officials spent $1 billion on questionable arms purchases, Radhi said. The Interior Ministry currently pays for at least 1,100 ghost employees, he added, at a cost of $1.3 million a month.
Corruption in Iraq is not new. Yet many experts believe that the situation has become dramatically worse since the invasion in 2003.
“Corruption thrives in a context of confusion and change,” Transparency International, a nongovernmental watchdog group, said in a report last year.
“In Iraq, public institutions are even struggling to find out how many employees they have on their payrolls,” the report said. “Obvious institutional safeguards are yet to be put in place, and ministries and state companies lack proper inventory systems.”
Terrorists, criminals help out each other
Corruption helps fuel the insurgency, as well, said Radhi. “The terrorists help the criminals and the criminals help the terrorists,” he said. “Without corruption, we would have been able to defeat the terrorists by now.”
Since 2003, hundreds of police officers and soldiers have abandoned their posts, and many of them took their weapons with them, U.S. officials say. Many of those weapons, along with millions of dollars worth of arms that are now unaccounted for, have likely ended up in insurgent hands, according to U.S. military sources and Iraqi anti-corruption officials.
Altogether, unaccountable weapons and equipment could total more than $500 million, U.S. military officials acknowledged earlier this year.
In a particularly egregious case, former Parliament member Mishan Jabouri was implicated earlier this year in a ploy where pipeline sentries conspired with insurgents to hijack oil convoys and spirit them out of Iraq.
A less dramatic but more pervasive pattern is the growing black market in unregistered and smuggled cars, which U.S. and Iraqi military officials believe play a part in the steady stream of car-bomb attacks.
Little prosecution of government officials
Located in offices within Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, the Commission on Public Integrity is the nation’s premier watchdog agency. But of the approximately 3,000 corruption cases investigated by the commission, only about 780 have been registered with the nation’s courts, and only about a dozen have reached a final verdict, according to commission and court officials.
Of 40 cases involving Iraq’s highest-ranking government officials, including ministers and ministry director generals, the courts have issued a verdict against only one individual – an Interior Ministry official accused of stealing police property and payroll funds. As of last month, the police had failed to execute an arrest warrant.
“We’ve seen a commitment on the part of the (commission) to fight corruption spanning different parties, sects and administrations,” said an American official who, like other U.S. government sources interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. “The problem we’re seeing right now is that these cases are not being adjudicated.”
To some extent, courts have been reluctant to take on corruption cases because they are so overloaded with terrorism cases.
But intimidation is also a major factor. More than 20 judges have been killed since 2003. Earlier this month, gunmen assassinated the son of Midhat Mahmoud, head judge in the Iraqi Supreme Judiciary Council.
‘Giving bribes is part of our everyday life’
Many ordinary Iraqis say they cannot imagine their society without a certain level of corruption. Iraqis pay off officials to lower phone bills and to expedite paperwork, to move to the head of the payroll line and to free imprisoned relatives from jails.
“I think giving bribes is part of our everyday life,” said Mohammed Jassem Rasheed Doulami, a Baghdad businessman. “About a week ago, I had to register my car. The whole process could have taken me three days, but I made a deal with a police officer to fix the whole thing in a half-hour if I paid him $17.”
Faiq Ali, a 36-year-old Baghdad sculptor, was stopped by traffic police earlier this month as he took his sick wife to the hospital. In Baghdad, cars with even and odd license plates are allowed to be on the roads only on alternate days to cut down on traffic. The officer told Ali that he was driving on the wrong day.
“I explained to him that this was an emergency and that my wife was ill – I told him that I respect the law, but I was asking for an exception in this case,” Ali said.
“He said the government charges a $20 fine, but he would let me pass for only $15. I was amazed at how brazen he was. So, I told him, ‘I won’t give you more than $8.’”
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