Subject: [NEXTEL-1] U.S. Struggles to Transform a Tainted Iraqi Police Force

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 11:32:21 -0400

June 30, 2003
U.S. Struggles to Transform a Tainted Iraqi Police Force
By AMY WALDMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 - In a freshly painted corner of the police college,
the first Transition Integration Program - a three-week course to remake the attitudes and behavior of the Iraqi police -was under way on Saturday morning. The Iraqi officers sat quietly as their American military police instructors solicited words consistent with "democratic policing."
At the college gates, though, the city's traffic police were carrying out an exercise in democratic living - nothing quiet about it.  They had arrived in a seething knot of protest, chanting "Yes to freedom!" and "Yes to justice!" to complain about paltry pay and superiors who had been part of Saddam Hussein's Baath Arab Socialist Party.
"The people who sit inside are not better than us," one man shouted of his managers. "People shout at us, people curse at us. We must stand in the street, in the heat."
All of the challenges of rebuilding Iraq, and its police force, seemed to coalesce in a moment - the battle between the progress represented by the revamped police college and the continuing chaos and mounting security threats that threaten to swamp it.
Even as they start trying to teach democratic policing, the Americans here are confronting both basic problems, like how to set pay levels and get the money, and larger ones, like how to identify and purge Baathists from the force.
Superiors are grappling with the new phenomenon of insubordination in the ranks,
while officers on the street are facing defiance- and more - from a no-longer-fearful public. Today, as two officers gave chase, thieves sprayed them with Kalashnikov fire.

All of this must be fixed, and soon.

Iraq is being remade in its entirety, with every institution - education, health care, the justice system, the economy - being reinvented. The world has done this kind of thing before, from Bosnia to East Timor, with mixed results. But it has not been done on such a large scale since the Marshall Plan, nor has America tried to do so much alone.
Without security, all else stalls. Doctors will not staff hospitals at night.
Contractors will not repair buildings, roads and bridges.  Investors will not put their money here. Iraqis are already growing to resent Americans who occupy Iraq but cannot protect them.
For now, the American military is Iraq's police force, operating 1,000 daily patrols nationwide. But the military is a blunt instrument for the job, and as attacks on American troops increase, it must balance protecting Iraqis with protecting itself. More important, no one - not the Americans, and certainly not the Iraqis - wants the American military policing Iraq forever.
So a national police force created under British rule after World War I and militarized under Mr. Hussein must be transformed again. It is a colossal endeavor on which America's success in Iraq may hinge.
The former police commissioner of New York, Bernard B. Kerik, is at the center of the effort. On May 8, he was in New York working for former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's consulting firm. Then came the call from the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Ten days later, Mr. Kerik landed in Iraq and moved into a white trailer in a palace parking lot. His new title is senior policy adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, which has no minister.
That haste, and the broad administrative problems here, seem to reflect the sketchiness of the planning for postwar Iraq.
"There was an assumption that Western-style policing was present in Iraq, and that's simply not true," said Samuel Juett, a Justice Department contractor working with Mr. Kerik.

Mr. Kerik's law enforcement team was mostly recruited in late April. It consists of 16 men, who, in addition to reinventing the police, must also reform customs, immigration, border control, the fire department and emergency services.
They were already stretched thin. But now growing security concerns mean they must travel in pairs, although that basically halves their productivity. "I'm becoming a mother hen more than a manager," said R. Carr Trevillian IV, who, as assistant program manager under Mr. Kerik, supervises much of the team.
By the time he leaves - in three to six months - Mr. Kerik must create a police force that understands, as he puts it, "the principles of a free and democratic society," but has enough public respect to maintain order.
No one, not even Mr. Kerik, thinks the task will be complete by then. Toppling Mr.  Hussein's government took three weeks, but when people talk about rebuilding the society he ruled, they speak in years.
"This guy is building a country from scratch," Mr. Kerik said of L. Paul Bremer III, Iraq's civilian administrator, whom Mr. Kerik frequently compares to Mr. Giuliani. "I really don't feel people understand how enormous his job is."

Mr. Kerik, who briefly returned to New York last week, faces an enormous job as well, because his available raw material is tainted. The public saw the police as the most visible arm of Mr. Hussein's repressive security apparatus. So a reconstituted force - essential to thwart nostalgia for the security of an authoritarian state -is reviled as a symbol of the one just deposed.
The police, however, saw themselves as the government's stepchild, disliked by Mr.  Hussein and disdained by the more elite security agencies. Many officers - 8,000 have returned to work in Baghdad alone -were poorly educated; most were poorly paid. They supplemented meager incomes with corruption so systemic that Iraqis say they could not report a crime without paying a bribe.
The security agencies largely kept order, so the police did not have to. Now that those agencies are gone, the police must be pushed out into the streets. "They don't understand the concept of patrol," Mr.  Kerik said.
The new police force must be retrained in everything from human rights to the use of firearms. Their ranks, in which the officers were mostly Sunni Muslims of Mr. Hussein's governing class and the enlisted men mostly Shiites, must be diversified.
But first, and fast, by order of Mr. Bremer, the force must be purged of senior Baath Party members. The complexity of doing that was clear at a police station in east Baghdad. Along a narrow room-length table set with small glasses of strong tea, the city's police commanders and their American advisers gathered one day early this month for their Monday meeting.
The Iraqi commanders, many of them large men stuffed into new uniforms designed by the allied forces, cut quickly to a central concern. They wanted to keep some of the Baathists.
Brig. Gen. Jamal Abdullah, the commander for west Baghdad, had 40 officials who were senior Baathists, but also men of talent.
He needed them. Abdul Said, chief of the Criminal Identification Division, needed his Baathist fingerprint experts. Some of the American military advisers in the room backed them up.
"I need to know," said Lt. Col. Richard Vanderlinden, the military policeman then advising General Abdullah. "Is this black and white, or is there room to maneuver?"
The answer came from a retired Army colonel, James Steele, now a civilian helping to restructure the force. "You don't have that discretion," he said firmly. "It's a trade-off between effectiveness and cleanliness here. The order is cleanliness."

A World Upside Down

In east Baghdad, 11 men sat sullenly inside the Rashaad police station, or what was left of it. The station was gutted in the postwar chaos. The prisoners broke out and fled. Rooms of files were burned in what appeared to be directed vandalism. The doors and windows were gone, and so were the patrol cars.
One hundred officers had returned to work at the station. They had 33 pistols and
two Kalashnikov rifles among them, provided
- along with a hand-written receipt - by the American military. Two of the officers had been issued new uniforms, but they were chafing over them. The uniforms looked too civilian, too unimportant, too much like the old bus collectors' uniform.

It could have been worse. Someone in Kuwait had decided at first to top off the new uniforms with baseball caps. "We're not playing sports," one Iraqi police official told Col. Teddy R. Spain, commander of the 18th Military Police Brigade. The cap idea was abandoned.
With or without caps, the police face a world turned upside down. An American soldier stopped by with instructions to adopt a "more polite, kind-hearted way" with the public. But the men - with two chairs among them and no salaries since March (they have since been paid) - were not feeling kind-hearted.
"In the past regime we had rights," Maj. Ali Dawood said glumly. "Now we have none."
The laments poured out. The security services that had sided with them against civilians and criminals were gone. They no longer felt safe in a society flooded with weapons. Before, they had dealt with three or four killings a month. Now there was almost one a day - and no one to take fingerprints or photos.
To the officers, one unassailable fact hovered like the helicopters circling over Baghdad. "It's an occupation," said Hassan Zeppala, a 36-year-old officer in west Baghdad. "You feel a kind of suffocation."
Colonel Spain, who is Mr. Kerik's military counterpart, balked at that. "The average soldier clearly believes we liberated the country of Iraq," he said. "But you know," he added, "we won the war."
As winners, Americans may enact any decree. Colonel Spain, who introduces himself to Baghdad residents as their police chief, fretted about the increase in cars with tinted windows, worrying they were transporting weapons. "I need to talk to my superiors about outlawing tinted windows in Iraq," he said.
Not long after, they did.

Lessons From New York

All the members of the initial American team for the Ministry of Interior were new to this place except one, Nouman H. Shubbar, a Philadelphia police sergeant with an Iraqi father and a German mother. He left Iraq at 18 and returned in May at 39. With his command of Arabic, his knowledge of the culture and his ability to earn the trust of average police officers, he has proved to be Mr. Kerik's best source of intelligence and his most reliable link to Iraqi society.
Mr. Kerik has moved quickly. His team drafted a short-term plan for allied commanders around the country to get police services running in the areas they control - a plan so meticulous that it detailed how many cases of push-pins, boxes of trash bags, pairs of handcuffs and protective vests each station should have.
He ordered 450 patrol cars and a sophisticated $16 million police radio system from Motorola and got money to begin renovating police stations. He put together a long-term plan to retrain and restructure the force, starting with a management seminar for its leadership.
He is trying to apply the principles that worked so well for him in New York:
measure everything, pay attention to details, find
and promote leaders.

But how do you measure allegiance to a fallen government? How do you keep an eye on details in a culture you do not know how to read? How do you promote leaders when you are also flushing them from the force? Those questions hovered over a recent Sunday meeting between Mr. Kerik and General Abdullah, the commander of west Baghdad.
Mr. Kerik had heard good things about General Abdullah and had been impressed, not least by his imposing, 6-foot-4-inch physical presence. Mr. Kerik left this meeting even more so. "I liked him," the irrepressible, often profane Mr. Kerik said with a grin several times later in the day, dwelling on General Abdullah's close-cropped hair, clean desk and pressed shirt.
What he found most impressive was that General Abdullah produced, unprompted, his own version, albeit a primitive one, of Compstat, the systematic tracking of crimes and directing of resources that New York used to reduce crime.
"He's got better stats than we do," Mr. Kerik joked.
The bonhomie was real, but conditional. Even as Mr. Kerik scouted General Abdullah as a possible leader, his men were scouring the general's past in the Baath Party. Both men are 47 and have spent most of their adult lives in law enforcement. But Mr. Kerik, who had also been New York City's corrections commissioner, came up through a merit-based system that allowed a high-school dropout and third-grade detective to rise to the top of New York City's police and prison systems.
General Abdullah toiled in a closed, politicized system imposed from above, doing what was necessary to survive and advance, but, he said, no more. Having lived under Mr. Hussein's way, he was now trying to learn Mr. Kerik's.

A Stream of Discontent

At midday one Saturday, the sun bore down like a drill outside the Jazaer station house in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in east Baghdad.
The station, with an armored Humvee out front, was heavily fortified. An American sergeant with an M-4 carbine manned the front desk, waiting for the public to report crimes.
Around him, but incomprehensible to him, a stream of discontent gurgled: men complaining about former Baathists still on the force - chief among them Maj. Gen. Makki al-Aani, who as commander of east Baghdad had been working closely with the Americans.
Down the hall, the station's Iraqi commander, Brig. Ali Yasari, 48, sat in his office at a desk bare but for a watch, desk calendar, notebook and small Koran. With 26 years on the force, Brigadier Yasari was not sure how much the Americans had to teach, but he would give them his help. They were occupiers in his station house, but also his guests.
As he spoke, his officers entered and exited the barren room with foot-stomping salutes, one more relic of the Baathist militarization of the police force, one more practice Mr. Kerik and his men planned to banish.
Mr. Kerik remains firm on this point: the culture must change. When Iraqi commanders express resistance to service-oriented policing, saying, "We don't do that," Mr. Kerik's aides respond, "You will, or we'll find someone else."
Michael Turner, the quietly efficient manager of Mr. Kerik's police program, said, "You've got an entire group that's still in denial." Some would never change, he predicted. Others would resist and be removed. Most would eventually reconcile to the new reality.
The team was going to impose women as interpreters, despite some resistance.
Military ranks would convert to civilian ones -
"the whole general thing's going to change," Mr. Turner's deputy, Mr. Trevillian, said - and reduce their number.
They vowed to continue expelling the bad elements, including General Aani. "He's a liar and a Baathist," Mr. Kerik said, citing intelligence from throughout the ranks. A day later, he fired him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/international/worldspecial/30POLI.html?ei=5062&en=8626213846331843&ex=1057550400&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

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