By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 18 May 2007
Iraq's Oil Minister has unequalled experience of adversity. As a leading Iraqi nuclear scientist, Dr Hussain al-Shahristani was summoned to see Saddam Hussein in 1979 and asked to assist in a project to make a nuclear weapon.
He flatly refused to help and was immediately thrown into jail and savagely tortured by being beaten for 22 days as he was hung in the air by his wrists that were tied behind his back. Adamant in his determination not to assist Saddam in developing a nuclear device Dr Shahristani spent 10 years in solitary confinement in a small windowless cell in Abu Ghraib prison.
During the chaos of the Gulf War he succeeded in escaping with the help of a "trusty" who delivered his meals. The man, a Palestinian jailed by Saddam as a favour to Yasser Arafat, agreed to help him get out of the dreaded Abu Ghraib.
Stealing a Mukhabarat (secret police) car, the scientist made his way to Kurdistan and then to Iran.
Sitting in his office in the Oil Ministry on a surprisingly rainy day in Baghdad, Dr Shahristani carries few outward signs of a life beset by danger and suffering. Following the overthrow of Saddam in 2003 he returned to Iraq and became the leader of the independent members of parliament who belonged to the Shia alliance. He became Oil Minister a year ago.
It is not an easy job. Iraq's only revenue is from the 1.6 million barrels a day of crude oil that the country exports out of the 2.2 million barrels a day it produces. Every day saboteurs blow up Iraqi oil pipelines and Oil Ministry teams try to repair them in an endless war to strangle Iraq's oil exports to the Mediterranean. Right now the saboteurs have, perhaps temporarily, the upper hand.
"It is as bad as it has ever been," says Dr Shahristani in an interview with The Independent. "If we can protect the pipeline we can add half a million barrels to our exports immediately."
The main problem is that the pipeline that takes crude oil from the oilfields in northern Iraq runs through notoriously dangerous territory between Kirkuk and Baiji to the west. "As soon as we finish a repair they plant another IED [improvised explosive device]. The pipe is hundreds of miles long and runs through a hostile area where insurgents are very active," he says. As a result all exports have to pass through Basra.
Iraq is trying to reorganise its oil industry. The US is pressing for a draft oil bill that has been in dispute for more than a year to be finally passed by parliament. It has become one of the famous "benchmarks" by which Washington says it is measuring progress in Iraq.
There is some hypocrisy here because the year in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority ran the Iraqi oil industry in 2003-04 was famous for managerial incompetence and corruption.
The control of oil and oil revenue is also at the centre of the fraught relationship between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurds. The need to share oil money is one of the few things holding Iraq together. The Kurds want to maximise their autonomy and, critically, to make sure that they get their present 17 per cent share of oil revenues. With some reason they are suspicious that money on which they wholly depend will be held up or sequestered by some delaying tactic in Baghdad.
Dr Shahristani says negotiations over the coming week will be crucial in deciding if agreement can be reached with the Kurds on oil and gas. He himself had just returned from Kurdistan. The Kurdish Prime Minister is expected in Baghdad this week. The Kurds are demanding that their share of Iraq's oil revenues be released to them automatically.
"We have had endless problems on getting our share," says Dilshad Miran, a Kurdish official in Baghdad. "They give us figures but we don't know if they are right."
Distrust is deep. The Kurds believe they have been deliberately short-changed by Arab-run ministries. The Baghdad government suspects what it sees as efforts by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to set up an independent oil industry. Four contracts for oil exploration signed in Kurdistan before the fall of Saddam will be honoured though they may be amended. Dr Shahristani says he told Kurdish leaders that any other contracts "are illegal and I will be writing to any company that signs a contract with the KRG... that Iraq will not deal with them in future."
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Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Saboteurs have upper hand in an endless war, says Iraq's Oil Minister," The Independent, 18 May 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2556485.ece
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