Iraq because of "American mismanagement," amid concern over daily attacks against United States soldiers and Christians.
Marcel Alberts (60), Consultant and International Chief Observer of the UN Food for Oil Program and the UN Development Program tells BosNewsLife Iraq will likely experience "guerrilla warfare."
"We know what happened in the Vietnam war…(In Iraq) Every day one or two Americans are dying. You should not be surprised that number of casualties goes up," he adds. The 60-year old Dutchman Alberts, who already lives and works three years in Iraq, believes America was "to quick" with war, without thinking about security in the post-Saddam Hussein era.
"As long as people didn’t say anything against the regime, they could live safely. Now there are shootings and kidnappings," he says in his hotel apartment in Baghdad’s Christian district, where hours earlier a bomb exploded nearby. Christian aid workers have also expressed concern about the violence in Iraq, although they do not intend to leave Iraq.
PICTURE
On Albert’s desk, a picture of his wife and children, for whom it is apparently to dangerous to visit him. "I am getting tired." His says "a colleague, two homes from here" was recently kidnapped. "He heard shots and came outside. He was pushed by masked men into a car. He only was freed after a ransom of fifty thousand dollars was paid."
While American soldiers suggest they understand the frustration of Alberts and other foreigners in the country, they have apparently not enough peacekeepers on the ground to change. "There problem is there are still people who don’t want us here," explains 29-year old Specialist Dustin Owens, from Warsaw, Indiana.
UN staff is also suffering under the apparent anti-American violence, notes Alberts. "Because of the insurance" Alberts and his colleagues are no longer allowed to go outdoors alone and are transported to their workplaces in special blue coloured cars. "The white vehicles were stolen," he explains.
PRISON
"We now live more or less in a prison. Around 7.30 am we leave from the hotel to a complex with a wall of three and a halve metres with barbed wire. We stay there till around seven a clock in the evening, before coming back." Although the U.S.-imposed curfew starts around 11.00 hours PM, "at the UN we have to go to bed three hours earlier," adds Alberts.
He fears tensions in the country will increase the number of Iraqis suffering of hunger. "In the last the UN reached sixty percent of the people in need of food. I am not sure how this will continue with the Americans. There is a movement that they will leave, so that other countries will be seen as quietly of the mass Iraq is in right now," Alberts says.
"Being an aid worker it is difficult to see results. Perhaps that’s different for someone working as a nurse in a hospital." However, like Christian relief agencies ANS spoke too, Alberts is not planning to leave Iraq. "I am already old, this is most likely my last job," he
adds.
Perhaps his son will take over his work. "He was always against it, but I would not be surprised if he come to Iraq." Baghdad is not only about suffering, suggests Alberts. "The Dutch beer market is well represented here…"
