US plan would restart 10 Iraqi factories
Boost intended to reduce attacks
BAGHDAD -- US officials have drawn up a list of 10 former state-run Iraqi factories they hope to restart within weeks to employ 11,000 people, kicking off a plan aimed at giving potential insurgents an economic reason not to fight.
Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation, said the factories on the list are among 200 major factories in Iraq that used to employ more than 300,000 people before the 2003 US invasion.
US policy immediately after the invasion was to promote privatization so most factories closed.
That left their employees surviving on stipends of about 30 to 40 percent of their former salaries and had a ripple effect on the economy, for example on farmers whose produce was no longer bought by food-processing plants, Brinkley said.
"The core effort right now is to restore employment to as many of the Iraqi people as we can," Brinkley said in Baghdad. "We think that will improve stability. It will undermine insurgent sympathy."
The factory program is billed as part of President Bush's new strategy of ramping up economic aid and reconstruction, in tandem with extra troops to stem the ongoing violence.
Six car bombs yesterday killed at least 19 people across Baghdad, including three bombs in quick succession that killed at least 10 people and wounded 30 in a vegetable market in the southern district of Dora, police said.
Earlier, a car bomb in Saadoun Street, a main commercial thoroughfare, killed four people and wounded 10. Two other bombs killed two and three people respectively in the mainly Shi'ite east part of the city.
Violence has surged as the Iraqi government prepares to launch a US-backed crackdown in Baghdad to stem sectarian strife. Today, US and Iraqi forces arrested a top aide to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad, an official in his office said. Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, al-Sadr's media director in Baghdad, was captured in the eastern neighborhood of Baladiyat, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. No other information was released this morning.
Iraq's population is about 26 million. Unemployment stands at about 18 percent, according to Brinkley, who said another 30 percent were "underemployed." Those figures do not include idled state factory workers.
Conceding that US policy had been based on the false assumption that Iraq's industry was "Soviet-style" and inefficient, Brinkley said a gradual transformation to the private sector was now favored over rapid privatization.
Brinkley said the first 10 factories were spread around the country and covered a range of industries, including cement, heavy industry, and textiles. 