Chapter Eighteen

Kurdish Factions conflicting
electricity requirements

When I completed my tour of Kurdistan I returned to Baghdad and busied myself with making out assessment forms for all the Kurdistan Electricity Grid components in order to record the condition of every installation on the system there. I intended to distribute them to the Electricity Companies on the first pass of my next trip to the north and collect them and analyse them with the companies on the second pass about a week later.

Peter Kounenbourg, Odeh’s Deputy, arranged to come to the Babylon Hotel at 7.00am on 18th February 1998, the date of my departure north, to deliver my travel permits from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). He then presented me with a letter of introduction to the UN chief in the north, Peter Farrell, together with a copy of a memo from Peter to Nauludole Mataitini the UNOCHI Security Advisor in Baghdad giving my proposed itinerary to and in the north. This was to ensure that I was firmly in the UN security net during my visit.

Every UN official and transport had a specific call sign. The call signs for Baghdad-based staff would be preceded by Bravo. When I was established in Erbil my Radio call sign was ‘Echo (For Erbil) Power One’. Every night each staffer would have to answer a radio roll call at the same hour. If anyone failed to answer his call efforts to locate the missing staffer would be triggered. Everyone had access to a map of Iraq with a network of numbered reporting-in sites so that in transit say between Baghdad and the north one had to radio to UNOCHI control giving one’s call sign and the location number of the call-in site as one passed it so that the control centre was aware of one’s progress throughout the journey. Any delay in calling in would trigger a search. Again in retrospect this was another sign of the potential danger that I was facing on my trip even though it never dawned on me at the time.

The mission objective had been to assess the amount of funding required, the capability of local management, skills of their work force and the amount and quality of their mechanical resources. The main difference between the two main Governorates was that Sulymaniyah had two generating stations (Dokan and Derbendikhan) while Erbil had none. Erbil on the other hand had customs revenue from the illegal sanction-busting oil trade while Sulymaniyah had none. Erbil could therefore buy their electricity from Sulymaniyah so an uneasy quid pro quo existed.

It was obvious from the local discussions that each governorate particularly Erbil and Dohuk wanted to be self-sufficient. This was never said but it was obvious from the projects they advanced as being high priority. Erbil was always pushing for a generating station at Duhok the most westerly of their cities, obviously to improve the continuity and security of their electricity supply but as a bonus would make themselves less dependent on Sulaymaniyah in matters of Energy.

Sulaymaniyah on the other hand were forever looking for extensions of the transmission network to reach the remoter parts of Dohuk such as Zakho and Amadiya on the Turkish border and so delay the need for generating stations for the KDP. This disagreement became quite serious and it arose at every subsequent budget or pre-budget meeting I had with them. It was a potential casus belli as tempers were fraught and each side still held prisoners from the other side arising from their civil war. When I had to make the decision I came down in favour of a generating station in KDP territory. I said that the PUK preference for more Transmission lines would result in unacceptable voltage drops so that the power at the end of the line (e.g. Zakho and other Kurdish towns near the Turkish Border) would not drive a toy train. Moreover we should take every opportunity to increase the generation capacity of the area as a whole.

This is the area near Srebrenica where the Bosnian men were separated from their womenfolk and children and led away to their deaths.

From my time dealing with the Cork trade unions I had acquired some expertise in dealing with explosive situations and, in fact, got involved in a similar situation in Bosnia a few years later when I reconstructed two transmission lines in that country. One was running from Srebrenica through the perimeter of the transmission station where the Bosnian men were separated from their womenfolk and children and led away to their deaths. The other was running from the city of Gorazde in Bosnia through the Republica Serbska ( Radavon Karadzic State) and on to Sarajevo in Bosnia. This involved clearing many minefields along the line’s route and actually going through the front lines and the Serbian gun emplacements from where they shelled Sarajevo. I had to chair many meetings between the two sides where the most awful atrocities took place between them just months previously. Here again my experience in negotiating with the electricians and linesmens’ unions in Cork stood me in good stead.

One of my Bosnian engineers, Fuad, posing in front of his grandparents’ house in Srebrenica where he was reared before he moved to Sarajevo. His grand parents as well as his granduncle and grandaunt who lived nearby were murdered by the Republica Serbska Serbs. The house is now being restored by Serbs who claimed it. Fuad assisted me with the work and translated at meetings between the Bosnian and the Republica Serbska Electricity engineers.

It was difficult to get a reliable Transmission Grid Schematic for Kurdistan as an aid to planning the system. As the transmission system or grid is of national strategic value it is regarded as a state secret in totalitarian regimes. Indeed when I did some work in the Crimea for the EU I was admonished once by one of the directors of Crimenergo, the Crimean Electricity Company, when he discovered that I had a copy of the Crimean Network schematic in my possession: “For all I know Mr Dan” he said “you could have a copy of it in Dublin.” I hastened to reassure him that no one in Ireland had any strategic interest in acquiring knowledge of the Crimean Grid. I also reminded him that any of the myriad spy satellites would have picked up details of the entire network already. In fact, when I was in Basra in southern Iraq one of the American consultant engineers wanted to know how many Iraqi transformers were in operation in the transmission substations there but he was not inclined to go out to the substations to find out (too dangerous). Instead he got a copy of a thermal image map from an American satellite and was able to pinpoint all the operating transformers from their thermal footprints (Transformers get hot when they are carrying load).

The macro situation of the system was worse. The Local Electricity Authorities (LEA) had no experience of planning and wildly exaggerated each side’s requirement. They had no records of the loads in the lines and substations as these were controlled from Baghdad and I was prevented from asking for them for political reasons. However, drawing on my experience of Network planning I was able to make a credible stab at their requirements by estimating the suppressed loads etc. (Suppressed load is load that exists but cannot be supplied due to lack of generation.)

Extra generation was the answer but when I recommended an increased emphasis on generation to the UN HQ I was refused. They claimed they could not add to Iraq’s power infrastructure as it would break the rules of the Sanction regime. All we could do was to increase the Network Grid. The repairs to the dams would last for years so we were increasing a network that was already about nine times too large for the dams’ output. To my knowledge the dams are not yet back to full rated output. In fact, an International Energy Consultancy Company has recently estimated it would cost about $60 million to do just that. The incremental increase of the Oil for Food budget was inadequate to fund any meaningful new generating station so we were caught between a rock and a hard place. This posture was eased later when three 30 MVA Diesel Turbine Generating Stations were erected but this was due to an emergency caused by lack of water after three years of drought and the inability of the hydro stations to provide any power for essential services such as hospitals, water pumps and sewage disposal facilities. Unless there was a high-level intervention in the allocation of funds, so that adequate funds were set aside for a substantial power station, and the veto on extra infrastructural generation was removed, we were literally engaging in an exercise of futility. Furthermore increasing the Kurds’ generation capacity had no bearing on the Saddam regime as the Kurds’ Network was separated from Saddam’s Network due to war damage and protected by Operation Northern Comfort.

As regards the quality of their human resources one would have to overlook many shortcomings as the Iraqi management and engineers had fled and the networks were now being run by Kurdish personnel from lower down the former management structure. Also LEA personnel had not been paid for four months and most including directors had other jobs even by day. In fact, the Transmission Director of one company was driving a taxi for a living and would arrive on site in his taxi to discuss the planning of a new transmission substation costing upwards of $6 million. When the meeting would conclude he would go off in his taxi to collect more fares. The procurement process was uncontrolled and some equipment was overestimated by a factor of 20 while other equipment was purchased to the tune of many millions of dollars without the ancillary equipment required to put it on the network. This ancillary equipment would cost $15 million.

When I had completed my investigations I produced my report. I made reference to the procurement problems. I stated that the tendering procedure should be driven by humanitarian considerations and value for money rather than vendor equity as it was under UN procurement rules; after all it was Iraqi money. Shortly afterwards I made out a report on the Procurement process. On the basis of the report a second audit was made on the procurement process in which I took part. This also was very negative and went up the ladder in the UN.

I concluded the report by summarising the recommendations I had made in the body of the report and added that contractors should be appointed to build the electricity substations, and lines to standard equipment and design. I asked for an assessment of the situation by an international consultancy company to give a road map of the way forward and to highlight and prioritise the critical issues. The actual report ran to 36 pages and was completed in the middle of March. It caused a stir in the UN and went to the top. Kofi Annan went to the Security Council immediately and got approval for US$ 500,000 for the assessment. I wrote out terms of reference for this assessment which Michael Higgins sent out to procurement and the tendering process was initiated.

The immediate result of the damning report was that I was instructed to move north until the end of my contract and achieve an 180o turnaround of the programme. We were told that major decisions would be made in July on the basis of the report and so we began to be more hopeful that change was possible. When I settled in the north I was visited with a plethora of successive fact-finding missions from New York. I took the opportunity to impress on each of them the desirability of running the electricity sector programme on the World Bank model where a consultancy company or companies would implement the programme including the procurement of equipment thus avoiding the ‘rules and regulations’ of the UN procurement process. The UN would then monitor the progress of the implementing entities.