Just business?
Political blowback from a recruitment campaign for security personnel in Iraq has caused the government to suspend it indefinitely. Omayma Abdel-Latif reports
"Wanted for work in Iraq and Kuwait: former army and police officers and university graduates. Salary ranges from $500 to $2000, according to experience" -- this was the job advertisement that appeared on the pages of two daily national papers earlier this week. It was meant to be an ordinary recruitment campaign that would run its due course, but instead, it triggered heated political debate over whether or not former army and police officers should be sent to Iraq to work under the authority and logic of US occupation.
It was the independent weekly Al-Osbou' that put the case in the limelight with a front-page article on Sunday and an accompanying editorial about the threat such a recruitment campaign would be posing to Egypt's national security.
The government itself seems uncomfortable with the issue and decided to halt the campaign until "the case is studied thoroughly", according to the official statement sent to the three recruiting companies. This was a veiled reference to the fact that the issue has now become a security matter.
Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on Tuesday, Nawal El-Naggar, head of the central administration for recruitment regulation at the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration, confirmed that "security concerns were behind the government's move. This was the first time that Egyptian recruits are sought to assist in reconstruction efforts in Iraq after the war. But we were given orders to put this campaign on hold due to security reasons". She would not, however, give further details.
Al-Osbou' alleged that the army and police officers were being recruited in order to act as "human shields to protect the American soldiers who die at the hands of Iraqi resistance on daily basis". The newspaper's Editor-in-Chief Mustafa Bakri said that "this is one of the most serious crimes that threatens to undermine Egypt's national security interests."
The director of the principal recruiting agency that launched the campaign described these allegations as "baseless" and expressed dismay over the way in which the issue has been twisted -- when presented to the public -- to serve political ends.
"This was a legal recruiting process," Sami Mahgoub, director of Gulf International Recruitment Company, told the Weekly. "It had the blessing of the Egyptian Embassy in Kuwait and we had the approval of the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration, but the issue was turned into a political matter and thus suspended." While Mahgoub was reluctant to disclose the number of applicants who sought hire, he said that the company received "hundreds of applications" and this was due to the fact that "the financial benefits were enormous". "The turnout had to be very good [and] because of the soaring unemployment rates in this country it was no surprise for us," he said.
Officials at the Egyptian Embassy in Kuwait were involved in the negotiation round that aimed at improving the contracts' conditions, explained Mahgoub. Egyptian recruits were due to travel to Iraq during the first week of September.
It was, however, the emphasis on the need for security personnel -- although this was not the only target for recruitment -- that triggered the anger of a public that has remained adamantly opposed to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Al-Osbou' alleged that the Egyptian recruits were to be assigned to secure the Iraqi oil refineries and pipelines and to reinstitute public order, which was likely to put their lives at risk. "They are going to be used in combat operations to fend for the American soldiers and they will not be able to disobey the orders of the occupying forces," Al-Osbou' claimed.
This, however, is simply not true, says one government official. Abdel-Galeel Megahed, head of the recruitment companies department, an official body which supervises the activities of recruitment companies at the Egyptian Chambre of Commerce, stressed that the job description of the security personnel stated that they were to safeguard Iraqi civil installations such as banks and hospitals. Megahed was quick to point out that under no circumstances were such recruits going to engage in combat operations.
"They had to have a military background just because they will have to defend themselves, and not because they were going to do proxy wars for America," said Megahed, a former army officer who has been supervising labour recruitment for the past 20 years.
This recruitment campaign is part of a larger scheme to hire an international cadre of security personnel to work in Iraq. The only other Arab country from which police recruits are sought is Jordan. Recruitment is also underway in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Nepal to appoint 40,000 labourers in different sectors. Egyptian labourers are no strangers to Iraq. The 1980s witnessed a surge in the number of Egyptian workers moving to Iraq as economic migrants. However, during the mid-1990s this flow reversed when hundreds of Egyptian workers came home in coffins and the circumstances behind their deaths remained unclear. The Egyptian government opened an investigation into the deaths without reaching a conclusion. While the actual number of the Egyptian workers currently working in Iraq is uncertain, official statements put the figure between 30,000 to 65,000. Before the Iraq War began, many Egyptians working in Iraq returned home, leaving behind families and businesses.
Last week, news reports disclosed that the US Civil Administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer turned down several official requests made by Egypt to allow Egyptian labourers -- who have been working in Iraq and left before the war broke out -- to go back to Iraq. Political observers contend that in Iraq, a country where unemployment rates among professionals reached almost 70 per cent and an army of 400,000 well trained personnel has been dissolved by the occupying administration, recruiting foreign labour is a questionable enterprise.
According to Mahgoub, however, the main concern is not to allow what happened in Kuwait after the Gulf War, to be repeated. "When we accepted this offer, we had one thing in mind and that is to make use of this opportunity for the Arabs to participate in the reconstruction of Iraq," explained Mahgoub. "We did not want to repeat the Kuwaiti experience when the reconstruction job was done by American companies. The issue of the politics of the occupation was never discussed. This was a purely business operation."
