A plaque at the entrance to the Baghdad police academy reads: ”Your gun is your honour, so keep it.” Underneath it on Wednesday someone had scrawled: ”I needed some money, so I sold it.”
The morale of Iraq’s newly recruited police force is extremely low, and confidence among Iraqis in their police is lower still.
That is why the British were in Majar al-Kabir, south of Amara, this week. The six dead British military policemen, like their United States counterparts elsewhere in Iraq, were attempting to re-establish a police force. They had been training newly recruited Iraqi police officers, while at the same time trying to fill the gap in policing by enforcing a ban on arms in the village near Amara.
The lack of a working police force in Iraq has been one of the biggest problems facing the US-British coalition, which has been unable to cope with continuing waves of lawlessness.
US and British commanders, in planning for post-war Iraq, made the mistaken assumption they would inherit an Iraqi army and police force that would maintain order.
US and British attempts to reintroduce policing have faltered badly. Although the US command in Baghdad frequently issues claims about return of officers to Iraq’s streets and roads, they are little in evidence.
The few who can be seen are usually accompanied by US or British forces, and they are rarely seen at night. Moreover, these Iraqi police command little respect.
The relationship between the US-British forces and newly recruited police is frequently fraught. Some of the recruits have turned out to have lurid Ba’ath Party pasts and have been dismissed on the spot.
A police chief in Baghdad, Lieutenant Major Hafudh Jasim, was arrested and temporarily thrown in jail this month by his US minders. Time magazine reported there had been a row after a US commander ordered police to stop taking the station’s 30 patrol cars home.
With no police force, US and British troops have had to try to bring law and order themselves to a country awash with weapons.
The British sector of Iraq has been relatively quiet since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in contrast to US-controlled Baghdad. The calm is partly because it is a Shia Muslim area, and partly because the British force has chosen to turn a blind eye to the number of guns openly carried by Iraqis, and to allow local guerrillas to enforce law and order. But that was never going to be more than a temporary solution.
At some point, either the British or the newly recruited police force were going to have to confront the gun problem. This week, in Majar al-Kabir, the British military police attempted to do just that.
But taking weapons from a people who are either former guerrillas or who regard being armed as essential in lawless Iraq was always going to be fraught.
And it is especially difficult in a traditional Shia area where there is a particular objection to British forces searching homes and allegedly going into the women’s quarters.
US and British soldiers, and their military police, are too thinly spread to deal with the almost overwhelming breakdown in law and order. Reinforcements are coming, with nine countries having already deployed, or promising to deploy, in the British sector soon. But in the long term Iraq needs its own police force.
In the coming days, US military police will begin a training programme focusing on human rights, and public and weapons safety.
Apparently cleansed of the thugs and the Ba’athists who ran the old force, the new squad will, according to Captain Steve Caruso of the US 18th Military Police Brigade, ”help Iraqis to feel safe and to trust in the force of law and order again”.
As many as 900 police at a time, dressed in smart new uniforms, will undergo a three-week training programme at the Baghdad police academy.
”Under Saddam they learned how to fire mortars and salute their leader,” Caruso said. ”We want to teach them to be policemen: about ethics, how to handle evidence, and how to deal with domestics.” — Â