IRAQ:The former chairman of the Commission on Public Integrity in Iraq has charged the authorities with massive corruption.
Radhi Hamza al-Radi said the anti-corruption commission had collected evidence in 3,000 cases of corruption involving the misappropriation of $18 billion. Speaking in Washington where he took refuge recently for fear of assassination, Mr al-Radhi accused the government of preventing him from naming and indicting culprits.
He has appealed for asylum for himself and his family.
In testimony to a congressional committee, he revealed that of the 3,000 cases sent to the Iraqi courts for prosecution, only 241 have been tried. He said 31 members of his staff and a dozen members of their families had been gunned down or abducted and tortured before being killed.
He charged prime minister Nouri al-Maliki with protecting relatives and colleagues involved in various types of corruption.
The government responded to these charges by saying Mr al-Radhi was corrupt, dismissing him and threatening to charge him with misappropriating millions of dollars in public money. He dismissed the allegations as an attempt to discredit him.
Mr al-Radhi, who was a prosecutor during the period of Baathist rule, was twice imprisoned and tortured during this period. He is generally regarded as an honest man. Arthur Brennan, a former State Department official assigned to Iraq who had previously served as a judge, called Mr al-Radhi "courageous, honest and effective."
Last week four influential Democratic committee chairmen in the US House of Representatives warned secretary of state Condoleezza Rice that "endemic corruption" was fuelling the insurgency in Iraq and accused the State Department of covering it up. In a letter to the US inspector general for Iraq, they said, "we have learned that on September 25th, 2007, the State Department instructed officials not to answer questions in an open setting" about the readiness of the Iraqi government to tackle corruption.
In July, the US body responsible for reconstruction in Iraq said financial mismanagement and graft were endemic and as destructive as "a second insurgency".
Meanwhile in Baghdad Ammar al-Hakim, the son of Abdel Aziz al- Hakim, head of the Iranian-founded and funded Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) called for the division of Iraq into semi-autonomous ethnic and sectarian regions.
His call follows the adoption of a resolution by the US Senate proposing Iraq's division into three self-governing regions. This was vehemently condemned by most Iraqi politicians, with the exception of the Kurds. SIIC is the only Shia faction which favours such a political structure for Iraq.
While the Iraqi constitution lays down a federal union for Iraq's 18 provinces, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis reject regionalism for the country's Arab provinces although they accept a three-province autonomous Kurdish region.
The other two main Shia parties, Mr al-Maliki's Dawa and the Sadrists led by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Sunni parties insist that Iraq should remain a unified state with a strong central government.