Text: Bremer Stands By June 30
Hundreds of local and provincial councils have been formed. Student councils, women's groups, parent-teachers associations have been created in thousands of places. Professional organizations -- physicians and lawyers and engineers -- have come into being all over the country. These are the essential elements of civil society.
Neither security nor government can be sustained without money and without economic activity, so let me finish with a few words about the economy.
A moribund economy sooner or later leads to a moribund and insecure society. Iraq's once moribund economy is coming to life. As all of you know when you drive around, consumer goods are widely available. The Iraqi Central Bank, which was wholly subservient, has been independent since September.
The currency exchange was one of the most successful in history under extremely daunting circumstances. We put 4.6 trillion new Iraqi dinars in place, and finished on time and on budget.
BREMER: Iraq now enjoys observer status at the World Trade Organization.
The restoration and expansion of electrical services continues. Last week, electrical production hit its highest point since the war on a seven-day average of 4,260 megawatts. Yesterday we generated 98,917 megawatt hours of power: a record since liberation. We continue to project 6,000 megawatts of peak power by July 1st.
Telephone service continues to expand, with more than 95 percent of service outside of Baghdad around the country and substantial progress within Baghdad. Hospitals, schools, food supplies, water resources are all at or above prewar levels. It's not good enough yet, but progress has been made.
All of this economic activity will be further boosted by the $10.2 billion of reconstruction contracts funded from the supplemental budget that we expect to let by July 1st. Progress in each of these areas -- security, governance, economics -- reinforces each of the others. Not every piece will move just when we thought and there will be bumps on the road, but we have made great progress to date.
Thank you. I'll take your questions.
QUESTION (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): What is the American strategy, the case of winning or losing by President Bush toward Iraq? Will the American strategy change if President George Bush loses the election?
BREMER: I try to make it a habit not to answer hypothetical questions, but in this case I don't expect President Bush to lose the election, nor do I expect there to be any change in American policy.
The American people understand the importance of what we have done here: liberating 25 million people from a vicious tyranny, fighting the global war on terrorism and bringing democracy and pluralism to this country. We will continue on that until we succeed.
QUESTION (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Will there be a second source for legislation for the Iraqi new law in addition to the Islamic sharia, the Islamic law?
BREMER: It's important to go back to the principles of the November 15th agreement, in which the governing council committed itself to a transitional law which will respect fundamental rights, as I said in my opening statement, including the fundamental right to freedom of religion, while recognizing the Islamic nature of Iraqi society.
I don't want to predict at this point how precisely those principles will be recognized in the transitional law, because the governing council is just now considering the draft of that. But I'm assuming that the governing council will stick with what it said and recognize those freedoms and the equality of all Iraqis irrespective, as I said in my statement, of religion, ethnicity or gender.
QUESTION (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Mr. Bremer, the secretary general of the United Nations, according to what is mentioned in one of the Japanese newspapers papers in a meeting with him, is that there is no possibility to conduct elections during the set time for the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis. What is the alternative, in your opinion, if it is difficult to conduct elections?
BREMER: As I understand the process, the secretary general intends to issue his views on this question in the next 24 hours and I would prefer to wait until I hear what he has to say.
There are, as I have pointed out before, a number of ways in which a transitional government could be selected if it was not possible to hold elections. It is a very complicated task to do it if you don't do it with elections.
With the governing council, we put forward a proposal to do it by means of caucuses. But there are literally dozens of ways to carry out this very complicated task. There are caucuses that cascade downwards, upward-cascading caucuses. Various other kinds of selections, partial elections.
On all of these matters we are going to wait until we hear what the secretary general has to say and what Mr. Brahimi has to say. But I just invite your attention to how complicated it is.
QUESTION: If we could get your view on Al Qaida, we've seen a number of reports recently giving conflicting accounts as to whether it's here, one in Baquba saying they've detained seven members of the group linked to it. And I wonder if you have anything on a group that's recently surfaced, called Jaish Ansar al-Sunna?
BREMER: On the narrow question of the events in Baquba, my understanding is that at the moment we do not consider the people who were rounded up to be Al Qaida. They appear to be Iraqi extremists. But I will wait until we finish the interrogation of them to give you a final view on it.
However, it is clear that we have major elements of terrorist groups, including Al Qaida. They have been here basically all along. Ansar al-Islam is a group to whom Zarqawi is connected, as he is also connected to Al Qaida. Sometimes it's hard to make an actual distinction.
But what we do know is that we are on the forefront of the war against terrorism, a fact which is recognized by Zarqawi in his letter. He knows that they have to try to beat us and the Iraqis here. And that is their strategy.
Jaish Ansar al-Sunna appears to be a successor organization to Ansar al-Islam or a subset of it. I've been working against terrorist groups for more than 20 years now, and it's sometimes hard to know exactly where the boundaries of these groups are.
We do know we have a serious problem. We know these terrorists are now targeting Iraqis and killing many, many more Iraqis than they are killing coalition forces. I think we can be proud of the resilience of the Iraqi security forces against these terrible threats.
QUESTION: Your Excellency, Mr. Ambassador, you have (inaudible). What you don't understand what you mean, you said in your statements in Karbala that you do not want to have the Islamic religion as the main source of writing the constitution. What do you mean by that?
© 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
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