Foreign aid workers slowly returning to Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Foreign aid agencies are slowly returning to address Iraq's massive humanitarian woes following a fall in violence in the country to four-year lows.

The five-year-old conflict in Iraq has displaced around 2.8 million people internally, while health and education services have been badly hit by a lack of funding and the loss of qualified staff who have fled abroad.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier this month it had quietly redeployed expatriate workers to Iraq, re-establishing a permanent international presence in the country after five years.

The United Nations' refugee agency has also recently returned foreign staff to Iraq. U.N. agencies withdrew international staff after the deadly bombing of its Baghdad headquarters in August 2003, with Iraqi nationals continuing their aid projects.

"For all humanitarian organizations ... there is increased pressure to have more staff on the ground," said Dana Graber Ladek, a Jordan-based official with the International Organization of Migration (IOM), which has programs for displaced Iraqis.

"We've seen the improvement in security ... we want to respond to that," she said, adding that lower violence had not yet improved living conditions for Iraq's internally displaced.

Nearly three-quarters of those displaced lack access to regular food rations, one-third do not get the medicines they need, and 14 percent have no access to health care at all, the IOM says. Most also lack access to safe drinking water.

Responding to this and other crises, agencies have been upgrading their presence in Iraq since the end of last year, albeit quietly, so as not to attract the attention of militants.

For security reasons, none were specific, but many said foreign staff were visiting more and might soon be Iraq-based.

Mark Schnellbaecher, Middle East director of U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which currently funds Iraqi charities, said he was set to make his first visit to Iraq for more than four years in October or November.

The organization will then look at re-opening an office, having pulled out of the southern city of Basra in 2004 because of the growing threat from militias.

"It's under serious consideration to reopen (in Iraq)," Schnellbaecher said. "There's guarded optimism that the time is right."

SCORES OF AID WORKERS KILLED

The bomb that destroyed the U.N. office in Baghdad killed 22 people including mission chief Sergio Vieira de Mello, and scores of aid workers have been killed or kidnapped for ransom since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

As violence worsened, most aid agencies pulled out their foreign staff, relocating to the relatively peaceful Kurdish north or to neighboring Jordan.

But long-distance oversight has been difficult. Schnellbaecher said it made projects hard to evaluate and often led to CRS being less generous with funding.

"Remote management has strengthened Iraqis' opinion that the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are really not here (for them)," said Agron Ferati, Iraq director of International Medical Corps, UK, one of the few aid agencies that never left Iraq, even during the worst violence.

Ferati, who moves more or less freely through all of Iraq's provinces, said he was encouraging aid agencies to come back.

A spokesman for the U.N. mission in Iraq, Said Arikat, said other U.N. agencies besides WHO were increasing their work as security improved, including helping Iraq organize provincial elections expected later this year or early in 2009.

A number of foreigners also work in the main U.N. mission inside the heavily fortified Green Zone compound in Baghdad. The top U.N. envoy in Iraq is Staffan de Mistura, who holds Swedish and Italian nationality.

(Editing by Dean Yates and Catherine Evans)