NEWS: South Korean engineers quit Iraq
Power grid rebuilding could be delayed
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
THE WASHINGTON POST
msnbc.com
BAGHDAD, Dec. 7 — A week after two of their colleagues were killed in an ambush, the remaining contingent of 60 South Korean contract engineers and technicians working for the U.S. government on a project north of the capital has decided to leave the country.
IT IS THE largest known withdrawal of contractors over security issues and follows a week of confrontations between the workers and their managers that culminated with yelling and punches Sunday afternoon.
The decision by the men, who were working to fix electrical power lines, is likely to delay one of Iraq’s most critical reconstruction projects. The workers are subcontractors for the Washington Group International Inc., a construction firm based in Boise, Idaho, that has a $110 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to repair sections of Iraq’s power grid.
Electricity — or the lack of it — has become a symbol for the challenges facing the reconstruction. Many parts of the country still get only a few hours of electricity a day, a fact that angry Iraqis cite as evidence that the reconstruction has failed to live up to its promises. The difficulty in restoring power has had a ripple effect on other projects, making it difficult to operate factories, oil refineries and even produce cement.
Anxiety over security is increasing among the thousands of contractors in Iraq, as attacks in recent weeks have appeared to focus on unarmed civilians who look like foreigners. Recent victims include a Colombian working for Kellogg Brown & Root, an oil and military support contractor, and two Americans working for EOD Technology Inc., a company specializing in the removal of old munitions.
LACK OF SECURITY
Many large contracting companies concede that employees have left Iraq recently or have declined assignments because of safety concerns. The lack of security is complicating efforts to hire the thousands of contractors necessary to staff the $18 billion worth of new reconstruction projects recently approved by the U.S. government.
The Korean electricity workers said they were sorry to abandon the project but that they had been led to believe that the area they would be working in — the Sunni Triangle, where resistance to the U.S.-led occupation has been strongest — was stable. They said their managers withheld information crucial to their safety and neglected to provide them with protective equipment.
“If I had known it would be like this I would have never come. It was dangerous but no one told us, and they kept us working outside even into the night,” said Hyun Do Cho, 40, an engineer from Seoul.
The engineers and technicians are employees of Ohmoo Electric Co. of Korea, which is a subcontractor of the Shiloh company of the Philippines, which in turn is a subcontractor of the Washington Group. Officials from Ohmoo and Shiloh said they regretted the hardship they have subjected their employees to, but declined to comment on specific allegations. They said they would remain in the country for the time being to determine whether there was a way to continue the work-which was scheduled to be completed by the end of the month.
A spokesman for Washington Group, Jack Herrmann, said he had not been updated on the status of negotiations and therefore could not comment on the future of the project. He said that the company makes security personnel available to all of its employees and subcontractors, but that it is the responsibility of the subcontractors to provide protective equipment.
The South Korean engineers arrived in Iraq in groups beginning Nov. 11, and began surveying transmission towers on the road that runs north from Baghdad, past Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein, and on to the oil town of Baji. The engineers were sent out in plain clothes, without flak jackets or helmets. They routinely traveled with only a driver, in large SUVs, without escorts or bodyguards, they said.
HIGHWAY AMBUSH
On Nov. 30, four of the engineers were ambushed on that highway. The details of the attack are unclear, but around 1:30 p.m., a military patrol found their bullet-ridden vehicle on the side of the road, a South Korean Embassy spokesman said. Two of the contractors — Kyung Hae Kwak and Mansoo Kim — and their Iraqi driver, Luay Harby, were dead. The other two men, Jae Suk Lim and Sang Won Lee, lay bleeding in the back seat. Lim, shot once in the leg, and Lee, shot three times in the leg and twice in the hip and buttocks, were evacuated to a U.S. hospital in Germany, the spokesman said.
When the other workers heard about the attack, they said that their initial reaction was confusion. They could not understand why their colleagues had been targeted. But as they began to research the situation, they became irate, they said.
They learned that the previous day, two Japanese diplomats had been killed at just about the same location and in just about the same manner, the workers said. Suddenly, it appeared that all foreigners — not just Westerners — were targets. There had also been a huge firefight between U.S. forces and Iraqis just a few miles away in Samarra; at least 54 Iraqis, many of them wearing uniforms of Saddam’s Fedayeen militia, had been killed in the incident. The engineers asked their bosses why no one had warned the workers and why they were still being asked to work in the area. They also questioned why they had not been provided with protective gear or guards, standard issue for many companies that employ foreign nationals in Iraq.
And so a standoff began the day after the attack. The contractors refused to go out to the work sites until they got answers and a promise of more security. They said their managers withheld their passports and pay, and would not allow them to go home.
By Sunday afternoon, the workers said they had had enough. Several dozen of the men rented a bus and went to the house where six of the company’s executives lived.
It wasn’t exactly a kidnapping, but the managers did not go by choice. When an alarmed Iraqi employee called out to ask where they were being taken, one of the managers began to respond, but a worker smacked him in the head, a Washington Post reporter observed. Workers led the managers by their arm to a conference room in the back of the Tutaitulah Hotel, where the workers had been staying.
The room was dim, and the executives were placed in a row of seats in the front of the room.
Hae Chun Suh, Ohmoo’s president, wearing a sky-blue bullet-proof vest, stared stoically at the crowd. E Sah Park, a manager for Shiloh, sat in a corner with his hands on his face after a worker had hit him in the stomach. Another worker threw some food leftover from lunch at his bosses, the reporter observed.
Then, either individually or in small groups, workers came up to yell at them. “Why were they alone? Why wasn’t there anyone to help our friends?” demanded Song Kun Bae, 35.
Tae Ho Ohm, 42, chastised the managers for not taking into account the emotional state of the workers when they tried to order everyone back to work the next day. “The way we think, those who lived and died, we are all the same,” Ohm said.
‘AND WRITE IT PRETTILY’
The workers placed blank pieces of paper in front of their managers and told them to write letters apologizing for their role in the deaths of their co-workers and promising that there would be compensation. “And write it prettily,” one worker demanded.
About a half-hour into the confrontation, the Korean consul in Baghdad, Hae Hong Pyun, rushed into the room.
Pyun asked for calm and said that it would be best for everyone if the dispute were resolved peacefully. He suggested that the workers pick representatives who would negotiate a settlement with the managers. They went upstairs to a hotel room.
By around 5:30 p.m. the discussion was over.
The managers and workers came out of room 201 and announced that they had reached an agreement, which was written in neat Korean script on lined notebook paper.
The company would pay roughly $270 for each working day and $135 for each non-working day — a 50 percent increase over their contracted salary — plus an additional $2,700 for mental stress and hardship, according to both sides. They would also give each man a one-way ticket home.
But there was no jubilation, no cheering from either side. Some of the workers were seen in the lobby chatting and chain-smoking on their last night in Baghdad. Others scurried to their rooms to pack. Still horrified by the death of two of his workers and exhausted from the day’s events, Suh, the president of Ohmoo, collapsed in a corner of the hallway and began to cry. |
