Baghdad  – When the Iraqi Ministry of Finance agreed to loan 63-year-old Hussein Salem 8 million Iraqi dinars (6,900 dollars) to build a house, the retired Iraqi civil servant felt blessed.

Three years on, Salem says has received half the loan, but is still waiting for officials at the Iraqi Real Estate Bank to pay the remainder.

“I have paid 750,000 dinars since 2006 in bribes to bank officials in the hope of facilitating matters,” Salem told the German Press Agency dpa.

But when he ran out of money for bribes, he began to despair of ever seeing the rest of the money the ministry promised him.

“I was only able to get half of the loan. I had to sell some of my belongings and to borrow from relatives to finish the house,” Salem told dpa. “Bank and government officers have no fears about asking for bribes. It’s the norm.”

Salem’s is not an isolated case. Iraq was rated as the third most corrupt country in the world after Somalia and Myanmar, according to the 2008 report of international watchdog Transparency International.

In a recent poll of Iraqis, the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity (CPI), a public anti-corruption watchdog, found that 36 per cent of them had paid bribes to get a range of governmental services.

Many Iraqis say they also must bribe their way into jobs, if they do not have the requisite family connections.

Mostafa Hussein, a young man from Baghdad, told dpa that he tried to bribe his way into a job with the Baghdad police force. All the government jobs, he said, are reserved for friends and relatives of government officials.

“I had to pay the equivalent of a two months’ salary or more,” Hussein told dpa. “But it was not enough. To get a job, I have to pay a lot of money. More than I can afford.”

In late February, the US Department of State concluded there was “widespread, severe corruption at all levels of government” in Iraq.

Government officials “who were required by law to file financial disclosure reports, such as ministers, governors and parliamentarians, in many cases failed to do so,” the report found, faulting the Iraqi government for not following up on documented cases of corruption.

All this corruption cost the government 250 billion dollars over the last five years, Judge Moussa Faraj, of the CPI, said.

In 2006, former minister of electricity Ayham al-Samarrai was sentenced to two years’ in prison on the charge that 2 billion dollars earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq’s power network disappeared under his watch.

In its fourth and last year in office, the Iraqi government said it was serious about combating corruption. Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki vowed “to pursue those who enable corruption,” and to launch a campaign on the scale of the government’s campaign against al-Qaeda and other armed groups.

Next week, Iraqi Trade Minister Abdel-Falah al-Sudani may face a parliamentary no-confidence vote next week on charges that the ministry made thousands of dinars selling imported food it knew was unfit for human consumption, according to local press reports.

Sheikh Sabbah al-Saidi, chairman of parliament’s Integrity Committee, told Baghdad’s Aswat al-Iraq news agency that al-Sudani will not be the last. He said his committee would also call officials from the ministries of defence, interior, finance, education and health.

Blowing the whistle on corruption can be a dangerous enterprise in Iraq. Last week, a CPI employee was gunned down in the Baghdad district of al-Shaab as he left for work.

Others have reported being subjected to political pressure and, in some cases, anonymous death threats.

Such pressures have led to high turnover among anti-corruption campaigners. In September 2007, Judge Radhi Hamza resigned from his post as Iraq’s first anti-corruption commissioner, citing political pressure from al-Maliki’s government and anonymous death threats.

Iraqis like Hussein, who paid the equivalent of 640 dollars in bribes in the hope of finishing his house before despairing and turning to his family, will surely be hoping Justice Hamza’s successor will have better luck.  (dpa)