iraq sanctions (fwd)

["M.G.G. Pillai" <pillai@mgg.pc.my>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 20:17:00 +0800
From: aduru@pl.jaring.my
To: pillai@mgg.pc.my
Subject: iraq sanctions

Squeezed to death
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
By John Pilger

http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Iraq/pilger.htm

Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets
in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and
consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr
Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of
Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the
population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin
with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we
have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this
hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because
we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific
survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We
suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in
the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields." 

Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council
almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up
its contaminated battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same
time, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and
British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy
drugs and even pain-killers. "For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like
torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given
the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate." Three children died
while I was there. 

Six other children died not far away on January 25, last year. An American
missile hit Al Jumohria, a street in a poor residential area. Sixty-three
people were injured, a number of them badly burned. "Collateral damage,"
said the Department of Defence in Washington. Britain and the United
States are still bombing Iraq almost every day: it is the longest
Anglo-American bombing campaign since the second world war, yet, with
honourable exceptions, very little appears about it in the British media.
Conducted under the cover of "no fly zones", which have no basis in
international law, the aircraft, according to Tony Blair, are "performing
vital humanitarian tasks". The ministry of defence in London has a line
about "taking robust action to protect pilots" from Iraqi attacks - yet an
internal UN Security Sector report says that, in one five-month period, 41
per cent of the victims were civilians in civilian targets: villages,
fishing jetties, farmland and vast, treeless valleys where sheep graze. A
shepherd, his father, his four children and his sheep were killed by a
British or American aircraft, which made two passes at them. I stood in
the cemetery where the children are buried and their mother shouted, "I
want to speak to the pilot who did this." 

This is a war against the children of Iraq on two fronts: bombing, which
in the last year cost the British taxpayer 60 million. And the most
ruthless embargo in modern history. According to Unicef, the United
Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more
than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would have died before
sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this
statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to
200 Iraqi children may die needlessly. "Even if not all the suffering in
Iraq can be imputed to external factors," says Unicef, "the Iraqi people
would not be undergoing such deprivation in the absence of the prolonged
measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war." 

Through the glass doors of the Unicef offices in Baghdad, you can read the
following mission statement: "Above all, survival, hope, development,
respect, dignity, equality and justice for women and children." A black
sense of irony will be useful if you are a young Iraqi. As it is, the
children hawking in the street outside, with their pencil limbs and eyes
too big for their long thin faces, cannot read English, and perhaps cannot
read at all. 

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao
Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the
literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern
health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children
to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was
unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to
measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were
some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10
years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to
the highest." 

Anupama Rao Singh, originally a teacher in India, has spent most of her
working life with Unicef. Helping children is her vocation, but now, in
charge of a humanitarian programme that can never succeed, she says, "I am
grieving." She took me to a typical primary school in Saddam City, where
Baghdad's poorest live. We approached along a flooded street: the city's
drainage and water distribution system have collapsed. The head, Ali
Hassoon, wore the melancholia that marks Iraqi teachers and doctors and
other carers: those who know they can do little "until you, in the outside
world, decide". Guiding us around the puddles of raw sewage in the
playground, he pointed to the high water mark on a wall. "In the winter it
comes up to here. That's when we evacuate. We stay as long as possible,
but without desks, the children have to sit on bricks. I am worried about
the buildings coming down." 

The school is on the edge of a vast industrial cemetery. The pumps in the
sewage treatment plants and the reservoirs of water are silent, save for a
few wheezing at a fraction of their capacity. Many were targets in the
American-led blitz in January 1991; most have since disintegrated without
spare parts from their British, French and German builders. These are
mostly delayed by the Security Council's Sanctions Committee; the term
used is "placed on hold". Ten years ago, 92% of the population had safe
water, according to Unicef. Today, drawn untreated from the Tigris, it is
lethal. Touching two brothers on the head, the head said, "These children
are recovering from dysentery, but it will attack them again, and again,
until they are too weak." Chlorine, that universal guardian of safe water,
has been blocked by the Sanctions Committee. In 1990, an Iraqi infant with
dysentery stood a one in 600 chance of dying. This is now one in 50. 

Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London
blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against
diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title
of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs,
eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned,
he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass
destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of
mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him. A courtly,
eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian
relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant
Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior
officials. He had made his career in development, "attempting to help
people, not harm them". His was the first public expression of an
unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "I am resigning," he
wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We
are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and
terrifying as that . . . Five thousand children are dying every month . .
. I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like
these." 

When I first met Halliday, I was struck by the care with which he chose
uncompromising words. "I had been instructed," he said, "to implement a
policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that
has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and
adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the
price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by
them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their
parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security
Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own
Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention.
History will slaughter those responsible." 

Inside the UN, Halliday broke a long collective silence. Then on February
13 this year, Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as humanitarian
co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned. "How long," he asked, "should the civilian
population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have
never done?" Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food
Programme in Iraq, resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate
what was being done to the Iraqi people. Another resignation is expected. 

When I met von Sponeck in Baghdad last October, the anger building behind
his measured, self-effacing exterior was evident. Like Halliday before
him, his job was to administer the Oil for Food Programme, which since
1996 has allowed Iraq to sell a fraction of its oil for money that goes
straight to the Security Council. Almost a third pays the UN's "expenses",
reparations to Kuwait and compensation claims. Iraq then tenders on the
international market for food and medical supplies and other humanitarian
supplies. Every contract must be approved by the Sanctions Committee in
New York. "What it comes down to," he said, "is that we can spend only
$180 per person over six months. It is a pitiful picture. Whatever the
arguments about Iraq, they should not be conducted on the backs of the
civilian population." 

Denis Halliday and I travelled to Iraq together. It was his first trip
back. Washington and London make much of the influence of Iraqi propaganda
when their own, unchallenged, is by far the most potent. With this in
mind, I wanted an independent assessment from some of the 550 UN people,
who are Iraq's lifeline. Among them, Halliday and von Sponeck are heroes.
I have reported the UN at work in many countries; I have never known such
dissent and anger, directed at the manipulation of the Security Council,
and the corruption of what some of them still refer to as the UN "ideal". 

Our journey from Amman in Jordan took 16 anxious hours on the road. This
is the only authorised way in and out of Iraq: a ribbon of wrecked cars
and burnt-out oil tankers. Baghdad was just visible beneath a white pall
of pollution, largely the consequence of the US Air Force strategy of
targeting the industrial infrastructure in January 1991. Young arms
reached up to the window of our van: a boy offering an over-ripe banana, a
girl a single stem flower. Before 1990, such a scene was rare and frowned
upon. 

Baghdad is an urban version of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The birds
have gone as avenues of palms have died, and this was the land of dates.
The splashes of colour, on fruit stalls, are surreal. A bunch of Dole
bananas and a bag of apples from Beirut cost a teacher's salary for a
month; only foreigners and the rich eat fruit. A currency that once was
worth two dollars to the dinar is now worthless. The rich, the black
marketeers, the regime's cronies and favourites, are not visible, except
for an occasional tinted-glass late-model Mercedes navigating its way
through the rustbuckets. Having been ordered to keep their heads down,
they keep to their network of clubs and restaurants and well-stocked
clinics, which make nonsense of the propaganda that the sanctions are
hurting them, not ordinary Iraqis. 

In the centre of Baghdad is a monument to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which
Saddam Hussein started, with encouragement from the Americans, who wanted
him to destroy their great foe, the Ayatollah Khomeini. When it was over,
at least a million lives had been lost in the cause of nothing, fuelled by
the arms industries of Britain and the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union
and the United States: the principal members of the Security Council. The
monument's two huge forearms, modelled on Saddam's arms (and cast in
Basingstoke), hold triumphant crossed sabres. Cars are allowed to drive
over the helmets of dead Iranian soldiers embedded in the concourse. I
cannot think of a sight anywhere in the world that better expresses the
crime of sacrificial war. 

We stayed at the Hotel Palestine, once claiming five stars. The smell of
petrol was constant. As disinfectant is often "on hold", petrol, more
plentiful than water, has replaced it. There is an Iraqi Airways office,
which is open every day, with an employee sitting behind a desk, smiling
and saying good morning to passing guests. She has no clients, because
there is no Iraqi Airways - it died with sanctions. The pilots drive taxis
and sweep the forecourt and sell used clothes. In my room, the water ran
gravy brown. The one frayed towel was borne by the maid like an heirloom.
When I asked for coffee to be brought up, the waiter hovered outside until
I was finished; cups are at a premium. His young face was streaked with
sadness. "I am always sad," he agreed matter-of-factly. In a month, he
will have earned enough to buy tablets for his brother's epilepsy. 

The same sadness is on the faces of people in the evening auctions, where
intimate possessions are sold for food and medicines. Television sets are
the most common items; a woman with two toddlers watched their pushchairs
go for pennies. A man who had collected doves since he was 15 came with
his last bird; the cage would go next. Although we had come to pry, my
film crew and I were made welcome. Only once, was I the brunt of the hurt
that is almost tangible in a society more westernised than any other Arab
country. "Why are you killing the children?" shouted a man from behind his
bookstall. "Why are you bombing us? What have we done to you?" Passers-by
moved quickly to calm him; one man placed an affectionate arm on his
shoulder, another, a teacher, materialised at my side. "We do not connect
the people of Britain with the actions of the government," he said. Laith
Kubba, a leading member of the exiled Iraqi opposition, later told me in
Washington, "The Iraqi people and Saddam Hussein are not the same, which
is why those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting him, regard
the sanctions as immoral." 

In an Edwardian colonnade of Doric and Corinthian columns, people come to
sell their books, not as in a flea market, but out of desperate need. Art
books, leather bound in Baghdad in the 30s, obstetrics and radiology
texts, copies of British Medical Journals, first and second editions of
Waiting For Godot, The Sun Also Rises and, no less, British Housing Policy
1958 were on sale for the price of a few cigarettes. A man in a clipped
grey moustache, an Iraqi Bertie Wooster, said, "I need to go south to see
my sister, who is ill. Please be kind and give me 25 dinars." (About a
penny). He took it, nodded and walked smartly away. 

Mohamed Ghani's studio is dominated by a huge crucifix he is sculpting for
the Church of Assumption in Baghdad. As Iraq's most famous sculptor, he is
proud that the Vatican has commissioned him, a Muslim, to sculpt the
Stations of the Cross in Rome - a romantic metaphor of his country as
Mesopotamia, the "cradle of Western civilisation". His latest work is a
20-foot figure of a woman, her child gripping her legs, pleading for food.
"Every morning, I see her," he said, "waiting, with others just like her,
in a long line at the hospital at the end of my road. They are what we
have been forced to become." He has produced a line of figurines that
depict their waiting; all the heads are bowed before a door that is
permanently closed. "The door is the dispensary," he said, "but it is also
the world, kept shut by those who run the world." The next day, I saw a
similar line of women and children, and fathers and children, in the
cancer ward at the Al Mansour children's hospital. It is not unlike St
Thomas's in London. Drugs arrived, they said, but intermittently, so that
children with leukaemia, who can be saved with a full course of three
anti-biotics, pass a point beyond which they cannot be saved, because one
is missing. Children with meningitis can also survive with the precise
dosage of antibiotics; here they die. "Four milligrams save a life," said
Dr Mohamed Mahmud, "but so often we are allowed no more than one
milligram." This is a teaching hospital, yet children die because there
are no blood-collecting bags and no machines that separate blood
platelets: basic equipment in any British hospital. Replacements and spare
parts have been "on hold" in New York, together with incubators, X-ray
machines, and heart and lung machines. 

I sat in a clinic as doctors received parents and their children, some of
them dying. After every other examination, Dr Lekaa Fasseh Ozeer, the
oncologist, wrote in English: "No drugs available." I asked her to jot
down in my notebook a list of the drugs the hospital had ordered, but
rarely saw. In London, I showed this to Professor Karol Sikora who, as
chief of the cancer programme of the World Health Organisation (WHO),
wrote in the British Medical Journal last year: "Requested radiotherapy
equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by
United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee in New
York]. There seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could
be converted into chemical or other weapons." 

He told me, "Nearly all these drugs are available in every British
hospital. They're very standard. When I came back from Iraq last year,
with a group of experts I drew up a list of 17 drugs that are deemed
essential for cancer treatment. We informed the UN that there was no
possibility of converting these drugs into chemical warfare agents. We
heard nothing more. The saddest thing I saw in Iraq was children dying
because there was no chemotherapy and no pain control. It seemed crazy
they couldn't have morphine, because for everybody with cancer pain, it is
the best drug. When I was there, they had a little bottle of aspirin pills
to go round 200 patients in pain. They would receive a particular
anti-cancer drug, but then get only little bits of drugs here and there,
and so you can't have any planning. It is bizarre." 

In January, last year, George Robertson, then defence secretary, said,
"Saddam Hussein has in warehouses $275 million worth of medicines and
medical supplies which he refuses to distribute." The British government
knew this was false, because UN humanitarian officials had made clear the
problem of drugs and equipment coming sporadically into Iraq - such as
machines without a crucial part, IV fluids and syringes arriving
separately - as well as the difficulties of transport and the need for a
substantial buffer stock. "The goods that come into this country are
distributed to where they belong," said Hans von Sponeck. "Our most recent
stock analysis shows that 88.8% of all humanitarian supplies have been
distributed." The representatives of Unicef, the World Food Programme and
the Food and Agricultural Organisation confirmed this. If Saddam Hussein
believed he could draw an advantage from obstructing humanitarian aid, he
would no doubt do so. However, according to a FAO study: "The government
of Iraq introduced a public food rationing system with effect from within
a month of the imposition of the embargo. It provides basic foods at 1990
prices, which means they are now virtually free. This has a life-saving
nutritional benefit . . . and has prevented catastrophe for the Iraqi
people." 

The rebellion in the UN reaches up to Kofi Annan, once thought to be the
most compliant of secretary-generals. Appointed after Madeleine Albright,
then the US representative at the UN, had waged a campaign to get rid of
his predecessor, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, he pointedly renewed Hans von
Sponeck's contract in the face of a similar campaign by the Americans. He
shocked them last October when he accused the US of "using its muscle on
the Sanctions Committee to put indefinite 'holds' on more than $700
million worth of humanitarian goods that Iraq would like to buy." When I
met Kofi Annan, I asked if sanctions had all but destroyed the credibility
of the UN as a benign body. "Please don't judge us by Iraq," he said. 

On January 7, the UN's Office of Iraq Programme reported that shipments
valued at almost a billion and a half dollars were "on hold". They covered
food, health, water and sanitation, agriculture, education. On February 7,
its executive director attacked the Security Council for holding up spares
for Iraq's crumbling oil industry. "We would appeal to all members of the
Security Council," he wrote, "to reflect on the argument that unless key
items of oil industry are made available within a short time, the
production of oil will drop . . . This is a clear warning." In other
words, the less oil Iraq is allowed to pump, the less money will be
available to buy food and medicine. According to the Iraqis at the UN, it
was US representative on the Sanctions Committee who vetoed shipments the
Security Council had authorised. Last year, a senior US official told the
Washington Post, "The longer we can fool around in the [Security] Council
and keep things static, the better." There is a pettiness in sanctions
that borders on vindictiveness. In Britain, Customs and Excise stops
parcels going to relatives, containing children's clothes and toys. Last
year, the chairman of the British Library, John Ashworth, wrote to Harry
Cohen MP that, "after consultation with the foreign office", it was
decided that books could no longer be sent to Iraqi students. 

In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under secretary of state who
speaks for Madeleine Albright. When asked on US television if she thought
that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying,
Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is
worth it." When I questioned Rubin about this, he claimed Albright's words
were taken out of context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a
report by the UN's World Health Organisation, which had estimated half a
million deaths. Advising me against being "too idealistic", he said: "In
making policy, one has to choose between two bad choices . . . and
unfortunately the effect of sanctions has been more than we would have
hoped." He referred me to the "real world" where "real choices have to be
made". In mitigation, he said, "Our sense is that prior to sanctions,
there was serious poverty and health problems in Iraq." The opposite was
true, as Unicef's data on Iraq before 1990, makes clear. 

The irony is that the US helped bring Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to
power in Iraq, and that the US (and Britain) in the 1980s conspired to
break their own laws in order, in the words of a Congressional inquiry, to
"secretly court Saddam Hussein with reckless abandon", giving him almost
everything he wanted, including the means of making biological weapons.
Rubin failed to see the irony in the US supplying Saddam with seed stock
for anthrax and botulism, that he could use in weapons, and claimed that
the Maryland company responsible was prosecuted. It was not: the company
was given Commerce Department approval. 

Denial is easy, for Iraqis are a nation of unpeople in the West, their
panoramic suffering of minimal media interest; and when they are news,
care is always taken to minimise Western culpability. I can think of no
other human rights issue about which the governments have been allowed to
sustain such deception and tell so many bare-faced lies. Western
governments have had a gift in the "butcher of Baghdad", who can be safely
blamed for everything. Unlike the be-headers of Saudi Arabia, the
torturers of Turkey and the prince of mass murderers, Suharto, only Saddam
Hussein is so loathsome that his captive population can be punished for
his crimes. British obsequiousness to Washington's designs over Iraq has a
certain craven quality, as the Blair government pursues what Simon Jenkins
calls a "low-cost, low-risk machismo, doing something relatively easy, but
obscenely cruel". The statements of Tony Blair and Robin Cook and assorted
sidekick ministers would, in other circumstances, be laughable. Cook: "We
must nail the absurd claim that sanctions are responsible for the
suffering of the Iraqi people", Cook: "We must uphold the sanctity of
international law and the United Nations . . ." ad nauseam. The British
boast about their "initiative" in promoting the latest Security Council
resolution, which merely offers the prospect of more Kafkaesque semantics
and prevarication in the guise of a "solution" and changes nothing. 

What are sanctions for? Eradicating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
says the Security Council resolution. Scott Ritter, a chief UN weapons
inspector in Iraq for five years, told me: "By 1998, the chemical weapons
infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by UNSCOM (the
UN inspections body) or by Iraq in compliance with our mandate. The
biological weapons programme was gone, all the major facilities
eliminated. The nuclear weapons programme was completely eliminated. The
long range ballistic missile programme was completely eliminated. If I had
to quantify Iraq's threat, I would say [it is] zero." Ritter resigned in
protest at US interference; he and his American colleagues were expelled
when American spy equipment was found by the Iraqis. To counter the risk
of Iraq reconstituting its arsenal, he says the weapons inspectors should
go back to Iraq after the immediate lifting of all non-military sanctions;
the inspectors of the international Atomic Energy Agency are already back.
At the very least, the two issues of sanctions and weapons inspection
should be entirely separate. Madeleine Albright has said: "We do not agree
that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass
destruction, sanctions should be lifted." If this means that Saddam
Hussein is the target, then the embargo will go on indefinitely, holding
Iraqis hostage to their tyrant's compliance with his own demise. Or is
there another agenda? In January 1991, the Americans had an opportunity to
press on to Baghdad and remove Saddam, but pointedly stopped short. A few
weeks later, they not only failed to support the Kurdish and Shi'a
uprising, which President Bush had called for, but even prevented the
rebelling troops in the south from reaching captured arms depots and
allowed Saddam Hussein's helicopters to slaughter them while US aircraft
circled overhead. At they same time, Washington refused to support Iraqi
opposition groups and Kurdish claims for independence. 

"Containing" Iraq with sanctions destroys Iraq's capacity to threaten US
control of the Middle East's oil while allowing Saddam to maintain
internal order. As long as he stays within present limits, he is allowed
to rule over a crippled nation. "What the West would ideally like," says
Said Aburish, the author, "is another Saddam Hussein." Sanctions also
justify the huge US military presence in the Gulf, as Nato expands east,
viewing a vast new oil protectorate stretching from Turkey to the
Caucasus. Bombing and sanctions are ideal for policing this new order: a
strategy the president of the American Physicians for Human Rights calls
"Bomb Now, Die Later". The perpetrators ought not be allowed to get away
with this in our name: for the sake of the children of Iraq, and all the
Iraqs to come.