Allied atrocities against the people of Iraq, part 1
by Abu Khalid
Foreword: This article is an answer to the common question of "why did they do it?" asked by people in response to Arab/Islamic people's (alleged) role in the WTC attack (World Trade Centre attack of 11th September, 2001). The Islamic world has many grievances not dealt with in this article (which quotes from various sources), here, this article will only deal with the Western atrocities against the people of Iraq and aims to show Western people these attackers legitimate desire (though carried out in an utterly despicable manner) for revenge. One reason why they could have resorted to such extreme measures is the fact that these people get their voices drowned out deliberately by Western media outlets, as such they feel they have no other way of retaliation, but what really drives these people to do such acts is the outright denial of the Western leaders of any catastrophe (of their own doing) even though independent organisations and indeed UN organisations confirm the human rights abuses by Western nations, so they see hypocritical comments and decide it is time to do something, yet their voices are drowned out by media outlets so they resort to attacks similar to September 11th. Here is a sample of what the Western coalition has done to Iraq:
The US-led allied forces deliberately destroyed Iraq's water supply during the Gulf War - flagrantly breaking the Geneva Convention and causing thousands of civilian deaths.
Since the war ended in 1991 the allied nations have made sure than any attempts to make contaminated water safe have been thwarted. A respected American professor now intends to convene expert hearings in a bid to pursue criminal indictments under international law against those responsible.
Professor Thomas J Nagy, Professor of Expert Systems at George Washington University with a doctoral fellowship in public health, told the Sunday Herald: "Those who saw nothing wrong in producing [this plan], those who ordered its production and those who knew about it and have remained silent for 10 years would seem to be in violation of Federal Statute and perhaps have even conspired to commit genocide." Professor Nagy obtained a minutely detailed seven-page document prepared by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, issued the day after the war started, entitled Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities and circulated to all major allied Commands.
It states that Iraq had gone to considerable trouble to provide a supply of pure water to its population. It had to depend on importing specialised equipment and purification chemicals, since water is "heavily mineralised and frequently brackish".
The report stated: "Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidents, if not epidemics, of disease and certain pure-water dependent industries becoming incapacitated"
The report concludes: "Full degradation of the water treatment system probably will take at least another six months."
During allied bombing campaigns on Iraq the country's eight multi-purpose dams had been repeatedly hit, simultaneously wrecking flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. Four of seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage facilities - 20 in Baghdad, resulting in sewage pouring into the Tigris. Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq.
Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population" and includes foodstuffs, livestock and "drinking water supplies and irrigation works".
The results of the allied bombing campaign were obvious when Dr David Levenson visited Iraq immediately after the Gulf War, on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He said: "For many weeks people in Baghdad - without television, radio, or newspapers to warn them - brought their drinking water from the Tigris, in buckets.
"Dehydrated from nausea and diarrhoea, craving liquids, they drank more of the water that made them sick in the first place." Water-borne diseases in Iraq today are both endemic and epidemic. They include typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera and polio (which had previously been eradicated), along with a litany of others. A child with dysentery in 1990 had a one in 600 chance of dying - in 1999 it was one in 50.
The then US Navy Secretary John Lehman estimated that 200,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War. Dr Levenson estimates many thousands died from polluted water.
Chlorine and essential equipment parts needed to repair and clear the water system have been banned from entering the country under the UN "hold"system.
Ohio Democrat Representative Tony Hall has written to American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, saying he shares concerns expressed by Unicef about the "profound effects the deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems on children's health". Diarrhoeal diseases he says are of "epidemic proportions" and are "the prime killer of children under five".
"Holds on contracts for water and sanitation are a prime reason for the increase in sickness and death." Of 18 contracts, wrote Hall, all but one on hold were placed by the government in the US. Contracts were for purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, water tankers and other water industry related items. "If water remains undrinkable, diseases will continue and mortality rates will rise," said the Iraqi trade minister Muhammed Mahdi Salah. The country's health ministry said that more than 10,000 people died in July of embargo-related causes - 7457 were children, with diarrhoeal diseases one of the prime conditions.
In July 1989, the figure was 378. Unicef does not dispute the figures. The problem will not be helped by plans for the giant Ilisu Dam project (to which the British government is to give £200 million in export credit guarantees), which will give Turkey entire control of the water flow to Iraq and Syria.
Constructors Balfour Beatty write in their environmental impact report, that for the three years of construction, water flow to Iraq will be reduced by 40%. Iraq has also suffered a three year drought, with the Tigris the lowest in living memory. [1]
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UN sanctions on Iraq are destroying an entire people, not Saddam writes Felicity Arbuthnot.
TODAY, Hiroshima Day, is the tenth anniversary of the imposition of United Nations sanctions on Iraq.
The most draconian embargo ever imposed has resulted in a silent Hiroshima for Iraq´s population, one third of whom are under 15 years old. When Martti Ahtisaari, then United Nations Special Rapporteur, visited Iraq immediately after the 1991 day Gulf war, he said: “Nothing we had seen or heard could have prepared us for this particular devastation - a country reduced to a pre-industrial age for a considerable time to come.”
Since then, the country has slid from the impossible to the apocalyptic and over 6,000 children a month - the equivalent population of a small Irish town - die of embargo-related causes.
Seventy per cent of virtually everything was imported. With the imposition of the embargo, Iraq faced decimation.
Formerly a largely developed country, with free access to high quality health care, 93 per cent access to clean water and an exemplary free educational system (according to 1989 World Health Organisation figures), the infrastructure has collapsed. With it, health, education, and the right to life enshrined in the most signed up to UN Charter in history, guaranteeing protection and succour for the world´s children. It lies in the dust. Iraq´s children are in the UN front line.
Basra, Iraq´s ancient southern city, where the biblical Tigris and Euphrates shimmeringly meet at the Shatt Al Arab, perhaps encapsulates Iraq´s plight. At the paediatric and maternity hospital, former flagship institution, one of the finest centres in the Middle East, the air conditioning no longer works in temperatures of up to 140 Fahrenheit, there is not hot water, the elevators are broken and the smell of blood overwhelms disinfectant is vetoed by the UN Sanctions Committee. One third of all live births now are of premature weight, due to malnutrition. In the hospital, where lack of facilities include working incubators, no premature weight baby has survived since 1994.
Reality is stark, and shaming. In June last year, in the premature unit, lay 17 perfect, tiny mites, including twins. The doctor was deciding which would have the only working oxygen cylinder (central oxygen long collapsed.) A doctor asked frantically if I or the photographer with whom I work, had a certain blood type - a baby needed an exchange transfusion. The blood bank no longer existed, they could not locate a donor. “Test us,” we responded. But the laboratory facilities had collapsed.
Since Basra´s electricity system died years ago such facilities would be meaningless anyway. Refrigeration is a memory in one of the hottest countries on earth.
When I returned in October, every child I had seen in June had died. Basra has a chilling legacy: a tenfold cancer epidemic linked to the depleted uranium (DU) weapons used in the Gulf war. DU is a radioactive waste, given free by the nuclear industry to the arms industry.
As coating or core for bullets and missiles, it is an effective armour piercing aid. The residual dust, generated on impact, has been linked to Gulf war syndrome, and to Iraq´s spiralling cancers and birth deformities.
In Iraq, the water table, flora, fauna, say experts, are DU contaminated. Basra´s birth deformities mirror the Pacific islands after the nuclear tests of the 1950s. Babies are born with no eyes, no brain, no limbs, foreshortened limbs, heartbreakingly twisted little limbs, internal organs on the outside. Professor Doug Rokke, a radiation expert who advises the Pentagon and devised the DU clean up for Kuwait, surveyed Basra for radiation. He told the Sunday Independent: “I can sum up for you what I found there in three words: ‘Oh my God.””
Iraq has repeatedly requested international expertise to assist in a clean up, but has been refused. Iraq is a poisoned land whose children are dying, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Meanwhile, the forgotten war continues. Almost daily, US and UK planes bomb the “safe havens” in and around Basra in the south, and Mosul in the north. An exhausted physician remarked: “I can now cope with operating without anaesthetic, with patients dying for want of medication. I cannot cope with the bombings. I swear to you I hear the cry of every child, in every house, in every street in the neighbourhood.”
Felicity Arbuthnot - Irish Sunday Independent, 6 August '00 [2]
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This passage was taken from “The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq” by Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (US), on March 30, 1991.
The most concentrated single bloodletting was organized by the U.S. command in the final forty-eight hours of the invasion, as Iraqi soldiers fled Kuwait along the roads to Basra. While publicly denying that Iraqi forces were withdrawing from Kuwait, Washington ordered that tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers be targeted for wave after wave of bombing, strafing, and shelling. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, others with rifles packed in bedrolls, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. Many civilians from Iraq, Kuwait, and immigrant workers from other countries were killed at the same time as they tried to flee.
The U.S. armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait city to Basra, sealing it off. They bombed the other end of the highway and sealed it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hills overlooking it. And then, from the air and from the land they simply massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on traffic jams backed up for as much as twenty miles. When the traffic became gridlocked, the B-52s were sent in for carpet bombing.
That was the killing zone. You couldn’t move down the road. You couldn’t move up the road. You couldn’t move off the road. You couldn’t surrender, wave a white flag, or give yourself up. The allied forces simply kept bombing and firing - at every person, jeep, truck, car, and bicycle. One allied air force officer called it a “turkey shoot.” …
This slaughter, along with similar unreported operations during Bush’s heroic hundred hours, ranks among the great atrocities of modern warfare. It was the Guernica, the Hiroshima, the Dresden, the My Lai of the U.S. war against Iraq.
Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by a reporter to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of combined allied bombing and ground operations. …. Powell replied: “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.” [3]
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(extracts from a much longer article. Full version available on request)
TOQ AL-GHAZALAT, Iraq - Suddenly out of a clear blue sky, the forgotten war being waged by the United States and Britain over Iraq visited its lethal routine on the shepherds and farmers of Toq al-Ghazalat about 10:30 a.m. on May 17.
Omran Harbi Jawair, 13, was squatting on his haunches at the time, watching the family sheep as they nosed the hard, flat ground in search of grass. … Omran, who liked to kick a soccer ball around this dusty village, had just finished fifth grade at the little school a 15 minute walk from his mud-brick home.
That is when the missile landed.
Without warning, according to several youths standing nearby, the device came crashing down in an open field 200 yards from the dozen houses of Toq al-Ghazalat. A deafening explosion cracked across the silent land. Shrapnel flew in every direction. Four shepherds were wounded. And Omran, the others recalled, lay dead in the dirt, most of his head torn off, the white of his robe stained red.
What happened four weeks ago at Toq al-Ghazalat, 35 miles southwest of Najaf in southern Iraq, has become a recurring event in the Iraqi countryside. A week of conversations with wounded Iraqis and the families of those killed, around Najaf and in northern Iraq around Mosul, showed that civilian deaths and injuries are a regular part of the little discussed U.S. and British air operation over Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Yassin Jassem, spokesman for Iraq's air defense command, said about 300 Iraqis have been killed and more than 800 wounded by U.S. and British retaliatory attacks in the 18 months since President Saddam Hussein ordered his anti-aircraft batteries to fire on allied warplanes enforcing "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq.
The Iraqi death toll has been substantiated in part by a U.N. survey that examined some incidents independently and accepted Iraqi reports on others.
U.S. and British warplanes enforcing the zones were heard almost daily crisscrossing the skies, although they were invisible flying at more than 20,000 feet. The Iraqi air defense command says it has detected penetrations into Iraqi airspace by more than 21,600 U.S. and British warplanes since December 1998, when Iraqis started opposing the patrols with antiaircraft fire. [There are] bomb or missile attacks on an average of once every three days. The Pentagon says more than 280,000 sorties have been flown in the near decade since the no-fly zones were imposed, without a single loss of aircraft to hostile fire.
The mounting toll - averaging one civilian death every other day by Iraq's count - has prompted France to freeze participation in enforcing the no-fly zones. It has generated growing protests from Russia and has left neighboring Saudi Arabia and Turkey increasingly uneasy about continuing to provide air bases for the U.S. and British enforcement aircraft.
Brian Whitaker - The Guardian, 16 June '00 [4]
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Behind the official version of Desert Storm lie awful secrets of a one-sided slaughter, writes John Pilger.
The great American reporter Seymour Hersh is at war with the American military over his report in The New Yorker that one of its most lauded generals, now a member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, ordered his troops to fire on retreating Iraqis on the eve of the Gulf War ceasefire in 1991.
Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division, has denied accusations such as the machine-gunning of 350 disarmed Iraqi prisoners. “Why are we shooting at these people when they are not shooting at us?” says one of his men on a tape quoted by Hersh. “It’s murder,” says another.
The allegations against McCaffrey suggest he was a bad apple. But the enduring secret of the 1991 Gulf War was that it was not a war at all, rather an epic act of homicide. A great deal of propaganda has been devoted to covering up this truth and promoting the precision of so-called smart weapons, as if war has finally become a science. The bombing of the Al-Amiriya bunker in Baghdad in February 1991, incinerating more than 300 people, mostly women and children, was immediately blamed on Saddam Hussein. The bunker, we were told, was a “military facility”.
Although the lie was exposed by several reporters, the taint of “Iraqi reporting restrictions” remained. Britain’s Independent Television News said it was censoring its report because the material was “too distressing”.
Six months later, the unedited CNN and World Television News “feeds” of footage of the bunker were obtained by the Columbia Journalism Review. “They showed scenes of incredible carnage,” wrote the reporter who viewed them. “Rescue workers were collapsing in grief, vomiting from the stench, dropping blackened corpses.”
The atrocity was passed over quickly, and the “coverage” returned to its main theme of a sanitised, scientific war. Unknown to reporters corralled in Saudi Arabia, less than 7 per cent of the weapons used in the Gulf War were “smart”; most were old-fashioned “dump” bombs. Seventy per cent of the 88,500 tonnes dropped on Iraq and Kuwait - the equivalent of more than seven Hiroshimas - hit no military targets and fell in populated areas. Paul Roberts, one of the few journalists to escape the “pool” system, travelled with Bedouins. “I experienced bombing in Cambodia, but it was nothing like that ...” he said. “There were three waves every night. After 20 minutes of this carpet bombing there would be a silence and you would hear a screaming of children and people. [The survivors] were walking around like zombies.”
This was never published in the mainstream media, nor was the overwhelming evidence that - as in Vietnam and last year in Serbia and Kosovo - civilians were not mistakenly killed, but targeted. Cluster bombs, still killing and maiming children in Kosovo, are, as the label says, “anti-personnel”.
As the ceasefire was being negotiated with Iraq, columns of retreating other nationalities who had been trapped in Kuwait, mostly guest workers, were attacked by American carrier-based aircraft. They used cluster bombs and napalm B, the type that sticks to the skin while continuing to burn. Returning pilots bragged about a “duck shoot” and a “turkey shoot”. Others likened it to “shooting fish in a barrel”.
Unknown to journalists in the pool system, in the two days before the ceasefire (when the McCaffrey atrocities allegedly happened), American armoured bulldozers were deployed, mostly at night, burying Iraqis alive in their trenches.
Six months later, the New York Newsday reported that three brigades of the 1st Mechanised Infantry Division used snow ploughs mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 110 kilometres of trenches.
A brigade commander, Colonel Anthony Moreno, said: “For all I know, we could have killed thousands.” To my knowledge, the only images of this shown in the West included a few fleeting pictures on the BBC.
The policy of the American commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was that Iraqi dead were not to be counted. One of his senior officers boasted: “This is the first war in modern times where every screwdriver, every nail, is accounted for.” As for human beings, he added: “I don’t think anybody is going to be able to come up with an accurate count for the Iraqi dead.”
The London Independent rejoiced in the “miraculously light casualties”. In the US, there was some attempt to root out the truth. However, this was confined to very few newspapers, such as Newsday, and samizdat publications such as Z magazine, which publishes Noam Chomsky.
Shortly before Christmas 1991 the Medical Educational Trust in London published a comprehensive study of casualties. Up to 250,000 men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack on Iraq. A one-sided slaughter.
In evidence before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the major international relief agencies reported that 1.8million people had been made homeless, and Iraq’s electricity, water, sewerage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure had been “substantially destroyed”, producing “conditions for famine and epidemics”.
Most of this was not reported, or was tucked away. In the most covered war in history, almost everybody had missed the story.
It is hardly surprising that, in the nine years since, the death of half a million children due to economic sanctions, and the continuing bombing of populated areas in Iraq by American and British aircraft, are not news. “The thought that the state is punishing so many innocent people,” wrote playwright Arthur Miller, “is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” [5]
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As part of a delegation on a recent fact-finding mission to Iraq, we feel compelled to respond to continued official support of the devastating international sanctions being imposed on the Iraqi people. This policy was outlined in comments made by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who recently visited Milwaukee to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.
Although none of us who were part of the delegation came from Iraq, all of us felt a need to understand the impact of the sanctions, particularly as they related to the deaths of so many of Iraq's children.
Before we left, our small group expected to have our travels strictly controlled by the Iraqi regime. We found the exact opposite to be true.
We delegation not only traveled freely, but we often changed our own itinerary on the spot. There were many times that the delegation members split up and went in different directions. This allowed us to meet more ordinary Iraqi citizens and delve further into their lives than we had ever expected.
Being fluent in the language and culture allowed us to work independent of government translators and made it quite easy to sift through statements that were government rhetoric and those that reflected true human despair.
UNICEF indicates that at least 300,000 Iraqi children have died from illness, hunger and disease as a result of the sanctions imposed after the Gulf War. This number was given as a minimum; other sources go as high as 1.5 million Iraqis.
The United States government believes that lifting the sanctions will not solve these problems. To the contrary, it would solve the most important problem, which is saving the lives of innocent children.
The problem of Saddam Hussein has not been solved after 10 years of sanctions. We are convinced this will not be solved even if sanctions remain in place for another 100 years.
Even if Hussein were to die, the Ba'ath Party ruling Iraq will come up with another person just like him, who will have grown up under the sanctions, developing a great hatred of the United Nations, the United States and Great Britain.
Claims that the "oil-for-food" program is sufficient neglects important information. First of all, more than 34% of the money goes to Kuwait for war reparations and to bankroll U.N. programs, including weapon inspection.
There also are severe problems tied to delivering the food and medicine in the country that needs them most. The Iraqi infrastructure has fallen apart and cannot be repaired due to the sanctions. How can you deliver food and medicine that needs to be refrigerated if there are no refrigerated delivery trucks and no equipment to repair demolished roads and bridges?
This doesn't even begin to address the many other necessities of life that are denied the Iraqi people. How long could Americans endure without soap, detergent or toilet paper?
Even if Hussein is the primary reason for the immense suffering of the Iraqi people, we cannot whitewash our own complicity. Nor can our responsibility be ignored. Is it humane to force the entire population of a country to teeter on the edge of starvation? Have sanctions ever made a good leader out of tyrant?
The U.N. policy has backfired, giving Hussein an excuse for not allowing weapons inspectors into Iraq. An increasing number of critics around the world - permanent members of the U.N. security council, countless political figures, Nobel laureates, religious leaders - are blaming the United States for leading the genocide of Iraqi children.
A lack of creativity in finding other ways to contain Hussein does not justify continuing an ineffective and immoral policy that is creating a whole set of long-term problems, not only for the Iraqi people, but also for the entire world.
Iraq does not have 23 million Husseins. There is only one. But there are 23 million innocent victims. The sanctions must be lifted now. The price being paid is definitely not worth it.
Waleed Najeeb is a physician from Mequon and Tom Seery is program director for Peace-Action Wisconsin, a group that traveled to Iraq on a fact-finding mission that was reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelearlier this summer. [6]
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Effects of the Iraq sanctions
The six-week Persian Gulf War in 1991 resulted in the large-scale destruction of military and civilian infrastructures.
The sanctions imposed on Iraq -- to force Saddam Hussein to allow the United Nations to dismantle or destroy Iraq's long-range missiles and chemical, nuclear and biological weapons -- and related circumstances have prevented the country from repairing all its damaged or destroyed infrastructure, and whenever attempts have been made, those have been incomplete. That applies to electricity-generating and water-purification plants, sewage-treatment facilities and communication and transportation networks. That has affected the quality of life of countless Iraqis, especially those belonging to the middle and lower economic levels who do not have alternatives or options to overcome the effects of the war and the sanctions.
Iraq is an oil-rich country, which before the 1991 war was almost totally dependent on the import of food and medicine. Financial constraints as a result of the sanctions have prevented the necessary import of food and medicine.
The vast majority of Iraq's people has been on a semi-starvation diet for years.
The reduction in the import of medicines, owing to a lack of financial resources, as well as a lack of minimum health care facilities, insecticides, pharmaceutical and other related equipment have crippled the health care services, which in prewar years were of a high quality.
The effect of this situation on Iraq's infant and child population is especially severe. From 1991 to 1998, children under 5 died from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,690 a month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.
The U.N. Oil-for-Food Program has kept the numbers of deaths and cases of malnutrition from rising still higher, but it was never intended as a remedy for the situation.
-- Information taken from U.N. reports and interviews with U.N. officials. [7]
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On 2 August 1990, the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait. Under these sanctions, all imports into Iraq and all exports from Iraq were prohibited, unless the Security Council permitted exceptions. A spokesman from the US State Department later referred to these sanctions as "the toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history". Similarly, a Select Committee of the UK House of Commons said that the Iraqi sanctions regime "is unprecedented in terms of longevity and its comprehensive nature" (§28).
Since 1990, there has been a severe and prolonged deterioration in the standards of living of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Iraq. These problems have been detailed most clearly in two reports of the highest integrity, written in 1999.
Firstly, the Security Council itself set up a "Humanitarian Panel" to investigate the effects of sanctions. This Panel produced a report on 30 March 1999. This is a summary of its findings:
"In marked contrast to the prevailing situation prior to the events of 1990-91, the infant mortality rates in Iraq today are among the highest in the world, low infant birth weight affects at least 23% of all births, chronic malnutrition affects every fourth child under five years of age, only 41% of the population have regular access to clean water, 83% of all schools need substantial repairs. The ICRC states that the Iraqi health-care system is today in a decrepit state. UNDP calculates that it would take 7 billion US dollars to rehabilitate the power sector country-wide to its 1990 capacity." (§43).
These are the panel’s more specific findings in its report:
The second report was produced by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) in August 1999. This was the summary produced by Unicef of their findings:
"The first surveys since 1991 of child and maternal mortality in Iraq reveal that in the heavily-populated southern and central parts of the country, children under five are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago. UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said the findings reveal an ongoing humanitarian emergency...
The surveys reveal that in the south and center of Iraq -- home to 85 per cent of the country's population -- under-5 mortality more than doubled from 56 deaths per 1000 live births (1984-1989) to 131 deaths per 1000 live births (1994-1999). Likewise infant mortality -- defined as the death of children in their first year -- increased from 47 per 1000 live births to 108 per 1000 live births within the same time frame. The surveys indicate a maternal mortality ratio in the south and center of 294 deaths per 100,000 live births over the ten-year period 1989 to 1999.
Ms. Bellamy noted that if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998."
Unicef also reported that approximately one in every three Iraqi women who die while of child bearing age (15 - 49 years old) die due to complications surrounding maternity (pp.15-16).
In summary, as Denis Halliday, the former United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq said after resigning his post in protest at the sanctions regime, we "are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral".
British and American government officials publicly deny that sanctions have contributed to the suffering in Iraq. However, their claims do not withstand serious analysis: sanctions are coercive instruments and they seek to coerce by causing hardship.
Whilst war, inefficiency and neglect by the Iraqi government have undoubtedly played a significant role in causing the present extreme hardships endured by the vast majority of inhabitants of Iraq, it is also clear that sanctions have significantly deepened the human suffering and have been one of its primary sources. Humanitarian and human rights agencies working with and in Iraq unanimously agree that sanctions have had a considerable impact on the welfare on the Iraqi population. This view has been put forward strongly by these organisations, as well as by campaigning groups such as CASI, for the past few years.
In 1997, the United Nations Human Rights Committee noted that:
"the effect of sanctions and blockades has been to cause suffering and death in Iraq, especially to children" (§4).
In 1998, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recognized that:
"the embargo imposed by the Security Council has adversely affected the economy and many aspects of daily life, thereby impeding the full enjoyment by the States party’s population, particularly children,of their rights to survival, health and education" (§5).
The Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council wrote in March 1999:
"Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Counciland the effects of the war" (§45).
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported in September 2000 that it:
"believes that the current sanctions regime is having a disproportionately negative impact on the enjoyment of human rights by the Iraqi population. OHCHR considers that the time has come for the extent and nature of the sanctions regime on Iraq to be reexamined" (§14).
Even the International Development Select Committee of the UK House of Commons concluded that, although "not all this humanitarian distress is the direct result of the sanctions regime", sanctions cannot be overlooked:
"This does not, however, entirely excuse the international community from a part in the suffering of Iraqis. The reasons sanctions were imposed in the first place were precisely the untrustworthiness of Saddam Hussein, his well documented willingness to oppress his own people and neighbours, his contempt for humanitarian law. The international community cannot condemn Saddam Hussein for such behaviour and then complain that he is not allowing humanitarian exemptions to relieve suffering. What else could be expected? A sanctions regime which relies on the good faith of Saddam Hussein is fundamentally flawed" (§40).
On 12 May 1996 Madeleine Albright demonstrated the difficulties involved in admitting the consequences of these sanctions in an appearance on the US television show, 60 Minutes. At the time she was the US ambassador to the United Nations; six months later she became Secretary of State. Host Lesley Stahl, referring to a 1995 figure, asked:
Stahl: "We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?"
Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.”
The most recent reports on Iraq show that the severe situation described by the Security Council Humanitarian Panel and UNICEF in 1999 has not changed substantially. In particular, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published an assessment of the food and nutrition situation in Iraq in September 2000. The report was based on the findings of a mission to Iraq in May 2000.
The report shows that in South/Central Iraq, malnutrition "remains unacceptably high ... since the six-monthly surveys began in 1997 it appears that there has been little further improvement except for chronic malnutrition [...] still, at least about 800,000 children under the age of five are chronically malnourished" (p.17). The report stated that its results "corroborate ... the findings of the 1999 Mortality Survey supported by UNICEF that found more than a two-fold increase in infant and child mortality since the end of the 1980s" (p.21).
While all age groups suffer from insufficient supply of micronutrients, caloric malnutrition problems are largely confined to children under 15. However, the report also argues that caloric intake is just about the only nutritional requirement that has been adequately met. The explanation for the continuing problem is that "malnutrition, especially child malnutrition, is often caused by factors other than those related to food", notably "disease and unsafe water" (p.34). The report also implicates overcrowding, poverty, and the lack of education. The conclusion is that "significant improvement in the health and nutrition status of the vulnerable population, and of children and mothers from these households in particular, cannot be achieved without improving these contributing factors" (p.35).
Therefore, many of the causes of malnutrition in south and central Iraq still exist. The continuing crisis in the region was summarised by the UN Secretary-General in his report of 2 March 2001 (§6):
"While chronic malnutrition has decreased in urban areas, it has increased in rural areas."
The "oil for food" programme, which commenced in December 1996, allows Iraq to export oil and use part of the money raised, which is kept in a UN bank account in New York, to buy basic goods from other countries. Iraq is using its own money to buy these goods: the oil for food programme is not "humanitarian aid" as some US and UK politicians have claimed on occasion. The nature of the programme was established in an agreement between the UN Secretariat and the Government of Iraq from May 1996. This agreement was in turn based upon Security Council Resolution 986 of 14 April 1995. The UN initially determined that 53% of the oil revenue would be allocated to the humanitarian programme in the areas under the control of the Iraqi government, 30% would go to pay for compensation claims arising out of the Gulf War, 13% would go to the UN programme in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq, and the remainder would be spent on further administrative costs of the UN. The programme is organised in 6 month "phases", with phase IX beginning on 5 December 2000: every six months the Iraqi government presents a proposal of import contracts to be examined and, if judged adequate, it is approved by the UN Sanctions Committee.
Oil for food was never meant to act as an adequate substitute for the independent functioning of the Iraqi economy. Security Council Resolution 986 itself refers to the programme as a "temporary measure". The UN Secretary-General has repeatedly made the same point: for example, in his report of 2 March 2001, he writes that "the programme was never meant to meet all the needs of the Iraqi people and cannot be a substitute for normal economic activity in Iraq." (§154)
The programme has largely prevented the worsening of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, especially as it has helped to provide for an improved food ration for ordinary Iraqis; nevertheless, the programme does not have the capacity to solve the severe humanitarian problems of Iraq. As the Security Council's humanitarian panel reported in March 1999, for Iraq to recover, "the 'oil for food' system alone would not suffice and massive investment would be required in a number of key sectors, including oil, energy, agriculture and sanitation" (§42); furthermore, oil for food "can admittedly only meet but a small fraction of the priority needs of the Iraqi people" (§46).
The oil for food procedure has been modified in subsequent Security Council resolutions. Most notably, in December 1999, Security Council Resolution 1284 endorsed three potential extensions of the programme: the removal of a cap on oil sales permitted by Iraq, the creation of "green lists" of items which can be imported without individual contract approval of the sanctions committee, and the possibility of a "cash component" to pay for local costs of implementing the programme. While "green lists" have been drawn up for food, educational supplies, and agricultural and medical materials, the "cash component" of 1284 has yet to materialise, even though the UN recognises its crucial importance for reconstructing Iraq's economy and infrastructure, and as a requirement for a sustainable improvement of the humanitarian situation in the country. In the UN Secretary-General's report of 29 November 2000, the statements about the need of a cash component are more explicit and pressing: "The absence of an appropriate cash component has increasingly hampered the implementation of the programme. A cash component is essential for all sectors of the programme. With the increased funding level and volume of supplies and equipment being delivered to Iraq, the effective implementation cannot be achieved unless there is an early positive resolution to the present impasse" (§133).
Last December, Security Council Resolution 1330 allocated 600m euros to upgrade the Iraqi oil industry, but it is not clear when similar decisions will be taken concerning other sectors. It also decided that it would reduce to 25% the amount of Iraq's oil revenues to be transferred for compensation claims.
In his June 2000 report, the UN Secretary-General wrote that "clean water and reliable electrical supply are of paramount importance to the welfare of Iraqi people" (§98). Such basic needs cannot be provided through the imports allowed to Iraq under oil for food.
Even if the food rations delivered by the Iraqi government cover in principle the caloric intake of Iraqis, under-nourishment persists due to a wrecked economy. When Tun Myat, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, returned to New York last October, after six months in Iraq, he emphasized the problem of poverty in a Press Briefing:
"The food distribution system ... now ensures that under the new Distribution Plan over 2,470 kcal of energy of food is being made available to every man, woman and child in the country ... but the fact is, of course, people have become so poor, in some cases, that they can’t even afford to eat the food that they've been given free because for many of them, the food ration represents the major part of their income ... they have to sell it in order to buy clothes and shoes or hats or whatever other things that they would require. So the sort of upturn in nutrition that we would all want to be seeing is not happening".
Another limitation of oil for food stems from the increasing number of holds placed on imports to Iraq. All 15 members of the sanctions committee have to approve contract applications made by the Iraqi government. In the UN Secretary-General's report of 29 November 2000, he warns that holds are "certainly one of the major factors that are impeding programme delivery in the centre and south. Current holds on such sectors as electricity, water and sanitation and agriculture impact adversely on the poor state of nutrition in Iraq. Similarly, holds on trucks badly needed for transportation of food supplies may soon affect distribution of food rations, which is also compounded by collapsing telecommunications facilities" (§128). And yet holds continue to increase both in numerical value and in proportion to the total value of contracts circulated. It is alarming that 20% of holds by value were being effected with no reason given by the holding missions.
Benon Sevan, the Director of the UN Office of the Iraq Programme, has lamented the "growing tendency to politicize" oil for food and appealed to Council members to avoid such tendencies within the relief effort in Iraq, to allow the programme to "maintain its distinct humanitarian identity".
Chronology of the Oil for Food programme
The UN Office of the Iraq Programme's introduction to oil for food
On 17 December 1999, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1284 ("SCR 1284"). This resolution was the product of a year-long tussle between the Permanent Five members of the Council (Britain, the US, France, Russia and China) in attempting to agree upon a future policy towards Iraq. Russia, France, China and Malaysia abstained from voting in the Security Council on this resolution. As had been anticipated, Iraq immediately rejected the resolution: it had already announced, and continues to declare, that it would not implement any Security Council Resolution that does not immediately lift the sanctions.
The British government often points to SCR 1284 as an example of its "commitment to helping the Iraqi people". SCR 1284’s humanitarian measures fall into two categories: improvements to the existing sanctions regime and the possibility of the suspension of sanctions.
The first set are a partial response to the recommendations of the Security Council’s 1999 Humanitarian Panel report, which estimated that adoption of its recommendations "may lead to incremental improvements". Thus, SCR 1284 lifts the "cap" on Iraqi oil sales, and establishes a "green list" of humanitarian items that can be imported into Iraqi without prior Security Council approval. SCR 1284 also gave an indication that the UN would seek to establish mechanisms to allow spare parts for the oil industry to be more easily purchased by Iraq; however, this procedure seems to have run into difficulties. Although a list of "spare parts" was prepared in July 2000, the approval of the list was held up by one of the members of the sanctions committee, widely presumed to be the US, until it could finally be approved on 1 December. SCR 1284 also provides for revenue from oil sales to be received in part as currency: the Humanitarian Panel had noted that the absence of such a "cash component" in parts of Iraq controlled by the Iraqi Government was "seriously impeding the distribution of some humanitarian supplies", as cash was required to pay for labour and local materials. However, as yet, this problem has not been resolved by the Security Council.
The second set of measures in SCR 1284 holds out the prospect of a "suspension" of sanctions and possible foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector. The resolution says that the "fundamental objective" of the suspension is "improving the humanitarian situation in Iraq"; it therefore admits that there is a causal link between the sanctions and Iraq’s humanitarian crisis. A suspension will occur, according to the resolution, if and when the Iraqi Government is found to have "co-operated in all respects" for a continuous period of 120 days with a new arms inspection body (Unmovic) and with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The meaning of this requirement was kept deliberately vague by Britain. The sanctions will be suspended "subject to the elaboration of effective financial and other operational measures", also left undefined. However, sanctions can be re-imposed upon the word of Unmovic’s Executive Chairman or the IAEA’s Director-General. This will occur within five working days unless the Security Council objects.
The Government of Iraq is therefore being asked to subscribe to a two-fold uncertainty: to co-operate, in a poorly defined sense, in order to achieve an undefined suspension of sanctions. As the Government of Iraq has good cause to suspect the intentions of the US and the UK (the former has repeatedly announced that the sanctions are linked to the present regime, not to weapons; both are currently bombing it) it is not likely to regard implementation of SCR 1284 as a good bet.
These suspicions can only have been confirmed by the new administration in the US, whose Secretary of State Colin Powell, has said on 8 March 2001:
"If the inspectors get in, do their job, we're satisfied with their first look at things, maybe we can suspend the sanctions. And then at some point way in the future, when we're absolutely satisfied there are no such weapons around, then maybe we can consider lifting." (emphasis added)
Not only may the resolution’s uncertainty decrease Iraq’s perceived payoffs to implementing SCR 1284, but it may also actually send a signal that SCR 1284 cannot be trusted. The Government of Iraq may wonder, for example, why the form of sanctions’ suspension has been left unclear, given that the French government presented detailed proposals for these measures in August; Russia and China had also called for more clarity in determining what exactly Iraq needed to do for the suspension of sanctions.
Given the Security Council's ability to re-impose rapidly the sanctions, the motive behind the 120-day co-operation period is unclear. The waiting period imposes further humanitarian costs on the Iraqi people and does not clearly enhance security as the proposed suspensions would not apply to military or dual-use equipment. Diplomatic sources tell us that Washington's concerns do not relate to security, but to its reputation. In return, the Security Council has lost an instrument whereby it could have signalled trustworthiness to the Government of Iraq.
From a humanitarian point of view, SCR 1284 continues in the direction set out by SCR 661 (1990) and SCR 687 (1991): the well-being of ordinary Iraqis is to continue to depend on the struggle between their government and those of the US and the UK. This is a perverse strategy if one claims that the Government of Iraq does not care about popular well-being. Finally, it is a strategy that can be expected to continue to have traumatic consequences for the Iraqi people: in August 1999, Unicef estimated that an additional half million Iraqi children under five years of age have died during the sanctions period. While SCR 1284 does offer some improvements (e.g. the lifting of the sales cap) it seems more designed to appear "tough on Saddam" (in the words of a Downing Street spokesperson the day after SCR 1284 was passed). If one sought signs of improvement in British policy, it is not reassuring that official statements continue to fail to address these concerns.
In CASI's view, a good Security Council Resolution on Iraq would have de-coupled humanitarian and political issues, removing Iraqi citizens from the cross-fire between the governments of Iraq, the US and the UK. SCR 1284, while making some concessions to ordinary Iraqis, does not do this: the suspension of non-military sanctions still requires extensive, undefined and unprecedented co-operation between the Iraqi government and a re-flagged inspection team. Even the humanitarian concessions are meagre, less generous than those proposed in an earlier Anglo-Dutch draft resolution and much less generous than those sought by France, China and Russia. The refusal to adopt low risk measures such as the loans from the Compensation Fund suggest that the US and the UK will only grudgingly cease to use Iraqi citizens as pawns.
A good SCR would also have taken steps to build trust and reduce the interest of the governments in fighting. SCR 1284 does not offer olive branches. There is no explicit acknowledgement that the old weapons inspectors, in whose image the new are created, seriously compromised their mandate, and only outlines of steps to prevent this happening again. By making Iraq's requirements explicitly vague the resolution fails to assuage what must be a central concern in their government's mind: do we have any reason to trust the US, whose announced policy is not weapons inspection but our overthrow?
The road to trust could have been embarked upon by suspending the non-military sanctions once the new weapons inspectors started work, as France, China and Russia wanted. The Iraqi people would have had substantial evidence of our concern and the Iraqi regime would have had a signal of co-operation and an incentive to prevent the sanctions' re-imposition. Instead, we have given the Iraqi people further evidence that we are as willing as their leader to use them as political bargaining chips.
CASI’s briefing of 24 December 1999: http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/briefing/ob2.html
News reports at the time of the resolution: http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/1999/msg00838.html
Two excellent briefings by Voices in the Wilderness:
- http://www.viwuk.freeserve.co.uk/library/spinning.html
- http://www.viwuk.freeserve.co.uk/library/1284.html
The UK government has persistently claimed that the humanitarian crisis in Iraq is caused in large part because the Government of Iraq diverts resources that it imports under the "oil for food" scheme, either for supplementing the wealth of a small elite, or to sustain poverty for propagandistic reasons. This is an explanation that has been consistently challenged by UN agencies and personnel working within Iraq.
Most recently, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in its report of September 2000 characterises the Government of Iraq's food rationing system as "effective". It notes that the availability of "cereal imports since 1997/98 under the oil-for-food deal has led to significant improvements in the food supply situation" (p. 31). Nevertheless, a major problem is that "food rations do not provide a nutritionally adequate and varied diet" (p. 33). The potential solution to this, complementing the ration with locally produced goods, is made difficult by the fact that "two consecutive years of severe drought and inadequate supply of essential agricultural equipment and inputs, including spare parts, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, have gravely affected the Iraqi agriculture sector" (pp.14, 31). In addition, poverty compounds this problem: "with the decline in household income, a significant number of Iraqis are not in a position to adequately complement the ration" (p. 14).
Tun Myat, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, made similar comments in his first press conference on 19 October 2000. He said that the food distribution system in Iraq under the "oil for food" programme was "second to none", but that "in order to affect the overall livelihood and nutrition state of the people, of the children, you need more than food, of course". Unless the basics – housing, electricity, water, and sanitation – were restored, the overall well-being of the people would not improve. In addition to the collapse of such infrastructure, he said, the major problem was poverty.
The Security Council’s Humanitarian Panel report of 30 March 1999 commented directly on the question of Iraqi cooperation with "oil for food" (§37):
"While there is agreement that the Government could do more to make the "oil for food" programme work in a better and more timely fashion, it was not clear to what extent the problems encountered could be attributed to deliberate action or inaction on the part of the Iraqi Government. It is generally recognized that certain sectors such as electricity work smoothly while drug supplies suffer from delays in distribution. But mismanagement, funding shortages (absence of the so called "cash component") and a general lack of motivation might also explain such delays. While food and medicine had been explicitly exempted by Security Council resolution 661, controls imposed by resolution 986 had, at times, created obstacles to their timely supply."
The "cash component" bears explanation. In the areas of Iraq under governmental control, the government is not given cash in return for oil sales under the "oil for food" scheme, but only receives delivery of goods. As a result it is constrained in its ability to, for example, hire a lorry to make a delivery if it does not have one available at the time.
Two excellent briefings by Voices in the Wilderness:
http://www.viwuk.freeserve.co.uk/library/hoarding1.html
http://www.viwuk.freeserve.co.uk/library/hoarding.html
Humanitarian agencies have consistently reported that, whilst the situation in central and southern Iraq – administered by the Government of Iraq – remains one of humanitarian crisis, there has actually been a decline in mortality rates in Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the UN since 1991. US and UK government statements have claimed this is evidence that the Iraqi regime is intentionally sustaining high mortality rates outside of Iraqi Kurdistan to win sympathy. In the words of one UK Foreign Office Minister, the difference "is because in northern Iraq the UN is implementing the 'oil for food' programme, not the Iraqi authorities. And it is doing so in a manner designed to bring maximum benefit to the Iraqi people."
Responses to this are two-fold. On one level, the direct cause of the suffering is much less relevant than ascertaining what can be done to prevent it. Under sanctions, at least hundreds of thousands more Iraqis have died. Whether or not the sanctions that the UK and US have imposed are intrinsically lethal or have only been so when manipulated by Baghdad, these governments have an ability to reduce the suffering if they choose.
On the second level, if one is concerned about the causes, various analyses make clear that the difference between Iraqi Kurdistan and South/Central Iraq is due to a wide variety of factors, and cannot simply be explained by pointing to the malevolence of the Iraqi leadership. As Anupama Singh, Unicef representative in Baghdad, explained in 1999, "the UN’s direct role in the north did not account for the widely different results in infant mortality, especially since the oil-for-food deal went into effect only in 1997." Instead, Ms Singh suggested that the differences could be explained by a number of factors, including "the heavy presence of humanitarian agencies helping the Kurdish population". In addition, according to Ms Singh, in Northern Iraq "the oil-for-food money includes a cash component, allowing the UN, for example, to train local authorities and more effectively implement and monitor programmes. In the centre and south under Iraqi regime control, no funds are allocated to ministries for fear they would be used for more sinister purposes. The government may receive sanitation equipment, for example, but not have the resources to pay for contractors to install it."
Ms Singh's statements are expanded upon by a Unicef document from August 1999 which seeks to explain the differences in the current levels of child mortality between the autonomous northern governorates and the rest of Iraq:
"... the difference in the current rate cannot be attributed to the differing ways the Oil-for-Food Program is implemented in the two parts of Iraq. The Oil-for-Food Program is two and a half years old. Therefore it is too soon to measure any significant impact of the Oil-for-Food Program on child mortality over the five year period of 1994-1999 as is reported in these surveys. We need to look at longer-term trends and factors including the fact that since 1991 the north has received far more support per capita from the international community than the south and center of Iraq. Another factor maybe that the sanctions themselves have not been able to be so rigorously enforced in the north as the border is more "porous" than in the south and center of Iraq."
The March 1999 report of the Security Council's Humanitarian Panel also provides reasons for the differences between the two regions of Iraq (§44):
"The North of Iraq is clearly doing better than the Center/South for a variety of reasons. The per capita allocation of funds under the 986 programme is higher, distribution of food and medicine through UN agencies is comparatively more efficient than distribution by the Government, and the Northern border is more permeable to embargoed commodities than the rest of the country. ... Although the historic vulnerability of the North, as recognized in paragraph 8 (b) of resolution 986 (1995) would seem to justify the special attention it receives, it is a matter of concern that the situation in the Center/South is, in general terms, comparatively worse - a circumstance which most UN agencies felt should not be overlooked. It was also noted, in this context, that the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Iraq has been consistently upheld by Security Council resolutions."
Similarly, a leading epidemiologist at Columbia University, Professor Richard Garfield, wrote to the New York Times on 13 September 1999, saying that:
"... the embargo in the North is not the "same embargo".... The North enjoys porous borders with Turkey, Syria, and Iran, and thus is effectively less embargoed than the rest of the country. It benefits from the aid of 34 Non-Government Organizations, while in the whole rest of the country there are only 11. It receives 22% more per capita from the Oil for Food program, and gets about 10% of all UN-controlled assistance in currency, while the rest of the country receives only commodities. Food, medicine, and water pumps are now helping reduce mortality throughout Iraq, but the pumps do less for sanitation where authorities cannot buy sand, hire day laborers, or find many other minor inputs to make filtration plants work. Goods have been approved by the UN and distributed to the North far faster than in the Center or South. The UN Security Council treats people in that part of the country like innocents. Close to 20 million civilians in the Center and South of the country deserve the same treatment. Spokesman James P. Rubin said that ‘We can’t solve a problem that is the result of tyrannical behavior.’ He probably was referring to Saddam Hussein. As one involved in providing assistance throughout Iraq, I must admit that the arbitrary, ineffective, or destructive control sometimes exercised by the Security Council over Iraqi funds for food and medicine seem no less tyrannical. A good faith effort to meet basic needs in Iraq would create a better basis to negotiate an end to the Iraq conflict. Instead, every problem is blamed on Saddam. This politicization of the Oil for Food program only delays and weakens our ability to address the urgent humanitarian needs created by this most comprehensive embargo of the 20th century."
Finally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in its report of September 2000 also points to the differences in health and nutritional status between the two areas of Iraq. The report notes that "in contrast to the situation in the centre/south, improvements in the nutritional situation in the north had started in 1994, prior to SCR 986". In other words, the start of the discrepant development preceded the arrival of goods under the "oil for food" programme by almost three years. According to the FAO, the difference between the north and the South/Centre is "due to greater resources in the north, the north has 9% of the land area of Iraq but nearly 50% of the productive arable land, and receives higher levels of assistance per person. The north also benefits from the greater flexibility the use of cash gives" (p. 28). In addition, there may be some truth in the claim that the UN administration is more efficient than the corresponding Iraqi authorities; for example, UN staff are paid while Iraqi officials do not receive salaries from "oil for food" money.
After the Gulf War, the Security Council determined that Iraq was liable for any economic loss and damage resulting from its invasion of Kuwait. Consequently, the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC) was set up in to oversee compensation claims, and the Security Council decided that 30% of Iraq's oil revenue should be paid into a Compensation Fund to this purpose. Ten years on, both the amount paid in compensation and the procedure whereby claims are processed have become increasingly questioned, and compensation has become a bone of contention within the Security Council.
The magnitude of the sums that Iraq must pay in compensation is a cause of considerable concern. According to a recent report of the UN Secretary-General, by the end of the year 2000, $10.5bn of Iraq’s revenues generated under "oil for food" had been diverted to the UNCC. Out of this sum, $175 million went to pay for the “operating expenses” of the UNCC, such as lawyers’ fees (see Annex I, para.2c). By contrast, the UN has stated that the total value of the humanitarian goods that have arrived in all of Iraq under the "oil for food" scheme was $9.8bn. The programme should perhaps be more accurately called "oil for compensation".
The international controversy over these payments started in June 2000 when the UNCC ruled that Iraq must pay $15.9bn in damages to the Kuwaiti Petroleum Corporation. France and Russia, backed by China, Tunisia and Ukraine, refused to ratify this decision. Eventually, a compromise was reached whereby the claim was awarded, while in exchange a reduction of the percentage allocated for compensation to 25% was formalised in Security Council Resolution 1330of 4 December 2000. This reduction is not a new idea. As early as March 1999, the Security Council’s Humanitarian Panel report recommended that "the Security Council could authorize – possibly as a temporary measure – reducing by an agreed percentage the revenue allocated to the United Nations Compensation Commission" (§54). More significantly, this was in fact included in §24 of an Anglo-Dutch draft resolution which preceded SCR 1284 (17 December 1999), and which proposed a reduction to 20% on a loanable basis.
The extra revenue generated by the recent reduction to 25% – an estimated $0.5bn in phase IX of "oil for food" – is, according to the Security Council, "to be used for strictly humanitarian projects to address the needs of the most vulnerable groups in Iraq" (§12). It is noteworthy that this is an implicit admission that reparations and humanitarian needs compete for scarce resources. This conflict was in fact foreseen already by SCR 687 (3 April 1991), which stated that the level of payment by Iraq should take "into account the requirements of the people of Iraq, Iraq's payment capacity ... and the needs of the Iraqi economy" (§19).
Such issues are bound to become even more contentious in the future, as the nature of claims being processed is starting to change, and the compensation debt grows. The award to the Kuwaiti Petroleum Company in a stroke doubles Iraq's compensation debt, and was the first of a series of very large claims, mainly by corporations, which now are in the pipeline. The newspaper ‘Le Monde’ concludes that, assuming that one third of the outstanding claims of c. $300 billion are awarded, and that the present rate of payment continues, Iraq would not have paid off its debt (including interest) even by 2070. While calculations differ, most observers agree with the words of Khaldun al-Naqeeb, a political science professor at Kuwait University, that the present arrangements ensure that "Iraq's economic future has been mortgaged for most of the coming century because of the hundreds of billions of dollars in claims for war reparations".
Michael E. Schneider, “How Fair and Efficient is the UNCC System? A Model to Emulate?”, Journal of International Arbitration, 15(1), 1998.
Thomas R Stauffer, “Critical Review of UNCC Award For Lost Production And Lost Reserves”, Middle East Economic Survey, Vol. 44, No. 5 (29 January 2001).
A much more extensive bibliography is on the UNCC's own website: this list of works provides more information on its history, operations and procedures.
In the last couple of years we have heard increasingly hard-hitting statements against sanctions on Iraq from very diverse sources. More UN officials have resigned on the grounds of their opposition to sanctions. In March 2000, Hans von Sponeck renounced his post as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator, explaining that he “cannot any longer be associated with a programme that prolongs sufferings of the people and which has no chance to meet even the basic needs of the civilian population”. Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, quit shortly afterwards, citing concerns about the humanitarian programme in Iraq.
In August 2000, the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights adopted a resolution with title “Humanitarian situation of the Iraqi population”. This was the fourth year in a row that the sub-commission had dealt with the issue of sanctions in Iraq, but their document this year makes, with strong language, a direct link between sanctions and the suffering of Iraqi civilians, “considering any embargo that condemned an innocent people to hunger, disease, ignorance and even death to be a flagrant violation of the economic social and cultural rights and the right to life of the people concerned and of international law”. Based on a working paper by the Belgian representative Marc Bossuyt, the resolution invokes the 1949 Geneva Conventions which, in the words of the Sub-Commission, “prohibit the starving of civilian populations and the destruction of what is indispensable for their survival”. The Sub-Commission calls “for the embargo provisions affecting the humanitarian situation of the population of Iraq to be lifted”.
Anti-sanctions voices have also become louder in the Middle East, where there is a sense that the UN leads a policy of double standards: it applies rigour to Iraq, but refuses to protect the Palestinians from Israeli onslaughts, a view rekindled by the recent killings of Palestinians since confrontations started last September. Countries which used to trade actively with Iraq have also suffered for ten years of the embargo; and the Arab public, in solidarity with ordinary Iraqis, puts pressure on their governments to help Iraq out of the crisis. All this pushes the leaders of neighbouring countries to overcome their fear of the Iraqi regime and soften their position on sanctions. In May 2000, Jordan's Prime Minister, 'Abd al-Ra'uf al-Rawabdeh, said that "the sanctions imposed on Iraq have lead to great human catastrophe of unpredictable destructive impact in the short and long terms. We call for lifting the embargo on Iraq". Similarly, in July 2000 the Egypt's Foreign Minister, Amr Musa, called the sanctions "unacceptable" and "void of logic". The governments of Syria Oman and Morocco have also been vocal in calling for an end to sanctions. Even Iran and Kuwait, both victims of Iraqi aggression, are now contesting the embargo. This undermines the regional security arguments in favour of sanctions.
Several governments outside the Middle East are also urging the UN to lift the sanctions, including India, Malaysia, Venezuela, Indonesia and Vietnam. In February 2000 a letter signed by 70 members of the US House of Representatives was submitted to President Clinton asking that he “de-link economic sanctions from the military sanctions currently in place in Iraq”, though it was quickly counteracted by a response from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In April 2000 the European Parliament passed a resolution on Iraq in which it noted that “the Iraqi people are in a tragic situation as a result of the imposition of sanctions” and called upon the Security Council for “the lifting of Sanctions as a matter of urgency” while still “exercis[ing] vigilance with regard to the Iraqi regime”. Anti-sanctions lobbying has also sprouted in the parliaments of (among others) Canada, Britain, Italy, and Holland.
Since the UN Humanitarian Panel report was made public, the NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have become more resolute in their support to the anti-sanctions movement. They have presented motions for an overhaul of the sanctions regime to UN bodies and the governments involved, that ensures the well-being of Iraqi society while targeting imports of military nature.
Save the Children Fund UK has been active in Iraq since 1991; its work is currently restricted to Iraqi Kurdistan, since the Iraqi government forbids NGOs active there to operate in South/Central Iraq as well. It has called the sanctions regime "a silent war against Iraq's children", and has said that "the maintenance of a comprehensive embargo on Iraq is a disproportionate act in international law when the deleterious effect on the civilian population and children is so clear". Similarly, the Catholic aid agency CAFOD, released a report in February 2001 that called for an immediate suspension of sanctions; the Director of CAFOD called sanctions "humanly catastrophic, morally indefensible and politically ineffective".
One of the central goals of sanctions is to put pressure on the government of Iraq to abandon its non-conventional weapons. Although it may be objectionable to harm a civilian population in order to pressurise their government, the human costs of sanctions are defended by some on the grounds that sanctions are succeeding in achieving the disarmament of Iraq. However, this is not the case: UN weapons inspectors themselves believe that sanctions in fact impede disarmament. Former Unscom executive chairman, Richard Butler, told the BBC that “sanctions as now applied to Iraq have been utterly counterproductive for this disarmament purpose”. Scott Ritter, formerly in charge of Unscom concealment programme is now actively campaigning for the lifting of the non-military sanctions, whose effects he claims are “felt by 22 million innocent Iraqi people, not by the leadership, not by Saddam Hussein, not by his cronies”.
See CASI's extensive list of Information sources on Iraq for a guide to statements of governments, international agencies and NGOs on Iraq. [8]
Sources:
[1] http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/poisened.htm
[2] http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/silent-hiroshima.htm
[3] http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/roadtobasra.htm
[4] http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/iraqi-skies.htm
[5] http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/sydney.htm
[6] http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/sep00/najeeb10090900.asp
[7] http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/iraq/effects.shtml
[8] http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/guide/