July 30, 2000
Civilians Suffer Under Decade-Long Sanctions in Iraq
By Seth Sandronsky
August 6 marks the 10th year of the U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq.
The sanctions, backed by the Bush and Clinton administrations, pre-vent
Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, from having normal economic relations with
other nations. He lives well, but Iraqi civilians are suffering.
Consider Iraqi children. They are dying daily from preventable dis-eases
such as diarrhea and typhoid caused by dirty water. Their deaths are due in
part to Iraq being unable to repair its electrical power and water treatment
plants destroyed during the Gulf War.
Under the sanctions, the repair costs exceed the funds Iraq earns from its
oil-for-food agreement with the U.N. Iraq has the world�s second largest
estimated crude oil reserves.
Before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the U.N. economically se-questered
Iraq, the nation�s civilians had easy access to health care. Education was
free.
Now, however, the living standards of ordinary Iraqis are in free-fall.
�Approximately 250 people die every day in Iraq due to the effects of the
sanctions,� reported UNICEF in April 1998. All this in a nation of 23
million people.
�Iraq�s power grid (and most of its water treatment system) was tar-geted
and bombed during the Gulf War,� said Lauren Cannon from Basra, Iraq. She�s
with Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based group working to end the
sanctions.
Basra is Iraq�s second-largest city. It was severely bombed during the Gulf
War and its civilian infrastructure remains unrepaired.
Cannon continues: �And now, 10 years later, replacement parts are still
being held up by the UN as "dual use" [potential military and actual
civilian use]. �So the government here has to ration electricity and even
wa-ter�with less and less available every day as the plants progressively
de-generate. The sanctions are making sure that the devastation begun with
the bombing inexorably, increasingly, kills the people here.�
In July, Cannon and other members of Voices began a two-month "cultural
immersion" in Basra, living with Iraqi families and sharing their lives�and
deaths�under the sanctions and bombings.
Today, Basra is repeatedly bombed by U.S. and British planes. They are
illegally enforcing the �no fly� zone in Iraq.
There is no U.N. resolution that calls for the military patrolling of Iraqi
airspace. Yet since December 1998, thousands of sorties have been flown by
American and British planes over Iraqi northern and southern "no-fly" zones,
officially to ensure the safety of northern Kurds and southern Shiites.
Meanwhile, ambulances struggle to reach Iraqi bombing victims. Re-placement
parts for the vehicles are considered �dual use� and are in short supply.
Denis Halliday, former Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs for the U.N. in
Iraq, resigned his post in September 1998 in opposition to the sanctions.
�We are in the process of destroying an entire country,� said Halliday. �It
is as simple and as terrifying as that.�
During his watch, the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs reported that
in Iraq, �public health services are near total collapse�basic medicines,
life-saving drugs and essential medical supplies are lacking throughout the
country. Fifty percent of rural people have no access to potable water, and
waste water treatment facilities have stopped functioning in most urban
areas."
According to UNICEF, 500,000 Iraqi children would be alive today if 1990
conditions in Iraq had continued through 1998.
U.S. politicians are starting to speak out against the sanctions.
�The economic sanctions against Iraq are �infanticide masquerading as
policy,� said David Bonoir, U.S. House Minority Whip last February 16.
Congressman Tony Hall (D-OH) was the first American government official to
visit Iraq since the Gulf War. In mid-April he wrote, "The future of most
of the people I met in Iraq will be bleak. That is because its children are
in bad shape, with a quarter of them underweight and one in 10 wasting away
because of hunger and disease. The leading cause of childhood death,
diarrhea, is 11 times more prevalent in Iraq than elsewhere, and while polio
has been wiped out throughout the Middle East, it has returned to plague
Iraq's people. Schools and water systems - the infrastructure any nation's
future depends upon�are decrepit and hospitals lack basic medicine and
equipment.�
Lifting the U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq is the decent thing to do.
Hungry and sick Iraqi children know no politics.
###
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