The Associated Press 30 March 2005
GENEVA (AP) - Almost twice as many Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a U.N. monitor said Monday. Four percent of Iraqis under age 5 went hungry in the months after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 7.7 percent last year, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food. The situation is ``a result of the war led by coalition forces,'' he said. Overall, more than a quarter of Iraqi children don't get enough to eat, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, the top U.N. human rights watchdog. The U.S. delegation did not respond to the report, and diplomats at the U.S. mission to the United Nations' European headquarters in Geneva also said they would not comment. Ziegler also cited an October 2004 U.S. study estimating that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis�many of them women and children�had died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion than would have been expected otherwise, based on the mortality rate before the war. ``Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels,'' Ziegler said. The authors of the report in the British-based medical journal The Lancet&mdash&researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad�conceded their data were of ``limited precision,'' because they depended on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors. Ziegler also told the human rights commission he was concerned about hunger in North Korea, Palestinian areas, Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region, Zimbabwe, India, Myanmar, the Philippines and Romania. Worldwide, he said, more than 17,000 children under age 5 die daily from hunger-related diseases. ``The silent daily massacre of hunger is a form of murder,'' Ziegler said. ``It must be battled and eliminated.'' ``Millions of undernourished people (who survive) are condemned to lives that are physically and mentally stunted, that are too short and full of suffering,'' he said. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
