Prem Shankar Jha, a former editor of the Hindustan Times, is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. His book Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History was published by the Oxford University Press in 1996.
Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War
edited by anthony arnove
London, Pluto Press, 2000. 224 pages
Hardback: UK £35. Paperback: UK £10.99
More than sixty years ago, one nation started a programme of genocide against an entire race and continued it for almost a decade until six million people had been killed. It was an age when the nation-state in its most atavistic form reigned supreme, and everything conspired to make the state the absolute master of the individual. Despite that, the genocide was carried out surreptitiously, behind tightly sealed frontiers, with iron controls on the press, in an era when there was no television, no satellite surveillance and no Internet to circumvent the state and carry cries of distress directly across the globe.
Today, all that has changed. The nation-state is in retreat. Human rights have been given primacy over national sovereignty by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a stance consecrated by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in its Istanbul Declaration of 1999. But genocide continues to be practised. What is more, it is being practised openly, in full view of our sophisticated technological information tools and agencies, and with the consent of the very people who claim to be the conscience-keepers of the world. A brainwashed and brain-dead world looks on in bovine apathy.
I am not referring to Bosnia or Kosovo, in relation to which the international media so abused the term “genocide” that it all but lost its true, awful meaning. It is in Iraq that genocide is being scientifically and cold-bloodedly carried out and where it has been ignored by the same media that is so ready to highlight the atrocities in Europe. The trigger for genocide in Iraq was the Gulf War. But Iraq hardly makes the news these days. The West has confined its soul-searching to NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia last year. There, too, the West bombed an “ irredentist” nation back to the Stone Age, and is determined to keep it there no matter what the cost in terms of human suffering. There, too, the West has demonised a nationalist leader and decided to use sanctions against his people to force them to oust him. And there, too, when these tactics have actually had the opposite effect, strengthening the leader’s position, the West has been left with no policy except that of mindless retribution.
Iraq does not have the “advantages” of Serbia. Its people are not white; they are not even Christians. They are Arabs, and as everyone knows, Arabs are Muslims and Muslims are terrorists. So when in four days in the middle of December 1998, the United States and the United Kingdom—not the United Nations, not NATO, but just these two countries—rained four hundred cruise missiles and over six hundred bombs on Iraq to punish it for having expelled the UNSCOM inspectors who were supposed to oversee its disarmament, the world’s media barely noticed. There were more than a thousand references to Iraq during that week in the major English-language newspapers, but only seventy-eight even mentioned the word “civilians”. Iraq was seen as a convenient firing range for show of military force.
The “world” paid no attention because it had by then been thoroughly persuaded that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a barbaric war criminal who had used chemical weapons to decimate the Kurds, his own subjects, in northern Iraq; that he had manufactured tonnes of chemical and biological weapons to use against his neighbours and possibly against the United States if the need arose; and that he was brutal towards his own people and completely ruthless towards his political adversaries. Thus, when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he became an international outlaw and had to be eliminated. The Gulf War that followed was a “just” war, for it was intended to restore the independence of a recognised member of the United Nations. It was a “war of liberation” to free the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Shia Arabs of the south-east from the clutches of the Sunni monster of Baghdad. For good measure, the United States and its Western allies also touted it as a war to end dictatorship and bring to Iraqis the blessings of democracy.
Again unlike the Serbs, Iraq was defenceless against this tidal wave of condemnation because it had no voice in the world’s media. Its people did not even speak the world’s language, English. Turning them into a non-human “other” was therefore fatally easy.
Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War is an attempt to give Iraqis a voice and to speak on their behalf to the conscience of the world. It is a collection of sixteen essays, published articles and interviews by journalists, academics, UN administrators and others directly involved in the Iraq tragedy who have been revolted by the genocide that the West is visiting on that hapless people. Part of the book highlights the United States’ willing partnership with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s when he perpetrated terrible crimes against his own people and against the Iranians at the tail end of the Iran–Iraq War. The germ cultures that Iraq used to develop its stores of anthrax came from a US firm, the American Type Culture Company, based outside Washington, D.C. And when Iraq wiped out the Kurds of Halabja and surrounding villages of northern Iraq with poison gas, the United States rewarded it with an increased supply of food grains. It did so because in wiping out its Kurds, Iraq had also inadvertently wiped out its own bread basket.
The United States collaborated with Iraq, or at least turned a blind eye to the profit-seeking American companies which aided the carnage, because Iraq was at war with revolutionary Iran, considered the greater enemy of the West. Thus, although it was Iraq that had declared war on Iran, the West quietly supported Baghdad.
All this, however, was part of the Realpolitik of the times. The United States’ perceptions of the Middle East can be faulted and its sanctimonious immorality condemned, but it is doubtful whether any other hegemonic country would have behaved very differently when presented with the opportunity of the Iran–Iraq War. The real tragedy of Iraq and the moral crime that dwarfs whatever the United States did in the 1980s began after the Gulf War of 1991, and it is to this tragedy and this crime that the bulk of the book is devoted. That crime is genocide.
One demographic statistic captures the horrific impact of the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. In August 1999, UNICEF published the first international report on the effect of the sanctions. It pointed out that the child mortality rate in Iraq had jumped from 54 per thousand before the Gulf war to 131 per thousand in 1998. The increase meant that around 500,000 children had died who need not have perished, or approximately 150 children per day. This figure does not tell the whole story. By the same reckoning, two years down the line the number of child fatalities has probably risen to 600,000. Most have died because of water-related diseases, notably gastroenteritis. These diseases have been caused by the breakdown of the water-treatment systems in Baghdad and other cities. The water-treatment plants have broken down because they have been bombed by the Western allies, not once but repeatedly since 1993 when President Clinton authorised the first post-war air raid on Iraq in retribution for the discovery of an alleged plot to kill his predecessor George Bush in Kuwait.
The US media claims that Saddam Hussein has blocked repair of these systems because he prefers to spend the money from the United Nations’ oil-for-food programme on building palaces and refurbishing his capacity for biological warfare. The truth is very different. One-third of the money from the oil-for-food programme was taken to pay the costs of UNSCOM’S weapons inspectors as they poked and pried and, as we learned in 1998, spied their way into the bowels of the Iraqi state system. The remaining two-thirds was paid into a UN escrow account and had to run the gauntlet of a UN sanctions committee that sits in New York and decides what items on Iraq’s purchase list should be stopped because they can be considered “dual-use” equipment, i.e., equipment that can be put to military use. As of early this year, the committee had held up over $700 million worth of Iraqi imports. These included life-saving drugs, ambulances, paper and books. Iraq has been refused permission to import even lead pencils on the grounds that the graphite can be extracted to build the heat-resistant nose cones of missiles. Other supplies that the committee has held up are equipment to restore Iraq’s power grids, telephone systems, water-treatment plants and food. The children are dying because such essentials are denied.
The elderly have also been major victims, because they have not received the life-saving drugs they need to fight heart disease, cancer and even asthma. Denis Halliday, who in September 1998 resigned as the United Nations’ humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq because he could not remain a silent witness to genocide, has estimated that at least another three hundred thousand adults need to be added to the list of direct victims of the sanctions.
These deaths have not been accidental. Iraq under Siege cites an abundance of evidence to show that the United States and the United Kingdom, not to mention other members of the UN Security Council and the UN secretary-general, have known all along what was happening. In 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Leslie Stahl on the CBS programme 60 Minutes whether she felt that the deaths of five hundred thousand children were an acceptable price to pay for maintaining US interests in the region. She replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.” A year later Albright declared at a press conference, “We do not agree with nations who [sic] argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.”
Washington has not been committing genocide alone. It has enjoyed the support of its unfailing ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, and has had to face only carping criticism from France and Russia. In 1998, during a Security Council debate on a resolution condemning Iraq, China shamelessly withheld its veto in order to wring concessions from the United States on other issues. But the true dimensions of genocide by consent are revealed by the American media. Between 1 August and 1 October 1999, there were more than eight hundred references to Iraq in the Lexis Nexis classification of “Major Newspapers” and fifty-three references on all US television and radio networks. But there were only seventeen articles on UNICEF’S damning report. And of the fifty-three television programmes, only three were devoted to the effect of sanctions on the people of Iraq.
The indifference of much of the US media to Iraqi suffering is illustrated by that best-selling icon of American journalism, Thomas L. Friedman. As Clinton deliberated in February 1998 whether to attack Iraq, Friedman advocated bombing the country
over and over again … The US has to make clear to Iraq and US allies that … America will use force without negotiation, hesitation, or UN approval … Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles. Cruise missiles are the only way to deal with him … If and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot let us make sure it’s a head shot.
In any other age these would have been considered the rantings of a madman. But in the United States of 1998 and 1999 they made Friedman a hero and best-selling author. He either did not know or, since he made similar recommendations during the Kosovo war, did not care, that deliberately bombing civilian targets is a war crime. But then one has only to read the op-ed pages of the International Herald Tribune to see that he was one of many to advocate such measures.
Among the contributors to Iraq under Siege are Noam Chomsky, probably America’s most famous dissident; former UN official Denis Halliday, who was the first to use the term “genocide” to describe what is happening in Iraq; award-winning documentary film-maker and journalist John Pilger; Robert Fisk of the British daily the Independent, who has won Britain’s best journalist award seven times; Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy studies in Washington, D.C.; and radical US historian Howard Zinn. It is a distinguished list, and the story they have to tell is heart-breaking.
If there is a weakness in the book it is the lack of any attempt to explain how the United States and the United Kingdom could come to enforce such a cruel and murderous policy as the sanctions regime against Iraq. Both countries are vigorous democracies, and their peoples have a keenly developed moral sense. Some explanation would have been desirable as to how two such countries could have sunk to such depths.
The United States did not set out to commit genocide. It has drifted into it. If the goal of the Gulf War was to prevent Iraq from gaining control of 60 per cent of the world’s known oil (which it would have done had it invaded Saudi Arabia after Kuwait), then the sanctions are inexorably defeating that purpose. For the longer Iraq’s oil output is constrained and the world exhausts other known sources, notably those of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait, the greater will be Iraq’s eventual monopoly of known reserves. With every passing day, therefore, the United States is locked more firmly into a dead-end policy that in effect says, “We will keep killing Iraqis until they depose, and preferably kill, Saddam Hussein.” Far more than the actions of the Serbs in Kosovo before 24 March 1999, this truly qualifies as genocide.
