Targeting the Powerless: Sanctions on Iraq

Geoff Simons is a freelance author whose many books have been translated into a dozen languages, including Arabic, Japanese and Russian. The second edition of The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice was published by Macmillan in 1998.

On 2 August 1990, the forces of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, following explicit British advice (albeit of some time ago) to do so. In 1930 the British High Commissioner in Baghdad proposed that “Britain should encourage the gradual absorption of Kuwait into Iraq”, with representatives of the British government observing that Kuwait was “a small and expendable state which could be sacrificed without too much concern if the power struggles demanded it”.¹ This British attitude reflected the long-standing Iraqi claim that since Kuwait had been part of the vilayet of Basra under centuries of Ottoman rule, Kuwait should properly be regarded as part of Iraq.

 

The 1990 Iraqi invasion did not focus on such historical territorial claims, though they were not forgotten, but on a fresh set of grievances following the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8).² In this war the pro-Iraq coalition included Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (both bankrolling Saddam to the tune of tens of billions of dollars) and the United States (aiding Saddam in many ways, even to the point of becoming an active belligerent in the Gulf to sink Iranian shipping and to destroy other Iranian assets). Moreover, in 1990 senior American officials gave Saddam ample reason to believe that the United States would not object to Iraqi encroachments on Kuwait.³

 

Hence, under massive financial and territorial provocation and with well-documented Western encouragement, Saddam Hussein launched his reckless and illegal invasion of Kuwait. The legitimate Iraqi grievances, rarely reported in the West, could not disguise the fact that Iraq had violated international law by invading a sovereign territory. It was no legal defence, though worth noting, that no international action had been taken in response to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, South Africa’s invasion of Namibia, and the United States’ invasions of Grenada and Panama.

 

The United States quickly responded to the Iraqi invasion by imposing its own unilateral sanctions on Iraq and by pushing the United Nations Security Council into a speedy adoption of a mandatory sanctions resolution (no. 661). Now Washington was preparing for the 1991 Gulf War, in which it would explode the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs over Iraq and use acknowledged weapons of mass destruction against helpless Iraqi conscripts caught in the desert.⁴

 

The war yielded 137 American fatalities (many from “friendly fire”) and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. Iraq was now a devastated land, with massive chemical pollution, radioactive contamination (produced by Western uranium-based munitions) and a wrecked social and industrial infrastructure. The Iraqi civilian population, including the most vulnerable sectors of society, was now set to suffer a cruel decade-long sanctions regime, today increasingly recognised as one of the most potent weapons of mass destruction.

War by Other Means

The months of sanctions that began in early August 1990 were followed by a catastrophic war and then by the draconian sanctions regime authorised by the cease-fire resolution (no. 687). The international community was soon made well aware of the appalling plight of the Iraqi civilian population.

 

In March 1991 Martti Ahtisaari, a UN under-secretary-general, led an investigation team to Iraq to report on the situation. The subsequent report to the UN secretary-general included the comments:

 

It should … be said at once that nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results … most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has … been relegated to a pre-industrial age.⁵

 

The Iraqi authorities were unable even to measure the dimensions of the calamity. The report noted that with the destruction of virtually the entire industrial infrastructure, about 90 per cent of workers had been “reduced to inactivity” and would soon have no income. Food was already “beyond the purchasing reach of most Iraqi families”; sanctions were drastically affecting Iraq’s ability to feed its own people.

 

It was now plain that the sanctions regime was affecting mainly the Iraqi civilian population. Thus, the respected British journalist Peter Jenkins noted that the peace “has turned into a nightmare, the continuation of the war by other means”.⁶ and Jack Geiger, president of the American Physicians for Human Rights, toured the Basra area and confirmed what other observers were reporting—soaring malnutrition rates, a rapidly deteriorating health situation, dangerous drinking water and a collapsed economy. A Harvard medical team reported that over the coming year 170,000 children would die because of the war and the merciless sanctions regime. And this was only the beginning.

 

In August 1991 official Iraqi sources reported that so far more than eleven thousand people had died of starvation and more than fourteen thousand children had died because the US-led economic embargo had blocked access to essential drugs. Aid workers were urging a relaxation in sanctions to prevent further increases in the rates of malnutrition and disease. UN officials were reporting an upsurge in such nutritional diseases as marasmus and kwashiorkor, with such infectious diseases as typhoid, hepatitis, meningitis and gastroenteritis soaring out of control.

 

In July 1991, a UN mission led by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan confirmed that sanctions were having a drastic affect on the Iraqi people. Raw sewage was flowing into rivers used for washing and drinking. On 20 November Oxfam director Frank Judd reported that millions of Iraqis were facing a winter without adequate food, medicines or housing. Children with matchstick limbs and distended bellies, like the worst famine victims of Africa, were dying in their hundreds in Iraqi hospitals denied even basic medical supplies. Louise Cainkar, director of a Chicago-based human-rights organisation, conducted detailed fieldwork in Iraq and encountered “the same scene I was to see over and over again … Iraqi women holding thin, bloated and malnourished children”.⁷ Robert Gates, nominated by President Bush to head the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that the Iraqi people—by any reckoning helpless in their predicament—would be made to “pay the price” while Saddam remained in power.⁸ This policy of bringing disease and death to millions of Iraqi men, women and children was authorised by no UN resolution. In fact it stood (and stands) condemned in countless UN conventions, declarations and statements, and other instruments of international law.

Innocent Victims

The children suffered (and suffer) most: the Harvard medical team’s prediction would be realised many times over. Observers recorded their grim perceptions over years:

 

Children Condemned to a Lingering Death⁹

 

Child Victims of the Sanctions Syndrome¹⁰

 

Sanctions That Should Shame the UN
(“Denying Iraqi Babies Medicines Amounts to Cold-Blooded Murder”)¹¹

 

When Dr Margit Fakhoury, a German paediatrician, visited hospitals in Iraq in 1991 she reported the unprecedented number of “malnourished babies and toddlers … with kwashiorkor, severe deficiencies of vitamins, or dying of a simple flu or diarrhoea”. After her second visit four months later she reported a worsening situation. Parents unable to afford adequate food were feeding their emaciated babies on water, sometimes with sugar added—one of the growing generation of bloated Iraqi “sugar babies”. The water was usually contaminated and so the grossly malnourished babies were contracting cholera, typhoid and other diseases.¹²

 

It was inevitable in such circumstances that thousands of seriously underweight babies and their emaciated older siblings would continue to die in ever growing numbers. Still, Washington judged that the prodigious cull of Iraqi civilians was insufficient: the slaughter was set to continue for many years.

 

Before the war Iraq was able to manufacture penicillin, ampicillin and other basic antibiotics. But the bombing destroyed the production plants and the sanctions prevented the Iraqis from rebuilding such facilities. One consequence was that the increasingly unavailable antibiotics were being used in lower and lower doses, often leading to ineffective treatments and long-term brain damage. In children this was causing permanent mental and physical disablement and early death.

 

The cases were well documented: three-year-old Sabreen, suffering from a broken fibula and a heavily discharging wound, was sent home from hospital after four months since the doctors had no means to treat her; eight-year-old Alah, wounded in an American bombing raid that killed her mother, was expected to suffer permanent disablement because of the unavailability of treatment; nineteen-year-old Ijad, having lost both legs in an American bombing raid on a civilian shelter, was sent home from hospital despite unhealed wounds and a continuing pus discharge; sixteen-year-old Maisoon, badly burned, was discharged from hospital because of the unavailability of treatment and was later found in a severely malnourished state. Today such a list could be extended to thousands and tens of thousands.

 

Iraqi children were also suffering a traumatic devastation of their psychological condition. Thus Dr Magne Raudalen and Dr Atle Dyregrov (both of the Centre for Crisis Psychology, Bergen, Norway) and others began collecting data on the generation of Iraqi children “trapped in trauma”. Many children were experiencing sleep disturbances, nightmares and the sudden inability to speak with parents and others. The child testimonies, recorded by Raudalen and Dyregrov, have a grim uniformity:

 

I look at the girl beside me at school and imagine she’s my dead friend sitting right next to me.

I dream, and the dreams are always about corpses.

It’s the sight of the corpses I remember. All the corpses.

Why doesn’t God come for me the way he came for them[?] I should be finished with this life.¹³

 

And through all the pain there was the knowledge that the West was determined to maintain the vicious sanctions. A child called Zaineb said:

 

I want to ask you a question, could you please tell me when the sanctions will be lifted[?]… We have no food, we have no water … we don’t have medicine … So when will all this be over[?] Just tell me when, because yesterday our last ration of flour was consumed.¹⁴

 

There was to be no respite. The desperate months ran into years, and by the time these words are published the sanctions regime will have been in place for more than a decade. The French deputy Yves Bonnet has described what he saw in August 1995 in the Saddam Hussein Children’s Hospital in Baghdad. A mother gently unwraps her three-month-old baby, four pounds in weight, emaciated and dying: “I look at the mother, two large black eyes silently reproaching me; then I turn away, guilty, ashamed. One after another, and each time this silent exchange with an incredulous yet resigned woman.”¹⁵ The UN sanctions committee continued to endorse its “implacable mission: the death of 100 innocent under-fives each day through respiratory infections, diarrhoea, gastroenteritis and malnutrition, and the death of 200 over-fives a day of heart problems, hypertension, diabetes, renal and liver disease, and leukaemia”.¹⁶ Bonnet declared:

 

I am filled with shame and anger at myself, at my cowardice, my silence, my complicity with those who, despite their claims to the contrary, have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, without incurring the wrath of the [war crimes] tribunal of The Hague, implacably going about their dirty, evil work.¹⁷

 

There was plenty of evidence of what the sanctions regime was achieving. In July 1993, a “Special Alert” issued jointly by two UN bodies, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), reported that “large numbers of Iraqis now have food intakes lower than those of the populations in the disaster-stricken African countries”.¹⁸ Beggars for food, unheard of in the time before sanctions, were a common sight on Iraqi streets.

A Shattered Society

Many Iraqi hospitals, once models of hi-tech efficiency, were now reduced to “mere reservoirs of infection”.¹⁹ There was a shortage of medicine, laboratories were not working, there were no surgical supplies, and even such essentials as food, clean water and electricity were no longer available. A physician in Kirkuk Hospital described how she had just performed an emergency caesarean section “with flies swarming over the incision because operating room windows had been shattered during bomb blasts” and the sanctions regime would not allow their replacement.²⁰ The health situation continued to worsen. In April 1995, the charity Medical Aid for Iraq concluded in one of its regular reports: “The situation has deteriorated yet further … Morale is extremely low, and there is no expectation of improvement … A severe deterioration in conditions continues to affect all the hospitals … Malnutrition is even more widespread among children than it was six months ago.”

 

In 1995, the FAO reported yet again on the deteriorating plight of the Iraqi civilian population: “More than one million Iraqis have died—567,000 of them children—as a direct consequence of economic sanctions … as many as 12 per cent of the children surveyed in Baghdad are wasted, 28 per cent stunted and 29 per cent underweight.”²¹ The journalist Victoria Brittain reported “chronic hunger … 20,000 new cases of child malnutrition every month”, while in March 1996 the UN World Health Organisation reported that the economic sanctions had caused a six-fold increase in the mortality rate of children under five, with “the vast majority of Iraqis” surviving “on a semi-starvation diet”. In May 1997, the Iraqi authorities claimed that whereas the pre-sanctions mortality rate for under-fives was 540 a month the figure had now reached around 5,600 a month and was still rising. Pre-sanctions adult deaths were 1,800 a month, whereas by 1998 monthly adult fatalities were more than 8,000. And in his 1995 report on the work of the United Nations, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had already acknowledged the desperate plight of the Iraqi people:

 

Health conditions have continued to deteriorate throughout the country because of shortages of essential drugs and medical supplies. The situation is further aggravated by the inadequate supply of potable water and poor sanitation facilities, as essential equipment and spare parts are lacking to rehabilitate the water, sewage and electricity supply systems … children are increasingly dying of ailments linked to malnutrition and lack of adequate medical care.

 

Other UN organisations have described the appalling plight of the Iraqi civilian population. Thus the London-based UN Information Centre reported the “deteriorating humanitarian situation … where the majority of the population are living below the poverty line and malnutrition is rampant with over 50 per cent of women and children receiving less than half their caloric needs”.²² Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the WHO, commented after visiting Iraqi health facilities that there was “a near breakdown of the health care system … reeling under the pressure of being deprived of medicine, other basic supplies and spare parts”. He added that the inability of the system to “provide services which the Iraqi people used to receive is of grave concern”. Malaria, typhoid and other diseases were threatening large areas of the country that had never been affected before.²³

 

The Iraqi people continued to suffer through the 1990s and into the new millennium. A detailed UN report (published on 28 April 2024) noted the situation facing millions of innocent men, women and children:

 

[T]here is little experience with the type of problems encountered when the whole spectrum of basic services starts to fail, as is happening in Iraq. The slow collapse of the electricity infrastructure has consequences which are rippling through every aspect of life … almost all power stations, distribution networks, automatic control, protection and safety systems are malfunctioning … The erratic quality of supply and increasingly frequent, unscheduled power outages damage industrial and domestic appliances. The loss of power leads to the spoilage of waste of medicines and vaccines. Refrigerated food suffers similar spoilage, creating dangerous health risks … The use of oil lamps increases the risk of domestic accidents … hospitals cannot operate life-saving equipment.²⁴

 

In July 1999, Iraq was claiming that sanctions had been responsible for some 1,110,282 civilian deaths, with a further 10,700,000 Iraqis—half the entire population—suffering malnutrition. Half of all the drinking water was polluted since sanctions had obstructed the import of chlorine for water purification. Pesticides, too, were unavailable in adequate quantity, leading to yet more environmental degradation. Saadoon Hammadi, President of the Iraq National Assembly, noted “a catastrophic deterioration in the public health situation”.²⁵

 

Such Iraqi claims are supported by many independent surveys and reports. As one important example, a 1999 report compiled by Unicef with the co-operation of the Iraqi Ministry of Health and assistance by the WHO found that sanctions had caused a doubling of the rate of child deaths. At the same time, other UN reports were admitting the desperate plight of the Iraqi people and the failure of aid and other measures radically to improve the grim situation. A report issued under the authority of the UN secretary-general noted that

 

the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr was continuing to deteriorate, so further impeding the delivery of foodstuffs;

the national electricity supply was “increasingly deteriorating”, making the fragile humanitarian situation even worse;

health centres were receiving less than a third of the needed medical supplies, including emergency drugs;

all health centres were experiencing a severe shortage of antibiotics (treatment for many tuberculosis patients was no longer possible);

water contamination caused by the release of raw sewage was on the increase;

most regions were experiencing daily power cuts of up to 16 hours;

the number of underweight children was increasing, as was the incidence of acute malnutrition.²⁶

 

Again such UN documentation is amply supported by reported findings from many other sources.²⁷

 

Economic sanctions were also causing a serious deterioration in the condition of the Iraqi oil industry—a vital consideration because all Iraq’s allowed income derives from specified oil sales. The UN secretary-general reported in January 2000 that “the oil industry in Iraq is in a lamentable state”, with a “continuing deterioration of the oil facilities”.²⁸ A report from a UN committee of experts confirmed this assessment in massive detail.²⁹ The Iraqi health ministry reported that 15,607 children and elderly people had died in January 2000 as a result of sanctions. Some seven thousand children under the age of five were now dying every month as a direct result of the US/UK sanctions policy.

 

The situation today (July 2000) is plain. The draconian sanctions regime remains in place, despite mounting international opposition. Two senior UN humanitarian co-ordinators in Iraq—Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck—have resigned in protest at what they perceive as the genocidal character of the sanctions policy. The evidence has accumulated to demonstrate the appalling effects of sanctions on the Iraqi population, with a further report from the UN secretary-general admitting that the UN programme “was never intended to meet all the humanitarian needs” of the Iraqi people.³⁰

 

Again, the secretary-general could note that “the decline in the condition of all sectors” of the oil industry was continuing; that the port of Umm Qasr was deteriorating, with larger vessels now “routinely unable to berth”; that humanitarian supplies were arriving in Iraq at a “slow and erratic pace”; that the prices charged for food were “beyond the reach of most Iraqis”; that there was an increase in deaths due to various diseases; and that in the case of acute respiratory infection “no more than 1 child in 10 was being correctly treated”.³¹ In the same vein the London-based Lancet medical journal (27 may 2024) reported that sanctions had at least doubled the child mortality rates in Iraq.

 

Against all this must be set the fact that before sanctions Iraq enjoyed some of the best health and education provisions of the Arab world. A modern health service provided virtually universal cover, with impressive immunisation and child-care schemes that compared with many of those in developed countries. The Iraqi people have been plunged into a nightmare from which there seems to be no relief. This is a situation that invites many questions. What is the nature of the system that supervises the years-long genocide? Are the supporters of sanctions upholding a criminal abuse of Iraqi men, women and children? Or does the entire fault lie with the brutal obduracy of Saddam Hussein, as all Western government propaganda suggests? Who is responsible today for the massive disease and death rates in Iraq? Who is to blame?

Administering Genocide

The main purpose of the UN Iraq Programme is to administer the terms of Security Council resolution 986 (1995), the functional successor to the stillborn resolutions 705 and 712. Resolution 986, the so-called “oil-for-food” resolution, is supposed to provide oil revenues to allow humanitarian supplies to be bought and distributed to the Iraqi people. In fact 986 is essentially a propaganda ploy to facilitate the maintenance of the endless sanctions regime. As another purpose, it enables Iraqi oil revenues to be fed to US-friendly organisations and contractors in the name of “compensation” for the damage caused by the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

 

American and British politicians constantly lie about the character and terms of resolution 986. For example, it is regularly asserted that the entire revenue from permitted oil sales is used to fund humanitarian supplies, whereas in fact more than 30 per cent of revenues are siphoned off for “compensation”, UN administrative tasks and other purposes. Compensation funds are fed through the system promptly while all sorts of impediments are placed in the way of humanitarian contracts. In reality the United States and Britain continue to resort to a range of tactics to frustrate the provision of humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people via both the terms of resolution 986 and the efforts of the independent charities (see “Sabotaging Humanity”, below).

 

The bureaucratic system for administering “oil-for-food” relief to the Iraqi civilian population seems designed to encourage confusion and delay. If any individual or organisation is invited to send free or purchased goods to Iraq it is necessary first to apply to the appropriate government department for a licence. In Britain applications are made to the Sanctions Unit, a department that functions under the Export Control Organisation of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Other countries have their own analogous arrangements. The application, which may be complex, is then processed over a period of time. This is the first source of delay because the Sanctions Unit, with relatively few staff, is also administering sanctions against various other countries.

 

If the application is judged to be defective in some way—for example, if it omits crucial information—it is returned to the sender with a request for more details. When the improved application arrives back at the Sanctions Unit it is placed at the back of the queue. The UN office of the Iraq Programme has produced detailed guidelines for the completion of requests to ship goods to Iraq.³² Here we learn that there are ten reasons why an application might be returned to the sender. These include: submission in wrong language (only English and French are allowed), imprecise quantities specified, wrong prices given, failure to specify any free goods and failure to indicate a valid border crossing point. It is emphasised that these reasons for rejecting an application “are not exhaustive” and can be reviewed “whenever appropriate”. So new reasons for rejecting a request can be invented at the whim of officials invariably hostile to the Iraqi regime.

 

The completion of an acceptable application is only the first hurdle. The national Sanctions Unit then despatches it to the UN Iraq Sanctions Committee in New York. Copies of the licence application are circulated to the fifteen members of the committee, a reflection of the UN Security Council. Any committee member can block an application or delay it indefinitely by asking for further details. Thus every member has an unchallenged power of veto—a deliberate recipe for delay and procrastination.

 

The Sanctions Committee meets irregularly and in closed session. An official committee handout emphasises that there is “plenty of scope for debate”, which means that decisions are often held over to future meetings, by which time new committee requirements may have emerged. It is sometimes claimed in US/UK propaganda that Saddam Hussein deliberately misuses the funds from oil sales. In fact he never has any sort of access to such funds since they are tightly controlled by UN officials supervising approved escrow accounts. The Iraqi government is not even represented on the Sanctions Committee. It is not allowed to make formal objections to blocked contracts or deliberately procrastinatory debates. It is not even allowed to know what is said in the closed sessions of the committee. Iraq is totally excluded from the decision-making process that controls whether Iraqi hospitals are allowed to import surgical gloves and whether Iraqi schools are allowed to import pencils. No item is too trivial for protracted consideration by the Sanctions Committee. If you want to post a teddy bear to Iraq then you will need a licence.

 

In this context, it is hardly surprising that the entire Iraqi cultural, social and industrial infrastructures are facing terminal collapse. How can it be seen as reasonable for the fifteen-member Sanctions Committee to consider the hundreds of thousands of licence applications necessary for the oil industry alone? It clearly is not sensible, which is one reason why Iraqi industry is progressively decaying and denied the opportunity to rebuild. It is not the only reason. Efforts have been made to “fast-track” certain humanitarian supplies, but such measures do not begin to address the central problem. The suffering of the Iraqi people will never be effectively relieved until Iraq is allowed to run its own affairs, freed from the genocidal burden of a foreign hostile bureaucracy.

Sabotaging Humanity

The behaviour of members of the Sanctions Committee—mainly the United States and Britain—has resulted in “blocks” on billions of dollars worth of supplies to the Iraqi people, including blocks on most basic humanitarian goods. For example, blocks have been placed on food, clothes, shroud material, pencils, paper, tooth brushes, toilet paper, cleaning agents, balls, notebooks, sanitary towels, medical journals, water purification chemicals, catheters for babies and a wide range of other hospital equipment. In 1994, an Iraqi woman in Baghdad sent a pair of hand-knitted leggings to her daughter who lives in Britain and who had just had a baby. The daughter was contacted by the UK Customs and Excise department and told that she would have to apply to the Sanctions Committee for an import licence before she would be given permission to receive the leggings. In February 2000, Article 19, the London-based anti-censorship campaign, tried to send documents on human rights to Mosul University in Iraq. The documents gave details of family planning, Aids and press freedom in democracies. The package was returned to Article 19 by British officials with an anonymous notice saying it was blocked “due to international sanctions against Iraq”. If “goods” were to be sent to Iraq then an export licence must first be submitted for approval.

 

The question of “blocks” has long been of concern to people struggling to ease the suffering of Iraqi civilians. In August 1999 the UN secretary-general, commenting on the work of the Sanctions Committee, noted: “There has been a significant increase in the number of holds being placed on applications, with serious implications for the implementation of the humanitarian programme.”³³ On 23 September, the Iraqi government reported that the United States and Britain had put 328 contracts on hold, valued at $438 million and covering food, medicines, water purification equipment, sewage equipment and spare parts for electric power. In addition the Sanctions Committee had failed to approve a further 796 contracts worth $1.3 billion. The Iraqi statement concluded:

 

This hostile stand taken by the United States and the United Kingdom against the people of Iraq aimed at killing as many Iraqi children, women and elderly people as possible. We call upon the international community to put pressure on the United States and the United Kingdom to lift the unjust sanctions and to put an end to this genocide.

 

The information provided by Iraq is well supported in official UN reports. In October 1999, Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, was again expressing his concern at how the Sanctions Committee was treating applications to supply Iraq with essential goods: “I have expressed concern about delays in the approval of applications … I have referred to the growing number of holds … and the resultant serious implications for the implementation of the humanitarian programme … it is highly desirable to find a prompt solution to this problem.”³⁴ In an annex to his letter of complaint Annan noted that “the number of holds overall continues to increase” and that “the time required by members of the Committee to review holds is becoming longer”.³⁵

 

On 1 February 2000, the UN Office for the Iraq Programme admitted the number of contracts on hold for the various phases of the programme: 516, worth $1.26 billion; 22, worth $36.61 million; 177, worth $541 million; and 320, worth $685.3 million. In March, Annan was complaining yet again about “the excessive number of holds placed on applications, which have been affecting adversely the overall implementation of the programme”. On 20 April 2000, Benon Sevan, executive director of the Iraq Programme, declared that “the very large number of applications placed on hold, in particular those concerning electricity, water and sanitation, transport and telecommunications”, had caused the humanitarian programme to suffer “considerably”.³⁶ On 6 June, Sevan reported that at 31 May the total value of holds was $1.6 billion; and that the distribution of food in Iraq may be expected to deteriorate because of “the extreme dilapidation of the port of Umm Qasr, the railway system, the transportation fleet, mills and silos”.

 

In addition to blocking humanitarian contracts, the United States and Britain have conspired in various ways to impede the provision of humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people. For example, charity workers are likely to be harassed and otherwise obstructed in their efforts. One glaring case is that of the American charity Voices in the Wilderness. When the US government learned that the charity was collecting medicines and toys to take to dying Iraqi children, the US Department of the Treasury issued a WARNING LETTER to Kathy Kelly, organiser of the charity. If the charity workers persisted in collecting vaccines and glove puppets for Iraqi infants the workers would face criminal penalties of “up to 12 years in prison and $1 million in fines”.

 

Charity workers have been arrested (court hearings pending) for taking medical supplies and toys to Iraq, and for importing unauthorised goods from Iraq. In a document issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (US Department of the Treasury) the offending imported items are listed. They include: an Iraqi water bottle label, an Iraqi stamp, postcards, a necklace and a wooden drum.³⁷

 

Hence the United States and Britain work hard to sabotage the humanitarian programme by impeding contracts and harassing charity workers, among many other means. In addition, the United States is funding terrorism against Iraq via the provisions of the Iraq Liberation Act (1998) and by carrying out bombing raids against Iraq on an almost daily basis. In 1999 alone, American and British warplanes flew six thousand sorties over Iraq, dropped eighteen hundred bombs and hit 450 targets. In mid-2000, the Iraqi death toll from the US/UK bombing campaign was about three hundred, with thousands injured, including many children. On 19 January 2000, the former US president George Bush declared that the American pilots bombing Iraq were “doing the Lord’s work”. In his address to the pilots Bush stated that the United States was “a moral country” and that the pilots, in bombing Iraq, were making “a moral statement”.

Who Is to Blame?

Today the United States and Britain are virtually the only countries that are keen to maintain the genocidal sanctions regime against the civilian population—babies, pregnant women, the elderly, war widows and widowers, war orphans, the traumatised and the sick, ordinary people—of Iraq. The Pope, American Catholic Bishops, dozens of American Congress members, Unicef, the WHO, the FAO, the WFP, even most of Iraq’s neighbours, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the majority of the UN General Assembly, three permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, France and China)—all are opposed to the continuation of the sanctions regime in its present form. War and sanctions have already caused many millions of Iraqi casualties. Today sanctions are killing more than seven thousand Iraqi children every month and thousands of sick and elderly adults. The social and industrial infrastructure continues to decay, with some sectors on the point of ultimate disaster. On 23 January 2000, Beat Schweizer, head of an International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Iraq, said that the hospitals were close to total collapse. Soon the “hospitals will not be functional anymore”.

 

Sanctions are supposed to prevent Iraq again threatening its neighbours. The surrounding countries hear the argument and (Kuwait apart) urge a lifting of sanctions. This signals no love for Saddam Hussein, only the conviction that the Iraqi people have already suffered too much. The sanctions are also intended to guarantee the disarming of Iraq. Scott Ritter, former head of the weapons inspectors, has declared: “Does Iraq have chemical weapons today? No. Does Iraq have long-range missiles today? No. Nuclear? No. Biological? No. Is Iraq qualitatively disarmed? Yes.” Ritter, former Gulf War commander and no friend of Saddam Hussein, believes that Iraq no longer poses a threat. Can we really justify continuing to inflict such appalling suffering on the Iraqi people for what Saddam may or may not do in the future? The Iraqi regime has lied and prevaricated, perhaps desperate to survive against the encroachments of a foreign superpower publicly committed to its destruction. At the same time there has been massive Iraqi co-operation with aid workers and UN officials.³⁸

 

Suppose Saddam Hussein has lied (has Bill Clinton ever lied?) and will not behave as Washington and London want. Can we really say: “Do as we say or we will kill another 190,000 Iraqi babies”? To the vast bulk of the world the answer to such a question is obvious. The issue is not the character of Saddam Hussein but the dire impact of sanctions on millions of innocent people. The blame for their endless suffering lies plainly with those powerful men and women who insist on maintaining a genocidal sanctions regime that violates international law and all natural justice.

Endnotes

1. H. V. F. Winstone and Zabra Freeth, Kuwait: Prospect and Reality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 111.

 

2. These grievances are discussed in Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1996) pp. 338–45.

 

3. Ibid., pp. 345–51.

 

4. US forces in Iraq used fuel–air explosives (FAEs) to produce nuclear-scale blasts and incineration fireballs over a wide acreage. Michael Klare, a weapons expert, has commented that FAEs produce “nuclear-like levels of destruction without arousing popular revulsion” (quoted in Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1998], p. 6). American FAEs were first used in Vietnam.

 

5. The Impact of War on Iraq, report to the secretary-general on humanitarian needs in Iraq in the immediate post-crisis environment by a mission to the area led by Mr Martti Ahtisaari, under-secretary-general for administration and management, United Nations, New York, 20 March 1991.

 

6. Peter Jenkins, “War Continues by Other Means”, Independent (London), 24 April 1991.

 

7. Louise Cainkar, “Desert Sin: A Post-war Journey through Iraq”, in Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader, ed. Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck (London: Canongate, 1992), pp. 335–55.

 

8. Patrick E. Tyler, “Bush Links Ending of Trading Ban to Hussein Exit”, New York Times, 21 May 1991.

 

9. Felicity Arbuthnot, Asian Times, 16 March 1993.

 

10. Miriam Ryle, letter, Guardian (London), 15 July 1994.

 

11. Yves Bonnet (French deputy), Guardian (London), 8 August 1995, reprinted from Le Monde.

 

12. Margit Fakhoury, “A German Doctor Tells How Iraq’s Children Are Being Killed”, Committee to Save the Children in Iraq, funded by the Schiller Institute, Washington, D.C., 1991, pp. 14–18.

 

13. Atle Dyregrov and Magne Raundalen, “The Impact of the Gulf War on the Children of Iraq” (paper presented at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies World Conference, Amsterdam, 21–6 June 1992).

 

14. Ibid.

 

15. Bonnet, “Sanctions That Should Shame the UN”, Guardian (London), 8 August 1995, reprinted from Le Monde.

 

16. Ibid.

 

17. Ibid.

 

18. FAO/WFP Special Alert, no. 237, July 1993.

 

19. Eric Hoskins, “The Truth behind Economic Sanctions: A Report on the Embargo of Food and Medicines to Iraq”, in War Crimes: A Report on US War Crimes against Iraq, Ramsey Clark et al. (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), p. 165.

 

20. Ibid.

 

21. FAO, report, December 1995.

 

22. News Summary, 21 October to 22 November 1996, United Nations Information Centre, London.

 

23. “Iraqi Health System Close to Collapse Says WHO Director-General”, press release, WHO/16, 27 February 1997.

 

24. Review and Assessment of the Implementation of the Humanitarian Programme Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 986 (1995) (December 1996–November 1998), S/1999/481, 28 April 1999.

 

25. Letter (26 June 2024) from Saadoon Hammadi, President of National Assembly of Iraq, submitted to UN secretary-general as annex to letter from Saeed H. Hasan, Iraqi ambassador to United Nations, S/1999/742, 1 July 1999.

 

26. Report of the secretary-general pursuant to Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1242 (1999), S/1999/896, 19 August 1999.

 

27. Examples include the Iraq Trip Report, US Congressional staff, 27 August to 6 September 1999; briefings by UN humanitarian co-ordinators (e.g., Hans von Sponeck, 26 October 2024); and a further UN secretary-general report, S/1999/1162, 12 November 1999.

 

28. Letter from UN secretary-general to President of Security Council, S/2000/26, 14 January 2000.

 

29. Report of group of UN experts established pursuant to Paragraph 30 of Security Council Resolution 1284 (2000); report issued following detailed itinerary in Iraq (January 2000).

 

30. Report of secretary-general, S/2000/208, 10 March 2000.

 

31. Ibid.

 

32. Guidance on the Completion of Requests and Notifications to Ship Goods to Iraq, Office of the Iraq Programme, approved by Security Council 661 Committee on 3 September 1999.

 

33. Report of the UN secretary-general, S/1999/896, 19 August 1999.

 

34. Letter from UN secretary-general to President of the Security Council, S/1999/1086, 23 October 1999.

 

35. Ibid.

 

36. Briefing by Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the Iraq Programme, 20 April 2000.

 

37. “Prepenalty Notice” from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, US Department of the Treasury, OFAC Nos. IQ-162016 and IQ-162433, 3 December 1998.

 

38. This co-operation cannot be described here, but see comments in UN documents S/1999/582, S/1999/896 and S/2000/208; and the public statements of the leader of the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Iraq, 25 January 2000.