London ~ [British punctuation and spelling used in this article.] For the people of Iraq, normality died in August 1990 when economic sanctions on their country began. Today, in formerly high-tech hospitals, built with petro-dollars and staffed with people who have completed postgraduate training in Britain, Canada and the U.S., surgery is frequently carried out without anaesthetic; the simplest items, from painkillers to antibiotics, are unavailable. Scanners, X-ray machinery and incubators lie idle for want of spare parts.
To witness the effect of the United Nations embargo is to live with images that haunt. To walk into any hospital ward is to see a look in the eyes of parents of a desperately sick child, which can be instantly translated: one is from outside, so possibly important, can perhaps wave a magic wand, help. Then the look dies. . .
On a visit to one ward I saw two children with acute myeloid leukaemia — cancers have risen fivefold since the Gulf War; a rise some experts have linked to the depleted uranium weapons used primarily by the U.S., Britain and France, which left a residue of radioactive dust throughout the country. The younger child, just three, his little body bloated with oedema, bleeding internally, in terrible pain, was making tiny mewing noises. His eyes were filled with tears but he had learned not to cry since it wracked his small frame further and increased the agony. His name translated as ‘the vital one’. The older child, aged five, was in a similar condition, yet when I bent to stroke the pathetic, puffy little face, damp with perspiration, a small hand grabbed mine and he squeezed with all his might.
By 1995 the World Food Programme noted that: ‘time is running out for the children of Iraq’. Figures — verified by UNICEF — record that 1,211,285 children died of embargo-related causes between August 1990 and August 1997. A silent holocaust in the name of the U.N., these numbers are similar to those lost in Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia. It is nearly twice the population of Kuwaitis in Kuwait in small lives lost. [In a population of 2.2 million, only 750,000 are Kuwaiti nationals.] And it is broadly ten times the 130,000 people that Amnesty International estimated to have died in Iraq in the ten years to 1989 as a result of the country's woeful human-rights record.
‘After 24 years in the field, starting with Biafra, I didn’t think anything could shock me,’ wrote Dieter Hannusch of the World Food Programme [of his visit to Iraq] in 1995.
A new medical diagnosis has manifested itself. Mothers too malnourished to breastfeed and unable to afford milk powder — a tin exceeds a doctor’s monthly salary — feed their babies on sugared water or sugared tea. These babies become chronically malnourished, terribly bloated and almost all die. Doctors call them the ‘sugar babies’.
The embargo has meant the death of childhood for those who do survive. There are no birthday parties any more: no one has the money for presents. Most children since the embargo have never tasted chocolate; on a recent visit I bought two chocolate bars and tubes of sweets for a child. They came to 3,000 Iraqi dinars. I realized with shock that I had just spent the monthly salary of my interpreter, who speaks seven languages and has worked all over the world.
Knowledge itself is embargoed too; medical journals are not allowed. Neither, in 1994, were 500 tonnes of shroud cloth. Sanctions reach beyond the grave — when children born after 1990 die, parents do not even have a photograph to remember them by. Film, even if you can find it, exceeds the average professional’s monthly salary — and is always out of date.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has described the blockade as the most draconian in modern history. In 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson advocated sanctions as a ‘quiet but most lethal weapon that exerts a pressure no nation can withstand’.
From 1945 to 1990 there were just three embargoes: Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and Cuba. The first two, largely big-business related, affected the populace but did not put them in a strait-jacket. The embargo on Cuba has affected normality from medical treatment to pencils, as with Iraq.
From 1990 to 1994 embargoes were implemented against nine countries. In the case of Iraq, Saddam Hussein remains unaffected while his people suffer.
It is not the first time [Arabs have been treated inhumanely by the West]. [Historical note: The Arabs had been promised freedom by Britain if they fought against the Ottoman Empire in WW I. After the war, Britain, instead, betrayed them, dividing Arab land into the present states, over which it ruled.] When the Iraqis revolted against British domination in 1919, the Royal Air Force requested authorization from Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the War Office, to use chemical weapons ‘against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment’. Churchill sanctioned their use, saying: ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using [it] against uncivilized tribes’.
Demonizing a nation into sub-humanity was justification for genocide then as now. Whilst the U.N. and the U.S. deem nations ‘pariah states’, it is the people not the regimes which suffer. Every time Iraq complies with one condition for the lifting of sanctions, another appears. These include recognizing the border with Kuwait (done); monitoring cameras being installed (done); destruction of armaments (stated by the weapons inspectors as done, but since they cannot prove there is not a weapon left in the country this can be open-ended).
While international bureaucrats wrangle at the United Nations, Iraq must prove what few other countries are in a position to prove — that it is adhering to the highest standards of human rights. In the absence of a concrete enemy post-Cold War, Saddam is a convenient demon; a dictator who is also a Muslim. Though Iraq is a Muslim country, it is not militantly so.
In a small grocery store in a poor area of Baghdad early one morning I watched a child of perhaps five, in the mode of small children everywhere, proudly doing a terribly important errand: he bought one egg. A tray of 30 eggs exceeds a university professor's monthly salary. To go to the home of professional, relatively wealthy people and have a dish with tiny pieces of egg in it is to be honoured.
As he left, the child dropped the egg. He fell to the floor, frantically trying to pick up the shell, yolk and white with his small hands, tears streaming down his face. As I reached in my pocket, the shopkeeper gently tapped him on the shoulder and gave him another.
Trauma is everywhere, in every small act. That child will never forget that egg — it could be a metaphor for Iraq, for human rights, for the U.N. and for the embargo itself, ‘the quiet but most lethal weapon’.
~ New Internationalist, January/February 1998; printed with permission.
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