(The Nationalist, 3 October 2003)
In 1990, the Iraqi people had a diet of 3,000 calories a day each, 92% had clean water, and 93% enjoyed free health care. The country had one of the lowest child mortality rates in the world. Then the UN, led by the United States, imposed severe economic sanctions.
The UN Children’s Emergency Fund estimated that between five and six thousand Iraqi children died every month as a result of those sanctions. Between 1991 and 1998, half a million Iraqi children above the anticipated rate died. Iraq now has the highest child mortality rate in the world. One study stated, ‘Economic sanctions have probably already taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history’. (John and Karl Mueller, “The Methodology of Mass Destruction: Assessing Threats in a New World Order”, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 23, No.1, pp.163-187)
This was well known around the world. The UN’s senior official in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, said of the effect of sanctions, ‘Make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable’. Seventy members of the US Congress signed a letter to President Bill Clinton, asking him to stop sanctions, describing his actions as “Infanticide masquerading as policy”. And Mrs. Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, and later US Secretary of State, in an interview on CBS TV, in a 60 Minutes programme, called Punishing Saddam, on 12 May 1996, when asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children through sanctions were worth the price, replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it’.
Last month the UN finally lifted sanctions on Iraq following the US-led invasion. Then, more recently, President George W. Bush admitted that Iraq had had no links with the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. Nor has evidence been found of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, though these were given as justification for this year’s invasion.
It seems obvious that there is another agenda at work here, one that can be spelled out in three letters, O, I and L. There is real injustice and exploitation at work here. The Iraqi people are human beings like ourselves. The worst of their sufferings may still be ahead of them, and we are partly responsible if we remain silent and do nothing.