Isn’t the Iraqi government responsible for its people’s suffering? Shouldn’t the Iraqi regime use its available funds (estimated at $400 to $500 million per year from smuggled oil) for social welfare rather than building palaces?
Of course it should. But this is a military dictatorship for whom decisions to place public needs over the maintenance of power should not be expected. And half a billion dollars a year would do little anyway to repair the devastated country.
The Iraqi government has a long history of denying many civil and political rights to its population. These human rights violations were a feature of the Baghdad regime throughout the pre-1990 years, when it was a favored Middle East ally of the U.S. and many other Western countries. They remain largely unchanged. But economic sanctions have done nothing to win those political rights; instead, Iraqi civilians now face the same problems of lack of opposition parties, arbitrary arrests, reported executions, etc., but they now ALSO face starvation, lack of clean water, collapsing education, international isolation, etc.
The Iraqi government’s failures and repression does not -- cannot-- excuse the international community’s own failures of responsibility to the Iraqi people.
Didn’t the recent UNICEF report show that Northern Iraq, where the UN is in charge, has much higher standards of living and lower child mortality rates than the Center/South where the same sanctions are in effect but the Iraqi regime is in control? Doesn’t this prove that the regime is preventing oil for food from working?
UNICEF did report better conditions in the North. But the reasons are far more complicated than "the UN is in charge". The sanctions are not the same in the North as in Center/South. The 13% of Iraqis who live in the North receive their full 13% of oil for food funds; it is taken off the top to guarantee their share. But the 87% who live in Center/South do not receive the whole 87% that’s left. First, the 30% that goes to the Compensation Board is deducted from their share. Then another 4% is deducted for other UN costs in Iraq. The result is that the 87% of Iraqis who live in Center/South receive only 53% of the oil for food funds -- about 60 cents for every dollar available to Iraqis in the North.
Other reasons include the UN’s access to a "cash component" in the North that is unavailable in Center/South, allowing much more efficient use of local labor and local supplies. The largely Kurdish North was and remains the traditional agricultural center of Iraq; Northerners have access to 47% of Iraq’s arable land. The North also has far more potable and accessible water, and widely available local produce. Agricultural production in Center/South began only in the 1960s, after oil was discovered, and was highly mechanized and electricity-dependent; thus it was much more vulnerable to the bombing raids of 1991 and 1998 than the traditional, non-mechanized agriculture of the North. The Iraqi-Turkish border is also exceptionally porous, so trade is frequent and profitable.
Isn’t the Iraqi government hoarding food and medicine in warehouses, denying it to the population?
No. Every UN agency head in Baghdad has confirmed that the vast majority (according to von Sponeck, over 91%) of goods imported through the oil for food program reaches its appropriate final destination -- neighborhood pharmacies, ration baskets, etc. There are serious distribution problems that lead to many goods remaining in warehouses longer than needed: Iraq needs refrigerated trucks to transport fragile drugs across the desert; those trucks have been denied by the Sanctions Committee. Iraq’s computers to track warehouse inventory are outdated and virtually useless; the Sanctions Committee continues to deny new computers. A war- and sanctions-driven "brain drain" has seen many of Iraq’s experts flee the country, leaving less well-trained personnel to operate the distribution systems.
Iraq’s distribution methods are not the most efficient. Specifically, Iraqi regulations require that the "food basket" be distributed each month with exactly the same contents, on exactly the same day, to the entire population of 23 million. As a result, in the days leading up to distribution day, warehouses are overflowing with food and other goods.
Doesn’t the sanctions policy reflect an international consensus? What is the UN role?
Most close observers, in and around the UN and throughout the world, believe that the sanctions policy is based on a forced consensus, orchestrated largely by successive U.S. administrations despite wide and growing opposition in the Congress. The British government, despite strong opposition in its Parliament, supports the sanctions policy. But no other Security Council nation fully supports maintaining economic sanctions.
(It may be that some Council members, and others, recall the story of Yemen. The only Arab country on the Council, Yemen was one of only two countries to oppose the U.S.-initiated "use of force" resolution authorizing war against Iraq in November 1990. As soon as the Yemeni ambassador brought down his hand, a U.S. diplomat was at his side who told him "that will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast." The remark was broadcast through an open microphone on the internal UN broadcast network. Three days later the U.S. cut its entire aid package to Yemen.)
Permanent Council members Russia, France, and China all oppose economic sanctions. They have been unwilling so far to use their veto (or to table a resolution that would require the U.S. and Britain to use their vetoes) to end the sanctions, but they refused to vote for 1284, choosing instead to abstain. While insufficient to change the policy, their lack of support for the continuing sanctions policy was notable.
In the General Assembly the policy is even more isolated. Other than Kuwait and Israel, virtually no other UN Member State publicly supports continuation of the current sanctions regime.
The sanctions policy is increasingly isolated and far wider sources are finding it indefensible. The London Economist magazine recently noted that when Denis Halliday, the earlier Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned to protest the impact of sanctions, it was "interesting." When his successor, Hans von Sponeck, did the same thing, it was "an indictment." A May 1, 2000 Wall Street Journal article noted that "it is unclear which side is more isolated: the dictator who has successfully defied sanctions, or the Anglo-U.S. alliance that insists they remain in place." The Journal went on to quote a European diplomat who noted that "there is great pressure from the world’s big companies to get a piece of this market."
In London, a recent parliamentary report noted that it was impossible to envision any future scenario in which comprehensive economic sanctions like those applied to Iraq would be deemed acceptable. The government of New Zealand recently announced full-scale opposition to the Iraqi sanctions regime. And the Canadian government, which has taken the lead in organizing discussion of sanctions alternatives and "smart sanctions," is under severe parliamentary pressure to follow suit. In Dublin, a group of parliamentarians is planning a visit to Iraq to help them frame new efforts to change their government’s position.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently described his horror at the global organization being increasingly viewed around the world as responsible for the widespread suffering of Iraqi civilians. By June 2000, even former UNSCOM chief Richard Butler said the economic sanctions harmed the Iraqi people, and had not realised their declared aim of stripping Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. "I deeply believe that sanctions as now applied to Iraq have been utterly counterproductive for this disarmament purpose," Butler told the BBC.
And in the U.S., 71 bipartisan Members of Congress recently asked President Clinton to lift the economic sanctions. Congressman David Bonior, the Democratic Whip and a close Clinton ally, recently called the sanctions "infanticide masquerading as policy." Five members of Congress sent their staff to Iraq last summer to examine the humanitarian situation. And Congressman Tony Hall, known as "Mister Hunger" for his twenty-year commitment to that issue, visited Iraq in April 2000 and confirmed the 25-30% childhood malnutrition, with child mortality rates "as high or higher than anywhere in the world."
