SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAQ:
A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
by Ramsey Clark
The following letter was sent by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark on
March 1, 1996, to all members of the Security Council before its scheduled
votes on UN sanctions on Iraq. Since August 1990, this vote has come up
every two months. Clark's letters have been widely circulated to the media
and on the Internet. They have become a voice of conscience against Iraq
sanctions, citing ethical and legal standards widely agreed to by all nations
but consistently disregarded. The letter is even more relevant today.
One issue between Iraq and the United Nations exceeds all others in importance.
That issue is the Security Council sanc-tions imposed against Iraq at the
insistence of the United States. The whole world knows, and history will
permanently record, the fact that those savage sanctions have cruelly killed
more than one million people in Iraq these last five years, injured millions
more, and damaged the population and society for generations to come. Is
this the legacy the United Nations wishes to support by failing to completely
end the sanctions now?
While February statistics are not yet available, more than 6,000 children
under age five and 6,000 persons five years or older died in January 1996
as a direct result of the sanctions. More than 20,000 human beings have
died since the Security Council reviewed the sanctions this January. Added
injuries affected millions and four million remain at risk of death from
malnutrition. A continuation of sanctions for another sixty days will cost
as much in life, justice, and respect for Security Council members that
continue the sanctions.
During last week, which I spent in Iraq, my fifth annual inspection since
the sanctions were imposed, I visited ten hospitals in four governates which
have nearly 15 percent of all hospital beds in the country. Conditions are
tragic. Lighting is dim, even in operating theaters, for lack of bulbs.
Wards are cold. Pharmacies are nearly empty with only a minor fraction of
needed medicines and medical supplies. Most equipment, X-ray, CAT scan,
incubators, oxygen tanks, dialysis machines, tubes and parts for transfusions
and intravenous feeding, and other life-saving items are lacking, scarce,
or inoperable for lack of parts. Simple needs like sheets, pillows, pillow
cases, towels, bandages, cotton balls, adhesive tape, antiseptic cleaning
liquids are unavailable or scarce. Surgery is at levels below 10 percent
of the 1989 numbers in all ten hospitals. Occupancy is below 50 percent
in all the hospitals, despite the far greater need, because only a few can
be helped. Death is omnipresent: a young mother weeping in her bed whose
infant had just died, an elderly diabetic -- his feet bloated with open
sores without adequate insulin for years, kwashiorkor and marasmus victims
living only a few days after admission.
In the emergency unit in Nasiriya we saw typhoid-fever dehydration victims
wasting because of the lack of simple medicines, a new meningitis admission
as we left. Doctors, nurses, and staff struggle courageously and creatively
against all odds to save life and resist despair and fury. Everywhere you
see their inventiveness: use of natural sedatives, an oxygen tent made from
plastic bags, machines held together by string and wire; cannibalized incubators,
the parts used to maintain other incubators with two undersized infants
each, often rotating with other infants. Over 25 percent are dangerously
underweight at birth.
The huge pharmaceutical plant at Samarra is producing at 10 percent of capacity
because of the lack of raw materials, machine parts, and packaging materials.
Skilled production workers sit idle in their units, or hand wash disposable
bottles gathered from hospitals and clinics throughout the country. The
domestic industry provided 50 percent of Iraq's pharmaceutical needs before
the sanctions, producing more than 250 different products. Today it produces
less than five. Machines capable of producing tablets costing pennies which
could save a child from dehydration stand idle, wrapped as if in burial
shrouds for want of raw materials.
Polluted water is a threat everywhere. Chlorine and other chemicals to make
water safe for drinking are in short supply. In Basra, all the drinking
water is trucked in for the city of nearly a million people and put into
large tanks located in neighborhoods where people come for their home supply.
In Baghdad, garbage disposal is severely limited because trucks which carried
garbage away from the city are largely inoperable. Huge dumps are located
within the city in or near residential areas so garbage can be carried there
by the people. Often, however, garbage is simply dumped in the street where
goats and little children scavenge together. Areas where sewage pipes were
broken by bombing or have deteriorated have raw sewage percolating to the
surface in huge pools, often flooding land surrounding housing projects
and commercial and residential streets. The entire operating sewage system
west of the Tigris, serving one and a half million people, dumps all the
raw sewage gathered directly into the river untreated. The rest of the city
does little better. The huge sewage treatment plants stand as idle as the
ruins of Babylon.
Schools have virtually no supplies: paper, textbooks, pencils (the graphite
is considered a dual-use item with military utility), lights, desks, doors.
The teachers struggle valiantly to help their students but like their students
they suffer malnutrition, have no desks, supplies, or training materials.
Malnutrition is the omnipresent physical and psychological fact of the Iraqi
people. Their caloric intake is a fraction of their need. Protein is a minor
fraction of minimum health requirements.
The government food ration program has kept millions alive and supported
everyone. Everywhere people agreed that it is fair, efficient, and the major
lifeline for the population. But it provides only about 40 percent of the
calories needed and no protein. The major staples it supplies are wheat,
flour, and rice. Farmers and millers are required to deliver their entire
product to the government for distribution. In addition, sugar, cooking
oil, baby milk for families with children under one year old, and teas are
distributed.
Each family has a ration card with allotments for each family member. Huge
warehouses service over 52,000 private retail stores which must regularly
sell food and have at least 20 square meters of floor space. These stores
are located throughout the nation. Families pick up their rations at a designated
store nearest them. They pay 5 percent of market value. Final deliveries
of all rationed items are usually made by midmonth. At the end of February,
we found warehouses stocking up for March, but, with few exceptions, retail
stores empty of all rationed goods and with few food items for sale.
If the present agreement pursuant to Resolution 986 is finalized in March,
it will be months before this ration can increase and by the most optimistic
estimates it still will be far short of basic needs, providing Iraq with
only a lower level of malnutrition. If the entire allocation of Resolution
986 oil-sale income available for health was spent on medicine and medical
supplies, there would still be severe shortages causing deaths and protracted
illness.
Billions of dollars will be required over and above funds available under
Resolution 986 for adequate levels of food and medicine, to replace and
repair machinery and parts, rehabilitate medical facilities; produce fertilizers
and insecticides to increase food production; build and repair food storage,
processing, distribution facilities and transportation equipment; to rebuild
water systems, water treatment facilities, pipe lines; to rebuild sewer
systems, treatment and disposal plants; to repair schools, provide desks,
benches, chairs, books, supplies; and to provide an acceptable standard
of nutrition, health care, and education for the people of Iraq.
The quality of life will continue to deteriorate even with the implementation
of Resolution 986.
The Security Council, which tragically bears the responsibility for so much
death and destruction in Iraq, must act now to completely end the sanctions,
to help meet the emergency needs of the Iraqi people, and to help Iraq rebuild
its society.
The lawlessness and cruelty of such death-dealing sanctions, which are genocide
and a crime against humanity and must be recognized. Their use against whole
populations, killing first infants, children, elderly, and chronically ill,
must be prohibited. Until then no poor people on the planet are safe from
the UN, or the superpower whose will it enforces.
Sincerely, Ramsey Clark, Chairperson, International Action Center, 39 West
14th St., #206, New York, NY 10011 (212) 633-6646 fax: (212) 633-2889 http://www.iacenter.org
email: iacenter@iacenter.orgInternational
Spring 1998-- N.C.Xpress
-- Archives -- Electrons
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