In a leather workshop in Baghdad.
During a July 1997 demonstration in front of the United Nations in New York calling
for an end to sanctions.
Irak
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Timeline
• 2 August 1990: Iraqi forces invade
Kuwait.
• 6 August 1990: UN resolution 661 is adopted, imposing economic sanctions on
Iraq.
• 16-17 January 1991: U.S.-led coalition forces launch the Operation Desert
Storm air attack, with the approval of the Security Council.
• 27 February 1991: Iraqi forces retreat from Kuwait.
• 30 June 1991: The newly-created UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), begins its
first inspection.
• 15 August 1991: Iraq rejects resolution 706 authorising it to sell oil to
finance the purchase of humanitarian supplies.
• 14 April 1995: An “oil-for-food” agreement between the UN and Iraq is reached.
• 16 December 1998: UNSCOM withdraws from Iraq. The U.S. and UK launch the Operation
Desert Fox air campaign, without UN approval. Bombing takes place on a close to daily
basis.
• 17 December 1999: The Security Council adopts resolution 1284 replacing UNSCOM
by a new monitoring, verification and inspection commission known as UNMOVIC.
Definitions
• The Statute of the International Criminal Court defines “crimes against
humanity” as acts “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed
against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” including “inhumane
acts . . . intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to
mental or physical health.”
• Genocide includes acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including “causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part.”
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“Ordinary
civilians
have exhausted their resources and their health trying to survive on $2 to $6 per
month.” |
Concern is mounting about
the suffering of the Iraqi people, and the ethics and legality of the international
sanctions weighing on them are being hotly debated
 Should
the economic embargo imposed on Iraq a decade ago be numbered among the crimes that
have made the 20th century one of the darkest in history? Can the international community,
led by the United States and Britain, keep on invoking the United Nations Charter
to prolong indefinitely, and with impunity, the sufferings of a people? Why does
the media make a fuss about some humanitarian disasters and not about the dozens
of Iraqi children who die each day?
William Bourdon, secretary-general of the International Federation of Human Rights
Leagues (FIDH), hints at an answer to the last question: “It would be easier to mobilise
public opinion behind this worthy cause if the Iraqi dictatorship was not one of
the world’s worst,” he says.
A recent resolution of the UN Human Rights Commission, on 18 April 2000, “strongly
condemns,” inter alia, “the systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations
of human rights” in Iraq, “resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression.”
It also condemns the “summary and arbitrary executions, including political killings,”
and “widespread, systematic torture.”
The subject of the Iraqi embargo may be a trap, just as the Iraqi people are trapped.
To talk about it might be to play into the hands of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s
regime. To keep quiet might be tantamount to failure to help a people in distress.
But the wall of silence is starting to crack after reports from UN bodies that the
sanctions may have killed more than half a million children under five, and because
of the despair of humanitarian organizations and the revolt of UN officials who have
resigned from their jobs in Iraq. Even the U.S. State Department’s website, long
silent about reports of the plight of civilians, has posted remarks by Congressman
Tony P. Hall, who returned from Iraq at the end of April 2000.
“I fear that no matter how quickly sanctions are lifted, the future of most of the
people I met in Iraq will be bleak,” he writes. “That is because its children are
in bad shape, with a quarter of them underweight and one in ten wasting away because
of hunger and disease. The leading cause of childhood death, diarrhoea, is 11 times
more prevalent in Iraq than elsewhere–while polio has been wiped out throughout the
Mideast, it has returned to plague Iraq’s people. Schools and water systems–the infrastructure
any nation’s future depends upon–are decrepit and hospitals lack basic medicine and
equipment. Ordinary civilians have exhausted their resources and their health trying
to survive on $2 to $6 per month. . . . It will take Iraqi people a generation to
recover from their present situation.”
The toughest economic blockade in recent times, voted by the UN Security Council
in August 1990, four days after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, originally aimed to
prevent Iraq rearming and to neutralize its regime. Five years later, on 14 April
1995, the so-called “oil for food” resolution gave the Iraqi regime permission to
sell a limited amount of the country’s oil and to use 53 per cent of the proceeds1 to buy food, medicine and basic necessities.
But the sanctions committee, which has to approve the purchases, can block some items
(ranging from lead pencils to chlorine to vaccines) if it thinks they could be used
to make weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, a UN special commission, Unscom,
was sent to Iraq to monitor the disarmament process.
When the commission was disbanded at the end of 1998, all of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons programmes had been dismantled or destroyed and the threat
from them reduced to “zero, none,” said the American former chief of the Unscom inspection
team, Scott Ritter, in a recent BBC documentary which attacked those responsible
for maintaining the embargo.2
But the UN Security Council set up a new arms control commission in its resolution
1284 of 17 December 1999. “The aim is to check that nothing nuclear has been rebuilt
and to see what the situation is concerning chemical and biological weapons,” says
the French foreign ministry. “After that we can move towards lifting sanctions if
Iraq co-operates.”
France, along with China and Russia, nevertheless abstained in the vote to approve
resolution 1284, saying the wording did not describe “in completely good faith” the
procedure for suspending the embargo. The Iraqi regime is refusing to co-operate.
So the people of Iraq are still hostages. “What was an acceptable situation in 1991
no longer is,” says Germany’s Hans von Sponeck, the latest UN humanitarian co-ordinator
in Iraq to have resigned his post, in March 2000. The embargo, decided upon in full
compliance with the UN Charter, is now “a clear violation of human rights,” he says.
Even worse, states former French foreign minister Claude Cheysson, it is a crime
against humanity, “as defined by the UN itself”3 (see box).
In the United States some people agree, including former Attorney-General Ramsey
Clark and Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois.
Von Sponeck’s predecessor, Irishman Denis Halliday, who resigned in September 1998,
has also joined the opponents of the embargo. “I’ve been using the term ‘genocide,’
because this is a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq,” he recently stated.
Some legal experts are sceptical about or even against using such terminology. “People
who talk like that don’t know anything about law,” retorts Mario Bettati, who invented
the notion of “the right of humanitarian intervention”. “The embargo has certainly
affected the Iraqi people badly, but that’s not at all a crime against humanity or
genocide.”
FIDH secretary-general Bourdon says “one of the key elements of a crime against humanity
and of genocide is intent. The embargo wasn’t imposed because the United States and
Britain wanted children to die. If you think so, you have to prove it.”
But what about today, when the whole world knows Iraqi children are dying because
of the sanctions?
“Leaving in place a measure which you know is killing people isn’t the same as applying
measures deliberately calculated and planned to cause the maximum number of people
to die,” he says.
Patrick Baudouin, FIDH’s president, is less sure. He says he “hesitates” to call
the embargo a crime against humanity. “As a lawyer, I’d say it wasn’t. But its open-ended
extension does raise serious questions.” All these lawyers agree, however, that the
embargo violates basic human rights, starting with the right to life.
There is also a lot of argument about who is responsible for the humanitarian disaster
in Iraq. The U.S. State Department, which does not even accept Unicef and Who figures,
puts the blame on Saddam Hussein. Samuel Berger, of the U.S. National Security Council,
said in May 2000 that “by obstructing UN relief, refusing to order nutritional supplements,
even selling food and medicine to build palaces, Mr. Saddam has aggravated his people’s
suffering and used the spectacle to seek the removal of sanctions.”
Von Sponeck spends most of his time rebutting these arguments. “The UN publishes
a monthly stock report that shows what has arrived in Iraq, what has been distributed,
what is stored away and why. The picture that emerges for food is perfect. (...)
Transport is a problem, but people are receiving their food baskets every month and
warehouses are empty the day after distribution,” he says.
When Washington accuses Baghdad of not distributing about a quarter of the medical
supplies, he notes that “Who recommends that a country should have 25 per cent of
its drugs in stock to prepare and be prepared for an epidemic. Iraq said it could
not afford this, but keeps 15 per cent in stock. The drugs all undergo quality control
tests, which 5.8 per cent of them have failed. Then you have medical components that
are unusable because they can only be used in combination with others.” Halliday
points out that the sanctions committee “would deliberately approve nine [items]
but block the tenth, knowing full well that without the tenth item, the other nine
were of no use . . . It’s a deliberate ploy.”
Reforming
the UN Charter
Unease over
the Iraqi embargo has reopened debate about the use of embargoes as a weapon. Article
41 of the UN Charter says the Security Council can enforce its decisions by applying
measures that include “the complete or partial interruption of economic relations
and of . . . means of communication.”
This trend has increased in recent years. Since 1990, the United Nations has imposed
sanctions on Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Libya, Liberia, Haiti, Angola’s Unita
rebels and Iraq.
Supporters of sanctions say it is often the only way to punish countries that threaten
peace. They cost little at a time when Western public opinion frowns on the huge
expense and loss of human life involved in military interventions. The opponents
of sanctions stress the serious effects on the civilian population while the targeted
regimes become more entrenched and manage to smuggle in supplies regardless.
The Iraqi example confirms their argument. The people have been bled dry. There is
abundant proof that the ruling clique is becoming wealthier and that oil is being
smuggled out. At the end of January 2000, the British House of Commons issued a report
admitting the embargo had failed and expressing the hope that no other country would
ever be submitted to such an ordeal.
“Nearly all embargoes penalize civilians and boost the power of the political leaders
they aim to bring down,” says Bourdon, who nevertheless adds that “one can perhaps
say that developments in South Africa were the result of international sanctions
against apartheid.”
Along with others, he points to the excessive weight of the United States, backed
by its British ally, in Security Council decisions. He thinks the UN Charter should
be amended and UN decision-making procedures changed. In particular, victims of human
rights violations should be represented by a consultative committee attached to the
Security Council. “It’s unacceptable that the future of a whole people should be
in the hands of two states,” he says. “We can no longer allow states to pursue cynically
their regional or international interests, as is the case in Iraq.”
Many analysts, including Halliday and von Sponeck, think the embargo is being prolonged
so as to maintain the status quo in the Middle East. According to them, its protagonists
are in favour of a weak Iraq, without necessarily getting rid of a regime that prevents
the country splitting apart. These analysts say the break-up of Iraq, with a Kurdish
government in the north and a Shiite authority in the south, could destabilize a
region that provides the bulk of the oil needed by the major world powers and would
threaten key U.S. allies such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Furthermore, says
Halliday, maintaining tension in the region has enabled U.S. arms manufacturers to
sell about $100 billion worth of weaponry to Baghdad’s enemies.
But with the Western media increasingly outraged at the embargo and three members
of the UN Security Council (France, Russia and China) openly against continuing it,
von Sponeck sees a glimmer of hope. “I don’t think the sanctions will be extended
far into 2001,” he says, “but think of all the children who’ll die in the meantime.”
1.The rest was to go to
victims of the war with Kuwait (30 per cent), to the Kurdish lands in northern Iraq
not under Baghdad’s control (13 per cent) and to fund the operation of the embargo,
including the cost of maintaining UN troops.
2. Killing the Children of Iraq: a price worth paying?, by John Pilger (March
2000).
3. In Irak, la faute, by Alain Gresh, Cerf, Paris, 1999.
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