According to UNICEF, 83 per cent of the country’s primary schools are in need of
repair as a result of the embargo.
Every month, malnutrition kills more than 4,500 Iraqi children under five |
Children are the first
victims of the international sanctions against Iraq. More and more of them are living
on the street in a country that has reverted to under-development
 Two
small children are standing hand in hand on the main street of the southern Iraqi
port of Basra. Evening is drawing in and the traders are starting to pull down the
metal screens in front of their shops. The smiling youngsters, less than eight years
old, are trying to sell to passersby their sole possessions—a couple of red and white
striped plastic bags. “We won’t quit the street until we’ve earned some money,” they
say, as we are joined by 40-odd other street children who have no wares left to sell.
They all talk at once. They left school, they say, because they failed their studies.
They don’t live at home because their parents are “divorced or out of work” and “they
have to live on their wits”. As the last shopkeepers switch off their electricity
generators, the street darkens. The youngest of the group, a boy hardly six years
old, steps forward and says he “wants to go to school”.
How long will it be before the world realises the dramatic effects the international
embargo is having on the people of Iraq and especially on their children? Iraq and
the Iraqis have been ruined by two wars1, but damaged even more by the
international sanctions imposed nearly a decade ago after Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s
troops invaded Kuwait.
Every month, malnutrition kills more than 4,500 Iraqi children under five, according
to estimates of a UNICEF
survey released
in August 1999. How many more deaths must there be before people realise what is
going on? There were hardly any street children a decade ago, when all youngsters
went to school. Today their numbers are growing. In Iraq, it is illegal to work or
beg under the age of 15, and street kids are punished for committing these offences.
When they are arrested, they are usually sent to detention centres where conditions
are very harsh. Some then manage to get to El Rahma (“Mercy”), Baghdad’s only reception
centre for street children, where conditions are better but carers are few.2
Adopting children is legal, unlike in other Muslim countries, but is not very common,
says Jabir Aboud Hamid, who runs the centre. He sees only two ways of getting the
children back into society: “Find the boys’ families and arrange marriages for the
girls.” The latter risk death if they return home after living in “run-down places”
(the street). “But before I start looking for something for them,” says Hamid, “I’ve
got to find a new battery for the centre’s car so I can go and buy bread for the
children.”
In Iraq today, every sector has urgent needs, says a UNICEF official in Baghdad: “We’re
doing the work the government can’t do any longer because of the embargo, like building
clinics, houses and schools, repairing drains, water treatment plants, printing presses
and chalk factories. It’s an enormous job and we have to work fast to save the children.
Most of all, we’ve got to get them back into school so this ‘embargo generation’
isn’t lost to the country.”
Over the past 10 years, the government’s education budget has shrunk by 90 per cent,
from $230 million in 1991 to $23 million today. As many as 83 per cent of primary
schools need to be repaired. Some have been totally destroyed, while others are working
at “full capacity”. At Diala school, on the road between Baghdad and Basra, the pupils
take turns learning in four-hour shifts in classrooms with broken benches and desks,
bare electrical wiring, ceilings with holes and floors under water.
Despair reigns in the public health department. “They say Iraq makes arms using anti-cancer
medicine and chlorine needed for water purification,” exclaims Abdul Amir El Thamery.
“Do we have to stand and watch people die? Must children fall ill because the water
is undrinkable? And what’s going to happen in the summer heat when illness, death
and malnutrition are already so common?”
1. The war with Iran between
1980 and 1988 and the Gulf War in 1990-1991.
2. Jointly run by the Iraqi government and the French NGO Enfants du monde.
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