How Saddam Hussein Starves the People of Iraq
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 23, 2002
EVER SINCE Osama bin Laden listed, among his grievances against America, our country’s ongoing "mistreatment" of the Iraqi people, opponents of the current sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime have seized every opportunity to blame America for Iraq’s current suffering. Among the most notable members of the anti-sanctions chorus is the Washington, D.C.-based Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), which argues that America’s punitive sanctions have caused Iraq’s current poverty and misery. EPIC board member Ramzi Kysia contends that the sanctions have "resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths." In last week’s column I discussed the fact that the sanctions continue for one reason alone: because Saddam has steadfastly refused to abide by the surrender agreements he made following the Gulf War. But be that as it may, we must also ask a larger question: Why does Iraqi suffering continue at current levels? Is it in fact because of the sanctions?
It is commonly reported that some 4,500 children – undernourished and unable to access adequate medical care – die in Iraq’s poorly equipped hospitals each month. What goes unsaid, however, is that this oft-repeated claim is based entirely on dubious information derived from partial surveys conducted on small, unscientific samples of the population. Moreover, the claim relies primarily on official Iraqi information sources. Thus, while the Iraqi people’s suffering is real enough, it is likely that the mortality statistics so casually bandied about are grossly inflated.
Nor do anti-sanctions activists address the fact that a number of Iraqi hospitals do not, by any means, fit the common picture of poorly equipped, understaffed institutions. And, by what we are presumably to deem a remarkable coincidence, the better hospitals just happen to be those that serve the medical needs of Saddam and his supporters. The Saddam Cardiac Hospital, for instance, rivals western facilities in terms of equipment and staff. Doctors there recently performed elective cardiac surgery on a member of Saddam’s inner circle. Yet in the basement of that same hospital is a modern morgue where the corpses of babies are stored for what one Iraqi doctor euphemistically calls "purposes of the state." That is, these tiny cadavers are kept on hand for periodic display during mass funerals geared for the Western press – ceremonies designed to imprint, upon the outside world’s collective mind, the image of myriad infants supposedly exterminated by American sanctions.
The sanctions, however, do not prohibit food and medicine from reaching the people of Iraq. In response to the great public attention focused upon Iraq’s declining health and economic standards in recent years, the UN’s oil-for-food program has actually allowed Baghdad to increase its revenues from $4 billion in 1997 to more than $17 billion today. Yet Saddam’s regime sells many of the medicines it receives through that program to private hospitals at exorbitant prices. In turn, Saddam uses these profits to provide his military, security, and government personnel with such perks as extra food rations, Mercedes automobiles, and lavish monthly stipends.
Nor, by any means, does Saddam skimp on his own personal extravagances. Since the sanctions were put in place in 1990, he has spent at least $2 billion on the construction of scores of palaces and monuments to himself – all with funds that could have been used for food and medicine. In 1994 his Baathist regime completed the Saddam International Tower, a 300-foot-tall, state of the art government office facility. In 1999 Saddam inaugurated the opening of a remarkable place known as Saddamiat al Tharthar. Located 85 miles west of Baghdad, this sprawling lakeside vacation resort contains stadiums, an amusement park, hospitals, and 625 homes for government officials. During a period when most Iraqis have had to survive with far less than they were once accustomed to, Saddam’s personal wealth has soared to over $6 billion.
In 1999, when Iraq faced its worst drought in fifty years, the water reserves supplying Saddam’s region of Tikrit never fell below normal seasonal levels, while elsewhere in the country they were dangerously low. It seems that Saddam, the self-professed champion of suffering Iraqis, quietly diverted massive amounts of water to serve his own purposes – at the expense of the general population. And as if that weren’t insidious enough during a time of need and scarcity, his regime has sought every opportunity to sell food exports to other nations – food that was originally earmarked for hungry Iraqi citizens through the oil-for-food program. In October 1999, for instance, Allied patrols in the Persian Gulf stopped three ships that were carrying food out of Iraq. When such transactions are successfully completed, the money is used to fund Saddam’s military and other pet projects.
Today the U.S. and Britain are working to put in place new "smart sanctions" that would remove nearly all limits on trade with Iraq, and thereby vastly increase Baghdad’s foreign revenues. In exchange for these loosened trade restrictions, the new sanctions would strengthen the enforcement of existing arms-sales bans and anti-smuggling efforts. But even though this plan would greatly benefit the Iraqi population as a whole, Saddam has vehemently rejected it – obviously because it would hamper his military ambitions
To determine who is truly at fault for the Iraqi people’s current suffering, we need only look at what has happened in northern Iraq during this decade of sanctions. Since the Kurdish uprising that followed the Gulf War in 1991, northern Iraq has been independent of Saddam (and guarded by US and British patrols). Under the sanctions, this region receives 13 percent of Baghdad’s oil income, and is free to use the money to finance UN-approved projects. Unlike Saddam, the Kurdish regional government has actually used the oil money to fund such projects, as well as to supply its people with food and medicine. As a result, northern Iraq has been utterly transformed. Where Saddam’s infamous Anfal campaign once systematically gassed Kurds to death, Kurdish authorities are now clearing the region of mines and introducing agricultural and reforesting programs – programs financed by the oil-for-food money. The same area that once suffered the destruction of 4,000 villages, chemical weapons attacks, and the murder or disappearance of 182,000 Kurds and Turkmans, is actually flourishing – as evidenced by its recent construction of 20,000 new homes, 800 water systems, 600 schools, and 2,300 kilometers of new roads.
In stark contrast to the regions of Iraq under Saddam’s control, infant mortality in the north is actually lower than it was before the UN sanctions began. In south and central Iraq, the number of children failing to survive their first year of life rose from 47 per 1,000 births before the sanctions were in place, to 108 per 1,000 births after the sanctions were instituted. Meanwhile in the north, where the same sanctions apply, infant mortality decreased from 64 deaths per 1,000 births to 59 per 1,000 births. Moreover, fewer Kurdish babies are being born underweight, and fewer mothers are dying in pregnancy.
Also during the 1990s, deaths of children under age five in south and central Iraq more than doubled, from 56 deaths per 1,000 to 131 deaths per 1,000. In the north, by contrast, the death rate of such children decreased from 80 to 70 per 1,000. These numbers offer remarkably stark evidence that the suffering of Iraq’s overall population is due not to the sanctions, but to Saddam Hussein’s monstrous corruption.
frontpagemagazine.com |
