JBE:More on Iraq. This article quotes figures from Amnesty International.
And this is supposed to be a country that threatens the world. A big lie of Hitlerian proportions.
T E A R S O F C H I L D R E N...AND SHAME FOR US ALL
"In a small grocery store in a poor area of
Baghdad early one morning I watched a child
of perhaps five...proudly doing a terribly
important errand: he bought one egg. A tray
of 30 eggs exceeds a university professor's
monthly salary... As he left, the child
dropped the egg. He fell to the floor,
frantically trying to pick the shell, yolk
and white, with his small hands, tears
streaming down his face."
W H A T H A S B E E N D O N E T O I R A Q
By K. Shreeram*
As Washington and London prepare to bomb Iraq, the ritual human
sacrifice of Iraqis continues unabated. Corpses continue to pile up,
victims of Washington's cynical and duplicitous policies in the Middle
East.
The statistics may be old hat now, but the dead are not -- more than
250 people, mostly children under 5, die each day because of sanctions,
according to a UNICEF report released in April. More than one-and-a-
half million faceless, nameless, and relatively unreported brown people
have been killed by the sanctions imposed in 1990. That's about 5
percent of Iraq's pre-sanctions population. In percentage terms, that
is equivalent to about 13 million dead Americans. The World Food
Programme says more than 1.2 million Iraqi children died due to the
embargo between August 1990 and August 1997 -- a generation sanctioned
into nonexistence.
The per capita income of Iraq has gone from $2,900 a year to $60 a
year. A can of powdered milk costs as much as one month of a doctor's
salary. Surgery is conducted routinely without anesthesia. Sanitation
facilities are abysmal. Fifty percent of the rural population does not
have access to potable water, compared to a 92 percent access rate in
1990. The majority of Iraqis has been on a semi-starvation diet for the
last few years, according to the World Health Organization. Infant
mortality has increased six-fold since 1990. The once exemplary and
free public health system has been decimated. Inflation has increased
astronomically. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization,
the price of wheat flour in August 1995 was 11,677 times higher (1.16
million percent) than in July 1990. Crime has skyrocketed.
"This is a town where people used to leave the key in the front door,
leave their cars unlocked, where crime was almost unknown. We have,
through the sanctions, really disrupted this quality of life, the
standard of behavior that was common in Iraq before," said Denis
Halliday, who in September resigned his post as co-ordinator of the UN
oil-for-food deal in Iraq.
Writing in the New Internationalist earlier this year, Felicity
Arbuthnot describes a little incident she witnessed in Iraq: "In a
small grocery store in a poor area of Baghdad early one morning I
watched a child of perhaps five, in the mode of small children
everywhere, proudly doing a terribly important errand: he bought one
egg. A tray of 30 eggs exceeds a university professor's monthly
salary....As he left, the child dropped the egg. He fell to the floor,
frantically trying to pick the shell, yolk and white, with his small
hands, tears streaming down his face. As I reached in my pocket, the
shopkeeper gently tapped him on the shoulder and gave him another."
Among the items banned by the Security Council from export to Iraq are
adhesive tape, soccer balls, bags, bicycles, books, calculators, candle
sticks, toys, children's clothing, shoelaces, lamps, detergents, dolls,
eyeglasses, hairpins, paper clips and medical supplies.
The list is endless.
The loss of life caused by the sanctions has made Sadaam Hussein's
human rights record virtually pale into insignificance. Amnesty
International estimates that Hussein's regime killed 130,000 people
between 1979 and 1989. In eight years, the sanctions have killed more
than 10 times that number.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, in a Nov. 11 letter to Sir
John Weston at the Permanent Mission of UK to the UN calls the
sanctions " a violation of the Genocide Convention." He goes on to say
"the notion that Iraq is a threat to the region is a false fantasy
created by the U.S. to justify its vast military presence in the
region, to dominate the oil resources and to contain Islam."
Others, such as Halliday, have pointed out that the sanctions violate
the Geneva Convention -- which prohibits the starvation of civilians as
a means of warfare -- as well as the Declaration of Human Rights and
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And what of Washington's duplicity? "Israel occupies territory
illegally for thirty years, it violates the Geneva conventions at will,
conducts invasions, terrorist attacks and assassinations against Arabs,
and still, the US vetoes every sanction against it in the UN. Syria,
Sudan, Libya, Iraq are classified as "rogue" states. Sanctions against
them are far harsher than against any other countries in the history of
US foreign policy. And still the US expects that its own foreign policy
agenda ought to prevail," wrote Columbia University professor Edward
Said, in Al-Hayat newspaper in London.
And, speaking of the weapons of mass destruction that Washington claims
ad nauseum to be so concerned about, a UN General Assembly committee on
Tuesday, Nov. 10, voted 134 - 2 asking Israel "not to develop,
produce, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, and to renounce
possession of nuclear weapons," and to sign the Nuclear Non-
proliferation Treaty (NPT). The two countries voting against the
resolution were Israel and the United States.
And in the wake of admissions by UNSCOM chief Richard Butler that UN
inspectors had shared intelligence information with Israel, and
allegations last week by a British MP that five UNSCOM inspectors were
undercover Israeli Mossad agents, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
flatly refused to endorse military strikes against Iraq.
"There is not a single Arab country which backs a recourse to force
against Iraq, and all are preoccupied by the lot of the Iraqi people,"
he told Egyptian Ministers of Parliament Tuesday, Nov. 10.
But Washington's hypocrisy, of course, neither begins nor ends with
Israel. We live in a country that was the only one to have ever dropped
a nuclear bomb on human beings, a country that is the world's largest
stockpiler of weapons of mass destruction, and one that has over the
last 50 years installed and supported some of the most murderous
dictators the world has seen. To hear officials of this country speak
self-righteously of the need to eliminate Iraqi weapons and Iraqi
violations of international law should turn anyone's stomach.
But historic amnesia and a history-starved populace guarantee settled
stomachs in the United States even as that government's policy ensures
that, a world away, little food makes its way into the hungry mouths of
brown children with shrunken bellies who will join the dead before they
have had a chance to live.
* K. Shreeram is former news editor of the late Guardian (N.Y.). |
