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 humansacrifice of Iraqis
continues unabated. Corpses continue to pile up,victims of Washington's cynical and
duplicitous policies in the MiddleEast.
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, thestandard of behavior that was common in Iraq
before," said DenisHalliday, who in September resigned his post as co-ordinator of
the UNoil-for-food deal in Iraq.
Writing in the New Internationalist earlier this year, FelicityArbuthnot 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 areadhesive tape,
soccer balls, bags, bicycles, books, calculators, candlesticks, 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 SirJohn 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 violatethe Geneva
Convention -- which prohibits the starvation of civilians asa 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 territoryillegally 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
againstthem are far harsher than against any other countries in the history ofUS foreign
policy. And still the US expects that its own foreign policyagenda ought to prevail,"
wrote Columbia University professor EdwardSaid, in Al-Hayat newspaper in London.
And, speaking of the weapons of mass destruction that Washington claimsad nauseum to be
so concerned about, a UN General Assembly committee onTuesday, 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 UNinspectors had
shared intelligence information with Israel, andallegations last week by a British MP that
five UNSCOM inspectors wereundercover Israeli Mossad agents, Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarakflatly refused to endorse military strikes against Iraq.
"There is not a single Arab country which backs a recourse to forceagainst 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 withIsrael. We live in a
country that was the only one to have ever droppeda nuclear bomb on human beings, a
country that is the world's largeststockpiler of weapons of mass destruction, and one that
has over thelast 50 years installed and supported some of the most murderousdictators the
world has seen. To hear officials of this country speakself-righteously of the need to
eliminate Iraqi weapons and Iraqiviolations of international law should turn anyone's
stomach.
But historic amnesia and a history-starved populace guarantee settledstomachs in the
United States even as that government's policy ensuresthat, a world away, little food
makes its way into the hungry mouths ofbrown children with shrunken bellies who will join
the dead before theyhave had a chance to live.
* K. Shreeram is former news editor of the late Guardian (N.Y.).
