Sanctions against Iraq

Matt Barr

think twice · archives · 2002

This page is an edited transcript of a talk given by Matt Barr at the Think Twice Conference in Cambridge, on 23 March 2002.

It is accompanied by slides which Matt showed during the talk. Follow the links on the inline images for larger versions.

• Sanctions: the background
• Going to Iraq with VIW
• Healthcare
• De-development
• Western policy in Iraq
• The "war on terror"
• What we can do
• Questions and answers

Sanctions: the background

The origin of the sanctions

Sanctions were imposed on Iraq by the United Nations Security Council on August 6, 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait. They were originally imposed to get Iraq out of Kuwait, but that didn't happen without the use of military force. After the Gulf War sanctions were maintained on different grounds, namely weapons of mass destruction, which is quite a topical subject at the moment, and something that I will talk about later. The sanctions policy is maintained predominantly by the United States, but it's backed very rigorously by the UK.

During the six weeks of the Gulf War, the Coalition dropped more bombs on Iraq than were dropped in the entirety of the Second World War bar the two atom bombs. They deliberately - and illegally - targeted civilian infrastructure: sewage plants, electrical plants, water purification plants. Under the sanctions Iraq can't import the parts that they need to rebuild these plants.

Sanctions have destroyed the economy of Iraq. when I was there last December we were carrying around 250 Iraqi dinar notes, which in 1990 when sanctions were imposed didn't exist because they would have been worth $500. In December they were worth 12 cents.

Death by sanctions

UNICEF stated in 1999 that, as a consequence of economic sanctions, in excess of 500,000 children under the age of five had died in Iraq that wouldn't otherwise have done. Robin Cook, the former, Foreign Secretary, and Jack Straw, the current one, have both denied this statistic. But if you look at UNICEF's website you can see diagrams like this. It shows that the mortality rate for children under five gradually falls from 1960 until 1990, when it shoots back up to roughly the level of 1970. Then it flattens off and has remained at about that level since.

This is a similar diagram, also from UNICEF, but the red mark shows where economic sanctions were imposed. The dotted line is a hypothetical continuation of the pre-1990 graph. If the mortality rates had continued to decline as they had over the last three or four decades, then the children in this space here wouldn't have died. In addition, UNICEF recently stated that there are 800,000 children under the age of five who are chronically malnourished in Iraq.

Oil For Food

In 1995 or 1996, a Security Council Resolution was passed which allowed Iraq to export a limited amount of oil in return for humanitarian goods - the so-called Oil For Food programme. Initially, they were only allowed to export up to a billion dollars' worth of oil in a six-month period. The money would sit in an account in New York, and the Iraqi government could then apply to the Security Council, which controlled the money, for basic humanitarian goods that it required. The Security Council could say yes, no, or maybe, as to whether these goods could be imported into Iraq or not. A similar situation exists today under subsequent resolutions. There's no longer a cap on the amount of oil that Iraq can sell, though unfortunately the capacity to produce oil is very much reduced. The basic structure of the Oil For Food programme is still the same: the Iraqi government never physically get their hands on the money from the oil they sell, but they can apply for certain goods.

What Jack Straw said recently in The Times on 5th March, and what Robin Cook used to say when he was foreign secretary, is that the Oil For Food programme provides sufficiently for the Iraqi people. But the humanitarian panel that was set up by the Security Council actually say that the Oil For Food programme doesn't provide enough for the Iraqi people and was never set up to so.

Going to Iraq with VIW

I was in Iraq last December with a delegation from Voices in the Wilderness, which is a sanctions-breaking organisation. We took medicines and toys to sick and dying children, which was a criminal act under UK domestic law because it broke the sanctions, so I am legally a criminal and liable to five years' imprisonment. If you're an American, it's twelve years and a million dollar fine. However, Voices in the Wilderness have been taking medicines out to Iraq since 1996 - I was on the forty-first delegation - and so far only two people have been arrested. One was Milan Rai, the co-founder of Voices UK, who was also on the delegation in December. They were in prison for about three weeks before they were let out without charge. So no one's actually been charged yet for sanctions breaking.

It's a difficult topic to talk about and I sometimes think it odd that it's something that I got involved in. Anybody who is old enough remembers the demonisation of Iraq, especially Saddam Hussein, in 1990/91 at the beginning of the Gulf War, and it's easy, because of what happened in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in Iraq, to condemn the entire country. But there are twenty-three million people in Iraq, and the ones I met when I was there were the most friendly, welcoming, generous people I'd ever met, even though I came from a country that has almost annihilated theirs with sanctions.

I'd like to show you some slides, some of I took while I was there. This is a shot of Baghdad, taken in 1998 by Milan Rai, and it's a nice shot to start with: sunset in Iraq. It's bizarre, but Baghdad is probably the most peaceful, mellow place I've ever been in my life. Everybody is so laid back it's unbelievable.

Healthcare

Equipment

This picture highlights some of the problems with the Oil For Food programme. It's a picture, taken in 1998, of an incubator (for underweight children and premature babies) that was purchased through the Oil For Food programme. But it doesn't have a thermostat in it, so it doesn't work. There are various reasons why this might be. It quite often happens that when an order is made under the Oil For Food programme, one or more parts of the order are deemed "dual usage" by the Security Council, so they refuse to let them in. Alternatively the thermostat may just be broken - the bureaucracy of the Oil For Food programme is such that it could take months to get a replacement.

It's also difficult to get the right equipment. Iraq, being in the Middle East, is incredibly hot, and some incubators allowed in by the Security Council are designed to work at temperatures below 40°C. With the electrical problems that Iraq has, they can't air-condition the hospitals sufficiently for this to work. This is another incubator that went out under the Oil For Food programme, but it doesn't even have a plug on the end of it, so it is almost useless. Again this could be a communication issue - the Security Council assuming that plugs are easy to get hold of - or it could just be that it's not wired up because it's meant to work in climates and conditions that are not the same as the ones that it's used in, so it wouldn't work anyway. If you get sent the wrong incubator, you can't just put it back in the post and expect an exchange next week.

Access

Healthcare in Iraq is still, for the vast majority of people, free - if they can get to the hospitals. And that's where it breaks down. The kids that I'm going to show you in these next slides are the lucky ones, the ones that got to hospital. Whether they leave hospital alive or not is a different story.

This is an eight year old boy called Ahmed, who I met in hospital in Baghdad on the first day I was in Iraq. He's being treated for leukaemia. Now, the cost for his mother to stay in Baghdad with him, to be there and look after him, was 30,000 Iraqi dinar a week. In our terms, this is a pittance, but her husband was only earning 30,000 dinar in a month, an exceptionally good wage in Iraq. The average wage for a nurse is about 12 to 15,000 dinar. When three of us were sitting round and had three bowls of soup and two cups of coffee, it came to 12,000 dinar, about the same as a nurse's monthly wage.

This family were from about 100km north of Baghdad. She had come to bring him and stay with him, but she couldn't really afford to be there, so they had to start selling anything that they had so that she could stay with him. He'd relapsed - he'd been treated in 1998 successfully and gone home, and then he'd relapsed about a month before we got there, and his prognosis was very bad - there was a 70% chance that he would die within two weeks, while we were there.

Underlying causes

This is a girl called Saja, who's four months old and broke my heart, because a child who is four months old should be six kilogrammes in weight and this baby was four. In effect a third of her body weight at four months old wasn't there, which results in stunted mental and physical growth. And this was a result simply of diarrhoea, which was caused by the surroundings where she lived, just outside Baghdad - her mother had a small farm on the north-east suburbs of Baghdad. Again her prognosis was incredibly bad - an 80% chance that she would die within a week if they couldn't get the weight back on her.

She was on an antibiotic programme which had been interrupted. Some medicines are blocked, but the vast majority are allowed into Iraq, so why had the programme been interrupted? Unfortunately, because of power cuts and because they're not allowed refrigeration units, it's very difficult for them to have enough medicines on hand, because they have no way of storing them properly. They bring them in as they need them, but if there's a sudden rush of some illness in a certain hospital, they might run out of basic drugs. And I saw on her chart, the doctor explained it to me, that she'd had this antibiotic on three out of the five times that she needed it, which simply isn't enough. If she had had the proper course of treatment, her prognosis would have been much better. But the fact remains that she's living in the conditions that she's living in, and I'll talk about that a bit later on, that caused her diarrhoea in the first place. I asked the doctor, "What would happen if you could put the weight back on her now and she went home?" He said that she would be almost certain to relapse, because of the conditions that she lives in.

De-development

The problem

When I was in Baghdad we stayed in a hotel, which is basically a requirement of the government - to get a visa you have to stay in certain places. But, luckily I was out in Baghdad with Cathy Kelly, who founded Voices in the Wilderness in 1996. She's been out here fifteen times and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice. As a consequence, we were given a certain amount of leeway that we probably wouldn't have otherwise, so when we went to Basra, which is six hours south by car, and the second city in Iraq, we were allowed to stay with families in their homes that Cathy had met when she was out there the previous year.

This is a district in Basra called Jimariyah, which is one of the poorest areas in Basra, and these are some of the children that I met. None of them spoke any English, and I speak about three words of Arabic, so communication was very difficult. But they were incredibly playful, very energetic, and just very youthful, which was wonderful to see.

We arrived in Basra very late at night, and it had been raining the whole time we were there, so I got out of the car and was covered in mud and we went into this house. It was Ramadan so everybody had just broken their fast, because the sun had just gone down, so there was a nice upbeat family atmosphere. We got up the next morning at about eight o'clock - most people were already up so they could eat before the sun rose - and I went outside and I realised what it was I'd been walking in the night before.

This is a picture of a child with a young brother or sister. But these open ruts you see which run all the way down this street, and all through the district, contain raw sewage, flushed out from backed up toilets. This pipe you can see here comes straight out of somebody's house. This is their sewage and plumbing system, and it's these kind of conditions that breed the diarrhoea and diseases that are killing children in Iraq.

So when I woke up and went outside the house, the sun had come up and the heat had evaporated some of it and the smell was in the air, and it was so overpowering that I almost fainted. But these children are running around in this stuff, and very few of them are wearing shoes and if they are, they're open sandals. But look at the smile on her face. You'd see four or five year old kids running around playing without shoes on, with huge grins on their face, infectiously happy. But then, these children have never known anything else. They weren't alive in 1991. So all they've known is a country suffering from annihilation from the Gulf War, and then from the sanctions policy which has not allowed them to rebuild it. So they walk around in human waste with broad grins on their faces.

The causes

I was doing a radio interview with BBC London Radio a couple of weeks back about Iraq. I talked about four month old babies dying, and raw sewage in people's homes. The interviewer said, "Matt, that's characteristic of a third world country," and he's right, it is. But in 1990 Iraq wasn't a third world country - it was close to being a first world country. The education system, the social security system, the health system, the sewage systems, the water purification systems, had all been modernised. So they've gone from relative affluence to complete poverty. One result is that all their systems are run by state of the art computers and rely on the electrical sector, which no longer exists. Iraq won an international award in, I think, 1987 for their progress in eradicating illiteracy. In the last ten years, there's only one country in the world whose literacy rates have dropped, and it is Iraq.

In Baghdad we met UN officials on the ground there, who have been in Iraq prior to the sanctions, prior to the Gulf War, and since. We were talking to the head of the United Nations Development Programme. He said that if, by design or by fault, a single power station was hit in an attack, the whole national grid could go out. The grid is on a circular system, so if one plant is overloaded and bottoms out, that load is passed on to another plant, and if that plant cannot take the load it too bottoms out and there's a chain effect. We said, surely if that happened you could communicate ahead that the plant's going down and do something about it? He said yes, you're right - you could prevent this chain reaction, if you had the computers and the telecommunications systems to do it. But the Security Council won't let Iraq have them. The computers that run sewage plants and electricity plants are the same computers that run defence systems - that's the world we live in. So the Security Council label them dual usage, and they are not allowed into Iraq.

In Basra, we went to a sewage plant about 12km outside the city. When it was built in the 1970s it was a state of the art sewage plant. When we saw it, it wasn't even turned on. We said to the engineer, why isn't it on? It's been raining for two days, the sewage is backing up, people are dying in Basra, why isn't this on? He said: it doesn't work. One of the components needed a turbine to work, to filter off the hard water from the sludge, and it didn't work, probably just through decay because these things wear over time. And the Security Council again wouldn't let them have this turbine because - the reason he said that they gave him - they could have used that turbine to power a ventilation system in a factory making biological or chemical weapons. So they can't have it.

When I was in Basra, which is south of the 36th parallel, which is a no-fly zone, a US or UK fighter plane, I don't know which, flew over. The air raid siren ran on, and they could have dropped munitions - it's a fairly constant thing - but no one batted an eyelid; everyone carried on as though it wasn't there. There were threats that there would be military action while we were there - I don't think any of us really believed it would happen, but there were threats and posturing that it would. We asked a lot of Iraqi people, what is it like living under the threat of bombing? They said: living under the threat of bombing's nothing; try living under sanctions.

Western policy in Iraq

The Ameriyah massacre

In Baghdad we went to the Ameriyah shelter, which some of you might have heard of. In 1991 during the Gulf War, this shelter was hit by two Tomahawk cruise missiles by the United States. It was a biological fallout shelter: it was meant to be sealed and had water purification, showers, and basic facilities so that up to about 350 people could survive for a prolonged period in case of a biological chemical or nuclear attack. It wouldn't be able to sustain a direct strike, but it would be able to survive an atmosphere that was polluted by such an attack. During the Gulf War women and children were allowed to use the shelter at night, when the coalition were undertaking the vast majority of their bombings, and as I said, it was struck twice.

Details of what happened have been released via the Freedom of Information Act in America. A Swiss company built this, and the American government got the detailed plans from the Swiss company, and found a weakness in the outer shell of the building. Then they struck it once with a missile and created the hole that you can just about see in the roof; and then they sent the second one through that hole and incinerated everybody inside. To this day, they still haven't apologised for it. They freely admit that they did it, but they haven't apologised. The shelter has been left as it was that day - it's a wreckage - and as you walk around it you can see pictures of babies, women and children that died.

The withdrawal of inspectors

In 1991, after the Gulf War, a weapons inspector team called UNSCOM went into Iraq and started dismantling and monitoring weapons of mass destruction. It was part of a Security Council Resolution that sanctions will remain in place until Iraq have been disarmed of weapons of mass destruction. But Madeleine Albright, of the Clinton administration, said that even if Iraq complied with the monitoring and verification, they still wouldn't lift sanctions. You've got the US which, in effect, imposes sanctions on Iraq saying: even if you adhere to your responsibilities on weapons of mass destruction, we will not lift sanctions.

Contrary to what is often reported, weapons inspectors were not expelled from Iraq. They were withdrawn by the United States on 15th December 1998. The next day Operation Desert Fox began, an intensive bombing campaign that lasted for four days. Since then weapons inspectors have not been back.

Cathy Kelly was in Baghdad during the four-day Desert Fox campaign. The next day she went round the hospitals, and she saw children with limbs amputated, people whose houses had been hit. Three months before that attack, Kofi Annan had brokered a peace deal with Iraq, which averted an attack that America and Britain had planned. And the American government had done a systems report of what the consequences of this four-day bombing would be, and they found that at a minimum 10,000 civilians would die indirectly as a result of that bombing. Three month's later they went ahead with the same plan the same targets, and presumably therefore the same knowledge that 10,000 civilians would die as a result.

Madeleine Albright was also asked whether she felt that the fact that more children had died in Iraq than people died in the Hiroshima bomb was a price worth paying. She said, I think it's hard to estimate but yes, we think the price is worth it. That was an open declaration of a policy of genocide. So what happened to Madeleine Albright? She went on to hold the highest position a woman has ever held in American administration.

Weapons of mass destruction

I read an article by Jack Straw in The Times where he said Iraq are producing weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam is spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on them. Now that's very strange, because the way the Oil For Food programme works, the Iraqi government never sees any of the money from the oil revenues; it stays in an account in New York, so I don't know where he's getting the money from to make these things. But the fundamental point is that if it he is building weapons of mass destruction, and they can prove it, then sanctions have not worked. In excess of 500,000 children under the age of five are dead, 800,000 are chronically malnourished, as a result of a sanctions policy that, if he's building weapons of mass destruction, has not worked! I cannot understand how our leaders can say: we're going to continue with this policy because it's preventing him from accumulating these weapons, and at the same time that he's accumulating them anyway.

The "war on terror"

Before I went to Iraq I was over in America on a Walk for Peace and Healing with six family members of victims of September 11th, who were calling for peaceful, non-violent solutions to what happened on September 11th. We walked from Washington DC to New York City behind a banner saying "Our grief is not a cry for war".

Like all of you, I'm sure, I was horrified by the footage of September 11, but when I hear about it now, having met these people, I feel it personally. Amber Arnoldson lost her husband in the Pentagon; at the time she had a two year old daughter called Charlotte and a five year old son called Elliott. And I stood by his grave as she wept with the Pentagon in the background with a hole in it where the plane had hit. I walked through New York City with David Patorti, whose brother was in the Twin Towers, who burst into tears as we walked past the site. I met people who told me horrific stories about the family members that they lost, and it is one of the most painful things I've ever had to listen to. These people are my friends, and I love them, and it's very difficult for me to sit back and calmly talk about the threat of terrorism now. But the fact is that if we go to war with Iraq, the people who will suffer are civilians.

Kelly Campbell lost her brother-in-law September 11th. She's just got back from Afghanistan. She went out there because she wanted to meet victims of the Coalition bombing out there, herself being a victim of terrorism and violence. She told me a story about her niece Charlotte, who's two years old, and they weren't sure whether or not she understood properly what happened to her father. Kelly was walking with her down to the park on the army base where he worked, and Charlotte turned round and said "I used to come here with daddy", and then she said "Somebody flew a plane into daddy's work and now he's dead".

When Kelly was in Afghanistan, she went to a hospital in Kabul and saw a ten year old child who had parts of his fingers missing on one of his hands. And she spoke to him through an interpreter and asked him what had happened to him and he said that he'd been playing with a friend of his, and his friend knelt down to pick up a yellow package. He turned round to his friend and screamed, "Don't pick that up, do not pick that up", and he stood there and he watched his friend explode, and the explosion took off part of his hand. She met children that had reverted to infantile states, who could no longer speak. She met a woman who had had eight children; she'd taken two of them up the road, and she'd come home and her house was rubble and five of her children and her husband inside, because a bomb had gone astray.

Now I'm sure there are lots of differing opinions about what should have happened as a result of September 11th. But Kelly Campbell, who lost her brother-in-law, said to me: on September 12th they knew where Bin Laden was, now they don't, and thousands of people are dead as a result of what happened. Yes, the Taliban aren't there any more, but these people have no homes, they don't have families, they've been traumatised in ways that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Cathy Kelly told us about a mother she'd met in Iraq who'd lost her son to a bomb that had been dropped in the no-fly zones - not in Operation Desert Fox, not in any war, just in the continual bombings of the no-fly zones. She said to Cathy, "I know what suffering is, and I don't want any mother anywhere else to feel what I feel." These are the people who are paying the price for our policies in Iraq, and if there's a war there, they're the ones who will suffer.

What we can do

But there's a lot that we can do to stop this from happening.

This is a picture from 1998 of a child receiving oxygen. It's not pure oxygen, it's industrial oxygen, because they had nothing else, administered through a tiny little tube inserted up her nose which was almost pointless. Six months later they were able to provide a facial mask. It wasn't perfect, they're still using impure oxygen, but it was better than it was before.

This is a picture of a girl I took in Baghdad in December, three or four months ago. That is pure oxygen being pumped, and that is a proper medical mask that is being used.

The Oil For Food programme cannot meet the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, but it does bring some benefit. And the Oil For Food programme came about from public pressure. But there's a new resolution that's going to come out in May called Smart Sanctions, and they're smart in the same way that smart bombs are - they're not. They are exactly the same as the current sanctions but there's a green list instead of a red list. It's just a PR offensive.

131 MPs have backed an Early Day Motion that says there's not sufficient evidence to justify strikes on Iraq at present. Write to your MP and get them to sign up to that Early Day Motion. That is something you can do.

The United Nations Development Programme said that if the American government lifts the holds that it has on contracts - at the moment there are five billion dollars worth of holds on contracts with Iraq - then within three years they would be able to produce enough electricity for the entire nation for 99% of the time. In three years they could almost reverse the situation. It would be a huge advance. Kofi Annan has said that he has troubles with the fact that these holds are on. The evidence is out there for anyone to see. And there are things you can do. Barrage Jack Straw, Tony Blair, your MP. Get these people to stand up and do what they're there to do, because it's in our hands now.

Questions and answers

Government of Iraq

I'd like to know a little bit more about what kind of government Saddam Hussein runs, and what effect sending money to that government will have in Iraq, because that's one of the arguments that's used against lifting the sanctions.

It's true that the government has an appalling human rights record. I'm sure you are aware of what happened in the late 1980s in the northern regions of Iraq - with American support. But sanctions have perversely made Saddam stronger because of the way the Oil For Food programme works. No individual in Iraq can export or import goods in or out of Iraq; they have to go via the Iraqi government, which empowers the government in a way that they weren't empowered before. Only the government can import the goods that are needed to support the whole country, so it is very difficult to de-link between the two, and it's an issue that I constantly have to battle with, being a human rights worker before I got involved with sanctions. But you can have an arms embargo without an economic embargo, and Voices want the economic sanctions lifted, but we support the arms embargo. They're fundamentally different but they get put in the same basket.

Also to me, appalling as they are, human rights violations by the Iraqi government don't justify more human rights violations by us. There's 4,000 children under the age of five dying every month in Iraq because of sanctions, so, far more people have died as a result of our policies that are supposedly to protect them.

What else can we do?

What would you recommend should be done about governments that are violating human rights to their own people?

The situation in Iraq is bizarre, because when Iraq was committing its human rights violations they were being economically supported by the US and the UK, and now they use them as justifications for what they're doing now. So the first thing is you've got to get in there straight away - as soon as you hear about a violation you've got to sort it out. People like Saddam Hussein could be up in the World Court if America hadn't vetoed the resolution that was going to set up a World Court in the first place.

The problem is that we have international law that some countries are allowed to flout and some aren't. I think the most important thing is that if you have laws they need to be adhered to. One very good way would be to set precedents in our own actions. If the United States and the United Kingdom undertook themselves the actions that they preached, then it would be a lot harder for other countries to say, why do I need to adhere to that if you're not going to?