http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/GULFsanctions250298.shtml
Iraq: Misery and hardship: the darker side of UN
sanctions
Children are dying as doctors find it impossible to buy
drugs to cure them
Robert Fisk in Baghdad, THE INDEPENDENT 02/25/1998
Not long before Christmas last year, UN Assistant
Secretary General Denis Halliday - the bearded and
balding Irishman who heads the UN's oil- for-food
programme in Iraq - paid a visit to four small Iraqi children
suffering from leukaemia in the Saddam Hussein City
Hospital.
"The doctors told me they couldn't get the drugs to treat
them and I got involved with them," Mr Halliday says in his
cramped Baghdad office, the walls hanging with cheap
Arab rugs. "With a World Health Organisation colleague, I
managed to get the drugs they required - some from
Jordan, one from northern Iraq, which means it was
probably smuggled in from Turkey. Then I dropped in on
Christmas Eve to see the children in their ward. Two were
already dead. You know, the doctors who look after these
children are incredible characters - you can imagine the
effect on them of not having what they need to heal their
patients."
Mr Halliday is palpably torn by his task of distributing food
and medicine to 23 million Iraqis, all of whom are being
punished and some of whom are being left to die in appalling
hospital conditions because of Iraq's refusal to submit to full
UN arms inspections. At the same time as he was seeking
drugs for the leukaemia children, Halliday wrote an
impassioned letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
complaining that what the UN was doing in Iraq was
causing untold suffering to innocent people.
"I wrote that what we were doing was undermining the
moral credibility of the UN," he says. "I found myself in a
moral dilemma. It seemed to me that what we were doing
was in contradiction to the human rights provision in the
UN's own charter." It was Halliday's idea to permit Iraq to
export more oil - to increase it from US $2bn every six
months to $4bn. "I started selling the idea to the Russian,
Chinese and French ambassadors here and they were quick
to take it up and convey it to their capitals. The fact that this
was accomplished makes my conscience a bit easier."
But Iraq, whose UN sales are strictly monitored - 30 per
cent goes to compensate individuals, companies and
countries which suffered from Saddam Hussein's 1990
invasion of Kuwait - has not been allowed to use its oil
income to repair or maintain the decrepit and war-damaged
machinery in its oil fields. Allowed to export more
oil - it might have been permitted to sell more than $5bn
every six months - it is deprived of the means of doing so.
When Mr Halliday accompanied Mr Annan to see the Iraqi
Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan at the weekend, Mr
Ramadan complained bitterly that he had no spare parts to
increase the oil flow.
Now a commission of experts is to enter Iraq to see how
much it will cost to restore Iraq's pumping and refining
facilities. But a far more terrible fate awaits the Iraqi people.
With its electrical power stations producing less than 40 per
cent of capacity, water and sanitation systems are on the
point of breakdown. Hospitals in Basra are filthy, their
doctors forced to re-use rubber gloves during operations,
their wards without air conditioning or clean water. Without
electrical pumps, water is falling in the pipes and sewage is
being sucked into the vacuum. To restore full electrical
current will cost a further minimum $6bn.
"The government here used to encourage the use of infant
formula, and infant formula with contaminated water is a
real killer," Mr Halliday says. "In the south, water and
sanitation have broken down. Some of the damage was
done by American bombing [in 1991], probably other
damage during the Iran-Iraq war. The reason the Iraqis
were slow to move on the oil- for-food programme [it was
almost two years before Iraq agreed to the system] is
because they see this as a national humiliation. They're
being given handouts, and it's their own money."
Mr Halliday is a Dublin-born Quaker who worked in Kenya
and Iran before joining the UN's bureaucracy in New York;
and he is a man who has no great trust in the sanctions
which he is helping to impose. "I think the international
community has got to find some alternative to sanctions," he
says. "... we need to find a way of separating the leadership
from the people. One way is to stop arms sales. If there
could really be control on sales of arms, there could really be
controls."
Most of the rejected Iraqi industrial requests are turned
down by the UN because of possible dual purpose use. "The
Iraqi director general of railways was telling me the other
day that he ordered some spare parts for his diesel locos in
1988 and paid 4 million French francs for them. Because of
the sanctions, he hasn't got them yet. It's a typical dual
purpose problem - trains can be used to transport soldiers."
Area electric power generators in Iraq are desperately in
deed of turbine parts, each of which has to be
custom-manufactured. The UN has been delaying supplies.
But Mr Halliday worries more about the long-term future of
Iraqis, those who survive the UN's punishing sanctions.
"There are men and women now in their 20s and 30s and
40s who have known little more than the Iran- Iraq war, the
Gulf war and the sanctions. They see themselves as
surrounded by unfriendly people, and a very unsympathetic
America and Britain. They are out of touch ... They have no
access to Western television. And these are the people who
are going to have to run this country in the future. They are
feeling alienated and very Iraqi-introverted. Their
next-door neighbours are going to have a tough time
dealing with these people."
