An interview with
DENIS HALLIDAY - Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq -
Conducted by Miriam Ryle. Recorded by Grant Wakefield in London, April 17th 1999.
Q. Please could you introduce yourself?
A. My name is Denis Halliday. I've been the Assistant Secretary-General in the United Nations for four years before I retired, and prior to retirement I became the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq for the so-called Oil-For-Food (O.F.F.) programme, set up by the Security Council to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Iraq created by the impact of sanctions.
Q. Do you think that the O.F.F. programme is an adequate measure to address the needs of the Iraqi people?
A. The O.F.F. programme as conceived is completely inadequate. It was designed in fact not to resolve the situation, but to prevent further deterioration of both mortality rates and malnutrition. It has failed to do that; at best it has just about sustained the situation. It's grossly underfunded, and it has not even begun to address the needs, the dietary needs of the Iraqi people. It's producing quantity at best, and even that [ration] amounts to about three weeks out of four in terms of need quantitatively. In terms of quality it falls very short. There are no animal proteins in the programme, no vitamins, no minerals, so it's a very inadequate diet. And on top of that you have a medical sector which gobbles up the rest of the money to a great extent, so again we have not managed to provide the basic the needs of the Iraqi people. There's a great shortage of antibiotics and all of the sophisticated drugs to which Iraq was used to, given the high standard of medical care prior to 1990. And the balance of the sectors that desperately need money, such as electric power production, domestic agriculture, education, water and sewage systems....there's really no serious money for an investment there, and that needs, I reckon, $40 to $50 billion dollars for rehabilitation and rebuilding those sectors. That's the situation right now.
Q. There have been claims that the ration distributed to the Iraqi people is manipulated by the regime. Please comment?
A. The Iraqi government have bent backwards to run an efficient ration card system which provides that every Iraqi is entitled, first of all, to food under this programme, and that they each get exactly the same quality and quantity, such as it is, throughout the entire country...and we're talking about 23 million people. They handle all the distribution themselves for everybody, other than those in the Kurdish North, who number about 3 million...they get their food distributed by the World Food Programme (W.F.P.) and World Health Organisation (W.H.O.) when it comes to healthcare. And UNICEF and one or two other agencies have roles up there, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (F.A.O.) for example, who handle domestic agriculture. The system works extremely well, right through from the contracting, to the receipt in the ports, through transportation throughout the country to mills, or to warehouses, and finally distribution to some forty five thousand agents who actually interact with the recipients themselves. We have on the ground a team of observers who interview warehouse staff, mills [staff], truckers and recipients as to the nature of the programme, its' adequacy, are they getting food on time, quality, quantity and so on, and that is reported by the office in Baghdad back to the UN and the Security Council on a two weekly / monthly basis.
Q. Could you comment on the problem of Iraqis being unable to supplement their ration?
A. What's happened over the years has been that the Dinar [currency] has been heavily devalued. In the meantime inflation is rampant, and the average civil servant, let's say, who may have had a reasonable income of say $800 to $1000 a month is now bringing $8 or $10 a month equivalent, and that does not allow them to buy what's missing from the O.F.F. programme diet, such as animal proteins, eggs, cheese, fish, vegetables, fresh fruit...that is just beyond their means. For example, a dozen eggs in Iraq today probably costs approx. 2000 Dinar, and the monthly income may be 10,000 Dinar. It just doesn't add up, and that's one one of the reasons we have the high level of malnutrition. Certainly there are a huge number of anaemic adults; malnutrition amongst children is probably 30%, with Chronic Malnutrition of children, which is not only destroying this generation but the generation to come, in the sense that you can not recover from the effect of both physical and mental retardation which may arise from Chronic Malnutrition.
Q. There have also been claims that the regime is withholding medicines from the people, specifically the allegation that only 15% of medicines which have arrive under the O.F.F. programme have been distributed. The current Humanitarian Coordinator disagrees. He feels that it's primarily a problem of distribution methods. Can you comment?
A. I think there is some misinformation here, and I'm rather upset with the UN for failing to clarify exactly what the problem is. In the health sector we had tremendous delays up front, first of all in the contract approval process of the Security Council. They delayed literally for months before approving contracts. Secondly they played games with those contracts. Say, in ten inter-related items, they may have approved nine and stalled on the tenth, thereby making the other nine largely redundant. The Iraqi government didn't do a great job in terms of contracting; they often went to companies who were simply too small to handle the sheer volume of some of those contracts. When you're asked to produce $3 million worth of Aspirin, for example, some of these small companies couldn't do that, or they could only after two or three months delay. So, between some of the contracting errors in the early months, and delays by the Security Council, we had a situation where medical supplies and basic drugs arrived probably five or six months after the programme began. There was a huge delay, and we've never actually caught up, so there's always been this backlog. But today, as far as I'm concerned, the reports that the warehouses are full or nearly full is extremely good news. That means that the medical profession can now undertake programmes of preventive health, can undertake programmes of care, secure in the knowledge that there will in fact be medical supplies and basic drugs available. But undoubtably there are some concerns that the medicines have arrived and have not gotten out, though they should have done, and there may be several reasons for this. One is that the W.H.O. is assisting the Iraqi government to set up a computerised inventory system. The Council, however, refuse to approve the computers. A second is that the Iraqis also desperately require refrigerated trucking for distribution of drugs that require refrigeration. Again the Security Council has not approved those trucks. So, that story is not coming out. There are problems on both ends. Thirdly, the Ministry of Health is not as efficient in distribution as the Ministry of Trade. So those factors come together and you have a problem. In my mind I have no doubt in saying that there is no one person in the Ministry of Health or anywhere else in the Iraqi government who is deliberately trying to damage the health, or allowing children or others to die by deliberately not distributing medical supplies. That's just nonsense.
Q. When set against the underlying problem of malnutrition, which makes children far more susceptible to disease than they would normally be, do you think it really makes all that much difference how much medical supplies are available?
A. The problem is a large one. People tend to think that malnutrition can be dealt with by food. That is not the case. Malnutrition needs to be dealt with in many different ways, and that includes clean, drinkable water. It includes sewage treatment and processing, it includes electric power, it includes domestic agriculture getting back on its' feet. There's a whole series of components. The great majority of children who die in Iraq do so from water borne diseases which can not be cured now because of the anaemic condition of these children, that and the fact they're malnourished, and the fact that the antibiotics necessary may not be readily available for children who've picked up diahorrea and are getting into dehydration, cholera and so on. There's a huge investment needed, and it's way beyond food supplies and basic drugs.
Q. There's been criticism of the UK and US policy within the Security Council, particularly in their efforts to block exports of spare parts to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. O.F.F. revenue is entirely dependant on this industry, and the Iraqi government is actually unable to raise sufficient funds. What are the reasons for the financial shortfall of the O.F.F. programme?
A. I think there are two sides to this story. The Security Council very reluctantly did accept a report written by SABULT, a Dutch company which we hired in the UN, endorsed by the British government, which said that the oil production capacity of Iraq is in very bad shape and probably needs something in the region of $1 billion investment to rehabilitate the existing capacity...not a solution, but an interim solution. However, they recommend that $600 million be invested to rebuild and maintain existing capacity, which I think was reduced by the UN and the Iraqis both to $300 million, given the other pressures for money for food, medicines and so on. Then the Iraqis went about trying to contract for these various supplies. They moved rather slowly, and I think the Security Council has received about $100-200 million in terms of contractual requests. Then they themselves became very reluctant, particularly Washington, to approve some of these parts, saying they were beyond minimum production requirements, that they were going into down-stream needs and so on. Well, that's second-guessing a sovereign nation who've been in the oil business for some time. All these things combined; I think that part of the programme has not worked. Meanwhile Iraq is producing 2 to 2.3 million barrels per day, which is a high level of production in many respects, but of course the low price of oil has undercut that effort. Therefore the increase we had all hoped for has not materialised. The increase since I was there has gone from $2 billion gross per six months to $3 billion gross, so there is an increase, but it's not really substantial, and again it doesn't begin to have resources to invest in electric power, sewage, water treatment, and other fundamental areas.
Q. It has been noted that the sanctions aren't imposed by the UN, but by The Security Council. Please comment?
A. The UN, of course, is held responsible for these sanctions. For many of us who work for the Secretariat, we like to make a clear distinction that it's indeed the UN, the Security Council, but in fact it's the member states of the Security Council who make these decisions that we in the Secretariat, from the Secretary-General down, implement. So I hold the member states responsible for the sanctions regime on Iraq. I hold them responsible for the genocide that is now existing in Iraq. I hold them responsible for resolutions and implementing resolutions that undermine the spirit and the content of the UN Charter, which undermine the Declaration of Human Rights, which undermine the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and other provisions of international law which provide for economic and social well-being, and so on. I mean we have the ironic situation where Saddam Hussein himself has undermined the human rights, political rights of his own people. We in the UN and the Security Council have taken away many of the remaining rights, such as food, housing, education, opportunities, employment, well being. That's what we've done. It's a tremendous irony that the UN itself is taking away the rights of the Iraqi people.
Q. Genocide is a very strong word.......
A. I know. For many months I refused to use the word 'genocide' and was criticised for not using it. The moment I did use it, in Paris in January 1999 at a press conference with all the major media there, it was written u Pin La Monde and the Herald Tribune among others, I was then criticised for using it. But you know, what I say now is that there is no other way to describe the death of 1, possibly 1.5 million people, to describe the death of thousand of kids each month, to describe the death of almost 600,000 children since 1990.....what else is that but genocide? And it's not a passive thing, it's not neglect. It's an act of decision making process of the member states of the Security Council. They know what they're doing. And Madeleine Albright has been on CBS Television's "60 Minutes" programme [May 12th 1996] and has justified, in a sense, the killing of 500,000 children. She claims that it's necessary, justified...to contain Saddam Hussein, the same Saddam Hussein who was an ally of the USA and the UK and others, who was bankrolled and provided military capacity by these same countries, who was provided the 'Seed Stock' for biological weapons, provided by a company in Maryland and approved by the Pentagon and, I think, by the Treasury Department. This is the same Saddam Hussein, and now they can't talk to him. They are going to punish the Iraqi people because they can't deal with this man. I mean, this is all to me unjustified and unacceptable.
Q. Do you believe that the policy of sanctions is not accidental, that it is deliberate?
A. I believe the member states are sustaining, particularly London and Washington, a programme of economic sanctions which they know is responsible for the death of thousands of people every month, is responsible for sustaining malnutrition, and is underfunded to the point where they can not rebuild production of oil, or electric power, or meet the other basic human needs, such as water and sewage, and other such aspects of civilian life.
Q. Then you feel that the USA and UK operate as a team within the Security Council, that there is a split in the Council?
A. Oh absolutely. Clearly London and Washington are one, and everybody else are somewhere else, almost without exception. It's hard to understand why the UK has followed the USA in this business. The bombing during Ramadan last December [Operation Desert Fox, December 1998] I think horrified all of us. We were all taken aback. I was here in London at the time, and I found that members of Parliament themselves could not understand why the Prime Minister would follow Clinton into this bombing regime, which nobody could articulate [as to what] was expected from it, what was the outcome of it, what was the benefit of it......it was an extraordinary....period of history, I suppose now, which of course has continued. The bombing of the 'No-Fly' zones, which don't exist under any resolution of the Security Council, has continued and still continues despite [the crisis in] Yugoslavia. It's a very tragic way for the USA and the UK to operate. It's completely outside the Security Council. It's a unilateral action which shows total disregard for the other member states of the Security Council.
Q. What sort of games do the Security Council play as regards blocking export applications?
A. Well, there is a history of that, but I think it's improved to a certain extent. The Secretariat is better than it was, the contractual procedures have been tightened, letters of credit have been facilitated, and so on. But there have been games played in regard to these so-called 'Dual Purpose' items. They range from the ridiculous, such as lead pencils, to tyres for trucks, which could be used, I suppose, for military purposes. And you get this whole range of items...the ridiculous also includes things like bed sheets, and paper, needed for education. And of course computers have been heavily targeted, which has tripped up the educational system; universities, laboratories and so on. There's no solution to it. They've got to be, I think, separated out very clearly. Those of us who advocate that some aspect of military sanctions should remain understand that this means that those 'Dual Purpose' items would be taken out of this continuing sanctions approach.
Q. Could you describe the effect on agriculture that sanctions, and the deteriorating infrastructure, have had?
A. In 1990, before the sanctions kicked in, the agricultural sector required the importation of some $2 billion per year of seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, vaccines for animal health, spare parts, tractors, what have you.....a huge bill. That of course stopped, so agricultural production has declined. There's been tremendous stress. [Electrical] power has been knocked out by the military coalition forces during the Gulf War, which deliberately
targeted civilian infrastructure, and therefore irrigated systems have had a real struggle. In the area of animal health there have been accusations that the introduction of Foot And Mouth disease, and particularly of Screw Worm, was in fact set in motion by ' the enemies of Iraq ' deliberately to further undermine the economy, and particularly affect the health of sheep and goats which are the main meat source in Iraq. The fact that some of the capacity to produce vaccines was destroyed by UNSCOM is, I believe correct, but I'm not an expert. Ironically, the pharmaceutical factory destroyed by American missiles in Sudan had a contract for $250,000 to produce vaccine, I think particularly for Screw Worm, as I recall. Maybe there's a connection, maybe there's not.
Q. Can you comment on the continuing 'demonization' of Saddam Hussein in the West?
A. The demonization of Saddam Hussien is a phenomenon which has been employed before. It allows then anything to take place, so to speak. But what I think is tragic about this is that it's somehow rubbed off on the entire Iraqi people. Now the Iraqis themselves are demonized, and for the average American and possibly the average British citizen, that's the end of the discussion. Saddam Hussein. Demonization. Iraq....forget it. And one of the consequences of this situation is that we are not able to respond to the needs of the Iraqi people, thus O.F.F continues, and sanctions continue, and until sanctions are lifted there will be no longer term solution to the humanitarian plight of the Iraqi people. The consequence of that is that Britain and Washington are now punishing the Iraqi people because they can't 'get at' Saddam Hussein. He's not really impacted by sanctions, in fact he's strengthened by sanctions. Every military attack, every bombing run in the no-fly zone, every extension of the sanctions regime strengthens Saddam Hussien, both in the country, because it diminishes the people of course, and outside the country in the Arab and Islamic world. So it's working exactly, I suppose, in the way the member states hoped it would not work. It's in reverse.
Q. How do sanctions strengthen Saddam Hussein in Iraq?
A. The dependence of the average Iraqi increases week by week on the central government. The middle class, the intellectuals, have been largely destroyed by sanctions. Probably two million professionals have left the country, and the capacity for change has gone with them, so to speak. And all the good things in life...and they're very limited in Iraq now, quite frankly, come from the government, or O.F.F. or from some other source, so it's strengthened the Ba'ath party, and it's diminished the individual Iraqis and their families.
Q. Could you comment on the recent revelations about the clandestine nature of UNSCOM, as regards its' infiltration by US and UK intelligence agencies?
A. Well, I have to say, to be fair, that in the early years under Rolf Ekeus, UNSCOM accomplished a tremendous amount of work. They filled their mandate very successfully. They destroyed vast quantities of [military hardware and] capacity. In the last couple of years that has not been the case. They've been looking for bits of paper and seem to have been involved in a stalling process. When Richard Butler took over, a new mandate seemed to have been written, and we found that the Americans were saying that regardless of UNSCOM's reports, until Saddam Hussein himself has gone, we will not lift sanctions. So the agenda changed, and that is simply not appropriate or correct. Furthermore I think the difficulty with UNSCOM has been the inclusion of espionage, of spies, of various intelligence organisations which, under the UN auspices, is something that is appalling to all of us. Now as it happens, UNSCOM staff, including Butler, are not staff members of the organisation. They are hired under secondment from other organisations, but nevertheless we expect them to behave in a manner consistent of a civil servant, and that clearly was not done. And the CIA and others have owned up to what they did, in fact that they used the UN as a cover for espionage, which is a very unfortunate thing and what, of course, the Iraqis had been saying for many years and the UN had denied for many years. They were right; we, obviously, were wrong. So it's a humiliation for the UN.
Q. US congress recently approved $97 million to fund opposition to Saddam Hussein....
A. Well I think the $97 million is just a joke. It's not serious, and the opposition anyway is outside the country, and I notice that most of them have simply refused to go near this money. They know that if they touch a penny of American money they will never play a role in Iraqs' future, whatever form that may take. Furthermore, for the Americans to pretend they support democracy is something I find extraordinary. They have never supported democracy. They've supported Suharto [in Indonesia] for thirty years, they've supported Kuwait, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia...there's no democracy there. The Saudis would panic if democracy were to bloom in Iraq. So this is not serious. I'm very concerned about the efforts to disrupt the Kurdish North and now the Shia South, again. I mean they were promised all sorts of support by George Bush if they rose up after the war. They did rise up, as a matter of fact, or they tried to, and the support was not provided. The Americans walked away from the Shia who turned on the Ba'ath party after the war in the South, and they walked away from the Kurds in the North, and it's so grossly irresponsible to see this sort of attempt to again set up a sort of civil war. It's also irresponsible in the sense that they've no idea what would result. I think the Saudis and the Kuwaitis would panic if they thought there was going to be some sort of independent or autonomous Shia state in the South, because they would certainly feel very uncomfortable with a Shia state in the South which is also cheek-to-jowl with Iran, another Shia state, but different peoples of course. So that again is a weird scenario which doesn't seem to hang well. Furthermore the effort to destroy a country through its' religious and ethnic differences I find appalling, and it's clearly a misunderstanding of the reality. The majority of Iraqis are Shia, some 63% I believe; in Baghdad itself, which is the Sunni part of the country, so to speak, you have no less than 1.5 million Shia. There's a Shia shrine in Baghdad, for example. The Minster for Foreign Affairs is Shia. So
this is something of a fiction, this difference between Sunni and Shia in the Iraqi context.
Q. Do you feel that the combination of religious and ethnic differences, outside pressures and internal impoverishment of the people may have disastrous consequences?
A. I agree with you in the sense that social difficulties are compounded when the economy has collapsed or is weak. I think the example I gave today [on a radio show in the UK] was Malaysia. Malaysia after the riots of 1969, and the racial tensions of the 1970's decided to re-allocate the 'pie' of the economy. Luckily their economy was growing, so the 'pie' for the Malay majority was cut differently and they got more, but because of the growth, the other two ethnic groups, the Indians and the Chinese didn't get any less. They also got some more and it worked extremely well. So after ten or twenty years you had a complete balance between the Malay, Indian and Chinese communities, and it's been very successful. There have not been race riots, I believe, since 1969. And what I was saying today about Kosovo is that if there had been an investment in the economy, if there were jobs and opportunities, education and housing and so on, probably the problems we see today between Serbia and Albania would have been very different. Whether that's true of Iraq......I think you're right, the stress of poverty is a real one. I think it's a less conscious issue. I'm not aware of it to the same extent in Iraq, despite the difficulties, the hardship circumstances.
Q. If the sanctions remain, what is going to happen to Iraq over the next few years?
A. I think we're going to see a continuing decline in the well being of the Iraqi people, both in terms of their health, mortality, malnutrition. We're going to see a decline in the social well being of the Iraqi people, the family unit, the rates of divorce, suicide, depression. We're going to see greater impoverishment leading to more drop-outs [from schools], more kids on the streets, more street crime, more murder, more daughters being put into prostitution. Some of these dreadful things that are happening. A further decline in the well being of professional women who are often forced to give up their careers and are forced into either staying at home, because they can't afford to go to work, or going into sweatshops to make money. I think we're going to see a further increase in the frustration of young people, who are now seeing their opportunities being taken away from them. We're going to see a further change in the Ba'ath party of young politicians who are frustrated and impatient with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz, who see that their continuing willingness to discuss the situation with the UN as a compromise. They don't want that anymore. They are ready to break away from the UN, close down O.F.F. and simply go it alone, in the interests of sovereignty, national interest and pride. I worry very much about that because the consequences could be quite calamitous, given Iraq's limited capacity to feed and take care of its' own. So I think we're going to see further and further deterioration. The infrastructure is crumbling, that's very obvious. The [electric] power is now down way below 40%. It's getting worse and worse all the time, and I really think we're going to see in fact what the British and Americans wanted in the first place, which is to push Iraq back into a pre-industrial condition, and that's just about where they are right now.
Q. Could you comment on the huge rise of working and begging children in Iraq?
A. Well, I used to drive home every night from the UN office. After dark and at traffic lights I almost always would have small children, some so small they couldn't actually see in the car window, 3 or 4 years old, begging desperately for money and or food. I used to have a policy of bringing food, which they would eat. The money I know was going somewhere else, probably the parents. This is a great embarrassment in most Islamic societies, very clearly in Baghdad. And clearly the street crime has changed. The people who run the tea shops, for example, will tell you that in the old days they stayed open after dark. Not now, now most of them close down when it's dark because people are afraid to go out. The incidence of burglary and robbery, theft, has increased dramatically; often it's becoming violent, again, almost unknown in Iraq. So it's a slow breakdown of the standards, the high ethical standards, I would say, of this particular Islamic society. The Iraqis had a very good reputation for being somewhat incorruptible and sustaining high standards, and this is simply falling apart by necessity....single mothers, large families, the male member of the family either killed in the Iran/Iraq war, or left the country, or walked away from his responsibilities. 'Dead Beat Dads' have become a phenomenon in Iraq, something largely unknown. Tremendous stress on the social scene. The middle class, the professional classes, the intellectuals...wiped out. Their salaries diminished dramatically by inflation and devaluation of the Dinar. And their capacity for change, to bring about change [is] completely removed, I would say. And you see a new level of corruption, which was not known, coming in now. There's always people in these circumstances who will take advantage of smuggling and opportunities where you have great hardship, and that's happening in Iraq. Not a big group, a small group. And you see the consequences in some parts of Baghdad with some 'Bennettons' and good restaurants, and other things, which seem to be almost inappropriate under the circumstances.
Q. What is happening in the education sector?
A. The education sector has suffered very heavily under the sanctions regime. Something like 10,000 teachers have quit their jobs. Either they couldn't survive on the salary, or they couldn't deal with children who didn't have breakfast, weren't focussed; they didn't have access to paper, to pencils, or chalk, or both. They had classrooms which were not heated in the cold winters, and not air conditioned in the hot summers. All in all it became intolerable. And the general decay, the lack of sanitation in many, many schools certainly diminished learning capacity also. And for different reasons there's also been a high drop-out rate, certainly in urban areas, and rural, where children have gone back into the farms or gone into the streets to find money by some device...to keep food literally on the table for their families. So education has suffered very badly. At the secondary and University level likewise, many teachers have left the country.
They tell me that many of the best universities in the Middle East are now staffed at the level of Dean, Professor and Lecturer, by Iraqis. That's also true, I think, in Europe and the USA. And the quality, clearly, of secondary and higher education has collapsed, diminished greatly. They're still churning out graduates, and of course the graduates are not able to find jobs as there's massive unemployment in Iraq, in the sense that the [allied] coalition military forces destroyed places of manufacture. Furthermore, much of the consumer production in Iraq required imported components, which, of course, are no longer available, and were they available, they were dependent on exports of the finished product which is also not possible under sanctions. So you have this...the educational sector has suffered greatly, and opportunities for those who are educated....they've suffered also. It's a very bad scenario, and it comes from a history where free education was guaranteed, urban and rural, and the best kids were able to go right up to University, and the best of those were able to go overseas at government expense for Masters and Ph.D.s, and did so, in their thousands. That's all, of course, sadly gone. So now you have the professions, such as the medical profession for example, completely cut off from developments in the real world. Men, surgeons, who had contact with the best universities and clinics around the world, and who could pick up the phone and call prior to serious surgery of some sort find themselves now cut off. They can't even get a copy of The Lancet [British Medical Journal publication] on a regular basis. I mean it's unbelievable what's happened. There are stories about UNSCOM inspectors going into secondary schools and destroying the science books in the library, so that laboratories couldn't function at even a fundamental level. Likewise with hospital laboratories and so on. It's just ludicrous [the] extent to which damage and destruction to the educational system capacity has gone.
Q. What's the solution?
A. I think there are three things that need to be looked at. One is that......I believe Iraq is ready to accept this...there needs to be a genuinely international arms monitoring device developed. Genuinely international meaning not an UNSCOM, not seconded spies and intelligence people and what have you, but internationally recruited by the UN, along [the lines of] the model of the Atomic Energy Agency, which did a very good job in their sector, and put to work representing many different nationalities looking at capacity within the country and its' growth, looking at capacity
and imports from outside the country. But most importantly, and this is where it becomes more difficult, that is, some monitoring and control of arms sales. Until the member states of the Security Council, which alone produce 85% of arms in the world today, until they control themselves, and impose some discipline on sales, men, leaders, dictators around the world who want arms will always find a way to buy them, and that sales issue has got to be controlled, and I fear that the integrity among the member states concerned is simply not there, and they can not or will not control arms manufacture and sales, and that's going to be a problem for the future. Furthermore, in the case of arms control and monitoring, it's got to be looked at as per Resolution 687, which calls for, under, I think it's Article 14, or Paragraph 14, for a down-grading of military capacity throughout the Middle East, particularly weapons of mass destruction. And that means, of course, tackling the problem of over-capacity of Israel, with nuclear capacity, Saudi Arabia with other capacities, Syria, Turkey and Iran probably with chemical capacity and massive conventional weapons, surrounding an Iraq which is now basically stripped bare, and what ever defensive capacity that was left has now probably been destroyed in the 'No Fly' zones by British and American aircraft. It needs to be looked at as a whole as per this Resolution. So that is a given, that has got to be done. The whole Middle East has to be down-graded in terms of this capacity for mayhem. Secondly then is to lift the sanctions. Allow Iraq to run its' own country, its' own economy, to rebuild as much as it possibly can. But lifting the sanctions alone will not solve the problem. As we know the revenue is not likely to be there...the price of oil and production capacity. To make this work it's going to mean that Iraq needs to have access to two sorts of funding. One is recurring budgetary needs, to have an expenditure pattern of maybe $15 billion or so per year for recurring costs, plus capital investment, capital, capital investment of I would guess $50 to $60 billion, a sort of Marshal Plan, which is going to be very hard to assemble. But without that they are not going to be able to build oil production capacity, or electric power production capacity, or rebuild domestic agriculture, or education, or health etc. etc. And therefore they'll never get out of this situation of the total collapse, almost, of the economy as it is today. Rebuilding factories, getting people back to work, getting the economy back to work. And the other, I think, political problem they are going to have, no matter who is running this country, is that the expectations of the Iraqi people may be very, very high. They are going to expect sort of a miracle, like a newly independent country, so to speak. They will expect to go back to the high quality of life and standard of living they had in 1989 and 1990, and Iraq, I think, has not the capacity to do that. It's going to take a long, slow climb to get back to where they were. Some recovery, of course, is going to be impossible, such as Chronic Malnutrition and conditions like that. And the tremendous 'Brain-Drain' and loss of talented Iraqis who may never come back. They've now got families overseas and so on. They are going to have a very difficult time.
Q. Could you comment about the agenda that Britain and America are acting out?
A. Yeah, it's certainly an issue. I think there was a tremendous concern that first Iran, and then Iraq, seemed to be moving beyond the prime producers of crude [oil] and were looking at petro-chemical industries, were looking at building up a capacity that would give them some sort of regional presence, which was a "No No" for Europe and North America. There's a need, I think, for the Americans to feel that they were in control of oil, oil resources worldwide. They knew that Iran and Iraq were going to be reluctant to see any interference whatsoever, understandably. I think there was a concern about this part of the world, and a need for control of the Arab / Islamic world. It's a matter of great concern, I would say, it's the racist and anti-Islamic phenomenon which I'm afraid we're seeing in many parts of the world, and increasingly so perhaps, and furthermore I think we have to acknowledge, as Eisenhower did back in the 1960's. that there is this Industrial / Military complex, which is a reality. It's more out of control now than it was then. It's in the hands of many multi-nationals which are really controlled by nobody. And the arms business is a very big business. Without it the American economy might well collapse, the British economy might well collapse. These are way out of proportion to...in terms of balance...to the strength of the economy....a very worrisome phenomenon and it's going to take many, many years to change that. But in the meantime countries like Britain and the US need wars. They need destruction to rebuild, to replace, to sell this stuff. And we've just seen the Secretary of Defence of the US, who's just come back from the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, selling billions, billions of dollars of additional military hardware to these people, which they don't need, can't afford, and probably can't even use. It's a tragedy, and I think it's driven by the need of these economies, domestic economies, to sell arms, and that's a reality. Look at John Pilger's books, it's scary reading.
Q. Did you find yourself compromised in Iraq as a UN official, and how did you reconcile the seemingly different agendas of UN organisations?
A. There wasn't one incident [that caused me to resign] but it was an unending battle of frustration. I naturally, as a development specialist with the UN for many, many years, for UNDP, looked at the situation and found this Ad Hoc temporary programme really incomprehensibly underfunded. I started the process of increasing it and found really no understanding in the UN Secretariat. In fact there was opposition to what I wanted to do, and thus I resorted to a tactic which is not normally acceptable, that is I went to the member states. I worked with the French ambassador, I worked with the Russian ambassador, the Chinese ambassador, and through their capitals to influence the thinking of the Security Council. So that when we convinced the Secretary-General to make a case for the doubling of the programme at the end of 1997, there was a warm reception. In fact that's exactly what happened. The Americans then added a political twist to it; instead of going for $8 billion [for expanded O.F.F. programme] they went to $10.4 billion per annum, which is, in a sense, an embarrassment to the Iraqis as it was more than they wanted to see totally controlled by the UN, or as they would see it, by the US. But anyway, it worked. We improved the programme, there was an enhancement, there was more money, but tragically the price of oil, in a sense, wiped out that improvement, although, as I said, there are increases today. So instead of $4 billion gross per year it's now approx. $6 billion gross per year, but still still not anywhere adequate in terms of investment and rehabilitation of the various sectors that are so fundamental to nourishment, well being, and removing the problems of child mortality and Chronic Malnutrition.
Q. So what caused you to finally resign from the UN?
A. Well, I resigned, you know, because I felt that as head of the UN family in Iraq I felt I was indirectly responsible for whatever the UN was doing, including the sanctions programme, and the impact of sanctions. And the incompatibility between the impact of sanctions and the O.F.F., and my own approach in my own life and my commitment to the UN was a very real one. And I found this just unacceptable. There was no way I wished to continue to be part of this organisation which was killing people on the one hand, and presumably trying to feed them on the other. And I could not...although I did in fact speak out whilst I was still in Baghdad, and in fact was reprimanded for it by the UN headquarters, I felt I needed to be free to speak out as I'm in fact doing with you right now. Furthermore I was coming to the end of a long career, so there's no great human sacrifice on my part; I don't want that impression to persist. And it was time, I think, for me to do something different, and this...there was the possibility of making an important difference. It's been a struggle, and the difference is not happening, but, you know, I think we're seeing some change in this country and in the US towards sanctions, towards what I consider to be the genocide factor in Iraq. I consider sanctions have become in effect a form of warfare, a form of warfare that is incompatible with the Geneva Conventions and Protocols on targeting civilians. Sanctions do nothing but target civilians, innocent civilians. And in fact in the case of Iraq it's targeting children, 40% of whom were not born when Kuwait was invaded. And the rest of the population was never involved in Kuwait, there's not a democracy, they were not consulted, they didn't make any decisions, but they're being punished nevertheless. So sanctions, I think, in the case of Iraq have become a disaster. I hope we're learning from that. They can never be used again, as far as I'm concerned. Whether there are 'Smart Sanctions', and we can create something better...I'm sceptical. We'll have to see what emerges. I think it was a very bad experience, and I think one of the by-products of this calamity, this genocide for Iraq and the people of Iraq, is the damage that's been done to the UN. Our credibility, and the credibility of the Security Council is damaged forever. The manipulation of the Security Council, the by-passing of the Security Council, by particularly Washington and London is a tragedy. And I think we've seen it very recently with NATO. NATO undertaking the attacks on Yugoslavia, knowing that this, of course, would never have gone through the Security Council. So there's a new tactic, but it adds up to the fact of the irrelevance of the UN, or the fact that it is being manipulated by just a few member states who have the power, the veto, and that's something we all have to worry about. It's really important for the future. I think we have to see reform of the Security Council. We have to see sanctions dropped, I think, as a viable tool. And we have to see the introduction of what Lord Owen called 'Preventive Diplomacy'. Like preventive medicine...in other words, you try to identify problems before they become problems, you deal with the problems before they become crises, and you resolve the crises before they become violent and you end up in catastrophes like the Gulf War, or now the war, or the NATO war in Yugoslavia. For the future I think the UN should probably get out of 'Peace Keeping' and move into preventive diplomacy and tackle these issues before they become crises.
Q. How does someone like Madeleine Albright, and other supporters of sanctions, justify their actions?
A. "Saddam Hussein." You can sum it up in two words. "He is responsible for this entire debacle. If he wanted to stop it he could." This is being said by the same people who say: "Even if he complies 100% with the mandate of UNSCOM, until he's gone we will not lift sanctions." Now how can you expect the President of Iraq to co-operate with this system, when he himself is required to quit? It's nonsense. So how Madeleine Albright can live with herself is a mystery to me. I think many Americans feel that way. How she could go on '60 Minutes' [CBS television programme] and justify the slaughter of 500,000 children is mind boggling. None of us can understand that.
Q. What about Tony Blair?
A. I'm terribly disappointed in Tony Blair. I thought he was a real breath of fresh air. He seemed to have tremendous potential, and why he has this need to follow blindly in the path of Bill Clinton, who knows nothing about foreign affairs, and is not really experienced, whereas Britain...we expect greater things of Britain in terms of foreign affairs. It's a mystery to me why this has happened, I think it's been a great embarrassment to many British people, and many members of the 'New' Labour party. It's a tragedy for Britain, a great tragedy, and the consequences for Iraq, of course, are horrendous. Now we see the consequences for Yugoslavia, where we've gone in, supposedly, to help the Albanians of Kosovo, and instead we've destroyed their lives, and I'm sceptical that we can ever rebuild their lives, to send them back and settle them down and rebuild...it seems to me to be most unlikely. So it's extremely frustrating, this strange relationship between the UK and the US which is so counter-productive, and so dangerous for the two of them. You see the anger in the rest of the world; you really wonder, it's a short term thing but it has a long term, I think, potential damage.
Q. Some observers have compared the current situations to George Orwell's vision of a world engaged in constant warfare, and this being used as a justification for internal control and police state measures in our own so called democratic countries. Do you agree?
A. I sense in the US, more than in Britain, that there is this great fear of the Islamic world, and the fact that Islam is equated with terrorism. Totally unjustified fear, but nevertheless it seems to be there, and I understand that there are 'anti-terrorist' forces being trained in the US to deal with this, quote, "problem". It's very worrisome, I think, for the future of world peace, and I've advocated, I should have said this, the third part of my solution....as I said, the disarmament monitoring capacity for the whole region, lifting economic sanctions with financial input to help Iraq to recover, but the third is, and I think it's fundamentally important, is that [of] a vision. There has to be a vision for the Middle East and the future of the Middle East. Not by us, not by North America, not by Europe, but by the peoples of this part of the world, I mean peoples in the sense of Iran, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Arab peoples together. They need to sit down and work out their differences. They've got so many common problems, and so many common riches. They've got some of the brightest and most educated people on earth. They still have these massive oil revenues; if they could get their act together and follow the ASEAN model of South East Asia, or follow even the European Union...they've got to build a community and a union. It may take 30, 40, or 50 years, but they've got to begin, because if they don't, they're going to fall apart. They're going to continue to have the sort of anxiety, stress, aggressions that they've experienced in recent years. And that is the third essential ingredient of some sort of long term "solution", quote, unquote, of the stress in the this part of the world.
Q. Why is there such a sense in the West that Iraq is a 'Pariah' state, when many other dictatorships in the region, which we continue to trade with, have equally bad human rights records?
A. Well, that's the price you pay for demonization of a leader. Once you've done that then it's very hard to back down. But, you know, I'm sure in due course Iraq will re-enter the international community. Relations will be restored, we'll have an exchange of students and education. But, you know...it's just one big game, and the price the Iraqis have had to pay is just appalling. But I'm quite sure that in ten years Iran and Iraq both will have restored international relations and will be doing business. And the business lobby will take care of this because both British business and American business is hurting right now; two huge markets that are not being exploited so to speak. And they will put pressure, the business community, the business lobby will put pressure on both governments in due course to change all of this. It's just a tragedy that somehow politicians, governments allow themselves to get trapped into these situations, and we end up in this appalling mess. It's such a bad investment of both human and financial resources, when this money could be used for something more productive. I think we end up going back to the warning that Eisenhower said when he retired, the industrial/military complex is something we all have to worry about. And I think since 1960 we've seen the prophecy being repeated again and again, and now we're seeing it in Yugoslavia. It's something beyond our control, I think it's out of control; it's go to change.
Q. Do you feel that the media coverage of world events has been deliberately narrowed?
A. Yes, I'm very concerned about the role of the media in Iraq, and the focus on the military...the excitement of jets flying off aircraft carriers, things like that. Scott Ritter, the [UNSCOM] inspector has made the same observation himself, and he acknowledged that there's a romance in his work and there's no romance in.... {*interview interrupted briefly by phone call*}
Scott Ritter has described why he has had better press coverage, so to speak, than I have, and it's due, as he says himself, to sort of the romance of the military, of spies, of espionage, and all that sort of stuff. Whereas people do not get excited by the humanitarian crisis. They don't want to see that or to know about that, frankly, and the media should be able to handle that and they don't. And it's quite clear from my tour of the US, where I've been to 21 different cities, in fact more than that, I reckon I've met with 10,000 live Americans, and they all lament the same thing: they don't know what is going on. And I maintain, I'm sure it's true of Britain also, that the average British person, British family, and likewise with the Americans, have a history of generosity and of caring about people overseas, and in difficulty, no matter where they are. But they don't know, they don't realise that in Iraq the Iraqi people, the Iraqi family are just like us. The same issues, the elderly, parents, young children, education, mortgages, you know, all the usual things. And if they understood that the policy of London and the policy of Washington was so devastating and was responsible for the death of so many thousands of people, and the responsibility is the responsibility of the electorate. You know we're not subjects...we're citizens, this is a democracy, we are responsible for what happens with the policies of London and Washington. I think the media has done us all a great disservice by not highlighting....they can show the jets coming off the Gulf, but they also have to show the consequences of these sanctions, no matter who's responsible. A great part of the responsibility has to be the leadership of Iraq, but also we are responsible for sustaining sanctions that are knowingly killing children, adults, the elderly. That is not getting through. The media, I think, has lost its' way, and one of the problems in the US, I'm not so sure about Britain, is the conflict of ownership. Much of the big media outlets in North America are owned by arms manufacturers, like Westinghouse, or G.E. [General Electric]. That's unacceptable. So we're not getting editorial policy, we're not getting a vision of truth. People just don't know what is going on anymore, and that's really dangerous stuff.
Q. When you resigned in September 1998, you said: "We are in the process of destroying and entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Do you wish to re-state this?
A. Yes, the impact of sanctions on Iraq, and on the people of Iraq is indeed an immoral undertaking. It makes us guilty, I believe, of destroying an entire society, a culture, a way of life. A way of life that enjoyed fairly high ethical standards, and a very high quality of life in itself despite the political difficulties of the Ba'ath party and of human rights in that context. The quality of life for the average Iraqi was pretty good. Education, public health, housing, employment, opportunities...that we've destroyed under sanctions. It's a tragedy and it's not justified.