A speech at "A Day and Night for the People of Iraq"
in Kensington Town Hall, London, 6 May 2000by Hans von Sponeck
Former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq
I want to start by quickly reminding ourselves that the world is not short of international instruments that are existing, that were created to protect us, to give people's lives a meaningful basis. The problem is, the big problem is, that the international community so easily forgets to apply these instruments when it counts, or ignore[s] these deliberately. When I was in Boston a few days ago to meet with the Editor of the Boston Globe, I was told not to refer, even, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or to the UN Charter because it has no meaning in that newspaper. Well how terrible, how frightening when one is warned not to refer to something which is meant to protect us and to give us a better life. The international community that is represented by the United Nations Security Council -- one can almost come to the conclusion that they are not trigger-happy but they surely are sanction-happy, because what we have seen during the last decade of the century just passed has seen six times the number of sanctions imposed on countries than in the past 40 to 45 years. So when this fateful mistake of August 1990 was made, through the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, the most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed on a country were imposed on Iraq. And in the following years until now, until very much now, Iraq has become a sanctions laboratory, testing -- its almost like an endurance test of humans, when you look and study the last ten years under sanctions. Resolution after resolution passed by the United Nations has led to incremental improvements that we must admit, but fundamentally it has not changed what I have to describe to you in a moment. What to me is so deplorable, the sanction managers that sit in the Security Council -- when they create these resolutions like the most recent one that was passed in December of last year -- they forget that behind every line and every word of these resolutions are real faces, are people with feelings, with fears and also with hopes.
So, what does it mean then, when we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that gives a right for education, a right for good health, a right for employment, for shelter, right to free movement? What is that reality now in Iraq in relation to these rights in March or in April 2000? Mr Halliday and I were on Capitol Hill earlier this week, and we met with a number of Congressmen, and there are seeds of hope I can report to you; but I want to say here, Congressman Conyers, one of the convenors of the Congressional Hearing that we attended, told us about a response by the President of the United States to a letter written by 70 Senators and Congressmen asking for a lifting of sanctions. The Clinton response was, and I say it not in a hostile way, I am not vindictive, I hope don't come across in this way, Mr Clinton said: the humanitarian programme in Iraq has made a major difference to ordinary Iraqi citizens. The US President is very ill advised in coming to this conclusion. Disinformation, distortion, misinterpretation, wherever you look you see it on all sides - but the finest example of distorted information is a State Department Report of 17 September last year, where every single figure is either not explained and therefore gives the wrong impression or it is the wrong information. The information that the United Nations put together is completely sidelined -- doesn't exist -- why don't they come and talk to us? I think my 17 months that I stayed in Baghdad give a very different reality from the one that is portrayed in documents like that. It is correct that the Humanitarian programme has halted, has slowed the deterioration of the human condition; but it has not at all reversed that condition.
Now let me -- maybe you know it, maybe you don't -- let me shock you: in the first three phases of this Oil-For-Food Programme, well if you hear the amount of 1.3 billion to be available it sounds like a big amount; if you divide this amount of 1.3 billion by 22 million Iraqi people you are getting an amount of $113 per year per person for meeting their needs, their physical needs to say nothing of their spiritual and non-material needs. This has changed and now we have a figure of $252 per year per person based on a higher allocation. This is part of the sanction experimentation effort and also better oil revenue, of course. Very quickly, let me just run you through the individual sectors that make up that programme. The food basket has never reached the levels it should have reached: 2000 calories was about the average during all of the phases instead of a higher value that was supposed to be available. Every night, if they have a bed, one out of five children will still go to bed malnourished. That is a very high figure. Medicines: they are more available in hospitals but far from adequately available. Treatment for complicated diseases is still extremely difficult. Leukaemia or other diseases that require batteries of drugs very often, more often then not, are not available. The International Committee of the Red Cross came to the conclusion that the health infrastructure had more or less collapsed in Iraq -- I agree with this. There was a US Public Health Delegation which came and visited us in May of 1999; and they in their report come to the conclusion that the infrastructure damage, that the failing economy and ten years of intellectual embargo have affected every level of medical education with the result that the quality of treatment is going continuously down, as you can imagine. UNICEF is giving us figures which I hope we will never get used to. It should shake us when we read that 56 children under five in 1991 out of a thousand died and that this figure had changed to 131 in 1999. That is a horrendous figure, and we should not get laissez-faire about the seriousness of this figure. The famous and most often quoted figure [is] that if the mortality trends of the 1980s had continued into the '90s, 500,000 children today would grow into fledgling adults, would have survived; but they are no longer among us. 50 mothers out of 100,000 died in pregnancy; this figure has gone up to 117 in the period of 1989 to 1996.
Mr Samuel Berger, International Security Adviser in the US, in an article just two days ago, he came to the conclusion in this article on the Financial Times of the US that the government of Iraq was obstructing UN Relief -- first of all I'm puzzled by the word 'UN Relief'. It is Iraqi money that is handled by the United Nations, so it is not UN Relief at all -- and that the government was selling food and medicines and ordering humanitarian supplies very grudgingly. That is simply not correct. Yes, some food finds its way into the market because people have to live and sometimes food is brought in that is of dubious quality or that is not meeting the dietary habits of Iraqis and some families, hard pressed as they maybe, are going to the markets and are selling food in order to have some cash they can use. Yes, it is correct 2600 pharmacists are selling drugs that come in under the Oil-For-Food Programme with a prescribed pricelist very deliberately done by the government in order to maintain these families with dignity in their jobs. So this is done very openly, it is known, it is not done to allow the Cabinet of Iraq to buy instead, Red Label Whisky and have a good time. They have a good time, many of them, and they get this money from other sources and we cannot approve of that -- it's not right but it's not done from Oil-For-Food resources.
The water and sanitation sector is another major sector. I don't want to go into too much detail [as] time is running out. Let me just say: the appalling reality of that sector has led to diseases becoming very significant again like cholera and typhoid that weren't so important before in the '80s, and diahorrea has become again a major killer of children.
Electricity: try and make a fire in your kitchen, close the windows and look at the thermometer and see when it rises to 125 degrees Fahrenheit and how you feel. There are between nine and 22 hours in Northern Iraq, sometimes there are 22 hours of no electricity. In modern buildings where people live, you can imagine what happens to their food, what happens to their well-being, what kind of diseases can also develop under such conditions. It is appalling that out of $7.1 billion one requires to rehabilitate at minimum level the electricity sector, 1.5 % or $112 million is all that has become available, most of it because items were held back by the Security Council because there was this fear, paranoiac fear, that it may be used for something else even though we have over 400 observers in Iraq travelling every day the roads and can testify the items go where they belong. That is the politics of the Security Council. The oil industry is the lifeline for the civilian population. If something goes wrong there, there is no money, then there is no humanitarian programme. It is in a very dangerous and to use a journalist's word, lamentable state, and we don't do enough; the Security Council is far from doing enough to maintain our safety standards and to maintain this industry from being every day at the brink of collapse and all the implications.
My last heading, as far as the Oil-For-Food programme is concerned, I can only describe as Sanction Victim Number One for those who survive -- and that is education. [In] 1989 the Iraqi Education budget was US$2.1 billion; this was one year before the sanctions started. Ten years later it had been reduced to $229 million: 10%. Literacy, once the pride of Iraq for men and women, [was] high: 90%. Today it is estimated to be down to 66%. School attendance has rapidly gone down; many families must send their children to the street to beg or to sell some items. I could tell you horror stories about this, which I myself experienced. You have many abandoned children now; UNICEF is trying to look after them. Teacher-training facilities are in deplorable conditions; the quality of teaching has gone down. A teacher in Baghdad earns between one dollar and 50 cents and four dollars a month. Now with that amount in that economy, if one can describe it as an economy, it is not possible to live a life meeting basic necessities; so they have to go out. They don't have time for their children. They must do something else, so you can imagine what that means for the quality of education. Cyberspace? Cyberspace in Iraqi skies does not exist. All computers requested for education have been put on hold as being dual use for the Military. Prostitution, young girls, unheard of in a Muslim country: a girl from an educated family is a part-time prostitute to make some money in order to prepare, to get what she needs, for the school year. This is not a story; this is a reality and a direct result of the kind of treatment Iraq has had to face. Is it surprising under these conditions that the incidence of mental disorder has dramatically increased for children under 14, as found out by UNICEF? I think it is absolutely correct to talk about an intellectual embargo. Of whom? Of the most innocent, of the most vulnerable. What has a 14 or 15 year old girl or boy in Iraq today to do with political conflict between outside powers and the government of Iraq? Nothing. The US Postal Services Regulations forbids even the import into Iraq of sheets of music. The songs that the Bruderhof children's choir has just sung to us -- their sheets of music would not be allowed to reach Iraq according to US standards. So it is killing not only the physical needs but also it is killing the whole ethos, the mindset of a society that should live under normal conditions.
I want to say, years of demonisation of the Iraqi leadership, and I am not a defender of the leadership -- it is not my role -- but we have to be fair. We mustn't suffer, from what a Princeton professor told us a few days ago, we mustn't suffer from political amnesia: by forgetting yesterday's friend is today's foe. That is too often forgotten in the discussion about Iraq. It is not true that there are 23 million Saddam Hussein's today, but the isolation to which Iraq was subjected gives the impression of a people that is rough, that is intolerant, that is brutal; and they are the finest, most beautiful people that I am sure you, and everyone who has visited Iraq, can find anywhere. I was very dismayed -- and in fact it had a role in my decision to resign -- that every attempt that I made with the United Nations in New York to get an agreement to prepare an assessment of the human condition in Iraq was blocked. All I was allowed to do was to carry out an assessment of the Oil-For- Food programme. There was a bigger picture that needed to be portrayed, picture of a community; and I was not allowed to do that. It was blocked at different levels and I must say by the Secretary-General but by others, including the Sanctions Committee.
Let me skip all what I had to say about related subjects. Just two more points: one is the air strike situation in the North No-Fly Zones. I introduced reports on this on a regular basis. The No-Fly Zones are north of the 36th parallel and south of the 33rd parallel. This is a clear violation of international law; and we were inhibited, at least I was, to say so when I served in these words but I gave the reports to let them judge in the Security Council and the UN Secretariat that it was a breaking of international law. In the beginning it was harmless, the planes came and flew; but after the December 1998 bombing, it changed under, the wonderful euphemistically sounding term, Enlarged Rules of Engagement. I wish they would introduce enlarged rules of disengagement, and leave the Iraqis alone, but they don't do this. As a result 144 people living in the very areas that were meant to be protected by these over flying aircraft have died and 446 have been wounded. When I reported I was told I was incompetent to report on this and that all I was doing was to take Iraqi propaganda and putting a United Nations stamp on it and sending it on. The truth is that when these incidents occurred, one every third day of the week, our people were there. They travelled in the area. They were frightened. I had people, United Nations staff, who said, No we do not want to continue we are worried for our safety. I don't think this is Iraqi propaganda; this is a reality.
Solutions, my colleague will speak a lot about -- what next. Let me say just one thing: economic sanctions must be lifted now, today not tomorrow. The House of Commons report of your parliament here has come to this conclusion also. It's a blunt instrument; it has not worked. No country -- [these are] their words -- should ever be subjected again to such a treatment. We can do monitoring at the border; but let this, for the civilian side, end so that the country can live again. The Foreign Minister of Canada just said something very very interesting and I quote: "It is imperative that sanctions reflect the objectives of the international community and not just the national interests of its most powerful members." I think that was a misprint because I think it shouldn't be members, it should be member. Tinkering at the edges of sanctions should not be allowed. The Oil-For-Food programme has been an inadequate band-aid over a festering wound, and there have been no antibiotics. The United Nations General Assembly should take over this whole discussion. When 15 representatives of governments in ten years have not managed to find a constructive approach, indeed a realistic and constructive approach, for Iraq then I think they have lost the legitimacy of dealing with Iraq. Therefore I would rather see the General Assembly now take a role; for if they do, there will be no solution but it will be a step towards a solution because it would become clear that many, most of the countries in the UN are opposed to this.
Lastly, a closed-door conference should take place in which finally Iraq can be admitted again. It has been for me always incomprehensible and in fact it has humiliated me when I would go to the Sanctions Committee or to the Security Council and I would see my colleagues from the Iraqi Mission on New York, standing there like hungry birds picking up pieces of information but when the meeting started and the doors closed, Iraqi diplomats were not allowed to participate. So for all these years decisions have been taken without bringing the very people about whom you decided into the discussion. That has to end. And I think one has to, at a low profile without media without anyone who wants to sensationalise this, one has to bring people around the table and let us talk it out. Let us give, in any case, preventative diplomacy a much broader role than resorting to sanctions of the kind that in the history books later will, for Iraq, become the example of how not to treat a nation.
(End)
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Stuart Halford MARIAM APPEAL
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