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Will the Last Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq Please Turn out the Lights?
Phyllis Bennis
Third World Resurgence, 18 February 2000
This one couldn't be ignored. There was a month of escalating anti-sanctions activity in the US, including a month-long fast in Washington by Voices in the Wilderness activists, a weekend of teach-ins and vigils in New York culminating with a large protest and 86 arrests at the US mission to the United Nations. Then a letter signed by 70 members of Congress calling on President Clinton to lift the economic sanctions against Iraq was delivered to the White House. At a 16 February press conference, Congressman David Bonior called those sanctions 'infanticide masquerading as policy'.
And then there were the resignations. Assistant Secretary-General Hans Von Sponeck, the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, announced his resignation on 15 February after fifteen months on the job, because he became convinced that 'every month Iraq's social fabric shows bigger holes'. The next day, the chief of the UN's World Food Program in Baghdad, Jutta Burghardt, quit as well, also to protest how the economic sanctions are eroding Iraqi society.
It should have been a stark wake-up call for Washington. Van Sponeck's predecessor, then-Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday, quit the same position after thirteen months, also to challenge the economic sanctions responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In his turn, Von Sponeck recognized that the UN's humanitarian program could never seriously protect Iraqi civilians from the ravages of those sanctions supposedly aimed at the Baghdad regime.
The fact that two sequential high-ranking UN officials, one German, the other Irish, each with a distinguished UN career going back more than 30 years, felt compelled to leave the same position to protest the inherent failures of a Security Council policy imposed largely through US pressure, should lead to some serious US soul-searching about the viability of that policy. The resignation of an able and respected director of the WFP should emphasize the point even further. Unfortunately, at least judging by the State Department's response to Von Sponeck's resignation, no such examination is on the agenda. State's spokesman Jamie Rubin, on learning of Von Sponeck's decision, responded 'good', followed by a repeat of false accusations regarding Von Sponeck's alleged work 'on behalf of ... the regime' in Iraq.
Since last November, Clinton administration officials, along with their counterparts in London, had been pressuring the UN Secretary-General, demanding that Von Sponeck be fired. His crime? As humanitarian coordinator for the world body, he insisted that tracking the civilian casualties from the continuing US-UK bombings in the unilaterally-declared 'no fly zones' in northern and southern Iraq was part of his job. Further, and perhaps most telling, he made clear that the economic sanctions themselves were devastating the people of Iraq - and they, not the regime, were his concern. True to form, Rubin announced last fall that Von Sponeck had overstepped his mandate in 'raising his own personal views as to the wisdom of the sanctions regime'.
To his credit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan resisted the pressure and extended Von Sponeck's contract. But the UN's sanctions program remained in place. The most recent Security Council resolution, which many in Washington like to claim would lift the sanctions, actually does no such thing. It creates a new arms monitoring agency, and considers, more than a year down the line, the possibility that some economic restrictions might be temporarily suspended. But the default position remains that economic sanctions stay, unchanged, unless the Council, including the US with its
veto, affirmatively votes to keep them suspended after each four-month period. Under such restrictions, no oil company worth its stockholders is likely to risk serious large-scale investment in Iraq, however much they may covet Iraq's oil wealth. And without such investment, repair and reconstruction of the oil industry itself will remain impossible, and Iraq's poverty will only deepen.
The US-led sanctions regime, now in place for almost a decade, has been responsible not only for the deaths of about one million Iraqis - 500,000 of them children, according to UNICEF - but as well to the absolute shredding of the cultural, economic, political, family, and intellectual fabric of Iraqi society. When the first delegation of congressional staffers travelled to Iraq last summer, Von Sponeck provided extensive
briefings and made his top staff accessible to them. At that time he described for the aides 'the less visible, less dramatic non-material side of the economic sanctions' impact'. In identifying the many coping methods to which Iraq's once-dominant middle class has been reduced in dealing with the economic crisis, he reminded the aides that 'many of those methods are illegal, and reliance on them is creating in Iraq a generation of fixers,
manipulators of the system, rather than thinkers or strategists'.
As a result of the sanctions, overall food shortages remain a serious problem in Iraq. It was the World Food Program's director, the same Jutta Burghardt who just resigned her post to protest the impact of the economic sanctions, who told the congressional staff delegation that 70% of household income goes for food: by UN and world standards, she said, that is considered an indicator of imminent famine.
Burghardt described how the oil for food program is shielding, but not reversing, the accumulated effects of sanctions. 'Iraq's middle class is disappearing', she said, 'and the stunted children will never recover. The monthly food basket lasts only about 21 days. Many families have no other income, and so are living in a situation of complete deprivation'.
Like other UN officials working in Baghdad, Burghardt made clear her criticisms of the Iraqi regime. She said that the Government of Iraq deals with the food question solely on an emergency basis, and has been reluctant to go forward towards a full solution, wanting to show clearly the full effects of the sanctions. However, in describing the urgent need for income-generating programs in Iraq, she explained the other side of the problem. She had tried to initiate such programs, the WFP director said, but her ideas 'did not fly' in headquarters. The US is the biggest donor
to the World Food Program, and played a key role in preventing the new plans.
It is Burghardt's team of WFP inspectors who monitor the food distribution program in Iraq. It is her observers who check that food gets from port to warehouses to mills to neighborhood level food distribution agents. And it is her agents who track the inability of the food basket - virtually devoid of protein, fruits or vegetables, or vitamins and made up largely of rice, flour, oil, beans, sometimes powdered milk, salt, tea and sugar - to nourish families, especially growing children.
It is understandable that UN humanitarian and development workers, trained with the goal of ending, not maintaining, humanitarian disasters, would find implementing the sanctions unacceptable. 'Everything is tired', Von Sponeck told the congressional aides six months before his resignation. 'Iraq's social fabric is under serious attack'.
What is less understandable to an increasing number of Americans is why their own government refuses to hear or take seriously these UN officials' - the only international experts on the ground in Iraq - legitimate concerns for the Iraqi civilian population. Or the concerns of the 70
members of Congress who asked President Clinton to lift the economic sanctions. Maybe the State Department's longstanding demonization campaign
has taken root within its own staff: maybe Jamie Rubin and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright really believe that Iraq is populated solely by
almost 23 million Saddam Husseins.
Copyright 2000 Third World Resurgence
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