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US Ignores Wake-up Call on Sanctions
Phyllis Bennis
Baltimore Sun, 20 February 2000
The resignations should be a wake-up call for
Washington. Hans Von Sponeck, the UN's Assistant Secretary-General and
humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, announced his resignation last week
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.
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 Assistant
Secretaries-General of the UN, 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 seriousUS 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 children alone, 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 is why our own
government refuses to hear or take seriously these UN officials'
concerns for the Iraqi civilian population, or the concerns of the 70
members of Congress who asked President Clinton to lift the economic
sanctions. Congressman David Bonior even equated those sanctions with
"infanticide." But 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 by almost 23 million Saddam Husseins.
Copyright 2000 Baltimore Sun
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