Dog in America

‘Any hopes, however, that the allied air strike might help topple Saddam Hussein are premature. [….] He can now argue that he has fulfilled most of the United Nations requirements of him, and co-operated with their weapons inspectors while his country suffers the torment of sanctions.’

In April ‘93, a showdown with UNSCOM led to new allied bombing. Within months, UN inspectors had announced their work was ‘all over’ – but the Security Council now demanded long-term survеillance. Until that was in place, sanctions would stay.

A UNICEF report dеtailed the consequences:

"Sanctions have led to a virtual collapse of health care, water supply and sanitation. Politically motivated sanctions cannot be implemented in a way that spares the vulnerable."

The report was shelved.

[GHAZWAN]
‘Sanctions against Iraq is affecting everybody in Iraq. It’s affecting the Arabs as much as the Kurds. It’s affecting the pro-Saddam forces and it’s affecting the anti-Saddam. It’s affecting the pro-Western, it’s affecting the anti-Western. There is no-one exempted from the sanction. The sanctions are on the whole country.’

The government ration now supplied only two thirds of energy requirements, and lacked vital nutrients. Malnutrition amongst children was widespread and lowered resistance to disease. Dysentery, Cholera and typhoid, eradicated before the war, were epidemic. With medical imports cut by ninety percent, Iraq’s once hi-tech health-service was unable to cope.

[ZEINAB]
‘If you see our hospitals we are complaining of shortage in everything. And I mean it everything.’

Medical staff were forced to choose. Which child shall have medicine; which child shall be left to die?

An Iraqi doctor wrote:
"For children with leukaemia to begin treatment, families sell their belongings and even their homes and after bringing in the drugs from Jordan, the children are dying from uncontrolled infection."

Two thirds of children in a psychiatric survey did not believe they would survive to adulthood. They were…

"Trapped within their trauma and unable to escape... time seems to have stopped."

[GHAZWAN]
‘I was just asking my little boy. He’s 7 years old. He is scared every time he hears a noise. He thinks ‘Where’s the rocket?’ The kids really are shattered.’

Children from poorer families were forced out of school to work or to beg.

[NASRA]
‘What will they do in the future if a child of 13 or 14 years old leaves school now? What will become of him?'

In July, the United Nations World Food Programme warned that twenty million Iraqis were now…

"…simply engaged in a struggle for survival."

Yet the sanctions committee banned essential items on the grounds that they were ‘dual use’: wheelchairs, because aluminium is used in aircraft wings; angina tablets, because they contain nitro-glycerine; midwifery kits, because scissors might be melted down to make bullets.

For lack of drugs women bled to death after childbirth. Caesarean sections had to be endured without anaesthetic. Many babies were born premature and underweight. Their mothers, too malnourished to breast-feed, had nothing to give them but sugar and tea.

In September 1994, the government was forced to halve the ration as food stocks failed. 400,000 children were estimated to have died since the war, and future generations had been condemned to pay the highest price of all: the integrity of their DNA.

‘For the very first time in that war the British and American military used a new and devastating weapon. It has left in its’ wake on and around the battlefields radioactive and highly toxic dust that lasts for over 4 billion years.’

Depleted Uranium rounds fired by the allies had left over 300 tonnes of dust, blowing across the sands with each new desert storm….into the water, into the food chain.

The rise in cancer was unprecedented.

‘But is the position even worse than first feared: that the weapons we used may also be responsible for a new wave of birth defects.’

‘Midwives have been coping with birth deformities they’ve never seen before.’

There was pressure to end the embargo, but Britain and America resisted. The US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, described sanctions as ‘... one of the most powerful weapons in our armoury…’ - and was adamant that they should stay.

[INTERVIEWER LESLIE STAHL]

‘We have heard that half a million children have died. And….and, you know, is the price worth it?’

[MADELEINE ALBRIGHT]

‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it.’

The US proposed the ‘Oil-for-Food’ programme. Iraq could sell 4 billion dollars of oil a year. A third would be paid as compensation to Kuwait; the remainder used by the UN to buy humanitarian supplies.

Russian and French diplomats dismissed the move as
"….a public relations tool."

In September, the World Food Programme reported:

"We are at the point of no return in Iraq. People have exhausted their ability to cope."

In May ’96, the regime accepted the terms of the ‘Oil-For-Food’ programme. The Iraqi people waited ten months for the first shipment to arrive:

125 tons of chick peas.

By April ’97, of 2000 applications submitted to the Sanctions Committee, only 284 had been approved. Forty contracts on the World Health Organisation’s ‘priority list’ were blocked by the Americans, as were consignments of beans, cooking oil and rice.

In September 1998, the Co-ordinator of the Programme, Dennis Halliday, resigned in protest.

[HALLIDAY]
‘The Oil-For-Food programme as conceived is completely inadequate. It was designed, in fact, not to resolve the situation, but simply to prevent further deterioration of both mortality rates and malnutrition. It has failed to do that; at best it perhaps has just about sustained the situation.’

‘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.’

There was worse to come. After seven years of inspections, relations between the Iraqi administration and UNSCOM broke down.

[TARIQ AZIZ]
‘This is not a UN commission. It has been turned into an American agency, with the support of the British.’

British and American planes readied to attack as the inspectors were pulled out of Baghdad. On December 18th, Prime Minister Tony Blair stood in front of his Christmas tree to announce that the bombing had begun.

[NASRA]
‘What do you want Iraqi children to think? How are they supposed to believe that friendship is possible with the world?’

‘Animals in the West are treated much better than him.’

‘The other day there was a child who said to me: ‘I wish I was born a dog in America’.’