A nation sagging under the weight of sanctions
Thousands of infants are dying

By LARRY JOHNSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOREIGN DESK EDITOR

This is life -- and death -- in Iraq after eight years of sanctions imposed by the United Nations following the 1991 Gulf War.

At Al Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad, malnourished children, covered with flies, lie on stained mattresses. Mothers and fathers sit on the beds, methodically swatting at the flies. Medicine is in short supply. The hospital is dark; electrical power is shut off periodically each day to conserve resources. The usual antiseptic odor of medical facilities has been replaced with the stench of urine, feces and decay.

Moving from bed to bed, Dr. Tarig Al-Shujairi lists the illnesses afflicting the children: typhoid fever, pneumonia, leukemia, tuberculosis, cholera. Even polio and measles are making a comeback, he says.

A nurse runs by carrying a small bottle of oxygen. Nemya, a 2-year-old girl with hair the color of sand, has meningitis and is unable to breathe because of the fluid clogging her bronchial tubes. Her father and mother are frozen at the side of her bed while the nurse covers Nemya's face with the small oxygen mask.

It is too late. Nemya's chest heaves, her body shakes, and she dies. Her mother pulls her scarf close about her face and cries silently. Her father looks at a visitor and touches his chest over his heart.

The father of 2-year-old Nemya grips her death certificate while talking to a doctor moments after she died from meningitis. A 50-cent tube could have saved the youngster's life, one doctor says. Dan DeLong/P-I

A 50-cent tube could have saved her life, another doctor says. But the hospital has none. Impossible to obtain under the sanctions, Al-Shujairi says.

The U.N. plans to keep the sanctions in place until it is convinced that Iraq's long-range missiles and chemical, nuclear and biological weapons have been dismantled or destroyed, which Iraq had agreed to do at the end of the Persian Gulf War.

The sanctions range from a ban on commercial flights to and from Iraq to an oil embargo, eased somewhat three years ago when the United Nations allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to buy food and medicine.

The sanctions, despite the hopes of many Western leaders, have had little apparent effect on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He remains firmly in control, and efforts to find and destroy his weapons are in limbo. But they have had a devastating effect on Iraq's 22 million people.

Reports from U.N. diplomats, church leaders and officials of humanitarian organizations point out how the economic and military sanctions have left many people scrambling for survival. Baghdad's unemployment rate is more than 50 percent; in the second-largest city, Basra, unemployment hovers around 75 percent.

Out-of-work engineers drive taxis, and doctors take second jobs to supplement a salary that, because of inflation, now averages only about $3 to $5 per month.

And each month thousands of infants are dying of malnutrition-related illnesses that many believe would not be a problem except for the sanctions restricting or bogging down the shipment of food and medicine.

"Ten years ago, malnutrition was almost non-existent," said Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children's Fund representative in Baghdad. From 1991 to 1998, children under 5 were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,690 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month, according to Singh's figures.

Four-year-old Jazwan Sulamin, battling a fever for more than a week, is held by his weeping aunt, Seeta Mohammed, at Al Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad. Dan DeLong/P-I

"Malnutrition in Iraq is not just epidemic, it is endemic," Hans von Sponeck, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, said in an interview.

"The sanctions are turning the social structure upside down -- the middle-class is every day more impoverished."

Robert Watkins, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Iraq, calls the situation "a natural disaster not caused by the forces of nature, but by the forces of man."

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright strongly defends the sanctions. When asked on "Meet the Press" last December if the United States bears any responsibility for the deaths of Iraqi children because of a lack of food and medicine, Albright said: "No, Saddam Hussein bears full responsibility for that. It is actually the United States that was the author of the oil-for-food program which permits Saddam to sell oil for food. If we had not done that, and if the sanctions weren't in place, then he would be selling oil for tanks. So it is the United States and our allies that have made sure that the people of Iraq have food."

Earlier this year, Peter Burleigh, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in a speech to the Security Council, expressed concern that the embargo has caused immense suffering in Iraq, but stressed that Saddam's regime was mostly to blame.

Still, whether the human cost of sanctions is worth what they may accomplish in curbing or changing the Iraqi regime is being hotly debated by business groups, humanitarians and politicians at the United Nations and in many world capitals. Russia, France and China, together with several Arab countries, have called for new approaches that could lead to the sanctions being lifted or eased.

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FOLLOWUP
Larry Johnson returned to Iraq in fall 2002 to see how the population has fared since the original report. See what he found.
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· Introduction · The people · Daily life · The delegates · Local impact · History of sanctions · A push for change · Iraq facts · Timeline · Effects of sanctions · Security Council   Resolution 986 · Gallery