Australia's minister for immigration and other politicians accuse people who arrive in Australia "illegally" of being "ungrateful queue jumpers" when they protest against their incarceration in detention centres here. Many of these refugees are from Iraq.
The following description of the living (and dying) conditions in Iraq is abridged from a letter by former US attorney general RAMSEY CLARK, sent to each member of the United Nations Security Council on January 26. It is powerful testimony as to why Iraqis risk their lives to gain asylum in Australia and other First World countries, and why they must not be forced to return to Iraq.
A delegation of US citizens from 20 states has just returned from Iraq. On January 17, we observed in Baghdad the 9th anniversary of the January 17 to February 28, 1991, war against Iraq. US aircraft flew 110,000 aerial sorties against Iraq, averaging one every 30 seconds, dropping 80,300 tonnes of explosives, the equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshima bombs.
This was by far the most intensive bombardment in history. It killed tens of thousands of people, injuring many more. Medicines and medical supplies were exhausted.
It devastated water systems from reservoir, pumping station, pipeline, filtration plant to kitchen faucet, as well as urban sewage and sanitation systems nationwide. Food production, processing, storage, distribution and marketing facilities were widely destroyed. Poultry was nearly wiped out by loss of electricity and lack of grain. Animal herds were decimated.
Fertiliser and insecticide plants and storage structures were destroyed. Communications systems, telephone, radio and TV were shattered. Transportation was badly battered. Vital industries were attacked everywhere.
Electric power was knocked out across the nation in the first 24 hours of the assault. Petroleum production, refining, storage and distribution from well to service station were attacked across the nation.
The combined effect of this vast destruction of essential goods, services and industries, and the most comprehensive economic sanctions of modern times, first imposed on Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1990, has caused more than 1.5 million deaths.
Life and death in Iraq
I have travelled to and within Iraq 10 times since sanctions were imposed, once during the bombing in 1991. Each year, the death rate has risen radically.
In Iraq, they are palpable. UN agencies, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Food Program, UNICEF and others have found and confirmed the deaths time and time again. They must shock the conscience of every sentient human being.
Comprehensive reports by UN agencies and other sources are available to you. You are charged with this knowledge.
As a tragic illustration, the total annual deaths of children under the age of five from respiratory infection, diarrhoea, and gastroenteritis and malnutrition was: during 1989 — 7110 deaths; 1991 — 27,473; 1994 — 52,905; 1997 — 58,845; 1998 — 71,279; 1999 (January to November) — 73,572. The annual number of deaths grew more than tenfold from 1989 to 1999.
While children under five are the most vulnerable age group, except for the extremely elderly, every age group has suffered radical increases in the numbers of deaths. Members of the population with serious chronic illnesses requiring regular medication or therapy suffer the highest percentages of death of any sectors, approaching 100% for some illnesses for which survival rates were as high as 95% before the sanctions.
The sanctions target to kill or injure infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill. The Red Crescent and other knowledgeable professional groups believe it will be years after the end of sanctions before the deaths from most causes stop rising, because of the cumulative effect of the sanctions on the physical conditions of parents, children, the new born and the overall environment.
Most of those who survive suffer severe physical and mental injury from the sanctions. Indicative of the impact of sanctions is the enormous rise in the percentage of registered births under 2.5 kilograms, a dangerously low birth weight in a nation without adequate food, medicine, and medical supplies and equipment. Like death, the proportion of births that are underweight has risen radically every year, from 4.5% in 1990, to 10.8% in 1991, to 21.1% in 1994, to 23.8% in 1998, to 24.1% in 1999 (January to November).
The consequence for the lives of these children is enormous. Many will have underdeveloped organs, mental retardation, remain smaller and weaker than average, and be more vulnerable to sickness, malnutrition and bad water. Their life expectancy has been reduced by as much as 30%.
Probably 90% of all the infants born in Iraq since 1990 have significantly lower birth weights than they would if there were no sanctions. Foreign medical teams have for five years referred to a "stunted generation" in Iraq.
Disease epidemics
The struggle that the children living and dying under sanctions in Iraq face are suggested in the following increases in treated cases of nutrition-related sicknesses and deficiencies. The incidence of kwashiorkor, an extremely dangerous end product of malnutrition in which the victim wastes and dies without early intensive care, has risen from 485 in 1990, to 20,975 in 1994, to 30,232 in 1998.
The incidence of marasmus, which inflicts a lower death rate than kwashiorkor, but is permanently damaging and requires early and extended care for survival, has increased from 5193 in 1990, to 192,296 in 1994, to 264,468 in 1998. The incidence of treated cases of protein, calorie and vitamin deficiency and malnutrition has increased from 96,809 in 1990, to 1,576,194 in 1994, to 1,910,309 in 1998.
Few doctors in Iraq had seen a case of kwashiorkor before late 1990, associating it only with starvation in the poorest regions of Africa and south Asia during periods of war, drought, pestilence and other calamities.
Common communicable diseases which are preventable by vaccinations, provided to nearly all children in developed countries and which were standard in Iraq before 1990, have increased by multiples. While rates for these diseases fluctuate because of the cyclical nature of their communication, they have been regularly higher, increasingly so, and have afflicted additional hundreds of thousands of children. Increases between 1989 and 1998 were: whooping cough — 3.4 times; measles — 4.5 times; mumps — 3.7 times. The Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council has failed to approve negotiated contracts for Iraq to purchase vaccines for these and other diseases.
Poliomyelitis, which had been virtually extinguished in Iraq, has increased by two to 18.6 times since 1989. Cholera rose from zero cases in 1989 to 2560 cases in 1998 and conditions in Iraq threaten an epidemic.
Amoebic dysentery was 13 times greater in 1998 (264,290 cases) than 1989. Typhoid fever was up 10.9 times (to 19,825 cases) in 1998, compared to 1989. Scabies increased every year from zero cases in 1989 to 43,580 cases in 1998.
All people in health care work under tragic conditions. Doctors and nurses uniformly state that patients they could easily save under normal conditions die every day.
The hospitals are in wretched condition: dark, cold, dirty, stairwells crumbling, walls peeling, beds without sheets, plumbing inoperable, electricity erratic, equipment without parts, medicines, oxygen, aesthetics, antiseptics, antibiotics, x-ray film, catheters, gauze, aspirin, light bulbs, pencils always scarce, often unavailable. Common life-saving medicines, from dehydration tablets to insulin, are never in adequate supply.
In plain numbers, without measuring the conditions under which they were performed or the availability of important equipment and supplies, major surgical operations have declined by 74.4% since 1989. The monthly average number of laboratory investigations has declined by 68.6%.
Drastic deterioration in the environment, the physical plant, sanitation and the introduction of some 800,000 kilograms of depleted uranium by US aircraft and missiles have caused enormous increases in illnesses, from tuberculosis to leukemia and other cancers, tumours and malformations in foetuses.
Unemployment is 60%. Ninety-five per cent of the private sector of the economy is shut down. There are no ambulances. Eighty per cent of the sanitation trucks from 10 years ago are inoperable. There are no new trucks, cars, tractors, buses or other vehicles.
Food distribution from a rationing system which controls staples delivers 1100 calories per day. The poor cannot significantly supplement their food rations. In 1989, daily caloric intake in Iraq averaged 3400.
These brief facts demonstrate the deadly conditions of life deliberately inflicted on the entire population of Iraq, but which inherently impact on infants, children, the elderly and chronically ill first and destroy a vast part of the nation and its overwhelmingly Muslim peoples.
End the genocide!
Representative of the attitude of the US foreign policy makers toward Iraq and the sanctions are the remarks of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger in a syndicated newspaper article published in the second week of January. He referred to the "alleged suffering of the Iraqi people".
Then US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright spoke more forthrightly. She stated in an interview on the top-rated CBS national network show 60 Minutes in Spring 1997 that she believed the deaths of 585,000 Iraqi children under the age of five as a direct result of the sanctions was a price worth paying.
The sanctions violate the Genocide Convention of 1948, in which genocide is defined, in part, as follows: "Article II ... genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
"(a) Killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
The sanctions against Iraq intentionally destroyed in major part members of a national group and a religious group, killing members of the groups, causing bodily and mental harm to their members and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, at least, in part.
The US, after decades of resisting, finally ratified the Genocide Convention before these sanctions were imposed. It has frequently accused other governments of genocide, sometimes assaulting them severely with its massive, high-tech military weapons, against which nearly all nations are defenceless.
The food for oil program has failed to stop the increased death rates. The program was approved in December 1996 as a means of maintaining the sanctions against Iraq which were meeting growing opposition in the UN Security Council.
After three years of operation, barely US$6 billion in contracts under the program have been received from $19 billion of oil sales. Despite Iraq's desperate needs, more of the funds from sales of its oil have been turned over to the US, the UN and others making claims against Iraq than have been allocated to contracts approved for purchase of food, medicine, equipment and equipment parts for the people of Iraq. $5 billion in contracts for purchases entered into by Iraq have not been approved.
To rebuild the health care system, the food production, processing, storage and distribution systems, and the water systems will cost many billions. Restoring facilities for health, communications, transportation, education, industry and to clean up of the environment polluted by the US aerial assaults will cost many tens of billions of dollars.
Income from oil sales for 1997-1999 averaged under $2 billion dollars annually, 10% of the amounts available before sanctions. If Iraq devoted all of the funds under the oil for food program to food, medicine and water, the deaths caused by sanctions would continue to rise and the health of the nation decline.
US military aircraft deliberately destroyed Iraq's water storage, distribution and quality control systems during January and February 1991. Within two weeks, there was no running water in any city or town in Iraq. Many tens of thousands of people have died as a result of drinking contaminated water.
Iraq has entered into contracts totalling $700,000,000 for water and sewage projects. This sum is a very small fraction of current needs. Only $65,000,000 has been received, less than 9%.
This is done deliberately to continue conditions of life that destroy the population of Iraq. Purchase of chlorine for municipal water treatment, a standard international usage, has been completely rejected.
Oil production for even the very low levels authorised under the program, less than one-third of the pre-sanctions level, has been difficult to achieve and usually below authorised amounts because of deteriorated and destroyed facilities and lack of equipment and parts. Still the Sanctions Committee has approved only 18% of the tendered contracts for oil production, refining and transport.
Of the $207 million sought for communications under the program, not a cent has been approved. The Sanctions Committee fears that communication of the truth will set opinion free and end the sanctions.
The food for oil program has never been anything more than a means for slowly increasing the rate of destruction of the people of Iraq. During the last three years of the program, well over 200,000 children under age five died in drastically increasing numbers each year.
The sanctions must be ended now. It is criminal to hold the people of Iraq hostage to demands of the US against their government, whatever those demands may be.
In war it is prohibited to use starvation as a weapon. Medical aid must be given to enemy wounded. An Iraqi is being deliberately killed every two minutes by conditions of life inflicted by the sanctions. Sanctions are the equivalent of pointing guns at the heads of Iraq's children and elderly while saying to their government, "Do what we demand or we will shoot", then pulling a trigger every two minutes.
[For more information, contact the International Action Center, 39 West 14th Street, Room 206, New York, NY 10011, e-mail <iacenter@iacenter.org>, or visit the web site at .]