Sanctions
UNICEF Establishes Blame in Iraq
UNICEF'S recent reports on child mortality in Iraq provided ready fuel for the ongoing propaganda war over the future of sanctions. Iraq's representative at the UN has spoken of a "genocide" caused by sanctions while US and United Kingdom spokespersons, completely ignoring the sanctions' impact since 1990, have blamed Saddam's regime for Iraq's socio-economic decline.
“The Bombing Has Started Again”
I recently informed an editor of a national news program about a delegation of Nobel laureates who planned to visit Iraq in March. He responded that “Iraq’s not on the screen now that the bombing has stopped.” A puzzling response, since on that very day, the US had bombed seven sites in Iraq.
“Sanctions Have an Impact on All of Us”
The following comments are excerpted from a speech delivered on Capitol Hill on October 6, 1998 by Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, shortly after he resigned his post in protest over the sanctions’ devastating impact on the Iraqi people.
Protesting Sanctions Against Iraq
Aida Dabbas is program officer for the Jordanian-American Binational Fulbright Commission in Amman. She has been an active opponent of the sanctions against Iraq and of the US arms buildup in the region. Jillian Schwedler, an editor of this magazine, spoke with her by telephone in June.
You recently visited Iraq for the first time.
The Containment Myth
Among those who direct American foreign policy, there is near unanimity that the collapse of communism represents a kind of zero hour. The end of the Cold War so transformed the geopolitical landscape as to render the present era historically discontinuous from the epoch that preceded it. Policy makers contend that America’s mission abroad has had to change to keep pace with these new circumstances.
Intervention, Sovereignty and Responsibility
Four years after Operation Desert Storm, and the mass uprisings that followed in the southern and northern parts of Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s regime, the country’s economic and social fabric is in tatters. Economic sanctions, following a destructive war and compounded by the Iraqi government’s abusive and divisive social and political policies, have devoured the country’s once substantial middle class and further impoverished the already poor. Even if tomorrow the sanctions were lifted and the regime were to vanish, the capacity of Iraqi society to reconstitute itself is in grave peril.
From the Editors (March/April 1995)
A public debate over the US-led economic sanctions policy against Iraq is long overdue. More than four years have passed since the Gulf war ceasefire and Baghdad’s bloody suppression of the popular uprisings that followed. The regime, the ostensible target of the sanctions, appears to be firmly in place. The vast majority of individual Iraqis, whose best interests are cited as a major justification for the policy, are suffering a degree of trauma and deprivation that has already set in motion a dynamic of social disintegration and self-destruction that will affect the entire region — and may be very difficult to reverse.
The Sanctions Dilemma
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has a historical perspective regarding the use of economic sanctions. We have both supported and opposed the implementation of sanctions — at times with clear strength of conviction, at other times with doubts and apprehensions. We have supported economic and cultural sanctions against apartheid in South Africa since 1976. We supported the pre-war sanctions against Iraq after it invaded Kuwait, but have opposed continuing sanctions since the end of the war. We support sanctions against the former Yugoslavia and against the military government of Haiti. We have opposed sanctions against Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya and the former Soviet Union.
Dilemmas of Relief Work in Iraq
The allied attack on Iraq in January-February 1991, and the hardship inflicted on the civilian population, prompted many UN agencies and non-governmental organizations to mobilize relief efforts in the country. I spent seven weeks in May and June leading a relief team in southern Iraq. Relief work was already underway in the Kurdish north, in the center (Baghdad) and in the largely Shi‘i south.
The Iraq Sanctions Catastrophe
The continuing public health emergency in Iraq is taking a higher toll in civilian lives than the coalition bombing last January and February. This emergency could have been over by now if the Bush administration and its allies at the United Nations had accepted recommendations on humanitarian needs and monitoring safeguards made by UN relief officials last July.
Document: Report of the UN Mission to Assess Humanitarian Needs in Iraq
Conditions in Iraq in the aftermath of the US military assault have been difficult to ascertain. The most authoritative report to date is that of the UN mission led by Undersecretary-General Martti Ahtisaari, which spent March 10-17 in Iraq. The mission, which included representatives of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and other UN programs, had intended to examine conditions first in Kuwait and then Iraq, but the Kuwaiti authorities requested it delay its arrival there until a UN Environment Program mission had completed its work.
From the Editors
Events elsewhere in the world — elections in Nicaragua, death squads in South Africa and recent decisions by the European Commission — hold much instruction for people concerned with the Middle East. Elections, after all, are not the same as democracy. After ten years of US armed intervention and economic aggression, a majority of Nicaraguans voting on February 25 chose an alternative to 10,000 percent inflation, to pervasive shortages, to the killings and sabotage of the Contras. “Sandinistas Lose the Hunger Vote” was the accurate headline in the Financial Times. The winning opposition front was cobbled together and financed by the State Department.
Economic Sanctions and Iranian Trade
Former President Jimmy Carter’s announcement of economic sanctions against Iran on April 7, 1980 aroused little enthusiasm except in Tehran, where crowds roared their approval of a formal break in ties with the “great Satan.” At home, hadn’t the freeze of Iranian assets, the longshoremen’s refusal to load Iran-bound goods, and the November ban on Iranian oil imports already reduced trade between the two countries to a trickle? In Europe, foreign ministers meeting in Lisbon on April 10 declined to heed Carter’s call. The Europeans, and the Japanese, had a stake in maintaining economic ties to the new regime. Western Europe as a whole was importing 650,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day.
