FEBRUARY 2003

There follow excerpts from the following article::
Economic Sanctions as a
Weapon of Mass Destruction
by Joy Gordon
Harpers Magazine    November 2002

If any international act in the last decade is sure to generate enduring bitterness toward the United States, it is the epidemic suffering needlessly visited on Iraqis via U.S. fiat inside the United Nations Security Council. . Invoking security concerns including those not corroborated by U.N. weapons inspectors  U.S. policymakers have effectively turned a program of international governance into a legitimized act of mass slaughter.

The U.N. adopted economic sanctions in 1945, in its charter, as a means of maintaining global order, it has used them fourteen times (twelve times since 1990). But only those sanctions imposed on Iraq have been comprehensive, meaning that virtually every aspect of the country's imports and exports is controlled.

How was the danger of goods entering Iraq assessed, and how was it weighed, if at all, against the mounting collateral damage? All U.N. records that could answer my questions are kept from public scrutiny.

The operation of Iraq sanctions involves numerous agencies within the United Nations. The Security Council's 661 Committee is generally  responsible for both enforcing the sanctions and granting humanitarian exemptions. The Office of Iraq Programme (OIP), within the U.N. Secretariat, operates the Oil for Food Programme. Humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization work in Iraq to monitor and improve the population's welfare, periodically reporting their findings to the 661 Committee. The United States has fought aggressively
throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country. And it has done so in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics. Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment plant but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it; this in a country that has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.



IRAN BEFORE THE GULF WAR
Saddam Hussein's government is well known for its human-rights abuses against the Kurds and Shi'ites, and for its invasion of Kuwait. What is less well known is that this same government had also invested heavily in health, education, and social programs for two decades prior to the Persian Gulf War. While the treatment of ethnic minorities and political enemies has been abominable under Hussein, it is also the case that the well-being of the society at large improved dramatically. The social programs and economic development continued, and expanded, even during Iraq's grueling and costly war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, a war that Saddam Hussein might not have survived without substantial U.S. backing. Before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was a rapidly developing country, with free education, ample electricity, modernized agriculture, and a robust middle class. According to the World Health Organization, 93 percent of the population had access to health care. Ninety-five percent of the population had access to potable water.

POST GULF WAR : SANCTIONS
A USA Defense Department evaluation noted that "Degraded medical conditions in Iraq are primarily attributable to the breakdown of public services (water purification and distribution, preventive medicine, water disposal, health-care services, electricity, and transportation). . . . Hospital care is degraded by lack of running water and electricity."

Nearly everything for Iraq's entire infrastructure  electricity, roads, telephones, water treatment  as well as much of the equipment and supplies related to food and medicine has been subject to Security Council review. In practice, this has meant that the United States and Britain subjected hundreds of contracts to elaborate scrutiny, without the involvement of any other country on the council; and after that scrutiny, the United States, only occasionally seconded by Britain, consistently blocked or delayed hundreds of humanitarian contracts.

In response to U.S. demands, the U.N. worked with suppliers to provide the United States with detailed information about the goods and how they would be used, and repeatedly expanded its monitoring system, tracking each item from contracting through delivery and installation, ensuring that the imports are used for legitimate civilian purposes. Despite all these measures, U.S. holds actually increased. In September 2001 nearly one third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational - supply contracts were on hold. Between the springs of 2000 and 2002, for example, holds on humanitarian goods tripled.

Although most contracts for food in the last few years bypassed the Security Council altogether, political interference with related contracts still occurred. A Syrian company asked the committee to approve a contract to mill flour for Iraq. Whereas Iraq ordinarily purchased food directly, in this case it was growing wheat but did not have adequate facilities to produce flour. The Russian delegate argued that, in light of the report the committee had received from the UNICEF official, and the fact that flour was an essential element of the Iraqi diet, the committee had no choice but to approve the request on humanitarian grounds. The delegate from China agreed, as did those from France and Argentina. But the U.S. representative, Eugene Young, argued that "there should be no hurry" to move on this request: the flour requirement under Security Council Resolution 986 had been met, he said; the number of holds on contracts for milling equipment was "relatively low"; and the committee should wait for the results of a study being conducted by the World Food Programme first. The British delegate stalled as well, saying that he would need to see "how the request would fit into the Iraqi food programme," and that there were still questions about transport and insurance. In the end, despite the extreme malnutrition of which the committee was aware, the U.S. delegate insisted it would be "premature" to grant the request for flour production, and the U.K. representative joined him, blocking the project from going forward.

 Many members of the Security Council have been sharply critical of these practices. In an April 20, 2000, meeting of the 661 Committee, one member after another challenged the legitimacy of the U.S. decisions to impede the humanitarian contracts. The problem had reached "a critical point," said the Russian delegate; the number of holds was "excessive," said the Canadian representative; the Tunisian delegate expressed concern over the scale of the holds. The British and American delegates justified their position on the grounds that the items on hold were "dual use" goods that should be monitored, and that they could not approve them without getting detailed technical information. The French delegate suggested, that providing prompt, detailed technical information was not sufficient to get holds released: a French contract for the supply of ventilators for intensive  care units had been on hold for more than five months, despite his government's prompt and detailed response to a request for additional technical information and the obvious humanitarian character of the goods.

CLEAN WATER, PURIFICATION:
"Dual-use" goods, of course, are the ostensible target of sanctions. Also under suspicion is much of the equipment needed to provide clean water. Chlorine, for example vital for water purification, and feared as a possible source of the chlorine gas used in chemical weapons is aggressively monitored, and deliveries have been regular. Every single canister is tracked from the time of contracting through arrival, installation, and disposal of the empty canister.

 Last year the United States blocked contracts for water tankers, on the grounds that they might be used to haul chemical weapons instead. Yet the arms experts at UNMOVIC* had no objection to them: water tankers with that particular type of lining, they maintained, were not on the "1051 list" the List of goods that require notice to U.N. weapons inspectors. Still, the United States insisted on blocking the water tankers  this during a time when the major cause of child deaths was lack of access to clean drinking water, and when the country was in the midst of a drought.

Among the many deprivations Iraq has experienced, none is so closely correlated with deaths as its damaged water system. Prior to 1990, 95 percent of urban households in Iraq had access to potable water, as did three quarters of rural households. Soon after the Persian Gulf War, there were widespread outbreaks of cholera and typhoid  diseases that had been largely eradicated in Iraq  as well as massive increases in child and infant dysentery, and skyrocketing child and infant mortality rates. By 1996 all sewage-treatment plants had broken down. As the state's economy collapsed, salaries to state employees stopped, or were paid in Iraqi currency rendered nearly worthless by inflation. Between 1990 and 1996 more than half of the employees involved in water and sanitation left their jobs.

The United States anticipated the collapse of the Iraqi water system early on. In January 1991, shortly before the Persian Gulf War began and six months into the sanctions, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency projected that, under the embargo, Iraq's ability to provide clean drinking water would collapse within six months. Chemicals for water treatment, the agency noted, "are depleted or nearing depletion," chlorine supplies were "critically low," the main chlorine-production plants had been shut down, and industries such as pharmaceuticals and food processing were already becoming incapacitated. "Unless the water is purified with chlorine," the agency concluded, "epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur."  All of this indeed came to pass.

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT
As of last March, there were $25 million worth of holds on contracts for hospital essentials sterilizers, oxygen plants, spare parts for basic utilities  that, despite release by UNMOVIC, were still blocked by the United States on the claim of "dual use."

  As of September 2001, nearly a billion dollars' worth of medical-equipment contracts for which all
 the information sought had been provided was still on hold.

 In the late 1980s the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five years old was about fifty per thousand. By 1994 it had nearly doubled, to just under ninety. By 1999 it had increased again, this time to nearly 130; that is, 13 percent of all Iraqi children were dead before their fifth birthday. For the most part, they die as a direct or indirect result of contaminated water.

  It is no accident that the operation of the 661 Committee is so obscured. Behind closed doors, ensconced in a U.N. bureaucracy few citizens could bypass. American policymakers are in a good position to avoid criticism of their practices; but they are also, rightly, fearful of public scrutiny, as a fracas over a block on medical supplies last year illustrates.



 In early 2001, the United States had placed holds on $280 million in medical supplies, including vaccines to treat infant hepatitis, tetanus, and diphtheria, as well as incubators and cardiac equipment. The rationale was that the vaccines contained live cultures, albeit highly weakened ones. The Iraqi government, it was argued, could conceivably extract these, and eventually grow a virulent fatal strain, then develop a missile or other delivery system that could effectively disseminate it. UNICEF and U.N. health agencies, along with other Security Council members, objected
strenuously. Despite pressure behind the scenes from the U.N. and from members of the Security Council, the United States refused to budge. But in March 2001, when the Washington Post and Reuters reported on the holds  and their impact  the United States abruptly announced it was lifting them.

  "smart sanctions,"
The idea behind smart sanctions is to "contour" sanctions so that they affect the military and the political leadership instead of the citizenry.  Subsequently basic civilian necessities, the State Department claimed, would be handled by the U.N. Secretariat, bypassing the Security Council. Critics pointed out that in fact the proposal would change very little since everything related to infrastructure was routinely classified as dual use, and so would be subject again to the same kinds of interference. What the "smart sanctions" would accomplish was to mask the U.S. role. After the embarrassing media coverage of the child-vaccine debacle, the State Department was eager to see the new system in place, and to see that none of the other permanent members of the Security Council  Russia, Britain, China, and France  vetoed the proposal.

 In the end, China and France agreed to support the U.S. proposal. But Russia did not, and immediately after Russia vetoed it, the United States placed holds on nearly every contract that Iraq had with Russian companies.

GOODS REVIEW LIST
Then last November, the United States began lobbying again for a smart-sanctions proposal, now called the Goods Review List (GRL). The proposal passed the Security Council in May 2002, this time with Russia's support. In what one diplomat, anonymously quoted in the Financial Times of April 3, 2002, called "the boldest move yet by the U.S. to use the holds to buy political agreement," the Goods Review List had the effect of lifting $740 million of U.S. holds on Russian contracts with Iraq, even though the State Department had earlier insisted that those same holds were necessary to prevent any military imports. Under the new system, UNMOVIC and the
International Atomic Energy Agency make the initial determination about whether an item appears on the GRL, which includes only those materials questionable enough to be passed on to the Security Council. The list is precise and public, but huge. Cobbled together from existing U.N. and other international lists and precedents, the GRL has been virtually customized to accommodate the imaginative breadth of U.S. policymakers' security concerns.

Propaganda ?
When U.N. weapons experts began reviewing the $5 billion worth of existing holds last July, they found that very few of them were for goods that ended up on the GRL or warranted the security concern that the United States had originally claimed. As a result, hundreds of holds have been lifted in the last few months.

In December 2000, the Security Council passed a resolution allowing Iraq to spend 600 million
euros (about $600 million) from its oil sales on maintenance of its oil-production capabilities. The United States and Britain devised a system that had the effect of undermining Iraq's basic capacity to sell oil: "retroactive pricing." Taking advantage of the fact that the 661 Committee sets the price Iraq receives from each oil buyer, the United States and Britain began to systematically withhold their votes on each price until the relevant buying period had passed. The idea was that then the alleged surcharge could be subtracted from the price after the sale had occurred, and that price would then be imposed on the buyer. The effect of this practice has been to torpedo the entire Oil for Food Programme. Obviously, few buyers would want to commit themselves to a purchase whose price they do not know until after they agree to it. As a result of this system, Iraq's oil income has dropped 40 percent since last year, and more than $2 billion in humanitarian contracts  all of them fully approved  are now stalled.
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Can we now depend on the united nations to come to an equable and just decision about the usa's desired war on iraq when they have allowed the usa and britain, by a technical rule, incapacitate and destroy that nation ??

Iraq

Population: 21,422,292   Density:128 per Sq. Mi    Area: 167,975 Sq. Mi (438,317 sq. km)

Ethnic Groups: Arab 80% and Kurds 15%, Others 5%

Languages: Arabic (official), Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldian, Armenian

Religions: Muslims 97% (Shi'a 60%, Sunni 37%), Christians 3%

Government Type: Republic.           Head of State: President Saddam Hussein

Local Divisions: 18 Provinces