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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The US-contrived economic siege of Iraq has now lasted well over seven years, as I write ... with, according to all the estimates, millions of casualties - perhaps 2,000,000 dead through starvation and disease, more than half of them children, and many millions more emaciated, traumatised, sick, dying…
There are thousands of independent witnesses - aid workers, UN staff, journalists. One, Kathryn Casa (Clark, 1996), tells of ‘a young mother standing over her child who lay listlessly on a dirty sheet, too weak to do much more than whimper, his abdomen swollen to the size of a large melon… This was a four-month-old baby boy... ‘flies crawling in and out of his eyes and mouth… this little Iraqi... starving to death.' This baby is one of millions, dead or dying...
The United States is the conscious architect of this years-long genocide. Knowingly, with a cruel and cynical resolve, US officials work hard to withhold relief from a starving and diseased people. And the grotesque facts are not even disputed by Washington. Madeleine Albright, now Secretary of State, was prepared to assert in public that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified.
Procrastination or veto in the Sanctions Committee, harassment of aid workers, threat (of up to $1 million fines and 12 years in jail) to American citizens taking medicines and toys to dying infants - these are some of the tools sanctioned by an American government committed to the slow extermination of a people. The old and the sick, emaciated pregnant women, the kwashiorkor children, grossly under-weight babies with no chance of survival, the desperately weak and vulnerable -these, by the million, are those most directly targeted for extinction by Washington. At the same time, Clinton, Albright inter alia smile their public-relations smiles and talk of compassion and human rights.
This edition provides more evidence of the ‘new Holocaust’, indicates the role of US propaganda, and profiles the cynical farce of ‘food-for-oil’ Resolution 986. It is shown how US policy, a slow and knowing extermination of a national people, falls unambiguously within the terms of the UN Genocide Convention; how US malevolence is not confined to Iraq; and how superpower arrogance can render a government deaf and blind to all the demands of decency, justice and international law.
Geoff Simons
December 1997
Preface to the First Edition
The researching and writing of this book have been an education. I have learnt not only about one of the twentieth century’s many unpublicized genocides, the subjecting of an entire people to a total years-long siege, but also about the psychology of comfortable, unthreatened human beings. Try to impress upon people - politicians, government officials, publishers, journalists, relatives, friends - what they are doing, or what they are allowing to be done in their name, and what happens?
Tell them about the innocent thousands, hundreds of thousands, forced to drink sewage; about the silent shrivelled women holding their dying babies; about the thousands of children trapped in unrelieved trauma; about the stick infants, the ballooning ‘sugar bellies’; about the children now going blind for want of insulin; about the millions today being denied adequate food and medicine - and what is the response? Incomprehension, blocking out, a refusal to believe or feel - what psychologists have called psychic numbing. And guilt transference: if people are suffering, it cannot be our fault, my fault… There must be someone else to blame. Let us rely on the propaganda to tell us who it is.
While I was writing this book, a number of distressing and tragic child murders were copiously reported in Britain. Wrecked families struggled to adjust to a desolate new reality. No-one doubted that whoever had perpetrated such crimes must be monsters. So how are we to regard Western leaders and others who, stubbornly and knowingly, support policies that cause the deaths not of isolated children (or even 16), but of very many: 100,000 in 1994, 100,000 in 1995, perhaps half a million so far, with all the genocidal policies still in place. Are we and they, as the international human-rights worker Elias Davidsson asks, ‘accomplices to mass murder’?
I propose a provocative and unfashionable theory: that any Iraqi child matters as much as any American or British child. And the corollary; that we are so ethically derelict that it needs to be said.
It is not necessary to visit Iraq. It is enough to acknowledge the copious testimonies and reports, some of which are quoted and cited here. I still feel the heavy shadow of Chapter 3, and something of what these inadequate words signal of human suffering. And I still feel the impotent shame to which my government, and all the other psychically numbed and guilt-transferring accomplices to genocide, have condemned me. It is enough.
Geoff Simons
Acknowledgements
Many people, either knowingly or unknowingly, have provided invaluable help during the researching and writing of the present book. Particular thanks are due to: Tony Benn, MP, for providing his characteristic support and for offering the pre-publication comment; Felicity Arbuthnot, journalist and Middle East expert, for her remarkable generosity in allowing me access to her entire Iraq archive; Alexandra McLeod, Librarian at the United Nations Information Centre, London, for highlighting reports, letters, resolutions and other essential material.
I am grateful also to individuals who took trouble to locate relevant papers and reports and for making them available: John O. Field, School of Nutrition, Tufts University, Massachusetts, US; Sarah Graham-Browne, the Gulf Information Project, London; Greg Steddy, Kluwer Law International, London; and the staff of the London-based charity Medical Aid for Iraq (MAI), whose detailed and regular reports have provided a valuable insight into the suffering of a people under siege.
Thanks should also be expressed to all those (politicians, journalists, human-rights campaigners and others) who through their independence and commitment have worked to change genocidal policies perpetrated in the name of Western virtue. They include: Tony Benn, MP, Tam Dalyell, MP, George Galloway, MP, Felicity Arbuthnot, Miriam Ryle, Eric Hoskins, Ramsey Clark, Henry Gonzalez, Elias Davidsson, Hugh Stevens, Jan van Heurck, Riad Al-Taher, Sabah Al-Mukhtar and many others.
Colette Simons provided valuable research assistance. Christine Simons helped with research and in many other ways.
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The Chronology of Genocide
… nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country [Iraq]. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results the flow of food through the private sector has been reduced to a trickle Many food prices are already beyond the purchasing reach of most Iraqi families. The mission recommends that sanctions in respect of food supplies should be immediately removed.
Report of mission (10-17 March 1991) led by
Martti Ahtisaari, UN Under-Secretary-General
for Administration and Management
… it is a country whose economy has been devastated… above all by the continued sanctions… which have virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment and widespread human suffering ... a vast majority of the Iraqi population is living under most deplorable conditions and is simply engaged in a struggle for survival... a grave humanitarian tragedy is unfolding ... the nutritional status of the population continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate… large number of Iraqis now have food intakes lower than those of the populations in the disaster stricken African countries.
UN Food and Agriculture Organisation,
World Food Programme, Special Alert No. 237, July 1993
Alarming food shortages are causing irreparable damage to an entire generation of Iraqi children… 'After 24 years in the field, mostly in Africa starting with Biafra, I didn't think anything could shock me,’ said Dieter Hannusch, WFP’s Chief Emergency Support Officer, ‘but this was comparable to the worst scenarios I have ever seen.’… ‘There actually are more than 4 million people, a fifth of Iraq’s population, at severe nutritional risk,’ said Mona Hamman, WFP’s Regional Manager. ‘That number includes
2.4 million children under jive, about 600,000 pregnant nursing women and destitute women heads of households as well as hundreds of thousands of elderly without anyone to help them... 70 per cent of the population has little or no access to food… Nearly everyone seems to be emaciated. We arc at the point of no return in Iraq... The social fabric of the nation is disintegrating. People have exhausted their ability to cope.'
UN World Food Programme, News Update,
26 September 1995
… findings illustrate a strong association between economic sanctions and increase in child mortality and malnutrition rates... The moral, financial and political standing of an international community intent on maintaining sanctions is challenged by the estimate that since August 1990, 567 000 children in Iraq have died as a consequence.
Sarah Zaidi and Mary C. Smith Fawzi,
The Lancet (London), 2 December 1995
The Red Cross has strongly criticised the ‘dire effects' of sanctions on civilians… There is chronic hunger… with 20,000 new cases of child malnutrition every month.
Victoria Brittain, The Independent, 4 December 1995
… health conditions… are deteriorating at an alarming rate under the sanctions regime... the vast majority of Iraqis continue to survive on a semi-starvation diet… The damaging effects of poor nutrition are being compounded by epidemics… and by a precipitous decline in health care The most visible impact of these problems is seen in the dramatic rise of mortality rates among infants and children.
UN World Health Organisation, 25 March 1996
Our policy is to keep Iraq in its box.
Western diplomat, The Guardian, 18 October 1995
Geoff Simons
Introduction
The main purpose of this book is to highlight the continuing and unjustifiable punishment of the Iraqi people through economic sanctions. It rests on the simple principle, enshrined in the Protocol 1 Addition (1977) to the Geneva Convention (1949), that the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is illegal and ethically indefensible. The book does not represent apology or exculpation for Saddam Hussein (I have charted his bloody rise to power in Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, 1994). It is important to remember that many of the politicians, business leaders, pundits and journalists who today are keenest to maintain economic sanctions on Iraq are precisely the people who in the 1980s did all they could to build up and sustain the tyrannical Iraqi regime. What is argued here is that it is unjustifiable in both law (Protocol 1; UN General Assembly Resolution 96(1); the UN Genocide Convention; etc.) and natural justice to target helpless men, women and children as a method of overthrowing a national leader.
The reality is that the Western powers are pursuing a strategic policy, linked to the control of Gulf oil, that has nothing to do with support for human rights or condemnation of military aggression (Western leaders have long tolerated abuses of human rights and military invasions when they were judged to serve Western economic and strategic interests). What this means is that the United States has consistently manipulated the United Nations to serve its foreign policy objectives; and where this option has not been possible it has acted unilaterally in defiance of UN majority opinion. As Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has admitted: ‘we will behave with others multi-laterally when we can and unilaterally when we must’. At the same time the United States remains in constant violation of its UN obligations - in deciding which national derelictions to ignore, which UN‘ resolutions to support, and when, if ever, to pay its financial dues. Washington’s financial debt to the UN, the largest of any Member State, has mounted over the years: in September 1995 it stood at $1.6 billion.
Chapter 1 profiles something of the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq, the suffering of the people and the devastation of the land. In this brief conflict alone there was enough to justify copious charges against the United States of war crimes; of serious violations of the Geneva …
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