"7,000 Iraqi Homes destroyed.. Leaving more than 90,000 Iraqies homless" - CNN'S Bernard Shaw reports on the destruction in Baghdad. Real Video:

The six weeks of allied air raids had destroyed the bulk of the electrical power stations that supplied hospitals, water pumping facilities, sewage treatment plants and water purification facilities; in addition, these various facilities had often been totally or partially destroyed by the bombing. A consequence was that many parts of Iraq had to face a public health crisis of vast proportions. In the immediate aftermath of the war the residents of Baghdad, having had no electricity or running water since the onset of the bombing in mid-January, had to rely for drinking water on the Tigris river, now being founded by gushing streams of raw sewage. Iraqi and international health authorities predicted that unless sanctions on Iraq were lifted the capital and other major cities would soon be facing outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and polio. Dr Mohammad Ani, the Iraqi director for immunisation and primary health care for the ministry of health, commented: 'We are being killed indirectly.' The Rustumiya and Sarafiya sewage treatment and water pumping stations had been attacked with allied missiles and bombs, and nearby water treatment plants were working at about one-quarter of capacity. Raymond Naimy, an official of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), commented that Baghdad's water supply had been cut by 90-95 per cent, and a World Health Organisation (WHO) delegation noted a fourfold increase in the number of children being treated for diarrhoea.

Scenes of damage in and around Baghdad taken from the Iraqi film "Sign of Miracle," produced in July 1991 by the Ministry of Housing and Construction. Real Video:

In March 1991 Dr Roger Vivarie, of the Paris-based Medecins Sans Frontieres, reported: 'The situation in Baghdad and in Falluja, 80km from the capital, which was visited by our team, was already very difficult a week ago. Hospitals, once among the most advanced and best equipped in the region, now lack the most elementary working tools. There is no infrastructure, no running water, no food and no medicine. All sanitary infrastructures have gone and not a single hospital is in a position to provide the most elementary of services.' The UN special envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, reported that Iraq was in a 'near apocalypse': Iraq was like a patient whose central nervous system had been destroyed. Ahtisaari warned that since the country's energy systems had been so badly damaged by bombing, food aid alone would not be sufficient to avert disaster. The UN sanctions committee was urged to respond to the crisis by declaring that an 'urgent humanitarian need' existed throughout Iraq. In his UN-sponsored report, Ahtisaari himself commented: 'Nothing we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country... the recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure'. Moreover, 'sanctions decided upon by the Security Council... seriously affected the country's ability to feed its people'; all sources of fuel and power and modern means of communication were now 'essentially defunct', with the telephone system and the mall service destroyed; the supply of food to private citizens had been reduced to 'a trickle'. There was a real risk of widespread deaths through disease and perhaps starvation. Ibrahim al-Nouri, the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, was reporting on cases of cholera and typhoid detected in several towns, and urging international aid organisations to send water purification chemicals to help combat the diseases. Relief officials in Jordan were commenting that Iraqi hospitals had been forced to halve rations for their patients.

The destroyed Nasiriayah bridge. Some 40 Iraqi civilians were killed or injured in that rare daylight Feb. 4 attack, although Baghdad radio claimed that hundreds of civilians had died.

In Basra and other cities women were forced to wash clothes and kitchen utensils in water contaminated with raw sewage, with the incidence of disease sharply increasing because of the shortage of food and the lack of clean water for drinking. All but two of the city's filtration plants were destroyed, and cholera and typhoid, not yet at epidemic proportions, were increasing. Said al-Tamimi, a medical engineer, was quoted: 'A friend of mine brought me a bucket of water from the mains supply in which was swimming a little snake.' The death rate, particularly among children, was rapidly increasing: the main bridges across the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Shatt al-Arab had been destroyed, making it impossible to take children to hospital where, in any case, virtually all normal services were impossible. At the same time it was impossible to monitor with any accuracy the incidence of the burgeoning cholera epidemic, since during the war and the ensuing civil unrest most of the laboratory equipment used to measure the disease had been destroyed.

In a damning article in The New York Times Zbigniew Brzezinskl, the former national security adviser to President Carter, shattered the US claim that the war was fought with discrimination to minimise civilian casualties. He emphasised that damage-toll 'raises the moral question of the proportionality of the response' to Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait. The respected British journalist Peter Jenkins, commenting on the Brzezinskl report and other material, noted that the peace 'has turned into a nightmare, the continuation of the war by other means.' Joost Hiltermann, Middle East organiser for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), commented: 'The bombing was called surgical, but we're calling it neurosurgical: with extraordinary accuracy the allied bombs took the brain out of the country's ability to survive'; and PHR president Jack Geiger, having toured the region of Basra, described the effect as: 'Bomb now, die later. You don't kill people, you just cause the system to collapse.' The main themes of the PHR report were familiar enough: malnutrition, diarrhoea and dehydration among the children; dangerous drinking water; and a crippled economy.

Destroyed buildings in Baghdad.

In the same spirit a Harvard medical team visiting Iraq found that the death rate of children under five was two to three times higher than before the war. They estimated that over the coming year a further 170,000 children would die because of the problems caused by the Gulf War: the massively dislocated social infrastructure and the harshness of the enforced sanctions. Now typhoid and cholera epidemics were flaring up throughout the country, with hospitals - lacking antibiotics, infant formula, medicines, bandages and other supplies - unable to treat malnourished children. One Baghdad hospital reported 30-35 new cases of cholera a week during April 1991; and infectious typhoid patients were being discharged in all regions because of a shortage of chloramphenicol, the drug needed for treatment. Dr Megan Passey, the leader of the Harvard team, said that the report would be presented to UN agencies, the US Congress and international relief agencies.

Destroyed Wahda Bridge in Baghdad.

In May 1991 Iraq declared it was desperate for access to its overseas assets, now frozen by the US-dominated Security Council, in order to pay for the next four months' food supply. Deals had been signed with Australia and Canada for the import of 1.5 billion tons of wheat, half the country's needs, but the orders were dependent on Iraq gaining access to its foreign assets. It soon became clear that the United States, Britain and France were in no mood to lift the sanctions on Iraq, while at the same time Washington began pressing for a 50 per cent levy on all future Iraqi oil revenues. In June the Soviet Union, backed by China and India in the Security Council, urged some relaxation of the punitive sanctions on Iraq, if only to allow the purchase of food and medicines. On 12 June Britain blocked an Iraqi move for the unfreezing of currency printed in Britain for the purchase of food, but the Security Council's sanctions committee agreed that thirty-one countries could release Iraqi assets to facilitate the purchase of food, medicines and other essential supplies. At the same time it was clear that this measure was insufficient to meet Iraq's growing humanitarian needs. Figures provided by the Iraqi health ministry suggested that many patients were dying from infectious diarrhoeal diseases; death from such a cause was rare in 1990 but in the post-war period deaths were running at about thirty-two per thousand admitted to hospital (in April and May 1991, 17,000 people were admitted). At Baghdad's main hospital for infectious diseases the staff acknowledged that they were treating many suspected cholera cases, as well as typhoid and meningitis.

Dr Michael Viola, an American professor of medicine and microbiology who visited lraq along with two other New York physicians, reported on the severe epidemic of several diseases, a situation now aggravated by malnutrition ('You don't need statistics. It's everywhere'). The journalist Patrick Tyler, who visited dozens of paediatric and infectious-disease wards across the country, encountered more than one hundred cases of marasmus, a condition of progressive emaciation caused by advanced malnutrition:

The destroyed Al Hathra power plant, north of Basra.

By August, according to official Iraqi sources, more than 11,000 people had died of starvation. The poor were at particular risk from malnutrition and disease: there was no suggestion that the Ba'athist leadership, against whom the sanctions were supposedly directed, was going hungry. Western aid donors were "Warning that unless international sanctions on Iraq were eased the country could face malnutrition and disease on an unprecedented scale. UN officials confirmed the fresh incidence of marasmus and kwashiorkor, and reported infectious diseases such as typhoid, hepatitis, meningitis and gastroenteritis surging out of control. Washington and London continued to block a relaxation of sanctions on the grounds that the Iraqi authorities were refusing to co-operate with UN officials required to inspect Iraq's surviving military facilities. In July a UN mission led by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan issued a report on 'humanitarian needs in Iraq', compiled following 'observations and conclusions drawn from on-the-spot evaluation'. The report declared that sanctions were having a substantial effect on the living standards of the civilian population. Damage to water treatment plants and the international block on the supply of spare parts had cut off an estimated 2.5 million Iraqis from the government system they relied upon before the war. The 14.5 million Iraqis continuing to receive water via the pre-war system were now receiving less than a quarter of the pre-war amounts, and this was of doubtful quality. Raw sewage continued to flow in city streets and into rivers used for washing and drinking, resulting in unprecedented levels of infectious diseases, including typhoid and cholera. The international blockade on spare parts meant that medical, surgical, dental and laboratory equipment could not be maintained, and that the electrical supply for most agricultural purposes was running at about one-third of the previous year's. The price levels of wheat and rice -the two normal staple foods - remained at 45 and 22 times their pre-war levels, with government rationing providing only about one-third of the typical family's food needs. Almost half of the nation's 900,000 telephone lines had been damaged beyond repair, and all the international communications facilities had been destroyed.

The Sadruddin mission urged that Iraq be allowed to import $1 billion-worth of spare parts and other materials to begin the restoration of the oil industry; that immediate steps be taken to alleviate the priority needs identified by the mission in the areas of food supply, medicine, water and sanitation, power generation, telecommunications and the oil sector; that food imports, to meet the minimum consumption requirements, be allowed; that imports of fertilisers, pesticides, animal feed and drugs, machinery and spare parts needed to repair the irrigation and drainage system be allowed; and that imports should also be permitted for the repair of surgical, dental and diagnostic equipment, for ambulances, for water pumping and treatment facilities, for the sewage system, for electrical generation, for the oil industry, and for telecommunications.

The destroyed July 14th Bridge. Repairs would take more than three years, cutting off a popular route to Baghdad University.

On 26 August 1991 Iraq reported that more than 14,000 children had died because of the lack of drugs since the United Nations imposed the trade embargo. A month later, publicity was given to the results of the study carried out by the 87-member Harvard Study Team which investigated some 6000 Iraqi households. The earlier enquiry carried out by the same team found that the child mortality rate had doubled. Now it was found that the death rate of under-fives had trebled and amounted to tens of thousands. Disease was rampant, with widespread epidemics of typhoid and cholera. There was also a major increase in domestic violence, with 'the highest rate of war-related psychological trauma ever found in a postwar study'. At the same time the UN Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cueliar, was urging the Security Council to allow Iraq to sell increased mounts of oil to provide revenue for humanitarian purchases.

In November 1991 there were reports of food riots in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, with particularly serious disorder in the Baghdad (Shia) suburbs of Thawra and Khadhimaya. Prices of some essential foods had risen a hundredfold. Fifty kilogram bags of sugar and rice were now costing 500 dinars, equivalent to two months' salary for a professional. The Iraqi government, faced with a partially collapsed currency, ordered the major Rafidain Bank to accept currency known to be counterfeit. On 14 November the Iraqi agriculture minister, Abdul Wahab al-Sabagh, declared that thousands more children and old people would starve unless UN sanctions were lifted soon: '.. . only 15 percent of our people can afford to buy food on the free market. The rest must accept hunger. That is the reality of the embargo'. Iraq had been allowed to import 100,000 tonnes of grain over the eight-month period since the end of the war, but the normal national requirement was 200,000 tonnes a month: 'Today we have a great lack of food and medicines. We lack spare parts for agricultural machinery. We lack fertilisers and pesticides as well as spares to get our power stations and oil refineries working again. We are a country that lives in the dark...we need pumps to bring the water to the the fields and these require electricity which we do not have.' At this time the United Nations was expressing a willingness to allow Iraq to raise revenues to buy food and other essential goods, provided that the UN was allowed to supervise food distribution and secure reparations for the victims of the Iraqi aggression. The British Overseas Development Minister, Lynda Chaiker, announced that further action might have to be taken against Saddam Hussein unless he agreed to the UN terms for oil sales.

Downtown Baghdad in shambels

On 20 November 1991 the director of Oxfam, Frank Judd, having just visited the region, called for a big international humanitarian effort to help the millions of Iraqis suffering malnutrition and now facing a winter without adequate food, medicines or housing. Now children with matchstick limbs and distended bellies, 'like drought victims from Ethiopia', could be seen in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. A doctor in a Baghdad hospital commented: 'It's a vicious circle. They get weaker from lack of food. Then they are susceptible to disease because they have no immunity, and that weakens them even more.' Britain had agreed a release of 70 million worth of Iraqi assets to buy the freedom of the businessman, Ian Richter, but there was no control over how the money would be used: it was unlikely that the plight of the needy would be alleviated, and in any case President George Bush had asserted that the UN economic embargo must remain in effect. Again there was no suggestion that the measures were hurting the Ba'athist leadership. Some 30 per cent of all Iraqi children were now mainourished, with infant mortality trebled since the Gulf War.

Two holes were made by 2,000 pound bombs on the roof of the destroyed Amiriyah shelter in western Baghdad. Planners believed the shelter was an Iraqi leadership facility when in reality about 400 civilians were killed in the early morning bombing of the shelter.

The situation in Iraq following the war was plain enough. The US dominated Security Council was insisting that de facto biologcal warfare be waged against the impotent and traumatised Iraqi people, not against the Ba'athist leadership who alone were culpable. By now the reports were frequent and unambiguous: the UN sanctions - whatever the callous machinations of Saddam Hussein - were bringing disease, malnutrition and starvation to virtually an entire nation. Louise Cainkar, director of the Chicago-based Database Project on Palestinian Human Rights, having spent several weeks conducting fieldwork in Iraq, reported in detail on the effects of the UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq. In Basra she encountered 'the same scene I was to see over and over again... Iraqi women holding thin, bloated and malnourished children ...'. On 20 May 1991 President Bush declared that the trade embargo would continue: 'We don't want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.' And in the same spirit, the deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates, nominated by Bush to head the CIA, stated that the Iraqis would 'pay the price while he [Saddam Hussein] was in power'

Bibliography:

• Simons, Geoff. Iraq From Sumer to Saddam St. Martin Press, NY 1994

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