Must children die for Hussein's defeat?

September 20, 1999

CYNTHIA McKINNEY

DURING AN independent fact-finding mission in Iraq this month, a member of my staff, Peter Hickey, and four other congressional staff members visited with United Nations officials, Iraqi government officials and non-government relief organizations to assess the humanitarian crisis engulfing the Iraqi population.

They traveled through Baghdad as well as to cities of the battered south of Iraq, which had borne the brunt of several wars spanning more than two decades, including the Persian Gulf War. This was the first official congressional trip to Iraq since 1991.

Hickey painted a vivid picture:

Desperately malnourished babies dying of treatable diseases formerly eradicated from Iraq as their undernourished mothers fan them in hot, dim hospital wards.

Barefoot children, walking in the raw sewage surrounding their barrack-like housing complexes without railings on upper-floor balconies.

Families living on meager government rations, and clean water almost non-existent.

Medicine in short supply. Parents watching helplessly as their cancer-stricken children lay dying for lack of sufficient chemotherapy drugs.

Nine years of UN sanctions are doing nothing to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, but are succeeding at denying the Iraqi people the basic necessities of life: clean water, adequate food, decent health care and education.

A society that once boasted a 90-percent literacy rate and the most sophisticated medical industry in the Arab world is, today, on the verge of collapse.

My opposition to the sanctions policy in no way means support for Hussein, whom I believe to be a murderous dictator. Newly defined military sanctions should continue. However, I believe the economic sanctions that have so devastated Iraq's once-vibrant middle class are useless weapons in the fight against rearmament and militarism in Iraq, as they damage only the weakest and most vulnerable of the country's civilian population.

The oil-for-food deal established by the United Nations in 1996 has slowed the looming economic collapse, but it is not enough.

The head of the UN's World Food Program in Iraq, Jutta Burghardt, told the delegation that Iraqi families spend approximately 70 percent of total income for food; by world and UN standards, she said, that indicates "imminent famine."

Since the end of Operation Desert Storm, more than a million Iraqis have died as a direct result of economic sanctions. According to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 4,500 Iraqi children under the age of 5 continue to die each month.

When asked about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the U.S. embargo of food and medicine, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "It's a hard decision, but we think the price ...is worth it."

Since the Secretary of State made that statement, about half a million Iraqis, mostly children, have died. What has been accomplished that makes the sanctions worth it? Whatever the merits of the accusations about Iraq, there is no way to justify the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

Economic sanctions are thought to be less expensive and less controversial than military intervention, but the devastating impact of those sanctions remain largely unknown to the U.S. public.

It is time for the U.S. policy-makers to recognize that. It is time to separate economic from military sanctions by ending the economic sanctions while simultaneously tightening the military sanctions by going after suppliers and establishing a new, serious commitment to real disarmament in Iraq. As the congressional staff delegation recently learned, sanctions can and do kill.

U.S. Rep. CYNTHIA McKINNEY, D-Ga., is the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. Write to her at 12 Cannon, House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515 or e-mail cymck@hr.house.gov.