50,000 children die each year as Saddam survives

Why is Ireland's voice not heard opposing the continuing UN sanctions in
Iraq? asks Niall Andrews

The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is undoubtedly right when she
says (The Irish Times, August 4th) that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq
violated international law by invading Kuwait 10 years ago. The brutal
assault on that nation broke every international and humanitarian law.
Nobody disputes that.

She was not right when she said previously that the deaths of 50,000
children a year in Iraq since the imposition of sanctions is a price worth
paying to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Desert Storm could have finished Saddam Hussein and the Baghdad regime, but
the world has never been told why this was never done. It might well be that
when President Bush called a halt to hostilities south of Basra he feared
the disintegration of Iraq as a unitary state if they moved on Baghdad and
destroyed Saddam.

A break-up of Iraq would have had consequences for the entire region and,
indeed, the Western world. More importantly, it would have imperilled the
supply of oil to the West and endangered the state of Israel.

Mrs Albright knows that her government force-fed arms and the means to
manufacture chemical weapons to Iraq in the eight-year war with Iran, in
which hundreds of thousands of young men on both sides died. Saddam Hussein
was her government's friend then.

Desert Storm in all its brutal force for a time united even Iran and Iraq in
common cause.

On my recent visit to Iraq, it was not in the capacity of an apologist for
either Saddam Hussein or Madeleine Albright, rather as one concerned for the
welfare of an ancient civilisation, its people and the apparent destruction
being brought about by constant conflict in the past two decades and the
added imposition of sanctions.

What I witnessed were children dying, streets with raw sewage, hospitals
with totally inadequate medical supplies, operating theatres with raw
sewage, schools without books or pencils, doctors without modern textbooks
and what in effect amounts to intellectual genocide. UN sanctions have
caused the deaths of 1.5 million women, children and elderly in the 10 years
since their introduction.

It simply is not a price worth paying. Mrs Albright and Britain are alone in
the United Nations in insisting on keeping the sanctions in place in their
present form.

To quote Denis Halliday, former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq from
1997 to 1998: "The war was always about controlling oil supplies, and never
really about Kuwait. But Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in breach of
international law, provided the opportunity for showing American military
muscle damaged by the Vietnam defeat, for experimentation with depleted
uranium and for the destruction of Iraq combined with the impoverishment of
the rich Arab world."

Mrs Albright says we must honour the memory of those who died as a result of
Saddam's aggression by vowing never to permit it to happen again.

Well, how many died as a result of the Gulf War? Almost one million Iraqis
but only 48 members of the allied forces. Sanctions have resulted in 1.5
million more deaths in 10 years. Who will honour their memory?

Every henhouse in Iraq has been combed and searched for weapons of mass
destruction and none has been found, according to international verification
sources. Yet the UN/US want to renew the searches for no other reason than
to prolong the justification for the sanctions.

They would not have to look too much farther to find nuclear warheads and a
capability to launch them - in Israel where Mordecai Vanunu still languishes
in solitary confinement for telling the world about them 18 years ago in the
Sun- day Times. In the course of my visit to Baghdad I met French and
Italian embassy officials and the papal nuncio, who all felt the embargo had
gone too far and appealed for Europe to intervene to end them.

Food rationing was introduced under the Food for Oil programme. The UN
insisted on putting the system in place so that everyone would get their
share. They then handed the computerised system over to the Baghdad
authorities, who now control the distribution of every morsel of food to
every citizen.

Say "Boo!" and you get no food.

Saddam Hussein remains in power today, stronger and more secure than ever
before. The 20 million people of the great Iraqi civilisation would take at
least two generations to recover from the sanctions if they were lifted
today. Why do we allow this to continue?

Ireland has a small voice. Frank Aiken made it heard in the United Nations,
fearlessly standing up to the United States in the past.

And today?