Conference Examines Iraqi Sanctions

By Kathryn Casa

Armed with more satellite photos and charges that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain is attempting to redevelop his chemical weapons capability, the U.S. in March again convinced U.N. Security Council members to continue sanctions against Iraq. Even Iraqi officials said they had no hope of lifting the 4-1/2-year-old embargo this time around. But Baghdad is attempting to set the stage for a change in April, when a more crucial U.N. sanctions review is scheduled.

Part of that effort included an international conference on the Iraqi embargo, held in Athens in mid-February. Sponsored by Arab and Greek business interests who, like Security Council members Russia and France, hope to see the sanctions lifted, the two-day conference presented compelling evidence that, regardless of who is accountable for the situation on the ground—Saddam or the U.S. and its allies—the embargo is targeting the frailest portion of the Iraqi population.

One conference participant, Margaret Papandreou, whose group Women for Mutual Security helped sponsor the event, said it's unreasonable to expect the sanction's only real victims—the women, children and elderly of Iraq—to play any viable role in the erosion of Saddam Hussain's power. Said Papandreou, "The United States is expecting the Iraqi people to do what the international community could not."

The conference included several hundred delegates from Europe, the U.S., the Middle East and Russia. Russian MP Iona Andronov, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and ex-president of the Russian parliament, said Iraq should not look to his country to press for a lifting of the sanctions while Moscow is embroiled in the assault on Chechnya. "Only Russia could do it," Andronov said of the move to end the blockade, "and Russia won't do it now. [Russian Foreign Minister Andrei] Kozyrev will do what the Americans tell him."

For their part, Iraqi delegates were armed with some compelling statistics. According to Abdul Razzak al-Hashimi, director of Baghdad's Foreign Relations Bureau, at least 500,000 children have died as a result of the sanctions and, he said, another 1.5 million are at risk of death or disease if Baghdad remains unable to sell its oil on the open market to buy needed food and medicine.

Shying away from a political solution, the conference delegates wrapped up the meeting with a straightforward statement condemning all sanctions as weapons of mass destruction that are impotent in their ostensible goals of making strongmen knuckle under, and instead, succeed only in punishing the most vulnerable parts of a society.

Kathryn Casa is a free-lance writer based in Sacramento, CA,