Iraq Embargo Toll Now Surpasses War's Horrors

By Kathryn Casa

The mosaic in the foyer floor of the luxury al-Rasheed Hotel in downtown Baghdad isn't a particularly good likeness of George Bush. Still, small Iraqi children, born in the twilight of the Bush administration, have no problem recognizing the former U.S. president. Charming little girls in frilly pink dresses, with paper flowers in their dark hair, dance across the picture, exclaiming, "There's Bush!" Charming little girls from wealthy Iraqi families, in frilly pink dresses that don't quite cover skinny, bowed legs—a tell-tale sign of malnutrition in an infant's diet.

Bush is known to everyone in Iraq as the architect of Operation Desert Storm, but Iraqis now credit him and his heir as the enforcers of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and Bill Clinton with a legacy even more devastating than the war itself: a generation of young Iraqis born into hunger and poverty.

UNICEF's most recent "Situation Analysis on Iraq," dated 1993, states: "The single most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration in maternal and child health standards in Iraq today is the lingering, long-term impact of the 1991 Gulf war, the subsequent domestic fighting and the economic and trade sanctions imposed through United Nations Resolutions."

The document says the sanctions have exacerbated the pressures on Iraqi families by freezing Iraqi assets abroad, blocking all exports and severely curtailing imports. The health system has regressed as a result of lack of power, imported spare parts, clean water, and basic supplies. Furthermore, according to the analysis, "nutrition standards are low due to the lack of sufficient home-grown and imported food. Food output has declined by perhaps over 50 percent."

As a result, according to UNICEF, adult men and women in 1993 were getting just 60 percent of the nutritional energy requirements. This harms the health of pregnant and nursing women, increases the incidence of miscarriages and low-birth-weight babies and "virtually guarantees that infant mortality rates will remain high for perhaps years to come."

It's difficult to determine to what extent the blockade is directly responsible for the strangulation of Iraq today. What is crystal clear, however, is that Iraq is being strangled. Hungry people are not being fed, the ill cannot get treatment, and the frailest portions of the population—women, children and the elderly—are bearing the brunt.

Iraqi children, like those everywhere, know what they see, feel and hear. The reality for most of them is that they are hungry and poor. Their parents work 16 to 20 hours a day to put scant food on the table. When they're sick, there is little medicine available to cure them. In a country where illiteracy less than a decade ago had dropped to almost zero, many children must now leave school to help earn a living, and in school there are no books, paper or pencils, anyway.

The war crimes museum on the banks of the Tigris River, within view of the rebuilt al-Jumhariyeh bridge that was destroyed during the bombing, holds corridor after corridor of photographs and models. There is a model of the well-known baby milk factory after the coalition allies determined that it was a weapons plant and destroyed it, mosques and schools with piles of burned books, and telecommunications centers, bridges, medical clinics and factories, as they looked after the war and as they look today.

Baghdad's success in rebuilding is a source of great pride among Iraqis. Many see it as a way to stand up to the West. On his birthday this year, President Saddam Hussain laid the cornerstone in Baghdad for what Iraqi officials say will be the largest mosque in the world. Never mind that in its shadow people will be starving. "We know this situation must be temporary," said one young mother of four of the food and medical shortages. "It cannot be permanent, because we know that our God is with us. Allah will not leave us."

Typically, in Iraq as elsewhere, as life becomes more difficult there is an increasing reliance on religion. Observers familiar with the country before and after the war report many more women are wearing the modest dress of conservative Islam, and swollen crowds frequent the mosques during prayers—both barometers of social and political trends. Indeed, imposing new mosques are being built in almost every neighborhood of Baghdad.

At the war crimes museum there also are samples of the "smart bombs" and cruise missiles that streaked across the Iraqi skies in 1991. On the TV screen, they made fantastic CNN footage of a fireworks extravaganza. We were reassured in daily Pentagon briefings that this was a "clean war." The scar that is al-Amariyeh would suggest otherwise.

Al-Amariyeh is the bomb shelter in a middle-class section of the capital where more than 1,200 people were incinerated early one morning during the war. The gaping crater in the shelter's ceiling—dubbed the "Bush Hole"—today looks much as it must have four-and-a-half years ago. Cables and wires dangle from the jagged orifice, diffusing the daylight that illuminates an eerie scene. The blackened walls of the shelter are lined with framed photographs of people who died there—some entire families, but mostly women and children, since males over age 16 were required to be at the front. Crowding the pictures is a profusion of flowers and family mementos.

One corner of the shelter is a dark patchwork of human skin, small hands and feet appliqued to the ceiling by the heat of the second missile that dove through "the Bush Hole" seconds after the first one cleared the way, bringing temperatures in the shelter to 4,000 degrees centigrade.

On a nearby wall, it looks as if someone has sketched a smudgy charcoal picture of a woman in a long robe, her facial features slightly smeared, and next to her, a similar life-sized image of a mother nursing her infant. Upon closer inspection it's clear that the medium is not charcoal, but flesh, the artist a U.S. missile that vaporized human beings into a timeless testimony of the atrocities of war. Not a "clean war," a dirty, brutal war.

Um Ghaida

The guide at Al-Amariyeh is Um Ghaida. Her somber face etched with pain, she wears a simple black skirt and blouse. Her single concession to this perpetual mourning is a gold chain and locket with a photo of her 16-year-old daughter, Ghaida, who died along with eight siblings in the double-missile assault. With only one of her 10 children still alive, Um Ghaida now makes her home in a small hut outside Al-Amariyeh, where she lives to remind others what happened there.

Um Ghaida has a message for Hillary Clinton. "Mothers are mothers, whether they are lawyers or housewives. So in the name of motherhood, and in the name of the law that defends all people, may you never forget the Iraqi children.

"From the mothers of the martyrs of Al-Amariyeh shelter," Um Ghaida declares defiantly, "this is your message. Convey it faithfully: The embargo should be lifted from the Iraqi people, not just partially, but completely. If you give life to any Iraqi child by doing this, then you have given life back to 10 of the martyrs who lost their lives in this place."

Iraqi officials say more than half a million children have died as a direct result of the blockade. Hugh Stephens is coordinator of the London-based International Commission of Inquiry on Economic Sanctions, an organization that challenges the popular Western notion that sanctions are an alternative to war. "They're a form of war," declared Stephens in a recent interview. "They're a new and terrible weapon of mass destruction which is not indiscriminate in its effects. On the contrary, it discriminates against the weakest members of society: children, old people and the sick. And it is generating new zones of poverty in parts of the Third World that were not affected by poverty in the past."

Stephens believes the embargo against Iraq is laying the groundwork for a whole new set of intractable problems that could further destabilize the region. "The proportion of young people in Iraq is very high. A whole generation of young people have grown up with the blockade as the formative experience of their lives. Through this blockade, the West is creating for itself a future which will give it many difficulties because the rising generation of Iraqis will always have this experience in their minds."

Nadia, the mother of four small children, says her oldest son, age 8, asks her to send extra bread with him to school each day because his friends are hungry and have no food. To make sure her own children have enough to eat, Nadia and her husband spend 14 to 16 hours a day in their small retail clothing shop. They earn just enough for this middle-class family of six to buy vegetables for their daily meals, with meat or fish perhaps twice a month.

The average Iraqi's monthly salary of 3,000 to 5,000 dinars is worth $5 to $8 at the official exchange rate. A kilo of meat or a dozen eggs sells for about 1,200 dinars, so few can afford such luxuries. Government rations of rice, sugar, tea, flour and milk for children under 1 are enough to last about a third of the month, Nadia said. "When my children ask me for cake, I feel sad that I can't bring it to them, but a cake costs 3,000 dinars."

Another man, a decorated veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, says he restricts his own diet to bread and tea so that he can afford to feed his four children potatoes.

The Vulnerability of Children

With food and milk in scarce supply, and medicine and vaccines even harder to find, Iraqi children have become particularly vulnerable to illness. Without proper water treatment (chlorine is banned under the sanctions) waterborne diseases like giardiasis, a common, easily treatable ailment in the West, is killing Iraqis under age 5 in ever-increasing numbers. The Iraqi health ministry reports sharp increases in the past five years in typhoid fever, diabetes, scabies, cholera and viral hepatitis. Birth rates have dropped. In 1991, 4.5 percent of the recorded births each month weighed in at less than 6 pounds; in March 1995, the figure was more than 20 percent.

At the Ibn al-Biladi pediatric hospital in a poor Baghdad neighborhood, chief pediatric resident Dr. Ghazi al-Fahad says of the 150 new patients he admits daily, virtually every one shows signs of rickets, the result of insufficient Vitamin D in an infants' diet that leads to inadequate bone growth in children. Many of the patients are dehydrated and undernourished, yet with only five I-V tubes on the entire ward, Dr. al-Fahad is forced to treat most of the infants and children orally, which often induces more vomiting, or by inserting a needle in the vein and asking the mother to hold it there.

The doctor said the shortages on his pediatric ward are acute. They include oxygen machines and tents, windows and thermometers for incubators, blood transfusers, anesthesia and even lab coats. Dr. al-Fahad said women in need of C-sections are frequently turned away or, as a last resort, sedated rather than anesthetized for the surgery. Epesiotomies are done with no local anesthetic, as is the post-partum suturing.

Deputy health minister Dr. Shawky Marcus said without anesthesia and adequate equipment, surgeries throughout the country have dropped 67 percent from five years ago. "Suppose I'm a cardiology surgeon operating on a patient with a heart valve problem," Dr. Marcus postulates. "I've got a very nice theater, but I've only got 50 percent of the valves at my disposal instead of a complete set. Now I can't open up that patient, because if it happens that the size of the valve that I need is X or Y and I don't have it, what will I do? Close him back up again?"

In theory, the blockade doesn't include medical equipment and supplies, but in fact, those items are not getting through to Iraq. The sanctions have shut down all air and sea routes into the country, so any imports, from legal medicines to illegal spare car parts, tires and Pepsi, are transported 500 miles across the desert from Amman, usually strapped to the dusty roof or stashed in the trunk of a dilapidated taxi or bus alongside a leaky, makeshift spare fuel tank. Even under the best possible circumstances, the 12-16 hour trip can be fatal to sensitive medication. Vaccines and antibiotics that need refrigeration seldom survive, and even if they do, Dr. Marcus said Baghdad must then seek permission from the U.N. to transport them within the country, a bureaucratic procedure that can take months.

The country that in 1990 spent $500 million on medical imports today spends $10 million. The U.N. sanctions committee says it does not interfere with medical orders unless an irregularity is detected, as, for instance, an Iraqi attempt to pay for a shipment with frozen assets. Still, some countries, such as Britain, refuse even to try to send medications like Angised, commonly used for the treatment of angina, because it contains glyceryl trinitrates, which could be used in weapons production.

Dr. Marcus said a pre-Gulf war order of radioactive isotopes, used to scan glands and tumors, has been delayed since 1990, when Iraq paid a British company for the material. Despite intervention by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the part of Baghdad, the application for the shipment has languished in various U.N. agencies for more than five years.

Medical equipment and supplies are not getting through to Iraq.

Iraq's need for the radioactive isotopes is particularly critical. During the past several years, health officials have reported alarmingly high increases in rare and unknown diseases, primarily among children. Anencephaly, leukemia, carcinoma and cancers of the lung and digestive system have risen dramatically, as have late-term miscarriages and incidence of congenital disease and deformities in fetuses, such as fused fingers and toes, not unlike those found in the babies of Gulf war veterans.

Dr. Siegwart Gunther, a professor of infectious disease and epidemiology and president of the International Yellow Cross in Austria, claims there is one significant common denominator: the allies' use of tons of depleted uranium in the bombing of Iraq.

DU, the radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, is denser than steel, which makes it able to penetrate tank armor, and highly flammable. Packaged in small, cigarette-sized projectiles, DU was used in combat for the first time during the Gulf war, when some 300 tons of the stuff were expended by Britain and the United States.

On May 24, Iraq formally complained to the United Nations that the widespread use of DU during the Gulf war was causing serious illness and death among Iraqi civilians. The officials cited "baffling pathological cases" that have appeared throughout the country.

Dr. Gunther believes DU has now infiltrated the food chain, resulting in new diseases among newborns and infants that he's been unable to diagnose. Symptoms include abnormal abdominal distention that may be related to kidney or liver dysfunction, a known effect of exposure to DU. "But we have no way of knowing, because there is no way to examine them thoroughly," said Dr. Gunther. "These children usually die within three months. Because of the impossibility of treatment, they die of secondary infections."

Dr. Gunther has joined a growing chorus of voices around the world calling for an end to the sanctions against Iraq. Conferences focused toward that end have been arranged this year in Athens, Moscow, Madrid and Paris.

Gille Munier, secretary-general of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Society, believes many countries support an end to the embargo but feel trapped by U.S. pressure to maintain the sanctions. Munier points to European businessmen who are nailing down lucrative oil deals with Iraq to take effect once the sanctions are lifted. "Members of the Security Council, including the permanent members, don't want a showdown with the United States," Munier said. "But the United States cannot go on forever coming up with new excuses for continuing this embargo."

Kathryn Casa is a free-lance writer who visited Iraq in April and May.