Parliament has adjourned. However, there is a task its members might usefully undertake, even informally, and report to the two Houses, the country and the world before the next UN General Assembly session. This is to send a parliamentary mission to Iraq, suitably assisted by some experts, to study what sanctions have done to that country and its quality of life. Iraq is in India's sensitive West Asian neighbourhood. So developments there concern India. More so when events are ostensibly taking place under the auspices of the UN.
Clinton's national security advisor, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, wrote an article in the Financial Times of London on May 4. The headings said it all - "Saddam is the root of all Iraq's problems: A change of government, not the ending of sanctions, is the only way to alleviate the sufferings of the nation". There was an unrelated response in bbc's Hard Talk on May 17 from Hans von Sponeck (former undp Delhi chief) who last February resigned in shame and disgust as head of the UN humanitarian programme in Iraq. Berger argues that Saddam is deliberately under-utilising and misusing the UN's oil-for-dollars deal for humanitarian assistance. Saddam imports food, medicines and other essential supplies "grudgingly", and prefers to siphon his dollar allowance to refurbish his military machine and build luxury palaces and lakeside resorts. Berger places the US on the side of the angels working "to ease Iraqi suffering without strengthening its leader". According to Sponeck, those sponsoring the continuance of sanctions after nine years, notably the US and Britain, should change tack in view of objective evidence of the dreadful damage they have inflicted on innocent Iraqis, especially women and children. Speaking from personal knowledge, he asserts the sanctions have failed. They've left the regime intact but subverted the UN's mandate.
Sponeck, incidentally, was one of three former UN officials who spoke at an Iraq forum convened in Washington by Congressman Dennis Kucinich on May 3. The other two had also resigned their UN assignments in protest. Denis Halliday quit in November '98 as UN assistant secretary-general and chief UN relief coordinator in Iraq while Scott Ritter pulled out of the UN Special Commission in Iraq. Halliday favoured a dialogue with Baghdad leading to lifting of sanctions and reconstruction of Iraq's economy. Ritter, who'd accused unscom of spying for the US and charged the latter with manipulating sanctions for its own ends, was blunt. He said the demonisation of Saddam had created a whole mythology and if the Security Council evaluates the UN weapons inspection programme qualitatively, "it'd be easy to find Iraq in compliance; (and) if sanctions were lifted, with effective monitoring, Iraq would not be able to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programme".
Sponeck cited the Iraqi people's rising vulnerability to disease, their plunging health, nutritional and educational standards, the "deprofessionalisation" of Iraq's middle class and the involuntary emigration of the best survivors. He pleaded that Iraq's people be treated with dignity and accorded the right under the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "to live a life as fully as possible".
This isn't being said for the first time. Last year, a World Food Programme (wfp) official in Iraq wrote of the "silent war" where malnutrition is killing 60,000 children annually. The official likened it to "two or three Hiroshimas" over eight years of sanctions. unicef, who and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (fao) have, likewise, documented the dire straits to which the Iraqi economy and people have been reduced. Halliday, speaking at Harvard earlier, had warned: "Sanctions encourage isolation, alienation and possible fanaticism. Sanctions create a danger to peace."
Exaggeration and bombast? The bbc interlocutor in Hard Talk tauntingly asked if Sponeck was implying a UN policy of genocide. His guest didn't rise to the bait. But unless words have lost their meaning, that's what is happening in Iraq. Yet the world looks the other way.
The issue isn't Saddam Hussein but Iraq. The Iraqis, heirs to a proud civilisation, are being systematically decimated. George Bush had threatened "to bomb Iraq back to the Stone Age" if necessary. Laos, after all, was mercilessly bombed for months on end in a war waged to 'save' it. But now, some do it with a kiss. Is Iraq being 'saved' by sanctions after being bombed with depleted uranium ammunition that has spawned cancer? More such horrors are listed in Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (ed. Anthony Arnove, Pluto Press, London).
The whole Iraq operation after the just UN reprisal for invading Kuwait is, like Kosovo's unfolding tragedy, becoming increasingly unsustainable, legally and morally. It's a partisan political agenda pursued mainly by the US and Britain for objectives far removed from the original UN mandate. The relevant UN resolutions reaffirm "the commitment of all member states to the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Iraq". Yet the US has pledged to overthrow Saddam, the head of a sovereign UN member state. Isn't this a grotesque perversion a UN goal? The inspection regime - for long, a search for an alleged black cat in a dark room on a moonless night - was aborted by Desert Storm. There's something rotten and dangerous in all this megalomania. The UN is being used and undermined.
Back to Berger. He calls on "friends of the Iraqi people...to question Saddam directly, bluntly and repeatedly" on his policies that've allegedly thwarted UN benevolence and, instead, wilfully "punished" them. Sponeck, Halliday, Ritter, the unicef, who, fao and the wfp stand rejected. An Indian parliamentary mission will probably find no greater favour among some. But, the effort could at least make Indians, friends of the Iraqi people and others, better informed about aspects of human rights and democracy in Iraq under a new world order.
