People's Democracy

CONTAINMENT BY STARVATION

Iraq Under The Blockade

S M Menon

(With the Volcker Committee report bringing the US-led and engineered economic blockade of Iraq into renewed focus, we find it appropriate to reproduce an abridged version of the article published in People’s Democracy, November 26, 1995 issue, detailing the debilitating effects of this blockade on the people of Iraq - Ed)

LONG after the supposed cause for Iraq’s international ostracism ceased to exist, that country continues to be the focus of the malevolent attentions of western imperialism. The economic blockade imposed immediately after the invasion of Kuwait has dragged on for over five years now – a period in which Iraq bore the sanitised brutality of the greatest killing force ever assembled and painfully reconstructed a war-shattered country under great adversity.

And yet, despite growing international opinion against the sanctions, the western imperialist lobby insists on their continuance. Early this month, the United Nations Security Council voted for a further extension, on the grounds that vital elements of the Iraqi armaments programme had been concealed from them. Disingenuously, British defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind came up with an elaboration: the sanctions could continue for many years, he said, since they were an integral part of the western policy of containment in the region. The security of western interests, in other words, requires that Iraq be kept in a state of isolation and economic collapse.

SLOW GENOCIDE

Five years into the sanctions, life in Iraq is a continuous struggle for the basic elements of subsistence. Every effort it has made to arrive at and compromise to mitigate the evolving humanitarian catastrophe has been rebuffed. From behind the thin fig-leaf of the UN, the western power lobby, led by the United states, has relentlessly raised its demands at every prospect of accommodation. What they have presented Iraq with is the classic Faustian bargain: to either yield up its soul as a sovereign and independent nation, or else to continue suffering in isolation.

Iraq retains a precariously thin lifeline, but only through the sufferance of neighbours such as Jordan, which has in particular been showing a degree of fickleness in its attitude of late. Otherwise, all essential procurements of food and medicine have to be mediated through the various multilateral agencies based in Iraq, such as the World Food Programme (WFP), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF). Every import requirement is routed through these agencies, to the Sanctions Committee of the UN in New York. Once sanction is obtained, the application of the supplies received is monitored and audited by the multilateral bodies in Iraq.

Every procurement operation has to be financed through the contributions of international donors, since Iraq has no authorised means of earning hard currency for imports. The principal contributions have come from non-governmental sources in the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and other European nations. But the donor response has always fallen short of requirement. Even with the matching grant from Iraq’s frozen assets overseas, meeting requirements has been a difficult proposition. UNICEF, which is the conduit for all medical supplies with a bearing on child health, reported a decline in its total contributions from $53.2 million in 1993-94 (April-March) to $28.8 million the following year. In the first six months of 1995-96, the contributions it received added up to a mere 11.8 million dollars. Donor fatigue has clearly set in, and the consequences for the health situation in Iraq are potentially catastrophic.

WOMEN & CHILDREN WORST AFFECTED

A recent WFP report estimates that four million people in Iraq are at grave risk on account of malnutrition and disease. As in most such situations of acute overall stringency, the worst sufferers have been children. The three most common afflictions of children under five – acute respiratory illness, diarrhea and malnutrition – have taken a heavy toll. Cases of mortality in this age group have increased from a monthly average of 593 in 1989 to 4,475 in 1995. Over the same period, the proportion of low birth-weight infants in relation to all registered births has increased from 4 per cent to 21 per cent.

An additional element of risk arises from water contamination. The incidence of typhoid in particular has increased alarmingly – from 1,812 reported cases of morbidity in 1989 to over 24,000 in 1994. Cases of cholera too increased in the early years of the blockade, though subsequent control efforts have borne fruit. Medical experts, however, believe that the threat of the “vicious cycle of malnutrition and disease” remains ominous.

Even in the capital city of Baghdad – home to a fifth of Iraq’s total population – the situation is far from secure. Aggressive bombing by the 30-nation coalition during the Gulf War had disabled the water supply system. The quantum of water handled by the system fell from a monthly figure of 45 million cubic metres to 9 million just after the war. With the restoration of electric supply and some emergency repairs the figure increased to 18 million cubic metres. But this still falls well short of the requirement.

Most of the sewerage facilities were disabled by direct bombing attacks and by the disruption of power supply. As a consequence, several of the urban areas were threatened with pollution and disease, and rivers contaminated with the inflow of untreated sewage. Water supply and sanitation are a high priority area in the emergency operation in Iraq. Yet, with all the effort, the system remains vulnerable. Leaking and ruptured pipelines are common, and the availability of spare parts has been far from certain.

Units producing chlorine gas for water treatment have come under the UN weapons inspectors’ gaze. Production of the material has been blocked on the grounds that it could be diverted into chemical weaponry. The import of chlorine gas now has to be sanctioned in New York, and the application of each consignment monitored by UN agencies in Baghdad.

With basic health and sanitation needs taking this burden, the more advanced needs have naturally been effaced. Surgeons confess to a feeling of helplessness when confronted with emergencies. All call cases are ignored in favour of true emergencies. But even so, the availability of surgical supplies is so poor that operations have on occasion to be conducted without an aesthesia or scheduled well beyond the limits of medical prudence.

SQUEEZE ON FOOD

Food represents another daily challenge. Immediately after the war, the government introduced a rationing system that covered the entire country, protecting basic necessities from inflation. With the blockade showing little sign of easing, various commodities were taken off the ration system over time. In September 1994, the quantum of subsidized food supplied through the ration system was curtailed by between 33 and 50 per cent.

Before the blockade, a kilogram of wheat flour was selling in the open market at 60 fils. (The basic unit of currency is the fil, of which 1000 constitute a dinar). Today’s price is 3,900 dinars. Rice, which sold at 240 fils before the blockade, today sells at 1,375 dinars. And cooking oil prices, having increased by the order of 2,300 times in five years of the blockade, today stand at 1,400 dinars.  

In this context, the ration system, which provides wheat flour at 950 fils, rice at 435 fils and cooking oil at 400 fils to every citizen, is a vital source of sustenance. The last five years have seen a major effort by the Iraqi government to augment domestic agricultural output and achieve a measure of self-sufficiency. But owing to chronic shortages of seeds, fertilizer and machinery, the results have been modest. This led to the curtailment of rations in October 1994. Today, the system meets no more than half of a family’s basic subsistence needs. With a senior civil servant in Iraq earning no more than 2,000 dinars a month, bridging the subsistence gap has been an uphill struggle.

Disposal of household assets has been the first of many survival strategies that the people have adopted. A second is to press every available appliance – whether a sewing machine or a motor-car – into an income-earning activity. Housewives and women professionals working as seamstresses, senior government officials plying a taxi at night – these are some of the realities of contemporary Iraqi life. But the stock of household assets has dwindled over five years. And with inflation gathering momentum, it remains a matter of conjecture what fresh survival options will now be explored by the beleaguered country.

The unstated western condition for lifting the sanctions against Iraq is the removal of president Saddam Hussein from authority.