Appendix 1 from Aijaz Ahmad’s Iraq, Afghanistan & The Imperialism Of Our Time

Appendix 1
Sanctions and their Effects on Iraq
Brief Summary

*August 6, 1990: United Nations Security Council passes Resolution 661, placing sanction on Iraq to 'restore the authority of the legitimate government of Kuwait'. (That government, 'legitimate' or not, was restored within months. By what criterion is restoration of monarchy ever 'legitimate'? The sheikhs of Kuwait were never required to offer themselves for electoral challenge or even referendum.)

*April 5, 1991: UN Security Council passes Resolution 688 that 'demands that Iraq' end its repression 'of all Iraqi citizens.' (By these standards, virtually every government in the world should have to face similar sanctions.)

*May 20 1991: President George H. Bush: 'At this juncture, my view is we don't want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.' (The declared policy of regime change is as old as that.)

*September 24 1992: The New England Journal of Medicine publishes the findings of Harvard researchers that 46,700 Iraqi children under five have died from the combined effects of war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991.

*May 12 1996: On 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asks US Secretary of State Madeline Albright: 'we have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in HIroshima. Is the price worth it?' Albright responds: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price... We think the price is worth it.'

*October 4 1996: United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) releases report on Iraq. 'Around 4,500 children under the age of five are dying here every month from hunger and disease', said Philippe Heffinck, UNICEF's representative for Iraq.

*November 26 1997: UNICEF reports that 'the most alarming results are those on malnutrition, with 32 percent of children under the age of five, some 960,000 children, chronically malnourished - a rise of 72 percent since 1991. Almost one quarter (around 23 percent) are underweight - twice as high as the levels found in neighbouring Jordan or Turkey.'

*April 30 1998: UNICIF reports: 'the increase in mortality reported in public hospitals for children under five years of age (an excess of some 40,000 deaths yearly compared with 1989) is mainly due to diarrhea, pneumonia, and malnutrition. In those over five years of age, the increase (an excess of some 50,000 deaths yearly compared with 1989( is associated with heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, liver or kidney diseases'.

*October 6 1998: Denis Halliday, who had just resigned as the head of the 'oil-for-food' programme for Iraq, Assitant Secretary General of the UN, gives a speech on Capitol Hill, citing a 'conservative estimate' of 'child mortality for children under five years of age is from five to six thousand per month.'

*In 1995, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that the embargo and the military attacks on Iraq had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children. A UNICEF study reached a similar conclusion, finding that 500,000 children had died needlessly between 1991 and 1998.

*Blocked by the US and UK governments, with UN connivance: vaccines, cancer-treatment equipment, pain-killers, plasma bags, food treatment equipment and myriad other items of medical need, over fourteen years, worth $5.4 billion as of July 2002.

*Karl and John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs ('Sanctions of Mass Destruction', May/June 1999), concluded that the sanctions had killed more Iraqis than had been killed by 'all the weapons of mass destruction in human history'.