Although I am pleased that The Observer printed an article addressing the 10 years of United Nations sanctions against Iraq, I felt the article failed to properly illuminate the extent of destruction which the sanctions have had on the Iraqi people. In addition to the 1 million chronically malnourished children of Iraq, the embargo is also responsible for the deaths of about 500,000 infants and toddlers between the years 1991-1998, according to a 1999 U.N. report. That number has undoubtably grown since 1999 and does not include the deaths of civilians over the age of five. In total, since its beginning in 1990, the embargo has been responsible for 1 to 1.5 million deaths.

Those who remain alive suffer from impoverishment, outbreaks of normally controllable disease, a lack of fundamental health care and the destruction of Iraqi society, despite immense relief programs from humanitarian organizations such as the World Food Program and the International Comittee of the Red Cross, whose efforts fall far short of making up for the lack of a functioning economy, due to the economic embargo. Among other troubles, the Nov. 2000 U.N. Report of the Secretary-General states that "nearly 90 percent of raw sewage from the sewage pumping stations in Iraq is currently being discharged directly into rivers and streams. Consequently, many Iraqi people who rely on river water for their daily needs are being compelled to deal with contaminated water, with serious public health implications."

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the Gulf War of 1991, much of Iraq's infrastructure, including sewage treatment plants and water purification plants, were destroyed by the United States. The economic embargo has not only crippled Iraq's economy, thereby making such expensive and widespread repairs impossible, but it also denies the importation of many of the parts necessary to repair such structures as sewage treatment facilities, hospitals or water purification plants.

Unfortunately, the economic sanctions against Iraq have been overshadowed by concerns of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, even though the economic embargo is responsible for more deaths than all the weapons of mass destruction ever used. Under current U.N. security resolutions, the embargo will not be lifted until U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspectors can verify that Iraq is completely disarmed of weapons of mass destruction.

Many Americans attempt to blame Iraq's humanitarian crisis on the Iraqi government, citing its refusal to comply with weapons inspectors and entirely destroy its chemical, biological and nuclear arms capabilities. Such an analysis, however, fails to take into account the United States' role in a 1999 scandal, during which allegations of the U.S. manipulating U.N. reconassaince to spy on Iraq were broken by the Washington Post and Boston Globe. The extent to which the U.S. violated its relationship to U.N. weapons investigators is debatable, but it remains clear that the U.S. illegaly misused U.N. weapons investigators' data to spy on the Iraqi government and destroyed the credibility of U.N. weapons inspectors.

Furthermore, before U.N. weapons investigators were kicked out of Iraq in Dec. 1998, they achieved a high degree of success in disarming Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as documented in U.N. reports. Despite recent efforts by Colin Powell to loosen economic sanctions against Iraq, U.S. foreign policy still demands the deliberate impoverishment of the 22 million people of Iraq and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, overwhelmingly concentrated amongst young children, pregnant women, the elderly and those with medical ailments.

Darren Kernaghan

sophomore

St. Edward's Hall

March 17, 2001

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