The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And all this while, the reasons for sanctions—or the conditions upon which they might be lifted—changed and extended. Saddam must allow the United Nations Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) arms inspectors to do their work freely, must end human rights abuses, free Kuwaiti POWs, end the torture of his own people, recognise Kuwaiti sovereignty, pay wartime reparations and withdraw missile batteries from the (non-UN) “no-fly” zones. Individually, there was nothing immoral about any of these demands. Collectively, they were intended to ensure that the sanctions regime continued indefinitely. By January 1998, the Pope was talking of the “pitiless embargo” visited upon Iraqis, adding that “the weak and innocent cannot pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible.” U.S. officials began to warn that sanctions would stay “for ever” unless Saddam complied with American demands.

  American spokesmen and spokeswomen repeatedly pointed out that Saddam Hussein was escaping the effect of sanctions. Albright appeared before the United Nations with satellite photographs of vast building complexes in Iraq, pictures, she said, of further palace-building by Saddam Hussein. She was correct in what she said, but wrong in her conclusions. For if Saddam had managed to avoid the effects of the UN sanctions on his regime, then those sanctions had clearly failed in their objective. In 1998, British foreign secretary Robin Cook became obsessed with the Iraqi regime’s purchase of liposuction equipment which, if true, was merely further proof of the failure of sanctions. He repeatedly stated that Iraq could sell $10 billion of oil a year to pay for food, medicine and other humanitarian goods—but since more than 30 per cent of these oil revenues were diverted to the UN compensation fund and UN expenses in Iraq, his statement was wrong.

  And Saddam Hussein yet again found a common cause with the Americans. Just as the latter needed to prove that Saddam had permitted the further suffering of his people while building temples to his greatness, so Saddam needed to show the world—especially the Arabs—how cruel were the Americans and their allies in decimating the innocent people of Iraq. It was a calculation that found a constant response in one of his own Arab enemies, Osama bin Laden, who regularly expressed his sympathy—he did so in an interview with me—for the Iraqis suffering under the U.S.-inspired sanctions.

  Those of us who visited the grey and dying world of Iraq during these ghastly years were sometimes almost as angered by the Iraqi government’s manipulation as we were by the suffering we witnessed. Each morning, Ministry of Information “minders” would encourage foreign journalists to witness the “spontaneous” demonstrations by Iraqi civilians against the sanctions. Men and women would parade through the streets carrying coffins, allegedly containing the bodies of children who had just died of disease and malnutrition. Only when we asked to see inside the wooden boxes were we told that the protest was symbolic, that the coffins only represented the dead. Yet the dead were real enough. The rivers of sewage that now moved inexorably through even the most residential of Baghdad suburbs were evidence of the breakdown of the most basic social services. From the countryside came credible reports that Iraqis were eating weeds to stay alive.

  So why did the Americans and the British and their other friends at the United Nations impose this hateful sanctions regime on Iraq? Many of the Western humanitarian workers and UN officials in Baghdad had come to their own conclusions. Margaret Hassan, a British woman married to an Iraqi, a brave, tough, honourable lady who ran CARE’s office in the Iraqi capital, was outraged by the tragedy with which she was striving to cope. “They want us to rebel against Saddam,” she said. “They think that we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything—even give our own lives—to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

  Margaret Hassan was right. “Big picture,” an air force planner told the WashingtonPost in 1991. “We wanted to let people know, ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that and we’ll fix your electricity.’” Just before the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document described the probable results of the destruction of power stations and continued economic sanctions. “With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population.” In other words, the United States and Britain and other members of the Security Council were well aware that the principal result of the bombing campaign—and of sanctions—would be the physical degradation and sickening and deaths of Iraqi civilians. Biological warfare might prove to be a better description. The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear. Bomb now: die later.

  Not long before Christmas 1997, Dennis Halliday, the bearded and balding Irishman who was heading the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq, received personal and deeply distressing evidence of what this meant. He had a paid a visit to four small Iraqi children suffering from leukaemia in the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre. “The doctors told me they couldn’t get the drugs to treat them and I got involved with them,” Halliday told me in his cramped Baghdad office, the walls hung with cheap Arab rugs. “With a World Health Organisation colleague, I managed to get the drugs they required—some from Jordan, one from northern Iraq, which means it was probably smuggled in from Turkey. Then I dropped in on Christmas Eve to see the children in their ward. Two were already dead.”

  Halliday was already palpably torn by his task of distributing food and medicine to 23 million Iraqis, all of whom were being punished and some of whom were dying in appalling hospital conditions because of Saddam’s crimes. At the same time as he was seeking drugs for the children, Halliday—who was clearly close to resigning—wrote an impassioned letter to UN secretary general Kofi Annan, complaining that what the UN was doing in Iraq was causing untold suffering to innocent people. “I wrote that what we were doing was undermining the moral credibility of the UN,” he said. “I found myself in a moral dilemma. It seemed to me that what we were doing was in contradiction to the human rights provision in the UN’s own charter.” Halliday, a Quaker who worked in Kenya and Iran before joining the UN’s bureaucracy in New York, was looking for some alternative to sanctions—vainly, because the United States and Britain had no intention of ending Iraq’s misery.

  His desk was piled with statistics the UN didn’t want to know; that Iraq’s electrical power stations were producing less than 40 per cent of capacity, that water and sanitation systems were on the point of breakdown. Doctors were forced to reuse rubber gloves during operations, their wards were without air-conditioning or clean water. Without electrical pumps, water pressure was falling in the pipes and sewage was being sucked into the vacuum. “The government here used to encourage the use of infant formula—and infant formula with contaminated water is a real killer.” But Halliday was worried by other, long-term effects of this suffering. “There are men and women now in their twenties and thirties and forties who have known little more than the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the sanctions. They see themselves as surrounded by unfriendly people, and a very unsympathetic America and Britain. They are out of touch with technology and communications. They have no access to Western television. And these are the people who are going to have to run this country in the future. They are feeling alienated and very Iraqi-introverted. Their next-door neighbours are going to have a tough time dealing with these people.”

  Halliday’s colleague in the Baghdad UNICEF office was no more optimistic. Outside, feral children prowled through street-corner garbage. Inside, Philippe Heffinck’s files showed that chronic malnutrition for children unde
r five stood at 31 per cent. “That accounts, in the whole of Iraq, for 1.1 million children, including the Kurdish areas. This is a serious problem—particularly serious when you have chronic malnutrition up to two years old, because that is the period when the brain is formed. You become stunted. There is a lack of physical and mental growth that will afflict the child—his schooling, his job opportunities, his chances of founding a family and quite possibly his or her offspring as well.”

  Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Baghdad for The Independent in April 1998, described the way in which the Tigris River had changed colour to “a rich café au lait brown” because raw sewage from 3.5 million people in Baghdad and other towns upstream was pouring into the river. Contamination of drinking water, he wrote, was the main reason why the proportion of Iraqi children who died before they reached twelve months had risen from 3.5 per cent in the year before sanctions to 12 per cent nine years later. Lack of spare parts for electrical equipment, absence of staff and the subsequent reduced power supply had cut off clean water in many areas.154

  Western humanitarian workers sometimes felt their own contribution was near-useless. Judy Morgan, who worked for CARE in Baghdad, described how she felt like a poor relative of King Canute. “The water is lapping round our feet before we’ve even had the chance to order the tide to turn back,” she told me one afternoon in 1998. Her colleague Margaret Hassan had a thick file of examples to prove that she was telling the truth. “If this was a Third-World country, we could bring in some water pumps at a cost of a few hundred pounds and they could save thousands of lives,” she said. “But Iraq was not a Third-World country before the [1991] war—and you can’t run a developed society on aid. What is wrong with the water system here is a result of breakdown and damage to complex and very expensive water purification plants. And this eats up hundreds of thousands of pounds in repairs—for just one region of the country. The doctors here are excellent—many were trained in Europe as well as Iraq—but because of sanctions, they haven’t had access to a medical journal for eight years. And in the sciences, what does that mean?”

  A mere glance at the list of the items prohibited by the UN sanctions committee revealed the infantile but vindictive nature of the campaign now being waged against Iraq. Included in the list were pencils, pencil-sharpeners, shoe laces, material for shrouds, sanitary towels, shampoo, water purification chemicals, medical swabs, gauze, medical syringes, medical journals, cobalt sources for X-ray machines, disposable surgical gloves, medication for epilepsy, surgical instruments, dialysis equipment, drugs for angina, granite shipments, textile plant equipment, toothpaste, toothbrushes and toilet paper, tennis balls, children’s clothes, nail polish and lipstick.155

  The campaigning journalist John Pilger, one of the few reporters who had the courage to condemn the sanctions at the time as wicked and immoral, recorded how, just before Christmas 1999, the British Department of Trade and Industry—a government department which tried to defend the sale of two mustard gas components to Iraq prior to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on the grounds that one of them could be used to make ink for ballpoint pens—blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. “Dr. Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children’s vaccines were banned, he said, ‘because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.’ That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction—sanctions—seemed not to occur to him.”

  By 2000, up to 70 per cent of Iraqi civilian industrial enterprises were closed or operating at a much reduced level. Unemployment had reached at least 60 per cent. Halliday and his successor Hans von Sponeck, the top UN humanitarian officers in Iraq, had both resigned their posts in Baghdad—Halliday in September 1998, and von Sponeck on 14 February 2000—and were now speaking out in the press, on television and at public meetings, von Sponeck pointing out that 167 Iraqi children were dying every day. “In all my years at the UN,” he said, “I had never been exposed to the kind of political manoeuvring and pressure that I saw at work in this programme. We’re treating Iraq as if it were made up of 23 million Saddam Husseins, which is rubbish.”

  Halliday was far more outspoken. “The World Health Organisation confirmed to me only ten days ago,” he said in October 1998, “that the monthly rate of sanctions-related child mortality for children under five years of age is from five to six thousand per month. They believe this is an underestimate, since in rural parts of Iraq children are not registered at birth, and if they die within six weeks of birth, they are never registered . . . I recently met with trade union leaders [in Iraq] who asked me why the United Nations does not simply bomb the Iraqi people, and do it efficiently, rather than extending sanctions which kill Iraqis incrementally over a long period . . . Sanctions are undermining the cultural and educational recovery of Iraq, and will not change its system of governance. Sanctions encourage isolation, alienation and fanaticism . . . Sanctions constitute a serious breach of the United Nations charter on human rights and children’s rights.” In 2000, Halliday wrote that “here we are in the middle of the millennium year and we are responsible for genocide in Iraq. Today the prime minister, Tony Blair, is on the defensive on a range of largely domestic issues. His unending endorsement of the Clinton/Albright programme for killing the children of Iraq is seldom mentioned. What does that say about us all?”

  The British Foreign Office—and especially Peter Hain, who was now minister of state with responsibility for the Middle East—tried to trash the UN officials who had resigned. “We know that some have raised concerns about the resignations of Hans von Sponeck and, before him, Dennis Halliday, as UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq,” a sleekly worded letter from the Foreign Office’s Middle East Department told a medical doctor who was an Independent reader.

  Managing a unique and complex programme worth billions of pounds is a job for an experienced and dedicated administrator committed to making the most of the “oil for food” programme for the Iraqi people. Unfortunately neither Halliday nor von Sponeck was the right man for it. It was clear from very early on that they disagreed with the decisions of the Security Council and the purposes of the UN resolutions. It was not therefore in their interests to make “oil for food” work.

  This was ridiculous. Halliday, a compassionate and decent man, and the earnest von Sponeck were both experienced humanitarian workers. To claim that two UN coordinators, one after another, were both “wrong men” for the job was beyond credibility.

  The same letter claimed that a new Security Council Resolution, 1284, would make the “oil for food” programme more effective because it removed the ceiling on Iraqi oil exports, failing to add that Iraq’s broken oil facilities and a sudden lowering of the price of oil—which was not the UN’s fault—largely neutered the effects of the initiative. What Iraq needed was not the sudden relaxation of restrictions on personal items but serious reinvestment in industry, infrastructure and commercial life—something that UN sanctions did not permit. Toothpaste and toilet rolls were no use if Iraqis could no longer afford them.

  And every few months, as the UN inspectors sent to disarm the Baathist regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons—often faced with the obtuseness and threats of Iraq’s security police—sought to discover the extent of Saddam’s armoury, the Americans would announce another “threat” by the Iraqi dictator to invade Kuwait, to ignore the U.S.-imposed “no-fly” zones in southern and northern Iraq—supposedly set up to “protect” the Shiites and Kurds—or to retrieve ground-to-ground missiles that had been left behind in the UN-administered zone along the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border. Repeatedly, in the early nineties, I would race to Beirut airport for yet another flight to Kuwait, just in case Saddam was about to repeat his messianic blunder of 1990—even though network news shows were filming Iraqi soldiers milling around rusting troop trains, some of them barefoot, m
any of them clearly emaciated, their uniforms torn and discoloured.

  Almost two years after they celebrated victory in the 1991 Gulf War, the conflict’s three principal Western allies—the United States, Britain and France— launched a series of air strikes against Iraq’s supposed violation of the southern no-fly zone and its seizure of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from the United Nations. On 12 January 1993, six British Tornado bombers and a squadron of French Mirage jets based in Saudi Arabia joined a much larger force of American planes from the carrier Kitty Hawk in attacking targets inside Iraq, most of them missile sites and radar bases. For more than a week, the United States had protested at Iraq’s positioning of SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries inside the “no-fly” zones.

  Yet if the Americans needed a regular crisis in the Gulf, Saddam also wanted to provoke tension. Saddam’s spokesman had claimed once more that very day that Kuwait was “an integral part of Iraq that will be restored.” The United Nations had escorted a troop of journalists up to the new Iraq–Kuwaiti frontier—the one that the UN revised in favour of Kuwait but that Iraq did not accept—and happily displayed the wooden boxes (stamped “Ministry of Defence, Jordan”) from which the Iraqis had indeed seized their old Silkworm missiles the previous weekend, weapons that were taken before the eyes of the UN guards.

  That same morning, the Iraqis had made their third foray across the new frontier—the one they didn’t recognise—saying they had an agreement with the UN to remove their equipment from warehouses up to 15 January. But they had not asked permission from the UN or the Kuwaiti government to do so. Why not? And why, for that matter, had we not hitherto been told that the Iraqi forays into the Um Qasr naval base began eight months previously? In May 1991, it emerged, Iraq took eleven Silkworm missiles from the base and then another four less than a month later. It subsequently gave the four back—at the request of the UN Iraq–Kuwait Observer Mission—but kept the other eleven. The weekend’s foray allowed them to “recapture” those four missiles yet again.