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The following - which includes further information from Richard Garfield - has been circulated in the U.S. via the Newhouse Syndicate, whose reach is substantial. This instance appeared today in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, at http://www.pioneerplanet.com/opinion/ocl_docs/009633.htm . Thanks to Edward Lee for posting. Thanks and comments can be sent to letters@pioneerpress.com If you write, please mention that sanctions needn't be all-or-none (a point Sullivan neglects). Regards, Drew Hamre Golden Valley, MN USA --- Half a million dead kids prove sanctions brutal as bombs ELIZABETH SULLIVAN Commentator Published: Thursday, August 19, 1999 In the first systematic assessment of childhood deaths in Iraq since international sanctions were imposed in 1990, the United Nations Children's Fund says an extra half a million kids have died. That's right -- 500,000 children who might otherwise have lived to see age 5. UNICEF documented a doubling of under-5 mortality in southern and central Iraq over the last decade. More than 10 percent of young kids are dying. It is a frightening indictment of the societal crisis that has enveloped this once-prosperous country since the end of the Persian Gulf War. The crisis for Iraq's children has many causes -- bureaucratic rigidity, internal neglect, U.N. sanctions, the continued U.S. bombing and isolation of Iraq, and Saddam Hussein's evil manipulations, using the deaths of children to advance his own international agenda. Saddam wants sanctions lifted, and he'll do just about anything short of self-destruction to accomplish it. But that doesn't excuse U.S. officials' callousness. Presented last week with this first credible evidence of what humanitarian aid workers had been saying for years about dying Iraqi children, the United States blamed it all on Saddam. As if our bombs and our support for sanctions played no role. "The bottom line is that if Saddam Hussein would not continue to hoard medicines and capabilities to assist the children of Iraq, they wouldn't have this problem," said State Department spokesman James Rubin. "So, clearly, the blame for the suffering of the Iraqi people falls squarely on the shoulders of its tyrannical leader." This ranks Rubin right up there with Saddam on the cynicism scale. Contrary to Rubin's assertions, recent U.N. reports on Iraq's handling of the oil-for-food program (it sells oil and the United Nations deducts war reparations, then buys food to give the Iraqi people) show a different picture. Food is being handed out aggressively in the south and center of the country. The nutritional value of the food basket is vastly improved, although the drop in oil prices caused problems in getting high-quality food. Richard Garfield, a U.S. epidemiologist who was in Iraq in May and June, said medicines were also finally coming out of the warehouses, where bureaucrats had mired them. He said Saddam regards food handouts as a matter of his own survival -- without the food baskets, people might be rioting in the streets. The chief problem remains unrepaired wartime damage in rural areas, where most childhood and infant deaths are occurring. Without money to fix ruined irrigation systems and get electrical grids and drinking-water systems working again, aid experts say, the health of kids in southern and central Iraq may continue to deteriorate. Rubin made much of UNICEF's finding that trends for kids in northern Iraq, an autonomous area run by the United Nations, were better than for children elsewhere in Iraq, where the Iraqi government hands out food -- proof positive, he said, that Saddam and not the sanctions was killing kids. But Garfield said northern Iraq had three times as many nongovernmental do-gooders as did the south and center of the country. Northern Iraqi kids also get about 10 percent more food per capita, because no war-reparations money is being deducted. Finally, he said, cash is given in addition to food, something that doesn't happen in the south. Garfield also argued that the trend lines were skewed since so many Kurdish kids in northern Iraq were dying five years ago after a vicious civil war and internal embargo. It may be true that, given Saddam's agenda, little can be done to fine-tune the U.N. sanctions to make them more humane. But UNICEF's study is a useful reminder that sanctions are a blunt weapon. The very poor, the very young and the very innocent are the very first to suffer. Sullivan is foreign-affairs correspondent for the Plain Dealer of Cleveland. Distributed by Newhouse News Service. --------------- Address of original story: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/opinion/ocl_docs/009633.htm --------------- (c) 1999 St. Paul Pioneer Press. All Rights Reserved. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To be removed/added, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk, NOT the whole list. Please do not sent emails with attached files to the list *** Archived at http://linux.clare.cam.ac.uk/~saw27/casi/discuss.html ***