January 13, 2004
SANCTIONS AND STARVATION
The late Michael Kelly recorded his personal account of the first Gulf
War in what might be the best piece of war writing ever published,
called Martyr's Day,
Chronicle of a Small War. Toward the end of the book, he
revisits Iraq to note the consequences of U.N. sanctions on the
population, as well as its Shi'ite and Kurdish refugee problem. Some
passages dispel the notion that the suffering of Iraqis was the result
of sanctions.
All that this woman said was true. The war that had liberated Kuwait City had also liberated Baghdad, freeing it to reach, you might way, its fullest expression of self. It had become the ideal mob town, the perfect capital of a gangster nation. The new millionaires, Baathist bosses and government ministers and their merchant friends, tooled around the city in Mercedes Benzes the color of creme fraiche and swaggered though the casinos tossing stacks of new money on the baccarat tables.No wonder the U.N. didn't want the party broken up; it sounds like a great place for the well heeled, the poor and persecuted be damned. Meanwhile, some NGO workers' frustration boiled over at the perverse insanity of Iraq under Saddam. Here's Doug Broderick of Catholic Relief Services:
The biggest man about town was Udai, Saddam's oldest son, whose new newspaper, Babel, had attracted great numbers of readers with its gossipy tone and its daring columns poking fun at bureaucrats. Udai and his entourage were out most nights, dancing and drinking and whoring and gambling, and occasionly beating up passerby. People avoided them when they could.
Only the rich and politically connected could afford to eat much. The government doled out some food, but never quite enough, and the Western relief workers in Baghdad had come to realize, after their offers had been stymied time after time, that the government wanted things the way they were. The deaths of the very poor served to turn the national anger outward, toward the United Sates, and the hunger of the middle classes kept them too preoccupied to plot rebellion.
If you had money, though, the city was a treasure pot. You could buy a two-hundred-year-old carpet for $150, a hundred-year-old gold pocket watch for $50, a twenty-year-old virgin for $20. The streets were crowded with trucks loaded down with liquor and cigarettes from Amman. The lobbies of the big hotels were busy with formerly respectable young women sipping tea and pretending they were waiting for someone they knew, with United Nations officials staggering under the trophies of their daily shopping sprees, with sleek, sly Jordanian husterlers whispering in the ears of large men in too-tight suits who looked like aging mob muscle, but were in fact ministers of state.
The dead-baby situation made Doug Broderick so angry that his face twisted up when he talked about it.Of course, the anti-U.S. anti-war anti-sanctions crowd played into this propaganda ploy like the perfect useful idiots they were supposed to be.
"The terrible thing is that Iraq is, technically, overfed. The food stocks are at one hundred and twenty percent capacity, seventy percent of which is imported, thirty percent homegrown. But the government will not distribute the food, or allow anyone else to. They are only giving out twenty-five to thrity percent of what is necessary for the people to be decently fed. We--Catholic Relief Services--have fourteen hundred metric tons of food in this country right now, sitting in warehouses, waiting to be distributed. We cannot distribute that food because the government will not allow us to. They have blocked us from distributing it through the existing network of Women's and Children's Heath Care Centers.
"It is simply a fact atht the Iraqi government is free to buy food and medicine if it wants to. Nobody is preventing the government from going to Amman and buying truckloads of baby milk and bringing it back here. It costs thirty tousand dollars to buy a truckload of baby milk in Amman, and twenty four metric tons of baby milk would be enough for the whole country, based on the number of births. So all it would take to stop all infant deaths would be seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars. You telling me these guys don't have that amount of money?
"Of course they do. They could cope with this if they wanted to. But who wants to be seen coping with it? That would be a message they do not want to send. If they sent that message, it would take pressure off the United Nations to lift the sanctions. The fact is, the sanctions make Saddam strong. He can take the time to get rid of his enemies, take care of the Shiites and the Kurds, while his people are busy pointing their fingers at the U.S. and looking for food. Everybody in the country is too preoccupied with food to think about rebellion. The whole nation is dreaming about a nice dinner."
In the run-up to the first Gulf War, a young Kuwaiti woman testified before Congress about Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait, including a story about the theft of incubators from a hospital that left premature infants on a cold floor to die. This story was later debunked, but it shouldn't obscure the fact that real atrocities--murder, rape, torture- -were committed during Iraqi occupation of the country. Earlier in his book, Kelly writes of what he saw in the just-liberated nation. Here is his most chilling passage:
Most of the bunkers and pillboxes were clean, the only clean Iraqi living quarters I ever saw in the city. There was one exception, in which we found a deep litter of trash and clothes. It was disturbing trash, a lot of the clothing belonged to women. There were several dresses and a brassiere and a pair of peach-colored nylon tap pants. A few feet away was a doll, with yellow hair and blue vacant eyes and a neat little plaid dress. There was also a very little girl's pair of underpants, white with a picture of a giraffe on them. The giraffe was holding a teacup, and underneath was written "A Giraffe's Party!" Nearby was an open, mostly full jar of petroleum jelly.Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq while traveling as an embedded reporter during the second Gulf War.
Posted by Lexiphane at January 13, 2004 10:15 AM
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