Iraq's Untold Story: Genocide in Iraq

                by Jillian Skeet

                Close your eyes and imagine.

                Parents have been withholding food, water and medical care to punish their
                children for misbehaving. The children are on the brink of starvation.

                The house itself is in total disrepair. Taps do not work and the children, dying
                of thirst, are forced to drink water from a dirty toilet bowl.

                By the time authorities are alerted, one child is dead and the remaining two
                are near death from starvation and disease. The public is horrified and
                outraged.

                How could this happen in our midst? There are calls for investigations,
                inquests and inquiries. Neighbours, teachers, doctors are questioned. Anyone
                even remotely aware of the situation is held accountable.

                The parents are arrested, probably sent for psychiatric assessment, and
                charged with an array of offences including murder. Donations and adoption
                offers pour in from the public heartsick at the maltreatment of the children.

                Keep your eyes closed.

                Now, imagine that instead of one dead, you have half a million under the age
                of five. Instead of two suffering from severe malnutrition and disease, you have
                millions.

                Instead of drinking water from the toilet bowl, the water comes from a river
                contaminated with raw sewage.

                Imagine that instead of two parents perpetrating this horror on their children, it
                is being done by the nations of the world, in the name of the United Nations.

                Open your eyes. You are in Iraq.

                As the latest international crisis over Iraq’s refusal to allow U.S. weapons
                inspectors in the country degenerates into sabre rattling and threats of further
                sanctions, there is a tragic untold story that explains the flag-burning images
                flooding our television screens.

                It has been the United States that has spear-headed the campaign to
                continue sanctions against Iraq despite warnings from United Nations
                agencies such as UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and
                the World Health Organization (WHO), of the genocidal conditions within the
                country. According to information from the FAO, since sanctions were
                imposed in 1990, more than one million Iraqis have died — half of them
                children under the age of five. They are victims of sanctions that have deprived
                the Iraqi people of food, medicine and the spare parts necessary to repair their
                water and sewage systems.

                With pumps and sewage treatment plants largely inoperable for lack of spare
                parts, raw untreated sewage flows freely into neighbourhoods and rivers like
                the Tigris — a major water supply for the country. Under sanctions, chlorine is
                banned as a substance with potential military applications. One factory in Iraq
                produces an inferior grade chlorine in drastically insufficient supply.
                Consequently, most water is, at best, partially treated.

                UNICEF estimates that children are currently dying in Iraq at the rate of 4,500
                to 4,800 per month. Many die of outright starvation, from diarrhea and
                diseases traced to contaminated water and food, or from communicable
                diseases once eradicated in Iraq.

                When children become ill, they are taken to hospitals where antibiotics and
                painkillers are non-existent or in short supply. Even adequate lighting and
                running water are sometimes lacking, not to mention basic medical
                equipment.

                The children do not stay long — parents quickly see that the hospitals have
                nothing to offer, nothing to alleviate their children’s agony, and the children are
                taken home to die. They die as they have lived so briefly — tortured. Their
                deaths could not be more cruel.

                All of this is happening with the full knowledge of world leaders. It is genocide
                against a people enacted in the name of the United Nations and in full
                violation of international law as embodied in the Geneva Conventions. The
                founders of the U.N. who, in the preamble to the UN Charter, pledged to save
                succeeding generations from the scourge of war, must be quite literally rolling
                in their graves.

                Sanctions, as they have been imposed on Iraq, are war in its most pervasive
                form. Where traditional war targetted the military establishment, a war of
                comprehensive sanctions like we’ve seen in Iraq, hits first and foremost the
                civilian population and, at that, the most vulnerable: the infants and children.

                Although sanctions are a provision of the U.N. Charter, and may retain some
                utility in specific instances, that clearly is not the case in Iraq. Saddam
                Hussein is a dictator. He has demonstrated that he is steadfast in his course
                despite tremendous death and suffering in his nation. Starving the population
                and depriving them of the most basic human needs will not transform Iraq into
                a democratic country that can vote Hussein out of office.

                In fact, the opposite is likely to occur. As the people of Iraq see that the world
                has issued them a death sentence, Saddam is likely to appear the lesser of
                two evils. He has set up an extensive food rationing system that provides a
                semi-starvation diet throughout the country. Without it, millions more would be
                dead. And, prior to the Gulf War, despite Saddam’s atrocities, Iraq was a
                relatively rich and modern nation where starvation was unknown. It had one of
                the most advanced health care systems in the region.

                It is time that we, as a society and members of the global village, asked
                ourselves some penetrating questions. Why can states kill with impunity
                while individuals are tried and imprisoned for similar acts? Why would we
                respond with outrage if parents starved a child to death for misbehaving, yet
                simply accept the deaths of half a million children who are similarly punished
                by the nations of the world — their sole crime being born in a country led by
                Saddam Hussein?

                The current situation in Iraq may well go down in history as one of the worst
                atrocities of this century because it has been willingly and knowingly
                perpetrated by the nations of the world. It is a double tragedy because the
                genocide in Iraq has been orchestrated through the instrument that once
                represented our highest international moral standard: the United Nations.

                We should all be deeply alarmed that our world is ruled by leaders so
                heartless that they can look at the facts attesting to the genocide, and vote
                over and over again in the U.N. to continue the sanctions.

                In a 60 Minutes interview, the former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine
                Albright, was asked point blank whether or not sanctions were worth the
                death of half a million children under the age of five. She responded that it was
                a very difficult question but, yes, it (was) worth it.

                The U.N. Charter begins with, We, the people of the United Nations. We are
                the people of the U.N., and it is incumbent upon us to act to stop the
                sanctions and save the people of Iraq — one of our nations united. In so
                doing, we will reclaim the United Nations institution and the moral foundation
                it was built upon.

                We can do no less. We must do no less.