The Great War for Civilisation (143 page)

In retrospect, General Schwarzkopf's account of these hundreds of civilians is a story of painfully weak diplomacy on the part of the victorious allies. “We settled for his [an Iraqi general's] assurance that anyone who had come to Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait would be free to approach the Red Cross and leave if he wanted,” Schwarzkopf wrote in his account of the February 1991 ceasefire negotiations. In fact, the ICRC did not receive a single communication from Kuwaitis, either in Baghdad or in their sub-office in Basra. Greatest concern was expressed for the 650 or so civilians—30 of them women—who were known to have been arrested in Kuwait during the occupation and who were later seen in prisons inside Iraq. Many of the Kuwaitis taken hostage in the last days of Iraqi rule saw these civilians in their Iraqi jails shortly before they themselves were freed, returning to Kuwait with first-hand evidence that the missing men and women were alive. But since February 1991, there had been no direct word from them, no handwritten messages, no access to their prisons for the Red Cross and only the occasional, months-old evidence that Kuwaitis remained alive in Iraq's prisons.

Two Egyptians, for instance, supposedly saw “Samira”—for the sake of her security, her family name was not given—on 1 August 1991, working alongside other female POWs in Baghdad. She had asked them to tell her mother she was still alive, that she was a cleaner in the Saadi hospital, living in the al-Qadimiya prison, ruled over by Uday Hussein, son of the president. That was all she told the two Egyptians, a message they faithfully delivered to the authorities in Kuwait. The twenty-nine-year-old—the snapshot in her file showed an attractive woman with bright brown hair and sparkling eyes—had been seen only once before, on 15 March 1991, when her message had been the same. Then there had been silence.

Kuwaitis drew strength from the 2,000 Iranian POWs whom Iran had thought dead but who emerged alive from Saddam's prisons after the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988. Saddam liked hostages, they reasoned. He knew how to use them. He had held thousands of Westerners captive after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But Kuwaiti prisoners held no interest for him. None of the 850 men and women—not even Samira—were ever seen alive again. Only after the Anglo-American invasion in 2003 did Kuwaitis know why. Amid the thousands of corpses dug up from the execution pits in the desert west of Hilla were dozens of men still carrying their Kuwaiti citizenship papers. So now Kuwait would have yet more names to add to their list of “martyrs” from the war, a small figure perhaps, but further proof that Arabs die at the hands of Arabs.

North of the Kuwaiti border, however, there now lay a barren land of misery, fear and defeat, its power stations bombed out, its water purification systems shattered by allied explosives, its sewers overflowing into streets and houses. Western journalists taken on a UN helicopter across southern Iraq saw thousands of tank revetments and trenches, all now covered with grass and sand; the Iraqi army had spent its energies in destroying the uprising and preserving the regime—threatening its neighbours was no longer an option. Iraq was prostrate and its people, under the burden of UN sanctions that were first intended to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without a fight and then to destroy his regime—neither of which was accomplished—were about to embark on a slow mass death, made more terrible and more immoral because those sanctions were imposed by nations that regarded themselves as the most civilised on earth.

Across southern Iraq, the Shiites lived in mortal peril of their lives, their sons and husbands and brothers already filling the execution grounds around Hilla and Nasiriyah. The great golden-domed mosque of the Imam Ali in Najaf was in partial ruins, its centuries-old blue marble tiles lying in heaps around the shrine, souvenirs for passing journalists and for Saddam's Republican Guards who had blasted their way into the sacred buildings of Shiite Islam to kill the Iraqi insurgents seeking sanctuary there. Twelve years later, Shiite insurgents—in some cases the very men who had fought Saddam's killers in 1991—were hiding in the very same shrine, this time from American army tank fire. In the north, the Kurds—now under American and British protection—lived amid the hundreds of villages that had been gassed and then systematically destroyed on Saddam's orders. We had betrayed the Shiite rebellion. We had betrayed the Kurdish rebellion. Later—much later—when we came to destroy Saddam himself, we would expect them to be grateful to us. But they would remember.

The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page—or so we hoped—on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime. When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were “ghosted” out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was “freedom.”

And indeed, when sanctions were first imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, there was little outcry; if they could induce Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait without the need for war, then few would criticise them. Besides, before the liberation of Kuwait, Iraq's power stations were still operating at full capacity and its economy, while crippled by the eight years of war with Iran, was capable of providing Iraqis with one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world. Rationing was introduced in Iraq in September 1990, but most Westerners—and most Arabs—assumed that once Saddam had withdrawn from Kuwait, hopefully before any hostilities took place, these sanctions would be lifted. As so often in the Middle East, a decision that initially appeared benign was to be quickly transformed into a weapon far more deadly than missiles or shells.

UN Security Council Resolution 661 was passed on 6 August 1990, scarcely four days after Saddam's army had crossed the Kuwaiti border, calling upon all states to prevent the import of “all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait” and to prohibit the supply of all goods except “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs.” In retrospect, it is clear that the United States never had any faith that these sanctions— mild by comparison with the postwar restrictions—would persuade Saddam to order his forces out of Kuwait. Just as America and Britain would claim, twelve years later, that the UN arms inspectors could not be given the time to finish their work before the 2003 invasion, so the Americans gave up on the sanctions regime by the time their troops were in place for the liberation of Kuwait. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy concluded before the end of 1990 that “sanctions cannot be counted on to produce a sure result.” By 15 January 1991, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd was announcing that Britain was resigned to fight for Kuwait because UN sanctions had had no “decisive effect” on Saddam's capacity to wage war.

Only after the war did the United States make it clear that there would be no lifting of sanctions until Saddam Hussein was gone. Sanctions would remain, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, “until there was a change of government in Iraq.” But the effect of sanctions was now catastrophic. In 1991 the Allies had crippled power stations and deliberately bombed water and sewage facilities—a decision that was bound to cause a humanitarian catastrophe among the civilians of Iraq. A Harvard team of lawyers and public health specialists, after visiting forty-six Iraqi hospitals and twenty-eight water and sewage facilities, stated in 1991 that deaths among children under five in Iraq had nearly quintupled, that almost a million were undernourished and 100,000 were starving to death. Their research found that 46,700 children under five had died from the combined effects of war and trade sanctions in the first seven months of 1991.

As more and more Iraqis started to die—not only ravaged by the foul water they were forced to drink from bomb-damaged water-cleansing plants but increasingly prevented from acquiring the medicines they might need to recover—a UN commission redrew the country's southern border to deprive it of part of the Rumeila oilfield and the naval base at Um Qasr, Iraq's only access to the waters of the Gulf. The confiscated territory was given to Kuwait. Western leaders insisted that Saddam Hussein could use Iraq's own resources to pay for humanitarian supplies, wilfully ignoring the fact that Iraqi financial assets had been blocked and oil sales prohibited. By the end of 1994, Iraqi inflation was running at 24,000 per cent a year and much of the population was destitute. On the streets of Baghdad, even the middle classes were selling their libraries for money to buy food. Volumes of Islamic theology, English editions of Shakespeare, medical treatises and academic theses on Arab architecture ended up on the pavements of Mutanabi Street in Baghdad: paper for bread.

By 1996, half a million Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. Madeleine Albright, who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave an infamous reply on 12 May that year when asked about sanctions on the CBS news programme
60 Minutes
. Anchor Leslie Stahl put it to Albright: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright's reply: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” In March 1997, Albright—now U.S. secretary of state—emphasised the impossibility of ending sanctions. “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions . . . And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein's intentions will never be peaceful.”

In October 1996, Philippe Heffinck, the representative in Iraq for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), estimated that “around 4,500 children under the age of five are dying here every month from hunger and disease.” A year later, a joint study between the UN and the World Food Programme concluded that sanctions “significantly constrained Iraq's ability to earn foreign currency needed to import sufficient quantities of food to meet needs.” On 26 November 1997, UNICEF was reporting that “32 per cent of children under the age of five, some 960,000 children, [are] chronically malnourished—a rise of 72 per cent since 1991. Almost one quarter . . . are underweight—twice as high as the levels found in neighbouring Jordan or Turkey.”

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.