MIDEAST : Complicated U.N. Role in Iraq Mixes Sanctions and Relief

An extraordinary thing happened at Al Habbaniya Airport south of Baghdad this week: A plane landed.

Heavy U.N.-imposed trade sanctions against Iraq have banned most civilian air traffic in or out for the last two years, with the country permitted to import only essential food and medicine.

The Russian Aeroflot cargo plane was packed with 100 tons of vaccines, hospital refrigerators, syringes, drugs and even schoolbooks and pencils--all courtesy of the United Nations, the same United Nations that is sponsoring and enforcing the trade embargo here.

The relief flight was something of a watershed for the U.N. operations here in post-Persian Gulf War Iraq--the first shipment of emergency aid since the Iraqis on Oct. 22 signed a sweeping agreement permitting continued U.N. activities on their territory. And its timing illustrated the apparent contradictions that run deep in the complex U.N. mission here.

Just two days before, the tires were slashed on two U.N. jeeps parked outside the state-owned Al Rashid Hotel. The jeeps belonged to U.N. personnel trying to force Iraq to comply with U.N. resolutions it signed after its army was driven from Kuwait last year.

A few days before that, the U.N. special commission charged with disposing of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction complained that, despite the government’s technical cooperation in the mission, handwritten death threats were slipped under the doors of team members’ rooms at Baghdad’s Sheraton Hotel--whose employees gave them filthy towels and sheets and refused to make up their $150-a-night rooms.

Iraq, which in the past has labeled the weapons inspectors “stray dogs” seeking to rob the country of its sovereignty, has expressed official regret for the incidents, attributing them to angry citizens. The United Nations insists that the acts are sanctioned by President Saddam Hussein’s government.

But many in the government and Iraqi society are puzzled by the U.N. role in a country that feels it already has been punished enough for Hussein’s August, 1990, invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which led to two months of allied aerial bombardment.

“When you look at the many legs and arms of the U.N. all moving in different directions at once here, you do have to sympathize at least a little with the Iraqis,” said one diplomat here.

In fact, there are no fewer than 13 separate U.N. agencies here, some to help the Iraqis, others to police them and still others to coerce them. Their telephone directory looks like alphabet soup: There’s UNSCOM, the commission attempting to destroy weapons of mass destruction; UNROP, the commission overseeing Iraq’s return of the billions of dollars worth of property it looted from Kuwait, and UNGCI, the commission of guards sent here to protect the U.N. relief workers. There are also the usual array of aid agencies, such as UNICEF, which sponsored this week’s airlift.

The centerpiece of the airlift was tons of measles vaccine needed to avert a near-epidemic--unusual in this nation, which once reported fewer measles cases than any other in the region.

“Things are very bad here,” said Dr. Giani Murzi, the Italian physician who heads the UNICEF mission in Baghdad. “The biggest problems are drinking water and sewage, which were destroyed in the war. . . . Malnutrition also is a great problem. We estimate now that there are 300,000 malnourished children under 5.”

The United States maintains that the embargo is an effective tactic to push Iraq into compliance with weapons inspections and other cease-fire terms. But most analysts here, as well as the Iraqis themselves, believe that Washington has been pressuring the United Nations to maintain the embargo in an effort to fuel popular dissent and ultimately overthrow Hussein.

Underscoring the contradictions inherent in the U.N. mission here, Murzi said he and his agency have publicly called for an end to the sanctions that other U.N. commissions are spending millions of dollars to enforce.

“We believe that sanctions, wherever they are, are hitting the most vulnerable people,” he said, echoing an opinion often heard among the few foreign diplomats still here. “The sanctions are not having the result they wish them to have.”