Iraq Embargo Is Killing Kids; End It Now : The United Nations should declare such economic assaults to be crimes against humanity.

For the fourth consecutive February, I have made the long road trip to Iraq under embargo. First it was to assess the effect of the U.S. bombing that became an admitted 110,000 aerial sorties, 88,500 tons of bombs--seven Hiroshimas--augmented by many rockets and missiles including 56,000 with depleted uranium tips. Most of the civilian targets were admittedly chosen to accelerate the effect of the sanctions: water supply facilities, food production and distribution including poultry and livestock operations, and food processing plants. The deadliness of the sanctions initiated in August, 1990, was already clear in February, 1991. The director of the Red Crescent of Iraq estimated 6,000 dead children, most infants needing milk supplement and simple medicines, others from dehydration.

In the following years, I observed the devastating effect of the blockade on the entire population. Through 1991 and 1992, thousands died monthly as a direct result of the sanctions, including epidemics and large increases in infectious diseases arising from the lack of vaccines and destroyed sanitation facilities. In 1993, deaths above the normal rate caused by the blockade exceeded 125,000.

It takes little thought to know who is first and most affected by the economic blockade of a whole nation. It is the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill and elderly. Most of the more than 375,000 who have died in Iraq have been from these three groups. Others have suffered terribly. There are thousands of undersized infants, weighing less than 5 1/2 pounds at birth, tens of thousands of victims of kwashiorkor and and marasmus, forms of malnutrition virtually unknown in Iraq before the Gulf crisis. The little bodies and limbs waste away, the belly bloats. The chronically ill often die for the lack of insulin, or medicines for heart, lung, liver, kidney or other common ailments. Cases requiring surgery--performed in only a few hospitals for want of anesthetics, sutures, gloves and compresses--must wait. The elderly live through their last days without sufficient food or even common painkillers like aspirin. Food consumption for the country is half what it was before the embargo. Available medicine is less than 15% of before.

The sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction attacking an entire nation at once, injuring all physically, mentally and spiritually. Severe physical handicaps will afflict many who survive. The life expectancy for the whole population is radically reduced. Tragically, hundreds of millions on the planet suffer a similar fate because those with power fail to act to end hunger, starvation, sickness and epidemics.

The people of Iraq suffer because the United Nations, coerced by the United States, has acted knowingly and deliberately to cause their suffering. This takes a terrible toll on faith in the future and belief that the Untied Nations seeks justice and to end the scourge of war.

In times of the most dangerous war, even if required to avoid defeat, international law prohibits assaults on the civilian sector. All humanitarian law has strived to preserve nonmilitary parts of society, to prevent the use of cruel weapons of death and weapons of mass destruction.

How then is it possible that the United Nations would authorize the cruelest weapon for destruction of the masses, knowing its first and primary effect will be on the poor, infants, children, sick people and those we should respect most, our elders? And that in time of peace. There can be no possible justification or avoidance of responsibility for these deaths. If law prohibits even minimal assault on civilians in time of war, when a government will not surrender, can it permit peacetime assault on an entire nation when its government will not submit, hitting the poorest and the weakest hardest and killing the most fragile?

The sanctions against Iraq must end immediately. Time taken to save face or find an excuse will cost several hundred lives each day, more than five times the 68 deaths at the market at Sarajevo that so rightfully outraged the world. Yet who bears the greater culpability, soldiers facing the horror of prolonged combat in the midst of mindless violence or heads of state and diplomats in cool reflection who unleash the worst horsemen of the apocalypse on the children and babies and sick and grandparents while cursing the evil of their adversary?

Only the prohibition of sanctions by the United Nations and a new covenant proclaiming economic assaults on a whole people to be a crime against humanity will show we can learn from the mistakes of the past. Only then will these tragic deaths not have been entirely in vain.