Group Assails Sanctions After Six Weeks in Iraq

U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq are missing their target, hurting not President Saddam Hussein but ordinary civilians, a group of U.S. activists said Sunday at the end of a six-week experiment in living among the Iraqi working class.

Five members of the Chicago-based group, Voices in the Wilderness, told a news conference at the Iraqi Trade Ministry that their stay in a low-income district of the southern city of Basra had shown them that sanctions crippled the ability of Iraqis to have safe water and an adequate diet.

“We have been eating the same food they get in the rations and drinking the same water people here drink,” said Liza Gizzi, 31, referring to the food rations distributed to compensate for the shortages caused by the sanctions.

“The food was not enough and the water made us sick,” said Gizzi, from St. Paul, Minn.

When the activists began living in al-Jumhouriya in Basra, 345 miles south of Baghdad, there were six of them. But Ken Hannaford-Ricardi of Worcester, Mass., found the conditions unbearable and, sick with diarrhea, left Iraq after two weeks.

Voices and other critics have said the sanctions imposed since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 have prevented the flow of pumps, parts and other means to repair the country’s infrastructure. Electricity works only intermittently. Systems for purifying drinking water and processing sewage do not work.

“Children are dying because of the bad sewage and water systems,” said Tom Jackson, 40, of Dover, N.H., one of the five in Iraq.

Bad water has created an epidemic of dysentery and infectious diseases, resulting in thousands of child deaths. UNICEF says the number of infant and child deaths in Iraq has doubled in the decade since the sanctions began.

The United States and Britain are the chief backers of maintaining the embargo until Iraq proves it has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq says it has done so and refuses to cooperate with U.N. disarmament inspectors.

U.S. and British warplanes that patrol no-fly zones over north and south Iraq frequently attack when challenged by Iraqi air defense systems. Allied spokesmen say the planes attack only military targets, but Iraq accuses them of bombing civilian sites.