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Iraq Groans Under 10 Years of UN Sanctions
"I wish someday I can see President Saddam Hussein and tell him the hardships of my family," said Thanaa Ali with a deep sigh.
The unprecedented 10-year-long United Nations sanctions on Iraq have reduced Thanaa's family to poverty. To meet means of livelihood, her parents have sold their most valuable things: a house, a car and a piece of land in the southern province of Thi-Qar.
Still, life becomes no better. Now her parents and their eight children��Thanaa being the eldest, live in a rented five-room house. What always worries them most is how to pay the monthly rent for the house in the north of Baghdad.
The monthly rent is 60,000 Iraqi dinars (30 U.S. dollars). Thanaa, the only one working in the family, earns 30,000 dinars (15 dollars) a month as a typist. Her father has made vain efforts to try to find another job after retirement in 1993 as a school teacher.
"To save money, it is so common for us to go to bed with our stomachs rumbling with hunger," she said, unable to hold tears.
In the Arab country that a girl used to get married at 17 or 18, Thanaa, 25, is still single and even has not a boyfriend yet.
"I can not get married because my family needs me," she said, adding fewer and fewer young people in Iraq are now getting married because of economic difficulties caused by the sanctions.
The sanctions started exactly 10 years ago: on August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. passed Resolution 661 and imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iraq.
The decade-old sanctions have played havoc with Iraq's economy and forced millions of Iraqis such as Thanaa to struggle for life.
The latest official annual inflation figure originates from 1995 when it registered a rate of 65,000 percent. Prices have skyrocketed, with goods which used to cost several fils (cents) now costing thousands of dinars instead.
A dollar now can buy 2,000 dinars. The dinar was an oil-backed currency with an official value of 3.2 dollars before the sanctions.
The sanctions, the toughest in history, are killing up to 6,000 Iraqis a month, according to Denis Halliday, a former UN coordinator of humanitarian aid to Iraq.
Halliday, along with top UN humanitarian official in Iraq Hans Von Sponeck and Representative of the World Food Program (WFP)in Iraq Jutta Burghard, resigned earlier this year to protest the continuation of sanctions on Iraq.
They stressed the sanctions have caused "a human tragedy" in Iraq.
Surely it is a tragedy. Life in Iraq has become increasingly desperate in spite of a UN oil-for-food program intended to ease the bite of the sanctions, said a report released by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in February.
"After nine years of trade sanctions...the situation of the civilian population is increasingly desperate. Deteriorating living conditions, inflations, and low salaries make people's everyday lives a continuing struggle," the report said.
Iraq's children have paid a particularly high price. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) released a report in August 1998, saying children's mortality rate in Iraq has doubled: In 1991, 56 children under the age of five per 1,000 died and the figure had gone up to 131 per 1,000 in 1998.
What is more, at least one third of Iraq's nearly 4 million children are malnourished, the report said.
Iraq claims that as many as 1.3 million people, mostly children and the elderly, have died as a direct result of malnutrition and medical shortages caused by the sanctions.
The ICRC report said the UN oil-for-food deal has not done its job well. "It has not halted the collapse of Iraq's health system and the deterioration of water supplies," the report said.
Baghdad has repeatedly complained most of its purchases within the framework of the UN humanitarian deal, which took effect in 1996, have not reached the country, blaming the US and British representatives at the UN Sanctions Committee for blocking them.
Iraq says that nearly 2,000 contracts it signed with foreign countries to buy relief goods have been put on hold, worsening the humanitarian crisis in the country.
The UN deal allows Iraq to sell oil, under UN supervision, over six months to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods for the Iraqi people who have been hardest hit by the sanctions.
The sanctions are not to be removed until UN arms inspectors verify Iraq is rid of all weapons of mass destruction and the capability to rebuild its arsenal.
Iraq has rejected a UN resolution issued last December which can ease the sanctions if Baghdad allows arms inspectors to resume work in Iraq, claiming the resolution was just aimed at prolonging the sanctions and keeping Iraq under the colonial control of the US and Britain.
The crippling sanctions have been accompanied by frequent US and British air strikes against Iraqi civilian targets since December 1998, when the US and Britain launched the four-night Operation Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq.
Now it has become a never-ending war. Once every four days on the average, the U.S. and British warplanes bomb Iraq to enforce the two no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq imposed by the US-led Western allies after the 1991 Gulf War.
While the airstrikes have killed 300 Iraqi civilians and injured nearly 1,000 others.
If the US and its allies attempt to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein through the sanctions and air strikes, the result is just the opposite, analysts have pointed out.
Sanctions have backfired and strengthened the Saddam regime instead of weakening it, as they make it easier for Saddam to control the flow of food and money, Nihad Awad, deputy director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a televised interview.
Ten years after sanctions, Saddam Hussein, whose grip on power is as strong as ever, has defeated numerous attempts by the US, domestic opposition and some of his neighbors to unseat him.
He has not only outlasted former US President George Bush, who led the Gulf War and drove the Iraqi occupation troops out of Kuwait, but will soon outlast Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, who is due to leave office next January.
US officials have admitted they have little choice but to stick to the unsatisfying containment policy, characterized by sanctions and air strikes, but some officials worry that it can take as long as another 10 years for the policy to work eventually.
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