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9,000 Iraqis Die in June due to UN Sanctions: Report
More than 9,000 Iraqis died in June due to the 11-year-old United Nations sanctions against Iraq, bringing the country's death toll of the sanctions to 1,508,006 since August 1990, Iraqi Health Ministry said in a report released on Thursday.
In June, some 6,078 children under the age of five died of diarrhea, pneumonia, respiratory infections and malnutritions, said the report, adding that 3,012 elderly people died of heart diseases, diabetes, hypertension and malignant neoplasms.
Such a high mortality rate, resulting from malnutrition and severe medicine shortage caused by the sanctions, was in sharp contrast with the same 1989 period, when only 387 children and 434 elderly people died, the report said.
Iraq has long urged the U.N. to totally lift the sanctions, imposed after its 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait.
Moreover, Iraq has often accused the United States and Britain of impeding the implementation of the U.N. oil-for-food program by blocking the contracts Iraq signed with foreign countries to buy food, medicine and other basic necessities.
The U.N. humanitarian program, launched in 1996, allows Iraq to sell crude to finance imports of humanitarian goods to help offset the crippling impacts of the sanctions.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday, Iraqi permanent delegate to the U.N. Mohammad al-Duri said that a total of 1,373 contracts, worth 3.4 billion U.S. dollars, have been put on hold by the U.N. Sanctions Committee "under the pretext of dual use."
"The suspension of contracts has reached an unbearable level," Duri said in the letter.
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