News Embargo on Iraq

On Nov. 29, 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan submitted a report to the Security Council stating that, after four years of the Oil-for-Food program, $8.8 billion worth of supplies actually arrived in Iraq. This amounts to only $110 per person per year. UNICEF's 2001 State of the Children report positions Iraq in last place of 188 countries for child mortality rates. The U.N. has documented the increase in incidents of mental disease among children under 14. Many of them suffer from "Air Siren Syndrome." A new term discussed at the U.N.'s Geneva human rights meetings is the "undue future burden effect" of the sanctions on coming generations of Iraqis. Both former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter and former Defense Secretary William Cohen have admitted that Iraq is now a third-rate military power that poses no threat to its neighbors. Yet, [Hans Von Sponeck] said, the U.S. always requires more verification on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. He advocated disarmament in the region as a whole, not just within Iraq, and further recommended inter-Arab peace talks on Iraq and Palestine, with no political, economic, or military arm-twisting from the outside. On the second day of the workshop, individuals recently returned from Iraq reported on what they saw there. Peter Lems, Iraq program director for the American Friends Service Committee, said that over the past few years there has been a growth in the number of organizations worldwide concerned about Iraq--indicating the anti-sanctions movement may be isolated in the U.S., but not in the wider world. Lems attributed this growth to the increase in the number of flights into Baghdad, including two from countries with permanent membership on the Security Council, and to the impact of the Al Jazeer satellite TV network on the Arab world. Al Jazeer, he noted, is able to address Arab opinion directly and to pressure Arab governments to have more accountability.