Protests of Sanctions on Iraq Should Be Wake-up Call to US.

• Author: Pearson, Cliff

It was hard to miss. First there was a month of activism opposing the US/UN sanctions on Iraq, including 86 arrests at the US Mission to the United Nations. Then 70 Members of Congress signed a letter to President Clinton urging an end to the economic sanctions. Representative David Bonior even called the sanctions "infanticide masquerading as policy." And then came the protest resignations. Assistant Secretary-General Hans Von Sponeck, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, announced he is leaving his job in protest after 15 months. The next day, Jutta Burghardt, chief of the UN's World Food Program in Iraq, resigned too, also in protest of the economic sanctions destroying Iraq. These events should have sent a powerful message to the White House. Denis Halliday, Mr. Van Sponeck's predecessor, quit the same position after 13 months--ending a 25-year career with the UN--also in protest of the economic sanctions responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Like Mr. Halliday, Mr. Von Sponeck also came to realize the devastation of the sanctions supposedly aimed at Saddam Hussein's regime. The fact that two high-ranking UN officials felt compelled to leave their jobs in protest of a US and UN policy should make all Americans sit up and ask themselves if that policy is sound. The resignation of a competent and respected WFP director should give added emphasis to the point. Sadly, judging by the State Department's response to Mr. Von Sponeck's resignation, no such soul-searching is on the agenda. The most recent Security Council resolution--Resolution 1284--which Clinton administration officials like to claim would lift the sanctions, actually does no such thing.

It creates a new arms monitoring agency, and allows that, more than a year down the line, some restrictions might be temporarily suspended. But the default position remains that the sanctions stay, unchanged, unless the Security Council--including the US with its veto--agrees to keep them suspended after each four-month interval. Under such restrictions, no viable oil company is likely to risk large-scale investment in Iraq, however much they may want Iraq's oil wealth. But without such investment, reconstruction and repair of Iraq's oil industry itself will remain impossible, and Iraq's problems will only worsen. The US-led sanctions, in place now for 10 years, have caused not only the deaths of about one million Iraqi people--half of them children...