LETTERS TO THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL FROM RAMSEY CLARK, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL

The following two letters are only the most recent sent by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to all members of the Security Council before its scheduled votes on UN sanctions on Iraq. Since August 1990, this vote has come up every two months. Clark's letters have been widely circulated to the media and on the Internet. They have become a voice of conscience against sanctions, citing ethical and legal standards widely agreed to by all nations but consistently disregarded. (Link here for a list of the names, addresses, phone, and fax numbers of the current members of the UN Security Council.)

January 1, 1996

March 1, 1996

Letters from Ramsey Clark to the UN Security Council since the publication of The Children are Dying in 1996

Letter from Ramsey Clark to Members of UN Security Council Before Their Bimonthly Vote on Sanctions

January 1, 1996

There is one crime against humanity in this last decade of the millennium that exceeds all others in its magnitude, cruelty, and portent. It is the U.S.-forced sanctions against the 20 million people of Iraq. The whole population has suffered. More than 1 million have died, mostly among the elderly, the chronically ill, children, and infants.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that UN sanctions on Iraq have been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children in Iraq since 1990. Most children's deaths are from effects of malnutrition including marasmus and kwashiorkor, wasting or emaciation which has reached 12 percent of all children, stunted growth which affects 28 percent, diarrhea dehydration from bad water or food which is ordinarily easily controlled and cured, common communicable diseases preventable by vaccinations, and epidemics from deteriorating sanitary conditions. There are no deaths crueller than these. They are suffered slowly, helplessly, without simple remedial medication, without simple sedation to relieve pain, without mercy.

While the United Nations Security Council is the nominal power imposing the sanctions, the United States has forced this decision on the council. Three of the five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, and the Russian Federation—have sought to modify the sanctions. The U.S. systematically eliminates opposition to the sanctions. It blames Saddam Hussein and Iraq for the effects of the sanctions, most recently arguing that if Saddam "stopped spending billions on his military machine and palaces for the elite, he could afford to feed his people." But only a fool would offer or believe such propaganda. If Iraq is spending billions on the military, then the sanctions are obviously not working. Malnutrition didn't exist in Iraq before the sanctions. If Saddam Hussein is building palaces, he intends to stay. Meanwhile, an entire nation is suffering. Hundreds are dying daily and millions are threatened in Iraq, because of U.S.-compelled impoverishment.

If the United Nations participates in such genocidal sanctions backed by the threat of military violence and the people of the world fail to prevent such conduct, the violence, terror, and human misery of the new millennium will exceed anything we have known.

I am enclosing a copy of the summary to the FAO report.

You must vote against these genocidal sanctions. Your nation should not share responsibility for the deaths of more than 10,000 Iraqis who will die before the Security Council review in March if sanctions are not lifted in January.

Civilian Impact of UN Sanctions to Members of the UN Security Council

March 1, 1996

One issue between Iraq and the United Nations exceeds all others in importance. That issue is the Security Council sanctions imposed against Iraq at the insistence of the United States. The whole world knows, and history will permanently record, the fact that those savage sanctions have cruelly killed more than one million people in Iraq these last five years, injured millions more, and damaged the population and society for generations to come. Is this the legacy the United Nations wishes to support by failing to completely end the sanctions now?

While February statistics are not yet available, more than 6,000 children under age five and 6,000 persons five years or older died in January 1996 as a direct result of the sanctions. More than 20,000 human beings have died since the Security Council reviewed the sanctions this January. Added injuries affected millions and four million remain at risk of death from malnutrition. A continuation of sanctions for another sixty days will cost as much in life, justice, and respect for Security Council members that continue the sanctions.

During last week, which I spent in Iraq, my fifth annual inspection since the sanctions were imposed, I visited ten hospitals in four governates which have nearly 15 percent of all hospital beds in the country. Conditions are tragic. Lighting is dim, even in operating theaters, for lack of bulbs. Wards are cold. Pharmacies are nearly empty with only a minor fraction of needed medicines and medical supplies. Most equipment, X-ray, CAT scan, incubators, oxygen tanks, dialysis machines, tubes and parts for transfusions and intravenous feeding, and other life-saving items are lacking, scarce, or inoperable for lack of parts. Simple needs like sheets, pillows, pillow cases, towels, bandages, cotton balls, adhesive tape, antiseptic cleaning liquids are unavailable or scarce. Surgery is at levels below 10 percent of the 1989 numbers in all ten hospitals. Occupancy is below 50 percent in all the hospitals, despite the far greater need, because only a few can be helped. Death is omnipresent. A young mother weeping in her bed whose infant had just died, an elderly diabetic—his feet bloated with open sores without adequate insulin for years, kwashiorkor and marasmus victims living only a few days after admission.

In the emergency unit in Nasiriya we saw typhoid fever, dehydration, victims wasting because of the lack of simple medicines, a new meningitis admission as we left. Doctors, nurses, and staff struggle courageously and creatively against all odds to save life and resist despair and fury. Everywhere you see their inventiveness: use of natural sedatives, an oxygen tent made from plastic bags, machines held together by string and wire; cannibalized incubators, the parts used to maintain other incubators with two undersized infants each, often rotating with other infants. Over 25 percent are dangerously underweight at birth.

The huge pharmaceutical plant at Samarra is producing at 10 percent of capacity because of the lack of raw materials, machine parts, and packaging materials. Skilled production workers sit idle in their units, or hand wash disposable bottles gathered from hospitals and clinics throughout the country. The domestic industry provided 50 percent of Iraq's pharmaceutical needs before the sanctions, producing more than 250 different products. Today it produces less than five. Machines capable of producing tablets costing pennies which could save a child from dehydration stand idle, wrapped as if in burial shrouds for want of raw materials.

Polluted water is a threat everywhere. Chlorine and other chemicals to make water safe for drinking are in short supply. In Basra, all the drinking water is trucked in for the city of nearly a million people and put into large tanks located in neighborhoods where people come for their home supply.

In Baghdad, garbage disposal is severely limited because trucks which carried garbage away from the city are largely inoperable. Huge dumps are located within the city in or near residential areas so garbage can be carried there by the people. Often, however, garbage is simply dumped in the street where goats and little children scavenge together. Areas where sewage pipes were broken by bombing or have deteriorated have raw sewage percolating to the surface in huge pools, often flooding land surrounding housing projects and commercial and residential streets. The entire operating sewage system west of the Tigris, serving one and a half million people, dumps all the raw sewage gathered directly into the river untreated. The rest of the city does little better. The huge sewage treatment plants stand as idle as the ruins of Babylon.

Schools have virtually no supplies: paper, text books, pencils (the graphite is considered a dual-use item with military utility), lights, desks, doors. The teachers struggle valiantly to help their students but like their students they suffer malnutrition, have no desks, supplies, or training materials.

Malnutrition is the omnipresent physical and psychological fact of the Iraqi people. Their caloric intake is a fraction of their need. Protein is a minor fraction of minimum health requirements.

The government food ration program has kept millions alive and supported everyone. Everywhere people agreed that it is fair, efficient, and the major lifeline for the population. But it provides only about 40 percent of the calories needed and no protein. The major staples it supplies are wheat, flour, and rice. Farmers and millers are required to deliver their entire product to the government for distribution. In addition, sugar, cooking oil, baby milk for families with children under one year old, and teas are distributed.

Each family has a ration card with allotments for each family member. Huge warehouses service over 52,000 private retail stores which must regularly sell food and have at least 20 square meters of floor space. These stores are located throughout the nation. Families pick up their rations at a designated store nearest them. They pay 5 percent of market value. Final deliveries of all rationed items are usually made by midmonth. At the end of February, we found warehouses stocking up for March, but, with few exceptions, retail stores empty of all rationed goods and with few food items for sale.

If the present agreement pursuant to Resolution 986 is finalized in March, it will be months before this ration can increase and by the most optimistic estimates it still will be far short of basic needs, providing Iraq with only a lower level of malnutrition. If the entire allocation of Resolution 986 oil-sale income available for health was spent on medicine and medical supplies, there would still be severe shortages causing deaths and protracted illness.

Billions of dollars will be required over and above funds available under Resolution 986 for adequate levels of food and medicine, to replace and repair machinery and parts, rehabilitate medical facilities; produce fertilizers and insecticides to increase food production; build and repair food storage, processing, distribution facilities and transportation equipment; to rebuild water systems, water treatment facilities, pipe lines; to rebuild sewer systems, treatment and disposal plants; to repair schools, provide desks, benches, chairs, books, supplies; and to provide an acceptable standard of nutrition, health care, and education for the people of Iraq.

The quality of life will continue to deteriorate even with the implementation of Resolution 986.

The Security Council, which tragically bears the responsibility for so much death and destruction in Iraq, must act now to completely end the sanctions, to help meet the emergency needs of the Iraqi people, and to help Iraq rebuild its society.

The lawlessness and cruelty of such death-dealing sanctions, which are a crime against humanity and genocide, must be recognized. Their use against whole populations, killing first infants, children, elderly, and chronically ill, must be prohibited. Until then no poor people on the planet are safe from the UN, or the superpower whose will it enforces.

International Action Center Anti-Sanctions Project 39 W. 14th St., #206; New York, N.Y. 10011.

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