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An occasional column by Nigel Parry for Middle East International magazine.
With the Iraq conflict in full swing and the commercial media churning out the usual justifications, it seemed appropriate to see what alternative viewpoints and supplimentary information exist out there on the Internet. The findings offer much material to assist you to add your own subtitles to the news, for those who miss the voices of Iraq's children speaking in the silences between sound bites.
CNN, our commercial media guinea pig for the purposes of this column, has an interesting angle on the casualties of the Gulf War. In its 1998 "Victory and Defeat" section, http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/iraq/9802/gulf.war.recap/aftermath/ the network claims that "while about 370 allied troops died in the campaign, as many as 100,000 Iraqi troops may have been killed. Thousands more Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians also died."
Amazing, isn't it, that there is no mention of the 300,000 wounded Iraqi troops? Almost half a million people killed, maimed and injured compared with 370 allied dead. And only "thousands" of civilian casualties when most estimates of Iraqi civillian casualties resulting directly from the war far exceed 100,000. CNN may be technically correct but hardly honest. Thankfully, the Internet offers alternate sub-texts to the media message.
Iraq's population of almost 20 million (1994 est.) has been suffering under sanctions for the last 7 years but, remarkably, the commerical media only briefly dwells on the actual nature of the sanctions. One excellent Web resource to counter this is that offered by the Iraq Action Coalition, another website you won't find on CNN's Middle East Sites page.
Its extensive website at http://leb.net/iac/ informs us courtesy of UN statistics, that more than one million Iraqis, half of them children, had died by the end of 1995. By the autumn of 1996, we can read that 4,500 children are dying each month. The current rate, if you follow some of the many links off the IAC's site, is closer to 4,800, or 160 children a day. Over 1.7 million Iraqis, including 750,000 children below the age of five, have perished because of the scarcity of food and medicines since the UN embargo took effect in 1990.
What does CNN say? In an article entitled "Sanctions have hurt Iraqi people", at http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/iraq/people/, we read that "behind the fiery rhetoric and defiant gestures one detects the uncomfortable reality that international sanctions have hurt the Iraqi people far more than their leaders." The rest of the article shies away from numbers altogether, instead choosing to focus on the case on the unnecessary suffering of one terminally-ill child. No mention of the preventable diseases?
Iraq's Children Committee at http://www.air-photo.com/iraq/ has some interesting points to make on this issue. Between 1989 and 1997 infectious but preventable diseases have spread rapidly. Typhoid cases have increased from 1,800 to 15,000, Amoebic Dysentry from 20,000 to 550,000, and Viral Hepatitis from 1,800 to 30,000. Prior to sanctions and before the current helath emergency, Iraq's annual imports of medical supplies was around 2 billion dollars. Today, 33 cents per Iraqi citizen per day, mostly for medical supplies, is the result of the "humanitarian" oil for food deal.
Back to the Iraq Action Coalition for the final blow to the mediocre "Sanctions have hurt Iraqi people", which can be found at http://leb.net/iac/list.html - a partial list of products that the United Nations has included as the sanctions.
The 'partial' list is pretty comprehensive and includes a list of dangerous goods that may help Iraq build some more of those "weapons of mass destruction." These include ambulances, ashtrays, answering machines, bath brushes, bicycles, books, cellophane, chewing gum, children's wear, dustcloths, handkerchiefs, hats, magazines, mops, paper clips, potties, sandals, swim suits, toilet paper, toys, Vaseline, and Venetian blinds. A description of how the UN has gone about the selection process is also offered.
Other resources worth checking out include "The US-Iraq Crisis" website from the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) at http://www.merip.org/ircrisis.htm, with intellegent overviews of the crisis from the point of view of international legality.
The Iraq Crisis Antiwar Homepage can be found at http://www.nonviolence.org/iraq/. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's task force on Iraq has some good material at http://www.adc.org/Special/Iraq/ and the Voices in the Wilderness campaign factsheet* can be found at http://leb.net/iac/voices.html.
For a glimpse of the size of the wilderness, see Time magazine's online poll at http://www.pathfinder.com/time/reports/iraq/. When I added my vote, on 18 February [1998], 14.62 percent wanted airstrikes, 40.04 percent wanted the invasion of Iraq, 11.46 percent wanted the economic sanctions to continue and 30.63 percent wanted to leave Iraq alone.
These sites and the links they contain will keep even the most avid Web surfer both busy and disturbed for days. The information contained in them is shocking as it speaks a powerful word into the existential disconnection of the US and UK media discussions about "whether the price [of sanctions] is worth it" and how the allies will pull off a "neat" or "self-contained operation". The eyes of the children in the images that will be found during your searches accuse such pretention.
by Nigel Parry
27 February 1998
MEI 569
* At the time of adding this article to nigelparry.com in March 1999, Voices in the Wilderness had launched their own website, found at: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/