Tweet
5.4 War Reparations Fund: Oil-for-Compensation
As we have seen, the United Nations deducts a substantial proportion of Iraq’s oil sales for payment into a fund to compensate for war damages. The Council set up the Compensation Commission with Resolution 692 and in Resolution 705 it set the deductions from the Oil-for-Food account at the very high level of 30%, against the advice of the Secretary General.
The Compensation Commission has considered a very large number of claims, including claims on behalf of many individuals. According to the Commission’s web site, the Commission received approximately 1,356,500 small individual claims and settled them all with payments of approximately $16 billion. Many of the claimants had been migrant workers from Egypt and other countries, working in Iraq and Kuwait at the time the war broke out. A strong case can be made for compensating these individuals. The Commission wisely gave priority to their claims. (111)
Corporations and governments have made most of the remaining claims, which come to an additional sum of about $290 billion. This includes claims by various Kuwait government ministries and by the Kuwait Oil Company concerning wartime losses. Considering the wealth of Kuwait and the absence of humanitarian problems there, the deduction of a large share of Iraq’s oil sales for war reparations to such claimants appears punitive and not attuned to Iraq’s urgent humanitarian and reconstruction needs. (112)
These are probably the most severe war reparations since the Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I. Taking a lesson from the interwar crisis, the victors of World War II did not impose war reparations on Germany and Japan, in spite of terrible damage they inflicted on other countries and personal hardship imposed on millions of people.
The Council has given the Compensation Commission unusual authority and power. The Commission operates secretively and allows Iraq only to comment on a summary of each case. The operations of the Commission alone absorb more than $50 million per year, also deducted from the Iraq’s oil export funds. (113)
The reparations process appears even more troubling when its results are compared with the results of the humanitarian goods going to Iraq. While the compensation fund received an allocation of about 29% on average, it actually awarded a total of $38 billion in compensation as of April 2002 compared to just $47 billion in humanitarian supplies ordered by Iraq as of the same date, putting the compensation fund awards at 45% vs. humanitarian orders placed at 55%. As of the same date, the compensation fund had paid out $16 billion to settle claims, while the humanitarian program had received only $21 billion in goods, putting the compensation fund at 43%, while the actual humanitarian outlays came to just 57%.
The reparations fund appears punitive and contrary to basic humanitarian principles due to its exceptionally large claim on total resources. Many Council members have taken this view, but they have been unable to persuade the sanctions protagonists that humanitarian needs should have priority over compensation claimants, especially wealthy claimants such as the Government of Kuwait, Kuwait’s state oil company, and other governments and large corporations.
Responding to growing criticism and a sharp controversy within the Council following a Compensation Commission award of $15.9 billion to the Kuwait Petroleum Corporatioin, the US and the UK agreed to reduce reparations deductions from 30% to 25% in Resolution 1330 of December 5, 2000, after the small claimants had been paid. Though very welcome, especially since the funds were allocated to the Center and South, this step fell far short of humanitarian standards. The reparations deduction should instead be eliminated completely until humanitarian needs in Iraq are completely met. Further, a limit should be placed on the corporate and government compensation level, so as not to hobble the Iraqi economy for decades to come and stoke future resentment.
5.5 North vs. Center-South
Sanctions advocates make much of differences in humanitarian conditions between the three Kurdish governates in the North of Iraq, where the UN directly administers Oil-for-Food and the 15 governates in the Center and South, where the Governmant of Iraq administers the program. Better conditions in the North are alleged to prove that Saddam Hussein’s misrule is the sole explanation of the difference. On March 24, 2000, Peter Hain, Minister of State at the Foreign Office told the UK House of Commons:
exactly the same sanctions regime applies [in the north] . . . The difference is that Saddam’s writ does not run there. Why do sanctions critics prefer to ignore that inconvenient but crucial fact. (114) But Hain was seriously misstating the case. Other important variables enter the equation, some an integral part of the Security Council sanctions’ architecture, of which the UK was a principal author and defender.
First, as we have already seen, the system of deductions results in per capita spending in the Center-South that was only 61% of the rate in the North until December 5, 2000 (69% thereafter), a very substantial difference. Second, the sanctions allow contracts going to the North to contain a “commercial clause” that enforces the quality of goods received, whereas the Center-South cannot include such a clause and must accept shoddy and even unusable merchandise with no legal recourse. Third, the sanctions allow the North to derive cash from 10% of its oil sales allocation, while absolutely no cash is available in the Center-South. Cash is needed to pay for services in the local economy, including staff for health clinics and food distribution programs. Fourth, while many important contracts in the South are blocked by holds, the United States puts relatively few holds on goods for the North, resulting in real infrastructure improvement in such sectors as electricity and public health. The US and the UK designed these four differences into the sanctions regime, but their propaganda pretends that the differences do not exist.
Several other regional differences explain part of the humanitarian variation. There is very active clandestine cross-border trade (smuggling) in the North, invigorating the economy there and putting money in the pockets of local people. Also, the climate in the North is more favorable, with cooler weather and more rainfall, resulting in better water supplies, more local food crops, and better overall health conditions. The North, with just 9% of the land area of the country, has nearly 50% of the productive, arable land.
The Government of Iraq is the seventh variable. Its administration is clearly less concerned with human welfare than the UN efforts in the North. It has not used imported goods as well, and it has failed to effectively implement targeted programs. But a fair appraisal of the North/Center-South differences must conclude that the Security Council bears considerable responsibility by imposing exceptionally harsh sanction conditions on the Center-South region, where 87% of the Iraqi population lives.
Conditions in the North may be better than the Center-South, but they are by no means acceptable. According to a study published in January 2002 by Save the Children, 60% of the population in the North live in deep poverty – with 40% living on incomes of under $300 per household per year and a further 20% living on less than $150 per household per year. The report concludes that the sanctions and ration system has “destroyed normal economic life for the vast majority,” who subsist largely through “unprecedented levels of dependency.” Up to 85% of the population are “at risk” in case of any reduction of their food access through the ration system. (115)
5.6 Nutrition and Health
Survey information by the World Food Programme/Food and Agriculture Organisa-tion in 2000 indicated 800,000 Iraqi children “chronically malnourished.” (116) The UNICEF 1999 study, also based on extensive field surveys, had shown 21% of children under five underweight, 20% stunted (chronic malnutrition) and 9% wasted (acute malnutrition). Several recent reports have noted that the UN has created initiatives to help the most vulnerable in the Center and South through targeted nutrition programs. These have had some positive results, but it is clear that the government of Iraq has not adequately implemented them.
The FAO 2000 report pointed out that at 2,000 kilocalories, the universal ration provided under the UN program was insufficient in total yield, absent substantial local food additions. The same report insisted also that the composition of the food basket remained nutritionally inadequate:
Of great concern is the lack of a number of important vitamins and minerals such as vitamin A, C, riboflavin, folate and iron in the diet. Although the planned ration is reasonably adequate in energy and total protein, it is lacking in vegetables, fruit, and animal products and is therefore deficient in micronutrients." (117) Despite the Oil-for-Food program and the $11 billion worth of food that has entered the country, infant mortality remains very high. Today, most child deaths are not directly due to malnutrition, though. Rather, they are water-related, from such conditions as diarrhoea. Poor water quality and lack of sanitation, combined with existing malnourishment, have taken over from poor nutrition as the prime killer of children in Iraq. UNICEF reported in July 2001 that “Diarrhoea leading to death from dehydration and acute respiratory infections (ARI), together account for 70 per cent of child deaths.” (118)
Deliberate bombing of water treatment facilities during the Gulf War originally degraded the water quality. Since that time, sanctions-based “holds” have blocked the rebuilding of much of Iraq’s water treatment infrastructure. Additionally, sanctions have blocked the rebuilding of the electricity sector which powers pumps and other vital water treatment equipment.
Health problems in Iraq arise from multiple factors, many of which can be attributed to the sanctions. Electricity shortages, in addition to shutting down water-treatment, seriously disrupt hospital care and disrupt the storage of certain types of medicines. Sanctions also result in shortages of medical equipment and spare parts, blockages of certain important medicines, shortage of skilled medical staff, and more.
There can be no doubt, based on health and mortality surveys, that Iraqis are suffering from a major public health crisis. The sanctions both deepen that crisis as a cause and also block measures that could mitigate it through public health measures and curative medical procedures. The health status of the Iraqi people has been a key indicator of the humanitarian consequences of the Iraq sanctions regime.
5.7 Deaths
None deny that Iraq sanctions have caused many deaths, but a debate has raged over how many. The larger the number, the greater the burden on sanction advocates to justify their actions. Unfortunately, wrangling over numbers obscures the unavoidable reality: a tragically large humanitarian disaster.
The measurement of deaths rests on the concept of “excess” mortality – those deaths that exceed the mortality rate in the previous, pre-sanctions period or that exceed a projection of the earlier trend towards further gains. The previous mortality rate is well-established, but two arguments arise – first, what is the present mortality rate (which, some argue, may be distorted by false Iraq government statistics) and second, what is the cause of such mortality increase. Neither of these questions has a simple answer. Not surprisingly, the government of Iraq claims a very large increase and blames most of its child mortality on sanctions. UNICEF, in a widely-publicised study carried out jointly with the Iraq Ministry of Health, determined that 500,000 children under five years old had died in “excess” numbers in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, though UNICEF insisted that this number could not all be ascribed directly to sanctions. (119) UNICEF used surveys of its own as part of the basic research and involved respected outside experts in designing the study and evaluating the data. UNICEF remains confident in the accuracy of its numbers and points out that they have never been subject to a scientific challenge.
Prof. Richard Garfield of Columbia University carried out a separate and well-regarded study of excess mortality in Iraq. Garfield considered the same age group and the same time period as the UNICEF study. (120) He minimized reliance on official Iraqi statistics by using many different statistical sources, including independent surveys in Iraq and inferences from comparative public health data from other countries. Garfield concluded that there had been a minimum of 100,000 excess deaths and that the more likely number was 227,000. He compared this estimate to a maximum estimate of 66,663 civilian and military deaths during the Gulf War. Garfield now thinks the most probable number of deaths of under-five children from August 1991 to June 2002 would be about 400,000. (121)
There are no reliable estimates of the total number of excess deaths in Iraq beyond the under-five population. Even with conservative assumptions, though, the total of all excess deaths must be far above 400,000.
All of these excess deaths should not be ascribed to sanctions. Some may be due to a variety of other causes. But all major studies make it clear that sanctions have been the primary cause, because of the sanctions’ impact on food, medical care, water, and other health-related factors. Though oil-for-food has changed the situation studied by UNICEF and Garfield, resulting in less malnutrition, recent field reports suggest that infant mortality remains high, due to water-borne disease. (122) The mortality rate for under-five children has probably not continued to rise since the 1999 studies, but the rate apparently remains very much higher than that reported in Iraq before 1990.
In the face of such powerful evidence, the US and UK governments have sometimes practiced bold denial. Brian Wilson, Minister of State at the UK Foreign Office told a BBC interviewer on February 26, 2001 “There is no evidence that sanctions are hurting the Iraqi people.” When denial has proved impossible, officials have occasionally fallen back on astonishingly callous affirmations. In a famous interview with Madeleine Albright, then US representative at the United Nations, Leslie Stahl of the television show 60 Minutes said: “We have heard that half a million children have died . . . is the price worth it? Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” (123)
Six years after Albright’s statement and twelve years after Security Council Resolution 661, comprehensive economic sanctions continue to impose on Iraq a very high number of deaths of young children, as measured by careful and well-regarded estimates. Combined with the deaths of older children and adults, this adds up to a great and unjustifiable humanitarian tragedy.
As we have seen, the United Nations deducts a substantial proportion of Iraq’s oil sales for payment into a fund to compensate for war damages. The Council set up the Compensation Commission with Resolution 692 and in Resolution 705 it set the deductions from the Oil-for-Food account at the very high level of 30%, against the advice of the Secretary General.
The Compensation Commission has considered a very large number of claims, including claims on behalf of many individuals. According to the Commission’s web site, the Commission received approximately 1,356,500 small individual claims and settled them all with payments of approximately $16 billion. Many of the claimants had been migrant workers from Egypt and other countries, working in Iraq and Kuwait at the time the war broke out. A strong case can be made for compensating these individuals. The Commission wisely gave priority to their claims. (111)
Corporations and governments have made most of the remaining claims, which come to an additional sum of about $290 billion. This includes claims by various Kuwait government ministries and by the Kuwait Oil Company concerning wartime losses. Considering the wealth of Kuwait and the absence of humanitarian problems there, the deduction of a large share of Iraq’s oil sales for war reparations to such claimants appears punitive and not attuned to Iraq’s urgent humanitarian and reconstruction needs. (112)
These are probably the most severe war reparations since the Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I. Taking a lesson from the interwar crisis, the victors of World War II did not impose war reparations on Germany and Japan, in spite of terrible damage they inflicted on other countries and personal hardship imposed on millions of people.
The Council has given the Compensation Commission unusual authority and power. The Commission operates secretively and allows Iraq only to comment on a summary of each case. The operations of the Commission alone absorb more than $50 million per year, also deducted from the Iraq’s oil export funds. (113)
The reparations process appears even more troubling when its results are compared with the results of the humanitarian goods going to Iraq. While the compensation fund received an allocation of about 29% on average, it actually awarded a total of $38 billion in compensation as of April 2002 compared to just $47 billion in humanitarian supplies ordered by Iraq as of the same date, putting the compensation fund awards at 45% vs. humanitarian orders placed at 55%. As of the same date, the compensation fund had paid out $16 billion to settle claims, while the humanitarian program had received only $21 billion in goods, putting the compensation fund at 43%, while the actual humanitarian outlays came to just 57%.
The reparations fund appears punitive and contrary to basic humanitarian principles due to its exceptionally large claim on total resources. Many Council members have taken this view, but they have been unable to persuade the sanctions protagonists that humanitarian needs should have priority over compensation claimants, especially wealthy claimants such as the Government of Kuwait, Kuwait’s state oil company, and other governments and large corporations.
Responding to growing criticism and a sharp controversy within the Council following a Compensation Commission award of $15.9 billion to the Kuwait Petroleum Corporatioin, the US and the UK agreed to reduce reparations deductions from 30% to 25% in Resolution 1330 of December 5, 2000, after the small claimants had been paid. Though very welcome, especially since the funds were allocated to the Center and South, this step fell far short of humanitarian standards. The reparations deduction should instead be eliminated completely until humanitarian needs in Iraq are completely met. Further, a limit should be placed on the corporate and government compensation level, so as not to hobble the Iraqi economy for decades to come and stoke future resentment.
5.5 North vs. Center-South
Sanctions advocates make much of differences in humanitarian conditions between the three Kurdish governates in the North of Iraq, where the UN directly administers Oil-for-Food and the 15 governates in the Center and South, where the Governmant of Iraq administers the program. Better conditions in the North are alleged to prove that Saddam Hussein’s misrule is the sole explanation of the difference. On March 24, 2000, Peter Hain, Minister of State at the Foreign Office told the UK House of Commons:
exactly the same sanctions regime applies [in the north] . . . The difference is that Saddam’s writ does not run there. Why do sanctions critics prefer to ignore that inconvenient but crucial fact. (114) But Hain was seriously misstating the case. Other important variables enter the equation, some an integral part of the Security Council sanctions’ architecture, of which the UK was a principal author and defender.
First, as we have already seen, the system of deductions results in per capita spending in the Center-South that was only 61% of the rate in the North until December 5, 2000 (69% thereafter), a very substantial difference. Second, the sanctions allow contracts going to the North to contain a “commercial clause” that enforces the quality of goods received, whereas the Center-South cannot include such a clause and must accept shoddy and even unusable merchandise with no legal recourse. Third, the sanctions allow the North to derive cash from 10% of its oil sales allocation, while absolutely no cash is available in the Center-South. Cash is needed to pay for services in the local economy, including staff for health clinics and food distribution programs. Fourth, while many important contracts in the South are blocked by holds, the United States puts relatively few holds on goods for the North, resulting in real infrastructure improvement in such sectors as electricity and public health. The US and the UK designed these four differences into the sanctions regime, but their propaganda pretends that the differences do not exist.
Several other regional differences explain part of the humanitarian variation. There is very active clandestine cross-border trade (smuggling) in the North, invigorating the economy there and putting money in the pockets of local people. Also, the climate in the North is more favorable, with cooler weather and more rainfall, resulting in better water supplies, more local food crops, and better overall health conditions. The North, with just 9% of the land area of the country, has nearly 50% of the productive, arable land.
The Government of Iraq is the seventh variable. Its administration is clearly less concerned with human welfare than the UN efforts in the North. It has not used imported goods as well, and it has failed to effectively implement targeted programs. But a fair appraisal of the North/Center-South differences must conclude that the Security Council bears considerable responsibility by imposing exceptionally harsh sanction conditions on the Center-South region, where 87% of the Iraqi population lives.
Conditions in the North may be better than the Center-South, but they are by no means acceptable. According to a study published in January 2002 by Save the Children, 60% of the population in the North live in deep poverty – with 40% living on incomes of under $300 per household per year and a further 20% living on less than $150 per household per year. The report concludes that the sanctions and ration system has “destroyed normal economic life for the vast majority,” who subsist largely through “unprecedented levels of dependency.” Up to 85% of the population are “at risk” in case of any reduction of their food access through the ration system. (115)
5.6 Nutrition and Health
Survey information by the World Food Programme/Food and Agriculture Organisa-tion in 2000 indicated 800,000 Iraqi children “chronically malnourished.” (116) The UNICEF 1999 study, also based on extensive field surveys, had shown 21% of children under five underweight, 20% stunted (chronic malnutrition) and 9% wasted (acute malnutrition). Several recent reports have noted that the UN has created initiatives to help the most vulnerable in the Center and South through targeted nutrition programs. These have had some positive results, but it is clear that the government of Iraq has not adequately implemented them.
The FAO 2000 report pointed out that at 2,000 kilocalories, the universal ration provided under the UN program was insufficient in total yield, absent substantial local food additions. The same report insisted also that the composition of the food basket remained nutritionally inadequate:
Of great concern is the lack of a number of important vitamins and minerals such as vitamin A, C, riboflavin, folate and iron in the diet. Although the planned ration is reasonably adequate in energy and total protein, it is lacking in vegetables, fruit, and animal products and is therefore deficient in micronutrients." (117) Despite the Oil-for-Food program and the $11 billion worth of food that has entered the country, infant mortality remains very high. Today, most child deaths are not directly due to malnutrition, though. Rather, they are water-related, from such conditions as diarrhoea. Poor water quality and lack of sanitation, combined with existing malnourishment, have taken over from poor nutrition as the prime killer of children in Iraq. UNICEF reported in July 2001 that “Diarrhoea leading to death from dehydration and acute respiratory infections (ARI), together account for 70 per cent of child deaths.” (118)
Deliberate bombing of water treatment facilities during the Gulf War originally degraded the water quality. Since that time, sanctions-based “holds” have blocked the rebuilding of much of Iraq’s water treatment infrastructure. Additionally, sanctions have blocked the rebuilding of the electricity sector which powers pumps and other vital water treatment equipment.
Health problems in Iraq arise from multiple factors, many of which can be attributed to the sanctions. Electricity shortages, in addition to shutting down water-treatment, seriously disrupt hospital care and disrupt the storage of certain types of medicines. Sanctions also result in shortages of medical equipment and spare parts, blockages of certain important medicines, shortage of skilled medical staff, and more.
There can be no doubt, based on health and mortality surveys, that Iraqis are suffering from a major public health crisis. The sanctions both deepen that crisis as a cause and also block measures that could mitigate it through public health measures and curative medical procedures. The health status of the Iraqi people has been a key indicator of the humanitarian consequences of the Iraq sanctions regime.
5.7 Deaths
None deny that Iraq sanctions have caused many deaths, but a debate has raged over how many. The larger the number, the greater the burden on sanction advocates to justify their actions. Unfortunately, wrangling over numbers obscures the unavoidable reality: a tragically large humanitarian disaster.
The measurement of deaths rests on the concept of “excess” mortality – those deaths that exceed the mortality rate in the previous, pre-sanctions period or that exceed a projection of the earlier trend towards further gains. The previous mortality rate is well-established, but two arguments arise – first, what is the present mortality rate (which, some argue, may be distorted by false Iraq government statistics) and second, what is the cause of such mortality increase. Neither of these questions has a simple answer. Not surprisingly, the government of Iraq claims a very large increase and blames most of its child mortality on sanctions. UNICEF, in a widely-publicised study carried out jointly with the Iraq Ministry of Health, determined that 500,000 children under five years old had died in “excess” numbers in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, though UNICEF insisted that this number could not all be ascribed directly to sanctions. (119) UNICEF used surveys of its own as part of the basic research and involved respected outside experts in designing the study and evaluating the data. UNICEF remains confident in the accuracy of its numbers and points out that they have never been subject to a scientific challenge.
Prof. Richard Garfield of Columbia University carried out a separate and well-regarded study of excess mortality in Iraq. Garfield considered the same age group and the same time period as the UNICEF study. (120) He minimized reliance on official Iraqi statistics by using many different statistical sources, including independent surveys in Iraq and inferences from comparative public health data from other countries. Garfield concluded that there had been a minimum of 100,000 excess deaths and that the more likely number was 227,000. He compared this estimate to a maximum estimate of 66,663 civilian and military deaths during the Gulf War. Garfield now thinks the most probable number of deaths of under-five children from August 1991 to June 2002 would be about 400,000. (121)
There are no reliable estimates of the total number of excess deaths in Iraq beyond the under-five population. Even with conservative assumptions, though, the total of all excess deaths must be far above 400,000.
All of these excess deaths should not be ascribed to sanctions. Some may be due to a variety of other causes. But all major studies make it clear that sanctions have been the primary cause, because of the sanctions’ impact on food, medical care, water, and other health-related factors. Though oil-for-food has changed the situation studied by UNICEF and Garfield, resulting in less malnutrition, recent field reports suggest that infant mortality remains high, due to water-borne disease. (122) The mortality rate for under-five children has probably not continued to rise since the 1999 studies, but the rate apparently remains very much higher than that reported in Iraq before 1990.
In the face of such powerful evidence, the US and UK governments have sometimes practiced bold denial. Brian Wilson, Minister of State at the UK Foreign Office told a BBC interviewer on February 26, 2001 “There is no evidence that sanctions are hurting the Iraqi people.” When denial has proved impossible, officials have occasionally fallen back on astonishingly callous affirmations. In a famous interview with Madeleine Albright, then US representative at the United Nations, Leslie Stahl of the television show 60 Minutes said: “We have heard that half a million children have died . . . is the price worth it? Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” (123)
Six years after Albright’s statement and twelve years after Security Council Resolution 661, comprehensive economic sanctions continue to impose on Iraq a very high number of deaths of young children, as measured by careful and well-regarded estimates. Combined with the deaths of older children and adults, this adds up to a great and unjustifiable humanitarian tragedy.
Is that your answer when you know I am right? Be a man and admit when you are wrong! 
Comment