BY ROHAN PEARCE
Despite quick proclamations of "victory" by the US media, fighting in Iraq continues. So too does the devastation of the country's fragile infrastructure and the suffering of the most vulnerable sections of Iraqi society due to a humanitarian crisis, the effects of which may have an impact on the population for years, even decades, to come.
This crisis is not just a medium- or long-term consequence of the war — it is unfolding hour by hour, particularly in the poorer neighbourhoods of cities currently engulfed in fighting, and in those already occupied by the invading US and British forces.
Although the final toll of the invasion on the Iraqi people is not known, there is a strong likelihood that it will eclipse the toll the 1991 Gulf War.
This is because that war attacked a society which, though still a Third World nation, was relatively developed and urbanised.
A report issued in January 1991 by a panel set up by the United Nations Security Council to investigate the humanitarian impact of the UN's sanctions regime, revealed that prior to 1991, health care reached 97% of the urban population and 78% of those living in rural areas. As a result, a "major reduction of young child mortality took place from 1960 to 1990".
The panel also found that, before the 1991 war, the southern and central Iraq had well developed water and sanitation infrastructure.
All this was obliterated by war and sanctions. After he resigned as UN assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator in Iraq in 1998, Denis Halliday told the British Independent: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
A report by the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) in 1999 blamed the sanctions for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five.
The current US invasion didn't assault the relatively well-off pre-1991 Iraq, but an already devastated nation in which 60% of the population depended on the government for food rations to survive. Much of what was left in the way of civilian infrastructure after the 1991 war fell into disrepair, largely because of the inability to import spare parts and the drop in Iraq's GDP because of the economic embargo.
The suffering of Iraqis is not merely from four weeks of massive US bombing, but from a war waged over the last 13 years by the US with the complicity of the UN Security Council.
Overwhelmed hospitals
For those already killed by the invading armies or caught in the crossfire, the war is over, but for the maimed and injured and the hugely overwhelmed hospitals, every hour brings new horrors.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, on April 7, the Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad — the only hospital ICRC representatives could visit because of continuing clashes between US troops and Iraqi resistance forces — was admitting around 10 patients per hour. Hospital staff had already been working non-stop for three days.
An April 7 report by the BBC put the average number of admissions to the hospital at 100 per hour. It noted that even before the first incursion of US troops in Baghdad on April 5, all five major hospitals in the city were overflowing with wounded — so many that the ICRC has given up trying to calculate the number.
Journalists from the British Independent reported that stocks of anaesthetics at Al Kindi had run so low that when surgery was performed patients were being provided with 800mg of ibuprofen — "the equivalent of two headache pills" — and even the ICRC has only been able to provide medical supplies for 100 operations, falling short of enough for even one day's injured.
"Clean towels cannot be supplied because the hospital washing machines overload the emergency generators", the Independent reported.
In Umm Qasr, under British occupation, the situation is much the same. Its clinic is overflowing, reported Radio Free Europe on April 7: "The helpless staff includes two doctors and 25 nurses, all working 12-hour shifts, who have long ago run out of medicines, including simple antibiotics."
The precarious state of much of the water supply to urban centres also threatens civilians with dehydration and the risk of outbreaks of dysentery and cholera. In Baghdad, the ICRC reports that the Qanat pumping station in the north of the city has stopped functioning. All water treatment and sewage plants were relying on back-up generators.
Water supply collapse
An April 8 report by the New York-based Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) identifies the potential collapse of the water system in southern and central Iraq as "the most serious humanitarian emergency of the war". The study cites UNICEF spokesperson Geoffrey Keele, who told the April 1 USA Today, "this conflict will have more people dying from water treatment plants going down than from the war itself".
The CESR report gives Basra as an example of the toll the US invasion has taking on vital water supply infrastructure: "On March 21, US-British bombing destroyed high voltage lines and knocked out Basra's electrical power. That in turn disabled Basra's water and sanitation systems, including the Wafa' Al Qaed Water Pumping Station, which pumps water from the Shatt al-Arab river to five water treatment plants that supply piped water to over 60% of Basra's 1.5 million residents."
The ICRC reported that "as of April 2, it should be possible to resume the water supply to several water treatment plants in the city". However, it also noted that several towns to the north and south of Basra have been without water for a week, and south and west of Baghdad, water treatment plants are operating at half or less of their normal capacity.
On April 7, Alex Renton from Oxfam International called for "greater effort in protecting the fragile infrastructure upon which the Iraqi population depends and allowing free passage of humanitarian relief".
UNICEF has warned that 100,000 Iraqi children under the age of five are in danger of serious illness. On April 2, the UN agency's Iraq operations head, Carel de Rooy, said that more Iraqi children had died from drinking unsanitary water than any other causes last year. Marc Vergara, a UNICEF worker trying to ensure a sanitary water supply to the country, told the April 9 Baltimore Sun: "What we're doing is symbolic. It does not even come close to meeting the need."
Access to food is also a problem for Iraqis. A spokesperson for the World Food Program told the Baltimore Sun that soon Iraqis "will have no food at all, and when that happens, the problems will be massive. It will be the biggest food distribution in history, and we have been able to do very little work." Iraqi government rations are expected to have run out by May.
Iraq's humanitarian crisis is exacerbated by the fact that 41% of the population is 14 years' old or younger.
An April 6 press statement by UNICEF noted that even for those children who are saved from death, "there are other profound and debilitating consequences that last for years to come". The statement added: "The scars of war do not easily fade. Physical and psychological trauma, fear and the loss of loved ones continue to plague the lives of those who have endured such horrors."
The UNICEF statement cites the example of three children between the ages of five and six maimed by a landmine near Dohuk: "One boy had both his hands blown off, another may lose an eye. The lives of these children and their families will never be the same... However sophisticated the methods of waging war, the end results are as bloody and tragic as they have been throughout the centuries. But there is at least one thing that has changed: increasingly, women and children are the principal victims."
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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