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Sanctions, war ruin Iraq life, activist says

By Matt Dulin
The Daily Cougar

The Garden of Eden stinks, "human shield" activist Benjamin Joffe-Walt told a meager audience at UH on Tuesday, largely because more than two-thirds of Iraqis water treatment plants were destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War and havenit been repaired.

Joffe-Walt said economic sanctions on Iraq havenit allowed supplies that would repair the plants to enter the country. The result?

"Thousands of gallons of sewage are dumped into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers daily," Joffe-Walt said.

This contaminates Iraqis most prominent water supply, leading to widespread disease and dehydration. While he was in Iraq as a human shield to protect Iraqi civilian infrastructure, Joffe-Walt used his skills as an EMT to help out at Saddam Central Pediatric Hospital. There, he said, doctors told him that many children die of dehydration simply because they get diarrhea-causing bacteria from the water, and since water is their primary source of hydration, thereis little else to drink to restore health.

Joffe-Walt cited U.N. numbers that indicate that since the sanctions were placed in 1991, some 750,000 children have died. Three-quarters of those deaths, he said, were from dehydration.

Joffe-Walt also said that the use of depleted-uranium weapons in the 1991 war has led to radiation poisoning of Iraqis agriculturally rich southern region, so "many people donit trust locally-grown produce."

While volunteering in the hospital, Joffe-Walt met several children crippled by disease. He mentioned one, Omar, a 2-year-old suffering from a cancer that originated in his kidney but grew to take his brain and right eye. Joffe-Walt said that there were no medical treatments available to save him because sanctions hadnit allowed the right tools to enter the country.

"Many peace activists have become medicine smugglers," he said.

Many families ask foreigners if they have simple medicines, like aspirin. "They donit have aspirin. They donit have antibiotics. They donit have much of anything," he said. 

He said that the United Nations has noted an increase in the number of cancer cases and birth defects in Iraq.

"Many families in Iraq, including one I met, said they were staying away from having too many children, simply to avoid these kinds of conditions," he said. He described how many of the growing generations look much younger than they are. A 16-year-old may look 10, or a 2-year-old child can look like a newborn.

In a critique of Iraqis economy, Joffe-Walt, who teaches history at a high school in Toronto, Canada, said the country is "horribly depressed." He handed the audience Iraq paper currency, saying that its value has gone from $750 to a dime within 15 years.

"This is the effect of sanctions on a once very rich, great economy, despite the fact that the government was oppressive and quite horrible," he said.

The sanctions, which placed restrictions on the kinds of materials Iraq could import, were designed to both punish the regime and limit its ability to use imported tools to engineer weapons, he said. The sanctions can be rescinded now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power. Such action requires approval from the U.N. Security Council.

Joffe-Walt handed down heavy criticism of the United Statesi military spending as well as the American mediais treatment of the war. He argued that Saddam and the United States are equal oppressors of the Iraqi people.
 

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