Paying the price
society. Isam Al-Khafaji* looks back upon a bitter harvest, and wonders what
monster will arise from the ashes of this all-out assault.
"Saddam Hussein himself showed little sign that he was moved by his people's
plight. To him, as to those who were enforcing the sanctions, they were
hostages, bargaining chips, whose very suffering was an asset. Thus he would
arrange displays of dead children to shame his enemies... But the dead
children were real. The tragedy was that in aiming at the hostage taker, the
United States and its remaining allies were killing the hostages." Andrew and
Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein,
Harper and Collins, 1999 In the post-cold war era, the word "sanctions"
became a buzzword, a panacea for world ills. In the 45 years since the
establishment of the UN, sanctions were only imposed on two countries: South
Africa and Southern Rhodesia (ex-Zimbabwe). From 1990 on, the number of
countries targeted by sanctions more than quadrupled. This could have been
welcome news, a sign of shift to a world where a set of more humane measures
that do not target civilians would replace devastating wars as a means of
enforcing compliance with international law. Because of the precedent Iraq
set by being the first country that occupied the full territory of another
sovereign member of the United Nations, the sanctions applied to it are the
harshest ever imposed on any country in modern history. The harshness of the
measures was legitimated by the fact that Iraq had "breached" international
security, whereas in all the other cases, the punishment was for "posing a
threat" to world peace. In order to judge the effectiveness of the sanctions,
however, we have to weigh them against their objectives, on one hand, and the
costs incurred while implementing them, on the other. As is well known, the
sanctions were imposed with the following initial aims: forcing withdrawal
from Kuwait; ensuring the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), including medium- and long-range delivery systems; and cutting off the
supplies that had sustained the regime's capability of threatening its
neighbours. While the objectives were fairly well defined, the mechanisms
through which sanctions would achieve them were never made clear; they were
simply assumed. Because Iraq was only the third country targeted by UN
sanctions, and because these sanctions did indeed contribute to the fall of
white minority rule in Rhodesia, and to the disintegration of South Africa's
Apartheid regime, a vaguely optimistic analogy may have been at work here.
Yet the very powers that imposed the sanctions on Iraq implicitly admitted
their insufficiency less than six months from the date of their imposition.
The launching of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 and the devastating
air campaign against Iraq amounted to recognition that the sanctions would
not force Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. The Gulf War came to a halt
when the allies succeeded in liberating Kuwait, i.e. in achieving the first
objective which the sanctions targeted. But rather than revising the whole
rationale of continuing the sanctions, the major powers kept them in place as
a means of tightening their grip on the Iraqi regime. The question here is:
have the sanctions forced Iraq to dispense with its WMD and weakened Saddam's
regime? If so, at what cost? One way to approach this admittedly complex
question is in the simple affirmative, which is what we have been hearing
continuously from the US administration: Saddam Hussein is weaker today than
ever, UNSCOM has been able to disclose and destroy huge amounts of WMD, and
therefore the sanctions should stay in place. As for the cost, outgoing
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was more than frank during a chilling
interview with CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl: Stahl: "We have heard
that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than
died in Hiroshima... Is the price worth it?" Albright: "I think this is a
very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price worth it." CBS News, 60
Minutes, 12 May 1996
Unfortunately, such an answer eschews the main issues that lie at the heart
of the sanctions regimen. It also makes it appear unnecessary to search for
the means of ensuring Iraq's security and the safety of the Middle East,
which should be the real objectives behind the destruction of Iraq's WMD. As
long as these issues are not addressed, the mechanism that has been applied
until now can only be counter-productive, as I will try to show. First, why
haven't the sanctions led to effects similar to those imposed on Africa's two
racist regimes? The short answer is that, while the latter were
dictatorships, they were accountable to a constituency, albeit a narrow one:
namely the whites. The legal channels for expressing dissent and objection
and for voting out a government were already in place. In Iraq's case, the
problem was (and is) not how to foment dissent. Dissent is already there. But
the tyrannical structure of the regime is far from responsive or sensitive to
the people's views and aspirations. Thus pinning one's hopes on popular
pressure to force the regime to comply with UN resolutions is self-deceptive,
unless one is hoping for mass protests in the form of revolution or
rebellion. But have the sanctions contributed to making such a prospect
possible? In other words, has a decade of sanctions altered the functioning
of the Iraqi state and society? Has it led to the weakening of the state's
grip on society and improved the chances for a democratic transition in Iraq,
as much of the US rhetoric implies? Or has it cemented the unity between the
leadership and the people, as the regime's propaganda claims? Such claims
require a reexamination of the meaning of "strength" and "weakness," because
any weakness on the regime's part must be weighed against that of society.
Sanctions on Iraq have hit ordinary people hard, which is not the case in the
other countries targeted (including the two recent cases of Afghanistan and
Sudan). The sanctions' comprehensive nature was aggravated by the fact that
the country depended almost totally on imports for its population's survival.
The main defendants of the sanctions, the US and the UK, have repeated time
and again that the problem is none other than Saddam Hussein, who is wickedly
exploiting the plight of his people to gain international sympathy and
perpetuate his hold on power. This is partly true: Iraq has been allowed to
fulfil its humanitarian needs to whatever degree it can afford. This argument
seemed to gain more credibility with the adoption of UNSC Resolutions 698
("Oil for Food") and, more recently, 1284, which allow Iraq to export as much
oil as it can to satisfy civilian needs. But the population's plight has not
improved. Impartial observers agree that even Resolution 1284 will not solve
the problem. Nor does blaming Saddam (however guilty he may be) absolve the
US of responsibility for a policy that is clearly damaging Iraqi society.
Iraq's ability to import, but not to export, has been crippled by an
objective reality in today's world: an infinitely wide variety of materials
can be used to produce WMD if one is so inclined. Scrutinising and banning
certain imports is not only futile, but is tantamount to offsetting any
positive steps taken on the export front, as the following facts make clear:
Of almost $25 billion earned by Iraq, less than a quarter became goods in
Iraqi markets. Thirty per cent of oil revenues were frozen on goods that were
being held, or had not yet been received, while 30 per cent went to war
compensation and to cover UN staff costs. Despite statements that
restrictions and bureaucratic measures on imports would be eased, this
situation is likely to persist as long as double-use material is not defined,
and a mechanism for monitoring Saddam's programmes is not perfected. What is
the overall impact of this situation on Iraqi society and politics? A host of
reliable surveys clearly demonstrates the impact of sanctions in terms of
rising poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, begging, prostitution and
crime. The virtual blockade on legal imports is manipulated to cushion
influential sections within Iraq's power structure against any adverse
effects, while weakening the rest of Iraqi society. Any traveller to Baghdad
can easily verify the availability of practically every commodity. Smuggling
is flourishing, mainly via the UAE, Iran and Turkey, and serves to foster a
network of powerful interests running from the sons of influential figures
(with Saddam's son 'Uday foremost among them, but the group includes many
others) to merchants, sanctions profiteers and intermediaries. The lesser
beneficiaries include intelligence officers, special members of the
Republican Guards, ordinary truck drivers, retail traders, and money
changers. The main mechanism through which these powerful strata profit is
inflation, which is the logical consequence in an atmosphere of general
scarcity of goods and services. That is why, while the sanctions have been a
social and economic shock that had to result in inflation, the astronomical
rates reached were not inevitable. They have been created, intentionally or
not, by the regime and its powerful figures, which have resorted to printing
money, spreading rumours to withdraw hard currency from the people's hands,
and creating market shortages. A glance at the deterioration of the exchange
value of the Iraqi dinar shows first that the drop was aggravated, but not
caused, by the sanctions; that the deterioration began in the 1980s, when the
dinar lost some 65 per cent of its value, and spiraled after 1993; it was
then checked in 1996, which indicates that fiscal policy is at least
partially responsible. Given the regime's social structure, therefore, the
sanctions' main impact was to empower those who were already powerful and to
impoverish the victims and potential or actual opponents of the regime.
Semi-official Iraqi sources today admit that the sanctions have widened the
gap between rich and poor -- naturally without reference to the fact that the
politically powerful are the main beneficiaries. The people's suffering is
caused by American policy, we are told, and is being exploited by a handful
of profiteers. Even though the data are censored and manipulated, serious
attempts at measuring the widening gap have revealed alarming results. The
Iraqi Society of Economists estimates that in 1993, the top 20 per cent of
the population possessed 47 per cent of Iraq's national income, and the
bottom 40 per cent only 14 per cent. The lowest five per cent had to make do
with 0.8 per cent of total income, while the top five per cent appropriated
21.2 per cent of income. A recently published study concludes: "The effects
of the sanctions, combined with government policies, [have] greatly increased
the divide between the wealthy and powerful, those whom Eric Rouleau has
described as the 'nomenklatura,' who have profited from the crisis, and the
majority of the population who struggle to maintain themselves at or above
subsistence." But poverty and huge income differentials alone do not account
for the disintegration of the Iraqi social fabric. Many Third World societies
suffer from levels of poverty and income differentials that are worse than
today's Iraq, yet we cannot characterise them as disintegrating. We have to
link these phenomena with atomisation and rentierism, for atomisation and
dependence on the state have paralysed Iraqi society under the sanctions and
given the central state even more power vis-à-vis society. The sweeping
privatisation programme of 1987, and the pressures of the war against Iran,
had already introduced new trends in Iraq: poverty, begging, crimes, the
expansion of the informal sector, were once again evident. The sanctions
reinforced these trends exponentially, but did not create them. Still, rather
than blaming the state for their worsening conditions, people are encouraged
to blame the US and the West in general. But most importantly, a weakened
state has been using the rationing card as a means of imposing silence or
acquiescence on the populace. An efficient programme for the distribution of
basic goods at nominal prices has been in force since 1990. Run through a
centrally computerised distribution system that channels basics to households
via local trading agents, this programme has been another powerful means of
controlling people's geographic mobility, and enforcing government relocation
programmes targeting the Kurds and those who emigrate to Baghdad in search of
work opportunities. In exchange for food and a minimum of security, people
are preserving a façade of silence, or at least are not venturing into
collective oppositional action. Although symbolic acts of protest and signs
of hatred towards the regime are rampant, they tend to take cynical forms and
are not explicitly political. Mocking the state and the "leader," as well as
individual signs of disobedience in the form of evasion and resistance, are
to be found everywhere. The state, aware of these troubling signs, shows a
degree of tolerance for society's relative de facto autonomy. A pro-sanctions
stance might take these developments as substantiating the view that Saddam's
regime has indeed grown weaker. While this may be true, it is equally true
that society has been weakened more, and more rapidly, than the state. While
an atomised and sanctions-exhausted population spends the bulk of its time
chasing bread, an inefficient administrative apparatus has been functioning
at lower cost -- a sign of the Iraqi state's flexibility and ability to adapt
to changing circumstances. This flexibility, it must be stressed, has not
been the product of a deliberate state policy. Administrations, just like
individuals and groups, develop survival strategies under pressure. In the
case of the Iraqi state, such strategies have taken different forms. For one
thing, the collapse of civil servants' incomes has led to widespread
absenteeism and desertion. The result has been a less costly administration,
characterised by a high level of feminisation of the state civil service.
Bribery and corruption, tolerated despite all the rhetorical threats of
Saddam Hussein and his aides, have also become means of subsidising state
activity. Public service today is sold to citizens at negotiated prices.
Furthermore, under the pretext of resisting sanctions, the Revolutionary
Command Council has introduced self-financing even to such institutions as
state hospitals and clinics, secondary schools, and institutions providing
basic services to the population. Rathe
