Open Discussion with Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck

von Sponeck: I have not much to add except to say that this is the third attempt by the WHO and I think it’s important that the media challenge the international community to be transparent about the progress that is being made in setting up this review. The media have to press for the truth.

Comment: We ought to address the whole question of depleted uranium and make the media pick that issue up as well.

Halliday: The fact is the IAEA and the WHO are both controlled by the same member States that control the Security Council. That is the way the world works. But I have a Time-Life video with me which I opened yesterday and looked at for the first time. There’s a six or seven minute segment on depleted uranium as explained by the United States military. It’s most revealing and educational.

Question: We see an influx of refugees moving into Europe mainly from north Iraq. There is an internecine Kurdish problem in the north. The economic situation is drastic, a lot of refugees and displaced people are there. Do you think this situation will remain in the north?

Halliday: Well, you know, the north of Iraq is a domestic issue which the Iraqi government doesn’t like people like myself to talk about. The fact is we have an extraordinary situation up there. We have a NATO member, Turkey, an ally of the US, bombing and invading the north of Iraq. I was once almost run over by 60 tanks of the Turkish army! And no reparations are being paid to Iraq or the Kurds in the north of Iraq for these invasions. It’s just outrageous. But it’s part of the double standards being used. Lebanon can be invaded, Iraq can be invaded and there’s no question of compensation, no sanctions, or anything of that sort.

So we have a huge problem. The fact is there are aircraft taking off from Turkish air fields to bomb Iraq and they’re only suspended when the Turks themselves want to take off to bomb the Kurds in the north of Iraq.

I’m not aware that the Iraqi Kurds are fleeing Iraq particularly and ending up in Europe. Now I know the Kurdish intake into Europe is huge – I thought most of them were coming from Turkey. But the fact remains no matter what we may think, the Kurds in Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Syria and Turkey by and large are much less well-off than their counterparts, the Kurds of Iraq, who have cultural freedom and use their own language and educational systems and all the rest of it which has been denied in these other places. And we know that the Kurds in the north are in touch with Baghdad. There’s a constant dialogue going on with Baghdad working out a modus vivendi, which is a domestic issue. They’ve got to work it out for themselves, we should not, in my view, interfere.

I’m horrified when I see opposition groups financed by the United States talking about putting an invasion force into the north of Iraq, in the Kurdish north, so to speak, in order to attack Iraq proper. This is outrageous. The Kurds have already been betrayed by the West so many times. This is not the way to do business. To me, the Kurds of Iraq and the people of Iraq are one. They’ve been there a long time, they’re an integral part. We sometimes believe the Kurds only live in the north. This is simply not true. The Kurds are throughout the country; many in Baghdad and many in government, including the cabinet.

I’m really concerned that somehow we try to understand the realities of what’s happening there, and we encourage the Kurds to work with Baghdad, which we know they’re doing, but work to the point that there is an agreement on some sort of semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave within greater Iraq. Because the economy of the North is strong. They are much better off in many respects than the rest of the country. They have a strong agricultural base, it’s really quite a prosperous part of the country and this needs to be integrated into the whole economy of Iraq to make a viable country.

von Sponeck: The procedures of the oil-for-food programme make it possible for the three northern Kurdish areas to import a lot of machinery, a lot of medical equipment – by the way hardly any items are put on hold by the Security Council for the northern areas. They get off lightly. So they import all this equipment and sanction regulations do not allow the use of cash to service this equipment, to pay for civil servants that are working up there. So you get enormous imbalances with more and more material coming in that is not being serviced properly.

The civil service, the Kurdish leaders said to me, are paid $15 dollars a month as a salary. Kurdish refugees are not going to return from Europe under those conditions. So here’s another flaw of the sanctions regulations that is creating imbalances. The longer this prevails, the greater the chance of separation of the Kurdish areas.

They’re experimenting every day with the United Nations to show that they are a little bit further removed from Baghdad. Simple things like licence plates. When I was in Baghdad they wanted to have separate licence plates. Well, they already have separate stamps, and separate ministries. This is not in the long-term interest and sanctions try to deepen that separateness.

Comment: In the future, the enormous sanctions debt that Iraq has incurred is going to jeopardise the future of the country and the future possibilities of re-development. The question is how can this problem be addressed now, and what suggestions do people have. Two perspectives seem possible to me. One is the work of the Compensation Commission in allocating who is owed what out of Iraq’s own money. Its lack of transparency and unfairness should be challenged in a more public way.

The second is the issue of reparations and compensation for Iraq itself as a result of the sanctions. Clearly this isn’t popular right now. If there were an organised, higher profile, scientific, economically accurate attempt to catalogue all the debts that Iraqis have incurred, including loss of life and pain and suffering due to the sanctions, it might shift the political debate a little.

von Sponeck: I can just maybe add to this by saying that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are doing country economic reviews as a matter of routine. I’m not suggesting for one single moment that the IMF and the World Bank do that for Iraq. That wouldn’t be acceptable for many reasons. But I do think that a team of independent, qualified and known economists should now carry out an economic review of Iraq that looks into debts and what it costs to run a nation.

I think it’s high time a study is carried out to look into the cost of repairs in a post-sanctions era linked to a review of the debt situation, linked to an assessment of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate in terms of asking for compensation, and looking at the cost of rehabilitating the oil industry. In a post-sanctions era there has to be a good mix between debt repayment and new credit. There has to be a lot of new credit. If this is not understood, then Iraq in a post-sanctions era will again catapult itself, right from the beginning, into fundamental controversy and confrontation because there will be disagreement. People will try to retain control by arguing for amounts that are unrealistic.

Halliday: I was going to mention the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which, of course, pushed Germany into fascism and I think we’re doing the same to Iraq in another way. The debt burden, if you add interest, is something in the region of US$350 to $400 billion. There’s no way Iraq can get out from under that bill and move ahead and survive now or in the post-sanctions era. And there is a movement within Iraq, perhaps even within the Baath party: Young men and women who see no hope and no future for themselves, who are isolated and alienated from the region and from the rest of the world. They look on the West as an enemy and don’t understand it and haven’t been there because they cannot. They think President Saddam Hussein is too moderate, too compromised. He’s backed down too often under pressure from the United Nations and the United States. There is a danger that we are pushing this country and young people like that towards a sort of Taliban-type approach to the world.

Now, of course, the Iraqis are much too sophisticated for that, but nevertheless, it’s a dangerous way to go and I think it’s one of the consequences of this ludicrous compensation burden which we’ve placed on Iraq while at the same time we apply what I call double standards. Recently I was in Beirut and had the privilege of meeting the President of Lebanon The south of Lebanon had just been freed, so to speak, from the occupation, so I asked him, when did he expect compensation payments to begin? He laughed. He said, ‘Well, there may well be payments, but the United States will compensate Israel, not Lebanon.’

Post-sanctions, the management of the economy of Iraq has got to be given back to the managers in Baghdad. It’s essential. They’ve got to be able to free up their resources, re-build the strength of the dinar, get people back to work, and they need massive credit, a Marshall plan, proportionally speaking, to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed during the Gulf War. Electric power production, water systems, water treatment distribution, sanitation, oil production capacity, and re-build the factories and pharmaceutical plants and the food processing plants and everything else that was destroyed. This disrepair, today, is probably more fundamentally damaging and more dangerous and more responsible for the death rate of children than anything else.

Water-borne disease is what’s killing more today in Iraq. And this is the simple diseases of diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid – things that were, of course, well under control in better days. We’ve got to re-build, that’s a massive investment, but, of course, let’s not forget, Iraq also has a huge burden of responsibility. The Kuwait invasion – whatever justification one can find – is unacceptable, it’s in breach of international law. That has to be recognised.

Secondly, Iraq has got to do much better on its human rights record. Recently, I met Tariq Aziz [Foreign Minister of Iraq]. He said, yes, we’re prepared to look at our human rights record which we know is not adequate. But we’ll do that only when the United Nations stops undermining the very basic fundamental human rights of the Iraqi people. We both would refer, I think, to Articles 23 through 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN has taken away the fundamental rights to education, health care, housing, employment, to life itself.

Iraq clearly has to also work out a relationship with the Kurds that is acceptable to the Kurds and, of course, to Baghdad, and they’ve got other work to do with Kuwait and the region and all the rest of it.

In terms of disarmament, we’re going to have to ease the tension in the Middle East, we’re going to have to respond to the fears that are there. We need to implement Paragraph 14 of Resolution 687, which calls for the removal of weapons of mass destruction from the entire Middle East region. That is the way to deflate some of the tension and danger that now lurks in the region, where Iraq is mired in weaponry of 20-25 years old, and the neighbourhood has been re-armed and is being armed as we speak to the tune of about US$40 billion a year, mainly by US and European sellers, manufacturers, of very sophisticated weaponry which of course vastly exceeds what Iraq has. So we’ve now got a very extraordinary change in the balance of power in the Middle East.

We’ve got to downgrade the whole capacity and that means, of course, removing the chemical weapons, which lurk probably in Iran and Syria and Turkey and certainly in Israel plus, of course, the nuclear weapons that we now know exist in Israel.

Question: A lot of us now hear discussions about ‘smart sanctions’ and we don’t know what it will look like in the end. What do you see within some of the circles in the UN and member States to support this?

Halliday: To me what’s developing, under the guise of something better, is really a continuation of the stranglehold on the economy of Iraq and it is totally counter-productive and very dangerous. To have any policy that continues economic sanctions and maintains control by the UN merely extends the inefficiency that Hans mentioned, the incapacity of the United Nations to deliver. The ‘smart sanctions,’ as I hear them, are bad news and the only good part, perhaps, is dealing with disarmament. But even there, surrounding Iraq with monitors – of course, they’ll be billed to the Iraqi government – is just nonsense. This is supporting a marketplace for the arms industries of the world, the five permanent members, Europe and the United States.

von Sponeck: As someone recently said, if you now talk about ‘smart sanctions’, that means for the past ten years sanctions have been ‘dumb’. There is enough professional and scientific evidence that sanctions as a tool for change don’t work, so why continue using them unless you have a hidden agenda?

The time has come not for smart sanctions but for smart action so that sanctions are lifted. Then you need an arms embargo – but not just on the buyer, also on the seller. It takes two. Smart action for change, and an end to a policy that has clearly targeted the wrong people.

Comment: We all know that Russia, China, European countries as well as other Arab countries are significant players on the scene – at least they have some potential and I would be interested in hearing your comments on perhaps what efforts they have tried to make in terms of developing a more constructive approach, and what efforts they might still make in terms of future steps. And if you could also comment a bit on the most recent Arab summit in Amman. The statement that came out suggested that the Arab community was not quite satisfied with Iraqi views with regard to Kuwait and so on.

Halliday. The Arab summit was a great disappointment – I think many of us thought it was going to be a breakthrough of some sort. We might at last see the Arab nations standing up and having some courage and reflecting the street Arab position, which is usually very supportive of the Iraqi people in the sense of they’re paying a terrible price for the Kuwaiti invasion and their suffering and so on.

Unfortunately the Arab leadership, as in the past, has failed yet again to stand up and be counted. I think the pressure from the United States is very real, and I bet every Arab leader in that meeting was being squeezed very tight by Washington. There must have been a lot of phone calls and threats being made. Egypt is sitting on – what is it? – $3 billion a year in aid. Practical things like that really count. So, there’s total corruption in the UN Security Council, even in the Arab summit, I’m sorry to say. And we saw the consequences of that and it’s extremely sad.

At the same time, I think, Iraq has disappointed me. I know I’m going to offend Baghdad, but that’s okay. They’re used to that! The fact is, Baghdad is going to have to say every month and every year for the next 20 years, ‘We have no ambitions vis-à-vis Kuwait.’ It’s just going to have to be said again and again – it may be redundant but the Kuwaitis are going to ask for it and the Arab world is going to need this reassurance. It also diminishes the arms sales industry and the capacity for sustaining chaos in the Middle East which is so good for the arms trade. It’s just going to have to be said, I fear, because the perception, the potential that Iraq is seen to have because of that venture into Kuwait, is not going to away for a long time.

A community in the Middle East without Iraq or without Iran is, of course, unthinkable. Also without the Palestinians and the Israelis. They have got to get their act together, and I say they because we should stop interfering, that’s my position.

In terms of Russia, China, and France, yes, they’re really disappointing, but the fact is they also are feeling the pressure. China wants the WTO. China doesn’t want to be embarrassed by Tibet, so they play the game, and Iraq is not top of their list. The Russians also need help, with IMF money or whatever else with the US’s influence. The Russians don’t want to be overly embarrassed on their human rights violations and Chechnya and all of these other ugly things. The fact is we all have our weak points, and the superpower knows all those weaknesses and exactly how to press the sore spots.

von Sponeck: I do differ a little bit on the issue of the evaluation of the Arab summit. First of all, before the summit, we heard interesting new voices from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The Kuwait Foreign Minister said, if the translation is correct – ‘We must recognise that Iraqis are not vegetables. We must treat them like human beings. We must hear the Iraqi voice again.’

The Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister also expressed conciliatory views and even went as far as talking about the no-fly zone and his apprehension over the sorties out of Saudi Arabia. I think that’s new. Also, King Abdullah of Jordan has been given the responsibility to mediate between Kuwait and Iraq. That is some progress.

The fact that the Arab summit wants to convene its meetings at regular intervals is important. Iraq, is well as Palestine, is an issue on the front burner of the Arab summit. We should not be too ambitious in our expectations. Let’s see what the next few months bring in terms of change.

Iraq’s statement to the summit didn’t say a single word about sanctions or Iraq itself. It talked from the beginning to the end about Palestine, so that was a lost opportunity. Nevertheless, I think there is some progress and it is now up to the skill of King Abdullah to see how he can establish relationships and dialogue between the two protagonists.

I hope that the media will critically examine arm-twisting. The American government must stop interfering in everybody’s internal affairs. Let the Arabs talk to themselves first and then all kinds of things are possible. I stress the importance of inter-Arab dialogue without European Union or North American participation at this point, and maybe then we’ll see some progress. The fatigue is there in the Middle East. The public is tired, and most of the governments are tired.

Question: What is happening to the emotional well-being of the people of Iraq, in particular of the young people there?

Halliday: Those friends of mine who’ve worked as journalists and speak Arabic and have done studies and surveys in the communities of Iraq – Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and elsewhere – find that the social consequences are horrific and possibly more difficult to repair than the consequences of destroyed electric power and water systems.

We’re talking about new levels of corruption in Iraq which were almost unknown before this period, the breakdown of the family unit, the extended family. People are now looking after themselves. Things are so bad that the sort of generosity of the extended family, what I would call ‘Islamic family values’, has suffered badly under economic sanctions.

So many families in Iraq today are being led by a single parent. Men particularly, perhaps, have gone overseas to find other solutions or simply just walked away from their family responsibilities. Thus the drop-out rate for children, the hopelessness amongst teenagers and others, professional women in Iraq for 20 or 30 years have enjoyed equal status, educational and employment opportunities. That, to a great extent, has also been set back very severely.

I would think that among the young – isolated from the world, the Internet, travel and all the things that many young Iraqis enjoy – are now very much alienated. They feel cut off, even from their Arab brothers and sisters, so to speak, and even more so by the West. It’s a very dangerous phenomenon, and these are the leaders of the future; these are the people that the United Nations and the rest of us will need to work with. Tariq Aziz himself was quoted as having said recently, ‘If you think that working with people like me is difficult, wait till you meet the next generation, because they don’t have the advantages that I do of understanding at least how you people think or how the UN works or how Washington deals with its friends or whatever.’

I was there two months ago with an Irish television team and they interviewed a professional family, wife and husband, both engineers, as it happened. And out of nowhere this woman said, ‘You know, the problem with us is that we’ve been totally spoiled by our government under the Baath party and the sort of social welfare system the government ran for so many years, we have become totally dependent. Now nothing works and there’s no money to make it work and the water system and the sewage and the health care and all the good things – education – have collapsed and we don’t know how to deal with, we can’t really deal with it.’

It was a very interesting observation. And her concern was not food, she obviously had a little extra money, they both worked, they were managing reasonably well. Her concern was for hope and the future and the future of her children. Why were her children not going to have the future that she and her husband had? Why must her children be penalised and punished by the United Nations and denied opportunities for travel and education, books, and music? Why must her children pay the price for something that was done ten or eleven years ago?