 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Dangerous games
By Graham UsherThere are very few UN officials who can attract an audience of 500 for a public meeting in London on a wet Saturday night or whose appearance is greeted with a spontaneous standing ovation. But then former assistant secretary-general, Dennis Halliday, is not like other UN officials.
A youthful looking Irishman -- with 34 years of service under his belt -- Halliday was appointed coordinator for the UN's oil-for-food programme in Baghdad in 1997. One year later he resigned in protest at the UN sanctions regime imposed on Iraq for its failure to provide a clean bill on possessing weapons of mass destruction. Even worse as far as his ex-employers are concerned, Halliday has spent the last five months publicly denouncing sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction in their own right.
"The problem with sanctions is that they focus almost entirely on civilians," says Halliday. "Iraq is the most extreme example of this. We have now had eight years of sanctions against Baghdad. The result is the death of 6-7,000 Iraqi children every month and a malnutrition rate of 30 per cent for the entire population. This could be referred to as a form of genocide and is an utterly appalling state of affairs for the UN and member states to be associated with."
Halliday rejects the claim that such effects are due less to the sanctions than to the Iraqi regime diverting oil revenues into its own coffers. "This is misinformation," he says bluntly. "The oil-for-food programme is tightly controlled by the UN. The revenues of all oil sales go into UN accounts -- not one dollar ends up in the hands of the Iraqi government. Indeed, without the cooperation of the Iraqi government the programme could not work. The UN alone could not do it."
But Halliday's present role is not merely to condemn. The speaking tour -- now in Europe and next month in the US -- is intended rather to change the "intolerable" status quo that obtains in Iraq. He is encouraged by the recent proposal submitted by France to the Security Council in which the embargo on oil exports would be lifted in return for a new UN monitoring system aimed at preventing Iraq's rearmament. The only problem is that the proposal doesn't go far enough.
"In addition to lifting sanctions, Iraq will need massive capital investment to rebuild its destroyed infrastructure," he says. "At the UN office in Baghdad, we estimated that $10-12 billion would be required simply to provide a safe water system, with proper treatment and distribution plants to keep sewage off the streets and out of the rivers. This is a massive task that will take several years to accomplish, but without such investment you will never tackle the problems of child mortality and malnutrition."
Halliday is pessimistic whether such new thinking will be forthcoming at the UN. And he is especially scornful of the disproportionate power wielded by the permanent members of the Security Council, above all by Washington. "You can sense in the General Assembly how angry the other member states are with the US," he says. "They resent enormously the abuse of power the US brings to bear. The fact that the US has yet to pay its dues [to the UN] simply adds insult to injury."
Yet without some kind of positive change the UN is in danger of squandering what little credibility it has left. "How can the UN refute the charge of double standards when its current policies on Iraq are themselves in violation of the UN charter and its own conventions on human rights?" he asks.
This may not be the only consequence of those policies. Halliday speaks of a new "introverted" generation of Iraqis emerging in the wings of the current leadership. After eight years of sanctions and "increasing alienation" from the West, they may turn out to be more radical than their forbears, he warns. He cites Iraq's recent belligerency over the no-fly zones and the vicious rhetoric it has poured on other Arab leaders as cases in point.
"It reflects the political pressure emerging from the rank and file of the Baath Party for the leadership to take more overt action against US and Britain," he says. "You can see the generational change even within the ruling family. Saddam's eldest son, Uday, is far more dangerous than his father, and he is already a major political force in the country. That is why I find the [American and British] military strikes so irresponsible. They are threatening a frail, admittedly undesirable government, but with no clear idea about what the outcome will be. It is an incredibly dangerous game."
