Part 2 - LA36 KB articles 1988 98 and cuttings 100 002

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-2- installations which were badly damaged and totally destroyed by the allied military forces were water, electricity, telecommunications, schools, hospitals, Sewage and other vital services. The Gulf War ended nearly two years ago, but just last week the UN Security Council once again renewed the sanctions on Iraq, although that country is making strenuous efforts to comply with a string of se resolutions that are as punitively vindictive as they are humiliating to national dignity. Yet Moreover, even these resolutions do not allow for external intervention to remove the present Baghdad government, nor, indeed, do these sanctions appear to be contributing to such an outcome. What they are doing is prever frustrating attempts to rehabilitate the national economy and to restore a semblance of normal and decent life. The real victims of the continuing sanctions are the most vulnerable members of that society - the old, the sick and wounded, the poor and, above all, children, up to 250,000 of whom may have already died. The environmental destruction and the lack of medicine, drugs, anaesthetics, water purification materials and so on are leading to incalculable suffering and countless unnecessary deaths. The United Nations says that essential foodstuffs and medicines are exempt from the sanctions, but Iraq's overseas assets remain frozen and cannot be used for such imports. Rather, the USA, Britain and France are attempting to arbitrarily seize - one might say steal - these assets so that an impoverished Iraq can be further punished - by, for example, paying So- Called 'reparations' to Kuwait. Other speakers will be able to tell us first hand about the human tax price of the continuing sanctions. For myself, I visited Iraq just two weeks before the war, as part