December 17, 1998, Thursday, Final Edition
NAME: DENIS HALLIDAY
SECTION: STYLE; Pg. E01
LENGTH: 1921 words
HEADLINE: The Deaths He Cannot Sanction; Ex-U.N. Worker Details Harm to Iraqi Children
BYLINE: Michael Powell, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: NEW YORK
BODY:
There is no easy way to make this argument as bombs and missiles
rain down. No fashionable way to rebut those intent
on vengeance against a nation run by the likes of Saddam Hussein.
So Denis Halliday offers only a quick instruction in the mathematics
of death, of the pure and deadly efficiency of the
United Nations sanctions he helped oversee in Iraq.
Two hundred thirty-nine thousand children 5 years old and under.
That is the latest -- and most conservative -- independent estimate
of the number of Iraqi children who have died of
malnutrition, wasting and dysentery since sanctions were imposed
at the behest of the United States and Great Britain in
1990.
Halliday, a tall and proper Irishman, is by temperament uncomfortable
with emotion. But the deaths and suffering -- and
he'll hate this word -- haunt him.
"We need to talk ugly: We are knowingly killing kids because the
United States has an utterly unsophisticated foreign
policy," Halliday says. "No matter how bad this bastard Saddam
is, how can we justify that?
"And the catastrophe of more bombing will only make matters much worse."
Halliday is an outcast, as close to stateless as an international
civil servant can be. He announced his resignation as the
U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq in August, a dramatic move
that met with wide media coverage almost everywhere
except in the United States. In careful, clinical language, he
offered a most compelling narrative of destruction:
The allied bombing in the Persian Gulf War devastated Iraq's infrastructure,
systematically destroying power stations and
water purification systems. Uranium-tipped armor-piercing shells
further contaminated the water supply in the southern
part of the country. And the American and British-led decision
to clamp U.N. economic sanctions on Iraq compounded the
problems.
"No one wants to acknowledge the amount of nonmilitary damage,
the destruction of cold food and medicine storage, the
power supply," Halliday says. "I went there to administer the
largest humanitarian challenge in U.N. history. I didn't realize
our level of complicity in the suffering."
According to preliminary numbers in a study conducted by Richard
Garfield, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and a
specialist on the health effects of the embargo, the death rate
for Iraqi children age 5 and under has spiraled up, nearly
tripling since sanctions were imposed in 1990. At that time,
child deaths in Iraq were on a par with much of the Western
world.
"There is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children
under 5 years old in the modern world," Garfield says.
"When the U.S. hit a bomb shelter in the Gulf War, it admitted
a grave mistake and changed its rules . . . yet these
sanctions are resulting in about 150 excess child deaths per
day."
U.S. officials usually dismiss such talk of American responsibility
as so much agitprop. They say that Iraq is a conspirator in
its own decline. And they add that the country is now allowed
to pump enough oil to stave off the worst suffering. Under
the oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell $ 5.2 billion worth and
use some of that money to buy food, medicines and limited
medical technology.
That allows Iraq to buy about one-third of the food and medicine it purchased before the war, according to Halliday.
Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright went on CBS's "60 Minutes"
in 1996 and assayed a defense of the toll taken by
sanctions.
A reporter stated that some estimates placed child deaths in Iraq
at half a million (Halliday uses the same figure), and
asked if the price was worth it. "I think this is a very hard
choice," she replied, "but the price -- we think is worth it."
More recently, Albright returned to "60 Minutes" as secretary
of state and advised reporters that "you can't lay that guilt
trip on me. . . . I believe that Saddam Hussein is the one who
is responsible for the tragedy of the Iraqi people."
Halliday wades warily into this moral calculus of blame. He is
not inclined to defend Saddam Hussein and senior Baath
Party officials, and he acknowledges problems in the distribution
of food and medicine. And Iraqi officials have, on
occasion, insisted on ordering sophisticated medical machinery
when wiser people would zero in on basic medicines and
foodstuffs. There are a few streets in downtown Baghdad, he concedes,
that seem strikingly cosmopolitan, full of well-fed
shoppers.
That, however, is but to concede the obvious: In all tragedies,
even more so in authoritarian nations, the poorest and
most rural suffer worst. What's more to the point, say two other
U.N. inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity, is
that even the best-run sanctions program could not deliver enough
food and medicine to ameliorate all the suffering.
Halliday seizes on that point, extends it. Let's suppose that
sanctions have contributed, through poor nutrition, stunting
and dysentery, to but 100,000 deaths.
"I've been to hospitals where they have enough heart medicine
for two patients and there are 10 who need it. How do
you count that? How do you spread it?"
He leans across the table toward a visitor. He uses a word he has hitherto danced around.
"These are criminal calculations."
He refused to talk about them at first, the four leukemia kids.
It seemed one of those maudlin stories the press favors,
Dickensian puff pastry that will only encourage those who favor
a more punitive policy to dismiss Halliday as a "damn
bunny-hugger."
He relents, finally, and tells of his visit to the Saddam Hussein
Medical Center in Baghdad. Once a modern hospital, it's
now filled with dust, baking in the heat of an infernal summer.
The air conditioning rarely works. He found four children
there, three girls and a boy, gravely ill with leukemia.
There was not enough medicine for all of them. So he broke his
first rule in Iraq: He searched for medicines on the black
market, traveling by car on the hot dusty track to Amman, Jordan.
He describes his next steps in a clipped, weary monotone.
"I walked back into the hospital. . . . We went to the ward, we
had picked up some presents for Christmas. We found that
two of the children were already dead."
He didn't go to hospitals much after that. He had no solutions.
And he "didn't want to be one more foreigner gawking with
no answers."
He recounts this in his sun-filled apartment on the East Side
of Manhattan. He is 57, with bred-in-the-bone reserve. He
was an assistant secretary general at the United Nations. It's
considered bad form to publicly rebuke a member nation.
"I used to lecture my staff about such things." He chuckles at himself. "Now I talk a lot about ends justifying means."
The leukemia incident wasn't the only time he bent the rules.
Frustrated at the rising death toll in late 1997, worried that
the United Nations lacked the will to stand up to the United
States, he took the highly unusual step of lobbying France,
Russia and China to relax sanctions. And one long night in Baghdad,
he typed and retyped an uncharacteristically
passionate letter to his boss, Secretary General Kofi Annan.
"I wrote a very nasty letter, probably too nasty," he says. "I
said that we were managing a process that was resulting in
thousands of deaths. I told him you have to stand up and speak."
The letter fed a growing sense that he needed to leave. But he
refused. His staff needed a leader, and enough could be
done in the margins of sanctions policy to save thousands of
lives.
Since his departure he's traveled a lot -- on his own dime, he
says -- to New Zealand, Iceland and all over Europe. He was
invited even to Great Britain to sit on a government-sponsored
panel and criticize that nation's policy toward Iraq. He has
refused to return to Iraq, though, even when invited by Saddam
Hussein. He doesn't want to appear sympathetic to the
regime.
In this country, he's found himself appearing mainly on talk radio
shows and college campuses. The establishment press
and Congress paid far greater attention to the resignation of
a different U.N. official: UNSCOM arms inspector Scott Ritter.
Ritter's narrative of Iraqi deception and the apparent willingness
of the Clinton administration to look the other way
resonated in a nation that has lived with the unfinished business
of Saddam Hussein and Iraq since the end of the Gulf
War. Ritter, the war hero, has come to function as sort of a
doppelganger, his outsize personality and tougher
prescriptions overshadowing Halliday's.
"You can't match Ritter. He's a hero, he's got a great message
to sell," Halliday says. "I play as just some jaded U.N.
official. I can't match his sex appeal."
The jokes conceal a tension that ran through relations between
the humanitarian staff and the arms inspectors in Iraq.
The arms inspectors are convinced, based on voluminous documents
and intelligence sources, that Iraq still harbors at
least the raw stuff of weapons of mass destruction: poison gas,
biological weapons, perhaps worse.
It's a history best paid notice: Saddam Hussein has used some of these weapons on his own people.
But Halliday says he found it nearly impossible to get the arms
inspectors to work with his staff, and to persuade them to
allow some technology into the country, to repair energy and
water systems.
"I would drive home through raw sewage, watching children all
but bathe in it," Halliday says. "But they wouldn't meet
with us. They seemed worried we'd convert their cowboys into
bunny-huggers."
His doubts about the UNSCOM mission run deeper. It's a dangerous
world, in which companies and nations across the
so-called civilized world hawk the most murderous weapons, legally
and illegally. To insist on staying inside Iraq until
every weapon is destroyed seems a fool's errand, he says.
"The inspectors destroyed tons and tons of arms and that was great," he says. "But they need a timetable."
Nor is getting rid of Saddam Hussein necessarily the answer, he
argues. The dictator's son, for one, is far worse, he
believes. As are the many thousands of young Iraqis who have
no access to Western thought and education, and who
increasingly believe that Saddam Hussein is too moderate.
"Beware what you ask for," Halliday says. "Killing Saddam does not necessarily solve anything."
Some American officials argue that there is an exile movement
with hooks deep into Iraq, and that a carefully coordinated
guerrilla movement could establish power someday.
Weeks after that interview, Halliday called again. He's worried
that the United States appears intent on war, he's flying to
Washington to hold a few meetings. Hours later, he's in Washington.
The civil servant's reserve is slowly falling away. He confesses
he's getting radicalized, that he feels the need to speak
more deeply, more passionately. Of late, he's taken to asking
American audiences if they could survive on some beans,
some rice, a little yogurt and impure water.
"I feel somewhat guilty for abandoning my colleagues in Iraq during
this talk of bombing," he said a week ago. "Now I see
the American generals talking about possibly 10,000 more Iraqi
deaths. This is not a strategy, it's simply to the point of
madness.
"One day, we'll all be called to account and clobbered in the
history books." Former United Nations humanitarian
coordinator Denis Halliday. "I didn't realize our level of complicity
in the suffering," former U.N. humanitarian coordinator
Denis Halliday says.
GRAPHIC: Photo, MITSU YASUKAWA FOR TWP