February 15, 1999, FINAL

 SECTION: News; B13

 LENGTH: 576 words

 HEADLINE: Suffer the children: Child workers crowd the streets andmarkets of once- wealthy Baghdad, reports Leon
 Barkho.

 BYLINE: Leon Barkho

 DATELINE: BAGHDAD, Iraq

 BODY:
 BAGHDAD, Iraq - Every day, 11-year-old Muslim Khalaf and his brother Wisam, 13, compete with the fast-moving traffic on
 their rickety, donkey- drawn cart.

 ''You bad boys!'' shouts a traffic policeman in downtown Baghdad. ''You are not allowed to bring your donkey and drive
 your cart in this street.''

 The boys voice unfelt apologies and move on. This is part of their routine. They spend their day lugging around
 36-kilogram butane gas cylinders, selling the cooking fuel to homes and shops. They are part of an army of children
 working the streets and markets of what once was one of the Arab world's wealthiest countries, selling cigarettes and
 tissues, toting bags and boxes, doing the dirtiest of dirty work.

 By law, Iraqi children should be in school up to age 15. Parents who fail to send their youngsters to class and people who
 employ them face hefty fines and jail terms.

 But those laws have fallen into disuse since the UN Security Council imposed sweeping trade sanctions on Iraq after
 President Saddam Hussein had his army invade Kuwait in 1990.

 Iraq's economy fell apart without oil exports, and the plunge of the Iraqi dinar reduced the buying power of salaries to tiny
 fractions of their former worth. Children's earnings became vital for their families.

 According to United Nations figures, the school entry rate has fallen from 98 per cent of children in 1990 to 60 per cent
 now. As many as one million children have dropped out or never even went to school.

 Muslim's and Wisam's work day starts at 5 a.m. at a government butane station, where they load their cart with 25 gas
 cylinders, paying 150 dinars each, or about eight cents.

 Then they drive to al-Kifah Street and the Shorja market, two of Baghdad's most congested areas, where they sell each
 cylinder for 250 dinars.

 ''We sell 50 cylinders a day and make about 5,000 dinars,'' Wisam says. Their profit, the equivalent of about $2.70 U.S., is
 more than what their father, a teacher, makes in a month.

 No one knows how many youngsters work in Iraq these days. But amid the warren of shops at the Shorja market, children
 are everywhere.

 ''They are very useful. Without them, I think our business would be in trouble,'' says Raheem Salman, a wholesaler.

 Every morning, children gather at Mr. Salman's shop. They are given cigarettes, incense sticks, candles or tissues to hawk
 on Baghdad's streets.

 They return at nightfall, and Mr. Salman gives each 1,000 dinars. He keeps their addresses and identity cards so they
 don't cheat him.

 Almost every shop owner in Shorja and along al-Kifah employs children ages eight to 14. ''I haven't seen anyone objecting
 to this. It is normal now,'' says shopkeeper Muhsen Maki.

 On a sidewalk on Rasheed Street, about 20 children sit in a row by shoe-polishing boxes. Alawi Qeis, 12, says none of his
 five brothers goes to school; all shine shoes on the streets of Baghdad.

 Dhia Hassan Maarouf, a factory owner, employs 10 youngsters.

 One is Sameer Farouq, a grease-smeared boy of eight who uses kerosene and a small metal brush to scrape rust from
 used car parts.

 Sameer is paid 2,000 dinars a week and says his family needs the money. Sameer's father is a retired government worker
 with a pension of 500 dinars a month.

 ''Ten years ago, it was almost impossible to find a child who would be willing to work,'' says Mr. Maarouf. ''Mind you, it was
 then against the law to employ children.''
 
 

 GRAPHIC: CP Color Photo: The Associated Press / Pieces of leather and a tin of glue are tools of the trade of 10-year-old
 Abbas Jabbar, who works in a leather workshop in Baghdad. Abbas has been working since he dropped out of school four
 years ago. Many Iraqis blame the rise in child labour on the devastating effects of UN sanctions against the country.; Color
 Photo: The Associated Press / Inaz Fallah, 14, operates a steam iron in a Baghdad clothing factory. Fallah, who dropped
 out of school two years ago to help support her family, says her dream was to become a teacher. Inaz and her 13-
 year-old brother, who works at the market, are working because their father is disabled and cannot work.; Color Photo:
 The Associated Press / Seven-year- old Salah Kareem, above, holds about 100 Iraqi dinar, worth less than $1 U.S., money
 made selling sweets on a Baghdad street. Salah roams the streets selling the homemade sweets after school while his
 brother makes the rounds of the nearby cafes. The two give the money they earn to their parents to help support the
 family.
 

The Boston Globe

                                  January 25, 1999, Monday ,City Edition

 SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

 LENGTH: 1463 words

 HEADLINE: Iraq sanctions leave mark on children;
 Malnutrition, unawareness define youth

 BYLINE: By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff

 BODY:

    BAGHDAD - They are Iraq's lost generation - stunted by malnourishment, trapped in ignorance, orphaned by war, and
 forgotten by the world.

 In an open market in downtown Baghdad, an army of these Iraqi street kids peddle cigarettes, shine shoes, and lift
 wallets under an enormous, hand-painted mural of a smiling Saddam Hussein.

 These children are living evidence of what the United Nations' imposed economic sanctions have wrought in Iraq - and a
 disturbing vision of the future. Even if the embargo were lifted tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of children would be left
 with irreparable developmental damage caused by eight years of crippling sanctions. But sanctions alone can't be blamed.
 The suffering is compounded by a nation dragged into two costly wars, a dictatorship that builds palaces while children
 starve, and a bureaucracy that lets urgently needed medicine sit in warehouses.

 But now there is new momentum to ease the UN embargo in the aftermath of the US-led airstrikes against Iraq last
 month. UN Security Council members France, China, and Russia stepped up efforts last week to ease sanctions. The
 United States insists that sanctions are the only way to contain Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

 Despite the diplomatic parrying over sanctions, the children of Iraq continue to suffer from them.

 On Baghdad's streets, many children are stunted by years of malnutrition. Children who say they are 15 and 16 look more
 like 9- or 10-year-olds. They are glaringly uneducated and ignorant of the modern world. Of 30 children interviewed
 through an interpreter, not one of them knew what a computer was. Simple questions were greeted with blank stares
 and downward glances.

 A tall boy with vacant eyes sat in front of the huge mural of Saddam Hussein's disturbing grin. The boy was filthy and flies
 buzzed around him. About six younger boys, sitting on rusted paint cans and waiting to shine shoes of passersby,
 explained that he just doesn't talk to anyone anymore.

 "He used to talk and he used to go to school," said Saad. "But now he won't say anything. He just sits there and gets
 food out of the trash."

 The market is officially named The Market for the Friends of the Ministry of Interior. But everyone calls it "Ali Baba's,"
 referring to the gangs of young thieves and pickpockets who flock there to fence stolen goods. Rows of tables are laid out
 with watches, radios, wallets, and used clothing.

 Qais Jabar, 16, and his brother, Rassol, 15, dropped out of school and live by peddling junk they pick up on the street.
 Their father was among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war, and they do what they
 can to help their mother feed the family.

 Qais carried a broken window he found at a building damaged in US missile attacks, an item he thought might bring 10
 cents at the market. His brother was trying to sell a pair of cracked, plastic sandals and a hair brush.

 When asked repeatedly what he wanted for his future, Qais kept replying, "I just want to live my life."

 Three older men wearing sports jackets suddenly appeared at Qais's shoulder and appeared to be government officials.
 One of the older men said, "Tell him you want an end to sanctions."

 "Yes," the boy nodded, looking down. "This is what we want. Do you want to buy a window?"

 Nearby, children waded through the traffic of Liberation Square, begging for money. One boy without shoes pleaded and
 cried with his hand held out on a cold, gray winter day.

 The squalor of this corner of the city, and the hunger and lack of education here, are not so different from many Third
 World slums throughout Asia and Africa. Many veteran international aid workers say Baghdad has less suffering among its
 young street people than New Delhi, Mexico City, and even Cairo.

 But for Iraq the poverty and the hopelessness of its youth are stark reminders of how far the country has fallen. In the
 early 1980s, Iraq was a confident and wealthy nation, the second-largest producer of oil in the world. It had some of the
 developing world's best hospitals and universities. It boasted high literacy rates and low percentages of child deaths.

 Now, veteran UN workers compare Iraq to the world's basket cases in terms of illiteracy and infant mortality.

 "This was a proud country, and now we have lost a whole generation. They are wasted, and without them we have to
 ask, "What is our future?" asked Ali Jassim, 34, who taught English in a middle school for 10 years until he could no longer
 live on a salary of $10 a month and took to driving a taxi.

 After Hussein's military miscalculations - the bloody and grueling 10-year war with neighboring Iran and his invasion of
 Kuwait - Iraq is exhausted and defeated. The punishing UN economic sanctions imposed as a condition of the cease-fire in
 the 1991 Persian Gulf War further crippled the country. Since 1995, Iraq has been allowed to import oil for food and
 medicine.

 Michelle Nahal, director of the Middle East Council of Churches aid program in Iraq, walked through the open market on a
 recent cold evening looking for the children who sleep in doorways to offer them shelter.

 "Most are orphans of war, all are malnourished and their growth stunted as a result," said Nahal. "The problem is these
 developmental problems can't be reversed. This generation will be written off."

 This month, the UN aid program UNICEF reported that 1 million Iraqi primary and secondary school pupils did not enroll in
 school, or 20 percent of the total. About 200,000 more dropped out during the year.

 Illiteracy rates are increasing at 5 percent a year. About 25 percent of children under age 5 are malnourished. In 1991,
 before the sanctions, only 9 percent were.

 These statistics make Iraq one of the world's few countries that are steadily declining in health and education, according
 to UNICEF.

 "The education system has collapsed," said Gloria Fernandez, who leads UNICEF's education projects. There are no books,
 schools are falling apart, and teachers are quitting over unbearably low pay, she said.

 Suham Hamza, who is a junior high school teacher just outside Baghdad, said, "The kids who haven't dropped out come to
 school hungry, tired, and in rags. They can't concentrate. They just slip further and further behind."

 These are the children who survive the sanctions. Many do not. Activist groups fighting sanctions, such as the US-based
 Voices in the Wilderness, cite a New England Journal of Medicine study of Iraq from 1992, which concluded that nearly
 6,000 additional child deaths occur per month as a result of the sanctions. The figure was based largely on data provided
 by Iraq and the study was conducted at the height of the postwar impact of sanctions. Nevertheless, Voices in the
 Wilderness and others extrapolate that monthly mortality rate out over eight years to conclude as many as 500,000
 children have died from sanctions.

 The former UN coordinator for humanitarian aid in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, has supported this staggering figure. Halliday quit
 the UN after watching the suffering due to sanctions.

 "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is illegal and immoral," Halliday said in a recent interview.

 But senior UN officials counter that the projections of hundreds of thousands of deaths are a reckless distortion. They say
 that it has been virtually impossible to obtain an accurate picture of child deaths caused by the sanctions. John Mills, a
 spokesman for the UN's oil-for-food program, said there is "intense suffering." But he added that exaggerations of death
 tolls do not help the situation.

 Recently, UN officials have focused on what they see as widespread and inexplicable delays of distribution of aid by Iraqi
 officials. Mills said that $287 million worth of medicines provided through the oil-for-food program - nearly half of the
 medicines delivered over the past two years - remain in warehouses. Another $8 million earmarked for "therapeutic milk"
 for malnourished infants and protein biscuits for nursing mothers have not been delivered, he added.

 "These are allocations just to stop the malnutrition," Mills said. "Unfortunately, they do not even begin to address the
 more costly and difficult efforts needed to turn around the effects of malnutrition."

 On the streets of the Ali Baba market the effects are on display every day. The "generation of the sanctions" who gather
 in this market have a song that they consider an anthem. It's by Iraqi pop star Khadem Sahair and is titled "Remember." It
 was blaring on a radio that 18-year-old Ethar Abbas, who dropped out of school in fourth grade, was trying to peddle.

 Roughly translated, the lyrics are:

 GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. GLOBE PHOTO/Selling what they can: Qais Jabar peddling a broken window frame while brother
 Rassol toted a bundle containing sandals and a brush.
 2. GLOBE PHOTO/Sanctions have led to the creation of a lost generation of Irai children. One boy (left) no longer speaks
 and finds his food among trash, said his friends, who gathered beneath a Saddam Hussein mural.

 LOAD-DATE: January 25, 1999