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Iraqi civilians woefully unprepared for war
NEW YORK, Jan 30 2003 (Reuters) - Iraq's already fragile public health system would collapse in any U.S.-led war and the United Nations, relief agencies and the Baghdad government are "woefully unprepared" for dealing with civilian casualties, a U.S.-based humanitarian group said on Thursday.
The Center for Economic and Social Rights, a civic group opposed to war in Iraq, said after a 10-day visit to the oil-rich Gulf country that most hospitals lack basic equipment, there is a shortage of medicine including antibiotics, and damage to electrical and water systems would cripple medical services.
"What we found is that the system, both the government and the U.N., is woefully unprepared for the devastation that is to come and in some ways it may not be possible to prepare for it," said Roger Normand, executive director of the New York-based Center, which organized the Jan. 19-29 research mission by 16 public health and international law experts.
Thursday's report provides an account of civilian conditions in Iraq as the United States and Britain prepare for war to disarm the government of President Saddam Hussein.
It said Iraq had become "like a vast refugee camp" with civilians surviving largely on government food rations and a public health system hit by 12 years of U.N. sanctions.
Last week, a letter from more than 550 staff, students and alumni at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair that hundreds of thousands of people would be killed and injured in a war and most of them would be civilians.
A U.N. report on Monday on weapons inspections bolstered the U.S. and British view that Baghdad had not yet come to a "genuine acceptance" of its disarmament obligations under agreements made at the end of the U.S.-led 1991 Gulf war. An international coalition pushed Iraqi troops out of neighboring Kuwait after Iraq invaded the oil-rich emirate in August 1990.
U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix said on Monday that Iraq had failed to answer crucial questions on long-range missiles and chemical and biological weapons programs, but Security Council members Russia, France, Syria, Germany and China said inspections were working and should be given more time.
The civic group said its researchers traveled all over Iraq and visited hospitals, clinics, public markets, electricity, water and sanitation plants, and other civilian sites and reviewed U.N. documents.
"Our report confirms that it is unlikely that international relief agencies can avert a major humanitarian disaster," said Michael Van Rooyen, Director of the Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
The mission included Hans von Sponeck, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq from 1998 to 2000, who quit over his criticism of international sanctions imposed on Iraq following its defeat in the 1991 Gulf war. The Center for Economic and Social Rights has led six humanitarian missions to Iraq. It is funded by individuals and foundations.
(Reporting by Grant McCool, editing by Mohammad Zargham)