Friday, Jul 4, 2008
International aid workers fear a humanitarian crisis as the bombs start falling on Iraqi cities.
Mar 20, 2003 | At a dramatic moment during his State of the Union address, President Bush assured the world that when the United States crushes Saddam Hussein's government, "we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom." The promise, which Bush repeated on Monday in his speech warning of imminent attack, is seen as crucial to his administration's plans in Iraq. In a war to be fought without international sanction, the plight of Iraqi civilians during and after an American invasion will most likely become, in this media age, a key measure by which the world judges the United States' military effort. If thousands of Iraqis are seen to suffer the horrors of war, the attack might be deemed a failure even if Hussein's regime is quickly toppled.
But on the eve of battle, the food and medicine Bush has pledged seem to exist only as a rhetorical flourish. The administration says that it expects much of the relief to be provided by international aid agencies, but many of these groups complain that they're starved of money, and they fear a "crisis" -- representatives of several organizations used that word -- once the invasion begins. Iraqis, many of whom get all of their provisions from their government, could face shortages of food and clean water in the event of a conflict that lasts more than a few weeks. As many as 600,000 refugees may stream out of the country, and aid groups worry that the flow could quickly overwhelm the infrastructure built up to house and feed such people.
"I think we're not prepared," says Steve Claborne, the director of program operations for Mercy Corps, an aid agency based in Portland, Ore. "We don't have the resources -- the pre-positioned stocks, tents, blankets, water, sanitation equipment. We feel hamstrung."
Aid groups say that the worldwide opposition to an attack on Iraq has hampered fundraising efforts for humanitarian aid. In the months before Bush shut the "window" on diplomacy, private foundations feared that if they donated large sums of aid money they would be seen as supporting the war. Perhaps for similar reasons, many governments around the world have also been slow to fund United Nations agencies like the World Food Program and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which recently reported that it has only about a third of the $60 million it needs to carry out its efforts in Iraq.
The greatest infusion of aid money from the U.S. is expected to come after the invasion begins, when the administration submits a funding request to Congress. According to Refugees International, the United States has provided about $24 million to U.N. aid agencies, money which the group says was "unnecessarily delayed." They add that the amount is woefully inadequate, noting that the U.S. already has spent more than $2 billion on the military preparation for the war. (The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, the agency coordinating aid efforts in Iraq, did not return calls for comment.)
The Bush administration has announced several steps it plans to take to minimize Iraqi suffering. In February, the White House's Office of Global Communications said that military plans in Iraq would be "carefully tailored" to reduce the "impact on civilian populations." The U.S. reportedly plans, for example, to avoid bringing down Baghdad's electricity grid during a war. The White House also hopes to discourage refugee flows by mounting an "information campaign" to "reassure populations not at risk that they are safe in their homes." And USAID has set up a 60-person Disaster Assistance Response Team charged with entering "liberated" areas of Iraq in order to determine humanitarian needs and make "in-the-field" grants to aid agencies.
It's worth noting, too, that aid groups made similar dire predictions of humanitarian catastrophe in the run-up to a U.S. attack on Afghanistan. Oxfam, a British aid agency, said that a war would force more than 2 million people from their homes, and the World Food Program feared that millions could face starvation. In the event, however, the predictions seemed exaggerated -- after the U.S. rout of the Taliban, thousands of tons of food aid were quickly brought in. And instead of millions of people pouring out of the country, hundreds of thousands who'd left during the previous two decades of war returned to Afghanistan after the war. In 2002, the U.S. gave more than $500 million in aid to the country.
Still, for a war the administration knew it was going to have -- a war that White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously suggested was rolled out with the deliberateness of a marketing campaign -- the government's humanitarian aid preparations for Iraq have the air of an afterthought. "At this point we're extremely concerned," said Cassandra Nelson, who works with Mercy Corps in Kuwait City, not far from Kuwait's border with Iraq, where she has been stationed for the past two weeks. "The clock is ticking the final seconds off and there is nothing here to distribute. People keep saying, 'Oh well, the NGOs will handle the humanitarian side,' and here we are waving a red flag and saying that we can only get so far until we get more money to spend on this."
She continued, "The scenario that's been painted for this is that after the war, the plan is to help the Iraqi people to rebuild the country and rebuild democracy. But at the same time people are not willing to do even the basics, like feed people and take care of what may happen due to the bombs and warfare."
Even in the absence of war, the humanitarian statistics on Iraq are grim. One-half of the 24.5 million people in Iraq are children. According to the United Nations Children Fund, known as Unicef, one child in eight dies before he reaches his fifth birthday -- one of the highest child-mortality rates in the world. About 1 million Iraqis under the age of 5 are considered malnourished, and could fare especially poorly during a conflict.
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