Child mortality doubles after 12 years of sanctions on Iraqi people.

06 May 2003 19:25:32 GMT
Child mortality seen as vital barometer for Iraq

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - Reducing Iraq's chronic child mortality rate to where it was in the 1980s could be a key indicator of the success of U.S.-led reconstruction efforts, experts say.

During more than 12 years of international sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the death rate for Iraqi children under the age of five more than doubled.

An August 1999 United Nations Children Emergency Fund survey found that from 1994 to 1999, there were 131 deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births in Iraq. From 1984 to 1989, the rate had been 56.

UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said at the time that if reductions in child mortality in Iraq in the 1980s had continued into the 1990s, a half million fewer children would have died from 1991 to 1998.

The main reasons for the increase were malnutrition, the lack of clean water and a shortage of medicine.

"Child mortality is probably the single best yardstick of the physical well-being of a people," said Steve Orvis, a political scientist who specializes in development issues at Hamilton College in New York.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development which is coordinating Iraqi reconstruction contracts, said part of the problem was the way the government of deposed President Saddam Hussein had used sanctions as an excuse for its gross neglect of the water and sanitation systems.

"I'm hoping in the next two years we can get the (mortality) rate back down to what it was," he said, adding that there was no reason why Iraqi child mortality could not be brought down to the rate of neighboring Jordan, which in 2000 was 34 death per 1,000 births according to UNICEF.

The rate in the United States was 8 children per 1,000 births. Iraq's figure was by far the highest in the Middle East and exceeded even some war-torn African nations like Congo, which recorded a rate of 108.

Natsios said Saddam's government had used water purification as a political weapon, withholding shipments of chlorine from some areas of the country.

"It does appear, although I can't prove it at this point, that there was a deliberate effort to deny certain regions of the country purification chemicals," he said.

Natsios said USAID was reviewing all of the chlorine production plants in Iraq and would determine what was needed to get them going and redistribute clean water equitably to everyone in the country.

"There are 867 pumping stations and 250 water purification plants. We need to see an equitable distribution," he said.

Michael Van Rooyen, director of the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said investing in water purification and emergency health could have dramatic results fairly quickly.

"The best bang for the buck is in fixing the water sanitation system and ensuring that there is an emergency health network," he said