Nearly 5m Iraqis Suffer From Chronic Poverty

ROME/ BAGHDAD, 20 June 2003 — One in five Iraqis, or around 4.6 million people, suffer from chronic poverty, according to details of a recent survey published yesterday by the United Nations’ World Food Program. The survey was conducted in February and early March in the country’s southern and central regions, just weeks before United States-led coalition forces attacked it.

The humanitarian relief agency said its survey was likely to be the last to have been carried out under the regime of Saddam Hussein, which has since been ousted by Allied forces.

According to the Rome-based organization, the survey indicates “a high level of chronic poverty and an alarming dependency on the monthly food rations that were established in Iraq in the early 1990s”.

“About 13 years of stringent economic sanctions, three wars in two decades and failing economic policies have impoverished a majority of Iraqi people and reduced them to relying heavily on free food handouts,” WFP’s representative in Iraq, Torben Due, said in a statement.

The study measured chronic poverty defined as a condition whereby a household or an individual becomes frequently unable to meet basic needs, including adequate food, water, clothing, shelter, health and basic education.

Meanwhile, cursing America, scores of gunmen fired in the air yesterday at the funeral of a former Iraqi Air Force man killed by US troops during a violent protest in Baghdad. “Revenge! Revenge!” several hundred mourners shouted as men with Kalashnikov assault rifles fired volleys into the air, in defiance of a US ban on carrying weapons in Iraq.

“There is no god but Allah, America is the enemy of Allah,” mourners chanted as they followed the coffin of Tareq Mohammed, one of two men shot dead at a demonstration on Wednesday. There was no sign of US troops in Baghdad’s impoverished Al-Hurriya district where Mohammed, a former air force non-commissioned officer, had lived with his wife and five children.

Mohammed was killed when sacked members of Iraq’s dissolved armed forces confronted US soldiers during furious protests outside the headquarters of the US-led administration in the capital. The US military said demonstrators had thrown stones at a convoy entering the compound and one had pulled out a weapon and begun shooting, prompting U.S. forces to respond.

Mohammed’s former colleagues who joined him in Wednesday’s protest denied the accusations, saying they were unarmed. “We were unarmed in a peaceful demonstration to demand our frozen salaries,” said one mourner, Khazaal Qatie, angrily. “Isn’t that terrorism, shooting at protesters?”

During the demonstration, protesters beat passing United Nations and press vehicles with shoes, and attacked some journalists, smashing their cameras. “They deprived us of our jobs and have not offered us new ones,” Qatie said of the US move to disband Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, security services and two ministries, throwing 400,000 people out of work.

The United States insists die-hard supporters of Saddam Hussein are behind a spate of deadly attacks on US troops — but many Iraqis believe American blunders are more to blame. They argue it is heavy-handed American raids, along with the failure to restore basic services, that are fuelling the violence and insecurity, not Saddam loyalists.

“The Americans are just using the Baath as an excuse to stay in the country... They don’t want an Iraqi government. So they just talk about the Baath,” said Ali Jassem, a unemployed Shiite Iraqi who lives in a slum. “We will rise up and fight the Americans. We have just moved from one dictatorship to another.”

The US military said some of the millions of dollars also seized in a raid had probably been set aside by members of Saddam’s outlawed Baath Party to pay supporters of the missing president to kill American troops. Few Iraqis are likely to be impressed by that claim. They say many Baathists have fled and some have been killed in apparent reprisal shootings, suggesting that anti-American sentiment, fuelled by unpaid salaries, insecurity and failing services is to blame for the violence, not Saddam’s henchmen.