Iraq Razing Villages to Quash Dissent, U.S. Says

WASHINGTON — In a sweeping report on conditions inside Iraq, the United States charged Monday that President Saddam Hussein has razed villages in response to the most sustained resistance he has faced since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The State Department, which prepared the report, revealed newly declassified satellite photos showing villages that were recently leveled after small uprisings.

In Al Masha in southern Iraq, about 160 homes were bulldozed or gutted, the photos showed. In addition, tank columns attacked the towns of Rumaitha and Khudur after protests over food shortages, while homes and fields in the southern marsh areas were burned, local tribes expelled and the marshes drained and poisoned to prevent residents from returning, the report said.

“The scale and severity of Iraqi attacks on Shiite civilians in the south have been increasing steadily,” the report charged.

Resistance among Shiites has increased since the assassination in February of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr. “This is the longest period in which they have continuously resisted [Hussein’s] efforts to suppress them,” Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk told reporters.

The regime’s campaign follows “a real range of demonstrations and dissent throughout the south, even stretching up into Baghdad over the past six to nine months,” Indyk said. The sporadic but ongoing Shiite revolt “has clearly manifested in ways that the regime has had great difficulty in getting control of,” he said.

In Iraq’s northern Kurd-populated region, the report alleges, the regime has razed civilian areas and forced families and even entire villages to move south, resulting in at least 900,000 displaced people.

The report was released in advance of a critical, and potentially contentious, meeting Wednesday in London among representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Of the five, Russia, France and China oppose U.S. attempts to maintain complete sanctions until Baghdad complies with its previous agreements on weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has been increasingly frustrated in recent months as it has attempted to convince its former Gulf War allies that Baghdad, rather than Washington, is responsible for the deteriorating economic and social situation in Iraq. The State Department said it now wants to see the Iraqi leader indicted as a war criminal.

In addition to the direct attacks cited, the report says Baghdad has abused the so-called oil-for-food program, selling thousands of tons of food and humanitarian supplies and withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in imported goods. Hussein’s goal, the report states, is to use public suffering to pressure the international community to lift economic sanctions.

In 1996, Baghdad accepted a U.N. plan that allows Iraq to sell oil to pay for humanitarian goods. Iraq’s food imports are now at pre-Gulf War levels, so the problem is not availability of food but distribution, U.S. officials say.

The regime has withheld 50% of medicine, 60% of supplies for clean water and agriculture, and 40% of educational supplies that were legally imported as part of the U.N. deal to help alleviate the plight of the Iraqi people, the report claims. Medicine and medical supplies worth more than $200 million are stored in warehouses.

Of the $25 million set aside by the U.N. for nutritional supplements for children and pregnant and nursing mothers, Iraq has spent less than $2 million since 1996 and nothing in the past 18 months, it says.

Meanwhile, baby milk sold to Iraq through the U.N. program has shown up in shops throughout the Persian Gulf as part of a scheme to convert goods into funds for illicit purposes, according to the report.

This summer, U.N. patrols discovered a ship carrying 2,000 metric tons of rice and other goods exported from Iraq in exchange for hard currency.

“Baghdad’s refusal to cooperate with the oil-for-food program and its deliberate misuse of resources are cynical efforts to sacrifice the Iraqi people’s welfare in order to bring an end to U.N. sanctions without complying with its obligations,” the report charges.

Iraq is required to declare and destroy all of its weapons of mass destruction--ballistic missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons--before the United Nations considers lifting sanctions. But nine years after its invasion of Kuwait sparked the Gulf War, Iraq has not even revealed what arms it has, a process that was initially supposed to take 90 days.

Although it lacks extensive evidence, the United States believes Baghdad is intent on developing the world’s deadliest weapons. “If given control of Iraq’s resources, Hussein would use them to rearm and threaten the region, not to improve the lot of the Iraqi people,” the report concludes.

While the Iraqi people suffer, the regime has managed to divert enough resources to build a sprawling vacation resort city called Saddamiat al Tharthar 85 miles west of the capital. It includes an amusement park complete with a Ferris wheel, a man-made lake, two stadiums, hospitals and 625 homes for Iraq’s elite. It opened in April as part of celebrations marking Hussein’s birthday.

“There is no clearer example of the government’s lack of concern for the needs of its people than Saddamiat al Tharthar,” the report says. The regime also has spent more than $2 billion to pay for 48 new palaces for the Iraqi leader since the Gulf War’s end, it adds.