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Denis Halliday
In 1998, after a thirty-four-year career with the United Nations—including as an assistant secretary general and the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq—Denis Halliday resigned when the U.N. Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq.
I think the United States and its population, who voted these governments in, need to understand that the children and the people of Iraq are just like the children of the United States and England and their people.
Halliday saw firsthand the devastating impact of this policy, which led to the deaths of more than 500,000 children under the age of five and hundreds of thousands of older children and adults. He called the sanctions a genocide against the people of Iraq.
Since 1998, Halliday has been a powerful voice for peace and for human rights around the world. He sailed in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2010, when ten of his companions on a Turkish ship were shot and killed in an attack by the Israeli armed forces.
I interviewed Halliday from his home in Ireland on April 1, 2021.
Q: Twenty years after you resigned from the United Nations, the United States is now imposing similar “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, denying their people access to food and medicines during the pandemic. What would you like to say to Americans about the real-world impact of these policies?
Denis Halliday: The sanctions imposed by the Security Council against Iraq, led very much by the United States and Britain, were unique in the sense that they were comprehensive. They were open-ended, meaning that they required a Security Council decision to end them, which of course never actually happened—and they followed immediately upon the [1991] Gulf War.
The Gulf War, led primarily by the United States but supported by Britain and some others, undertook the bombing of Iraq and targeted civilian infrastructure, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and they took out all electric power networks in the country.
This completely undermined the water treatment and distribution system of Iraq, which depended on electricity to drive it, and drove people to use contaminated water from the Tigris and the Euphrates. That was the beginning of the death-knell for young children, because mothers were not breast-feeding, they were feeding their children with child formula, but mixing it with foul water from the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
In addition, these conflicts introduced a new weapon called depleted uranium, which was used by the U.S. forces driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. That was used again in southern Iraq in the Basra area, and led to a massive accumulation of nuclear debris which led to leukemia in children, which took three, four, or five years to become evident.
When I got to Iraq in 1998, the hospitals in Baghdad, and also of course in Basra and other cities, were full of children suffering from leukemia. Those children, we reckon perhaps 200,000 children, died of leukemia. At the same time, Washington and London withheld some of the medicines and treatment components that leukemia requires, again, it seemed, in a genocidal manner, denying Iraqi children the right to remain alive.
So I think the United States and its population, who voted these governments in, need to understand that the children and the people of Iraq are just like the children of the United States and England and their people.
We kill people with sanctions. Sanctions are not a substitute for war—they are a form of warfare.
Q: How can the United Nations address the problem of a powerful, aggressive country like the United States that systematically violates international law and then abuses its veto and diplomatic power to avoid accountability?
Perhaps the only good thing coming out of COVID-19 is the slow realization that, if everybody doesn’t get a vaccine, we fail.
Halliday: When I talk to students, I try to explain that there are two United Nations: There’s a United Nations of the Secretariat, led by the Secretary General and staffed by people like myself and 20,000 or 30,000 more worldwide, through the United Nations Development Programme and the agencies. We operate in every country, and most of it is developmental or humanitarian. It’s good work, it has real impact, whether it’s feeding Palestinians or it’s UNICEF work in Ethiopia.
Where the U.N. collapses, in my view, is in the Security Council, and that is because, in Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, having noted the failure of the League of Nations, decided to set up a United Nations that would have a controlling entity, which they then called the Security Council. And to make sure that worked, in their interests I would say, they established this five-power veto group, and they added France and China. And that five is still in place.
The tragedy is that the five veto powers are the very member states that violate the Charter, violate human rights conventions, and will not allow the application of the International Criminal Court to their war crimes and other abuses.
Q: Could the General Assembly possibly be a venue to build support for Iraq to claim reparations from the United States and the United Kingdom, or is there another venue where that would be more appropriate?
Halliday: The tragedy is that the decisions of the Security Council are binding decisions. Every member state has got to apply and respect those decisions. If you violate a sanctions regime imposed by the Council as a member state, you’re in trouble. The General Assembly resolutions are not binding.
[The U.N.] has no power left, we have no influence left, because they know who runs the organization, they know who makes the decisions. It’s not the Secretary-General. It’s not people like me. We are dictated to by the Security Council.
I resigned, effectively, from the Security Council. They were my bosses during that particular period of my career.
Q: Now, what is happening in Afghanistan is that the Taliban once again control half the country. We’re approaching the spring and the summer when the fighting traditionally gets worse, and so the United States is calling in the U.N. out of desperation because, frankly, without a ceasefire, their government in Kabul is just going to lose more territory.
Halliday: What’s tragic is that, in our lifetime, the Afghanis ran their own country. They had a monarchy, they had a parliament—I met and interviewed women ministers from Afghanistan in New York—and they managed it. It was when the Russians interfered, and then the Americans interfered from 1979 on, and then Bin Laden also set up his camp there in 1979, and that became justification for destroying what was left of Afghanistan.
And then Bush, Cheney and a few of the boys decided, although there was no justification whatsoever, to bomb and destroy Iraq, because they wanted to think that Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda, which of course was nonsense. They wanted to think he had weapons of mass destruction, which also was nonsense. The U.N. inspectors said that again and again, but nobody would believe them.
It’s deliberate neglect of the one last hope. The League of Nations failed, and the United Nations was the next best hope and we have deliberately turned our backs upon it, neglected it and distrusted it. When we get a good Secretary General like Dag Hammarskjöld, we murder him. He was definitely killed, because he was interfering in the dreams of the British in particular, and perhaps the Belgians, in Katanga. It’s a very sad story, and I don’t know where we go from here.
Q: Where we seem to be going from here is to a loss of American power around the world, because the United States has so badly abused its power. We keep hearing that this is a Cold War between the United States and China, or maybe the United States, China, and Russia, but I think we all hopefully can work for a more multipolar world.
Halliday: Perhaps the only good thing coming out of COVID-19 is the slow realization that, if everybody doesn’t get a vaccine, we fail, because we, the rich and the powerful with the money and the vaccines, will not be safe until we make sure the rest of the world is safe, from COVID and the next one that’s coming along the track undoubtedly.
With the climate crisis and all the other issues related to that, we need each other more than ever perhaps, and we need collaboration. It’s just basic common sense that we work and live together.