A U.S. rights group which visited Iraq last month says that the United Nations’ six-year-old sanctions have devastated the country, and must be lifted.

The Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), in a report to be presented Tuesday to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali, argues that the sanctions are hurting only Iraq’s most vulnerable people. The collective punishment against Iraq’s people, the group argues, violates their human rights and should end.

“Saddam Hussein’s ruthless behaviour does not give the (U.N.) Security Council license to violate the dignity and humanity of 21 million Iraqis and hold them hostage to the policies of a government in which they have no voice,” says CESR Policy Director Roger Normand.

The CESR team, which returned from Iraq last month, says its findings support U.N. studies that estimate that infant mortality has increased five-fold since the United Nations began its embargo on virtually all trade with Iraq in August 1990.

According to CESR estimates, roughly half a million children died over the past six years from hunger or disease directly as a result of the sanctions’ effects on restricting availability of food or medicine.

Although humanitarian goods are excluded from the embargo, the Hussein regime claims it cannot afford to buy them since it is unable to sell oil — its principal means to obtain hard currency.

“The hospitals we visited were filled with sick and starving babies,” says Dr. Sarah Zaidi, the CESR’s science director. “Hunger was almost unheard of in Iraq before sanctions.”

“Iraq’s formerly modern infrastructure is falling apart due to a lack of supplies and spare parts,” Normand adds. “Raw sewage is flooding the streets. Water plants pump a feeble supply of contaminated water into people’s homes.”

Because inflation has boosted the cost of most basic foodstuffs above most families’ budgets, Iraq has instituted a system of public rationing. But rationed food, the CESR argues, only provides one-third of the public’s daily caloric needs.

The CESR report — a follow-up to the group’s 1991 review of the effect of sanctions — has added fuel to the fire at a time when few U.N. diplomats believe sanctions will be lifted soon.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, in praising the renewal of sanctions last week, said that the United Nations remains a long way away from “cooperation” with Iraq. Instead of waiting for sanctions to be lifted, Albright said, Iraq should accept Security Council Resolution 986, which would allow Baghdad to sell one billion dollars of oil every 90 days.

But Iraqi Ambassador Abdul-Amir al-Anbari, who leads the Iraqi delegation to discuss that resolution, has blamed the United States for blocking a deal with the United Nations last month.

According to al-Anbari, the two sides were near to clinching a deal acceptable to Iraq, which would allow Baghdad to distribute the money freed up from selling its oil, until Washington and London objected and insisted on harsher terms.

Such disputes have left a bitter taste for many U.N. diplomats, who worry the sanctions are hurting the wrong people.

“I see a very strong feeling of not (supporting) overall sanctions that will affect the people more than the leadership,” one Council ambassador, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS this week.

The belief that such sanctions can prod a country’s leaders, he said, is “a bit naive”, since discontent from the sanctions rarely affects the leadership.

Albright repeatedly has refused the blame for the hardships of sanctions-afflicted people. In Iraq, she argues, the Hussein government has built “pleasure palaces” for the elite, even as it claims it has no money to pay for food or medicine.

The United States and Britain maintain sanctions must be kept in place until the Hussein government proves that it will no longer threaten its neighbours and will scrap its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait sparked the sanctions in the first place, they note.

But that argument is disingenuous, because the goalposts for lifting sanctions keep changing, Normand says. “The real U.S. objective may be to keep sanctions indefinitely to prevent Iraq from ever threatening our strategic partners in the region, especially the oil-rich Gulf Sheikhdoms and Israel,” he argues.

What is needed, he says, is for the Council to spell out the exact conditions needed for Iraq to lift the sanctions, and then to maintain only an arms embargo and diplomatic sanctions until the conditions are met.

Iraq, however, is not waiting for such a possibility. Al-Anbari says he will keep working on a deal for limited oil sales, although talks with U.N. officials may recess this week, when Boutros-Ghali leaves New York.

One diplomat here told IPS this week that he hoped that deal could be reached, saying that Iraq’s acceptance of 986 would create “an atmosphere of understanding rather than confrontation.” The ambassador said a deal is very near.