In the largest act of defiance against the U.N. sanctions on Iraq, more than 100 Americans – including a former U.S. Attorney General – left for Baghdad Wednesday carrying some four million dollars’ worth of medicine.

The group, which calls itself the Iraq Sanctions Challenge and is led by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, claims that the nearly eight-year-old sanctions regime has led to deaths of as many as 1.5 million Iraqis.

“A death occurs in Iraq on the average every two or three minutes as a direct result of the sanctions,” Clark wrote the U.N. Security Council in a letter explaining the group’s mission. He accused the Council of violating the Geneva Convention’s prohibition of “starvation of civilians as a means of warfare” by its repeated extension of the sanctions regime.

The 15-nation Council extended sanctions without comment last week, and is not expected by U.N. diplomats to consider any significant change in the embargo until the next large-scale review of Iraq’s disarmament efforts in October. Iraq Sanctions Challenge, however, contends that the Council does not intend to lift the sanctions, regardless of progress in disarmament and other areas.

“Since February 1998, the Iraqi government has opened many sensitive sites to U.N. inspection teams,” the group noted in a statement issued last week. “This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that there is no evidence of an (active) Iraqi nuclear weapons programme … (But) it is clear that nothing Iraq’s government does will satisfy the U.S. and British authorities.”

The delegation, which includes members of Clark’s New York- based rights group, the International Action Centre, and several religious and peace groups including Pastors for Peace, intends to stay in Iraq for a week and to distribute antibiotics, anti- parisitics, heart medication and anti-malarial medicines.

The Council’s sanctions regime prohibits most commerce with Iraq but allows exemptions for the delivery of food and medicine – including all of the items being delivered by the Iraq Sanctions Challenge. Nevertheless, the group’s actions, including its vocal opposition to what it calls “the murderous U.S./U.N. sanctions on Iraq,” are clearly intended as a show of defiance.

The action comes at a time of growing concern by U.N. officials and various governments of the humanitarian cost of sanctions. The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 4,500 children die each month from sanctions-related hunger and disease.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), meanwhile, argued in a report last year that “it is mind-boggling that the price of the most basic food item, wheat flour, has risen by 11,667 times compared with (its cost in) July 1990,” when Iraq first provoked sanctions with its short-lived invasion of neighbouring Kuwait.

Worse consequences are expected in coming months, U.N. officials warn, as Iraq’s infrastructure may deteriorate sharply following several years in which Baghdad has been unable to buy the materials to make necessary repairs.

In an effort to address the humanitarian problems, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan this year proposed an expansion of an “oil-for-food” deal which currently allows Baghdad to sell two billion dollars of oil every six months to buy food and medicine.

Under the expanded plan, Iraq could sell 5.2 billion dollars of oil over a six-month period to buy not just food and medicine but also some crucial infrastructure repairs. The United Nations has asked for additional steps to patch up Iraq’s deteriorating network of oil wells and pipelines, arguing that it will not be able to meet the plan’s production levels without those repairs.

After months of hedging, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf admitted last week that Baghdad would comply with the oil- for-food deal and would soon develop for the United Nations a plan to distribute the proceeds of the oil revenues.

For Clark, a lawyer who served in President Lyndon Johnson’s Cabinet – and has since represented Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Liberian President Charles Taylor – the United Nations’ proposals are not good enough. He has argued in recent years that the sanctions regime constitutes a war crime, and that the intent of the embargo is “the destruction of a whole population.”

U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson last week reiterated U.S. concern over the humanitarian consequences of sanctions, but added that the measures would remain in place until Iraq’s destruction of its chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile weaponry has been verified and until questions about Kuwaiti prisoners of war and human rights have been addressed.