[former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright died on March 23, 2022. The corporate press lionized her, but we remember how she defended the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq in the early1990's. See the very bottom of this page for her exact words. For several years we tried to mark May 12 as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.]
Iraq Genocide Memorial Day - 2015
May 12, 2015
March 24 is the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. While the U.S. government won't describe it as "genocide" there certainly is discussion of the Turkish denial of the mass murder in the corporate media. However, the more recent genocide in Iraq committed by U.S. presidents, Congress and high officials via the sanctions 1990-2003 is never mentioned in the corporate media. We call for May 12 to be remembered as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day. May 12, 1996 was the day U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright admitted on "60 Minutes" that the sanctions had up to that point killed over 500,000 children.
Heller op-ed in the New Haven Register mentions the genocide
On April 19, 2015 Heller wrote to "60 Minutes" at CBS:
I read Scott Pelly's statement explaining why he will be showing "disturbing video" of the sarin gas attack in Syria tonight. He said, "That's not the kind of thing you want to report on for acouple of days and then walk away and never remember against. You want to never forget that that kind of thing happened - and that where 60 Minutes comes in."
I agree. We should never forget this atrocity by the Assad regime.
However, I want to ask why 60 Minutes has forgotten an atrocity that in once reported on and then never mentioned again. On May 12, 1996 Leslie Stahl had an extraordinary piece on the effects of the sanctions against Iraq, showing Iraqi hospitals without basic supplies, how the sanctions had killed up to that time over 500,000 children. She interviewed then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Albright. The ambassador made no dispute of the half million dead figure, but justified the deaths as as "worth it". She said the deaths were "worth it" so that the U.S. would not have to fight Iraq again in another Gulf War. She essentially admitted to crimes against humanity.
Yet, to my knowledge 60 Minutes has never brought up the subject again. The sanctions continued more or less for another seven years. High U.N. officers quit their posts in protest, but 60 Minutes did not go back to the subject. Denis Halliday, who had been U.N. Assistant Secretary-General, who was one of those who resigned his U.N. post estimated the sanctions killed one million Iraqis.
I urge you on the 19th anniversary of your excellent report to look at sanctions again. Talk about the effects of the sanctions, the people who ordered them and their subsequent careers. No one was fired, jailed or even demoted for ordering the sanctions.
Along that line I would also ask that you look at the case of New York cancer doctor, Dr. Rafil Dhafir. He is in jail with a 22 year sentence for breaking the sanctions and sending money and goods to Iraq. He arrested in 2003 with the media saying a "terrorist" had been apprehended. However, the major "crime" for which he was convicted was money laundering. He was sending money to Iraq to help those affected by the sanctions. Surely his breaking of U.S. regulations was a less severe offense than the killing one million people in peace time. His case would make an interesting story.
Iraq Genocide Memorial Day 2014
In 1990 Saddam Hussein's military conquered Kuwait. The U.S. and Britain made the U.N. enforce sactions banning all trade with Iraq. After the defeat of Hussein in 1991 and his withdrawal from Kuwait sanctions "eased" and Iraq could supposedly freely import food and medicine, however, sanctions on oil sales lasted for at least 12 more years. Without money Iraq could not import and Iraqis starved and died of disease by the hundreds of thousands. The supposed reason for this (illegal) mass killing of civilians was that Hussein was hiding "weapons of mass destruction" and was a "threat to the world". On national TV in '96 Clinton's U.N. Ambassador Albright was questioned about an estimate that 567,000 children had died because of the sanctions. She never denied the awful charge, but said the deaths were "worth it". While Albright was a willing participant in the crime remember she was administering the policy started by President George Bush and continued by her boss President Bill Clinton (and later by George W. Bush). Albright is widely reviled by the Left for what she did on Iraq, but Clinton has gotten away pretty much scott free as has the First Lady of that time, Hillary Clinton.
22 Second excerpt from "60 Minutes" May 12, 1996
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright Admits Sanctions Killed 500,000 Children
"Albright Questioned in 2013 and Answers with Gibberish
Followed by Questioner
At 2:20 She Claims She's Apologized for "the statement"
2013 Judge Dismisses Fine Against Bert Sacks for Defying Iraq Sanctions
Rafil Dhafir Still Serving Decades in Prison for Breaking Iraq Sanctions - 2014 Interview with Lynne Jackson on "The Struggle"
Joy Gordon, author of "Invisible War", a book about the Iraq sanctions speaks on Democracy Now! in 2010.
Iraq Genocide Memorial Day 2013
Article by Stanley Heller (see article lower down on the page.)
Was it Genocide? Samantha Powers and Jeremy Scahill Disagree (In the middle of the article look for: "SAMANTHA POWER: No, but we can talk about that. I don’t think the Clinton administration set out to deliberately destroy the Iraqi people as such. ")
Madeleine Albright Voted 23rd "most trusted" in Readers Digest 2013 poll - see her quote about women
Cartoons on Iraq Sanctions by Bill Deutsch of Ampersand
Cartoon: Bill Clinton and the Iraq Sanctions
Cartoon: Top Ten Reasons Americans Don't Feel Responsible for Iraqi Deaths
Cartoon: Oil Empire
Cartoon: Bloody Hands 2008
An Iraqi Remembers the Sanctions - Audio Interview Sabah al-Mukhtar May 2012
Cartoon: Tut, tut, not until you rise up and overthrow Saddam
Joy Gordon author or Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions talks on Democracy Now! - 2010
Willful Blindness - Chris Toensing's Review of Joy Gordon's book
Worth It - Andrew Cockburn 2010
Iraq Genocide Memorial Day 2012
At a meeting held on May 12 a banner that had been held for years protesting the genocidal sanctions against Iraq was unfurled to mark Iraq Genocide Memorial Day. It took place during a moment of silence during a meeting sponsored by the Middle East Crisis Committee , Council on American-Islamic Relations (CT), We Refuse to Be Enemies, and Tree of Life Education Fund.
Mention of this event in the Eurasian Review, Russia's "Pravda" and Egypt's "Al-Ahram"
May 12, 2012, the Sixteenth Year Anniversary
of Madeleine Albright's Admission
that the Sanctions Had Killed Massive Numbers of Iraqi Children
What Albright Said in 1996 Albright Confronted 2012
Bert Sacks Reflects this April...and in May
Bert Sacks had been to Iraq nine times and saw the terrible effects of sanctions first hand
Note towards the end of the article one of the British men responsible for the sanctions expresses some regrets for his role.
A Special Place in Hell - by Felicity Arbuthnot
Reading Suggestions for Madeleine, Bill and the George's
Video with a call to observe Iraq Genocide Memorial Day
Iranian People Are Main Victims of Current Sanctions
Audio Interview: Stanley Heller talks about Iraq Genocide Memorial Day
in the last ten minutes of Counterpoint, (interviewed by Scott Harris)
Iraq Genocide Memorial Day 2011
May 2011, the Fifteenth Year Anniversary
of Madeleine Albright's Admission
that the Sanctions Had Killed Massive Numbers of Iraqi Children
Protest Banner Carried at Demonstrations
What Albright Said on "60 Minutes" (see below)
13 Years of Terrible Iraq Sanctions - Phone Interview with Kathy Kelly
Dedicated to Madeleine Albright on Behalf of the Children of Iraq - Felicity Arbuthnot
Albright's Admission After 15 Years - Stanley Heller
Reflecting on the Remark that it was "Worth it" - Simon Harak
A Proposal: May 12 Iraq Genocide Day - Stanley Heller
The Debate in "The Nation" about Sanctions
Albright's Admission After 15 Years - Stanley Heller
15 years after the notorious Madeleine Albright interview the issue is mostly forgotten. She admitted to an unspeakable crime, the deliberate use of sanctions to kill civilians, mostly children, in huge numbers. It was on “60 Minutes” May 12, 1996. Leslie Stahl had been to Iraq with a news crew and was given, as she said, complete freedom to walk around hospitals and observe. She was appalled at the lack of equipment in the hospitals, the reuse of gauze in surgery and the multitude of flies.
So she asks then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.Madeleine Albright about the deaths.
Leslie Stahl: We have heard that a half a million children have died. I'm mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. You know, is the price worth it? Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think, we think the price is worth it
Half a million children have died? You would think Americans would have gagged, would stormed into the streets in disgust, but no, Saddam had been made into such a devil that the Administration could do anything to any Iraqi without worry.
The sanctions started back in August 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq was sealed off in terms of imports, not even foodstuffs and medicine. Once the war ended there was almost immediate warnings of civilian catastrophe by a group of Harvard doctors. The ban on food imports ended, but without oil sales there was no money to buy the food Iraq needed.
There were other reports of growing crisis but none had much impact until 1995. Two researchers for the UN Food and Agricultural Oragnization wrote to the British medical journal “The Lancet” and stated that an FAO study had determined that a likely 567,000 children under the age of 5 had died because of the sanctions.
That made the national news.
But it didn’t mean anything to the Clinton Administration. I spoke in the ‘90’s to Peter Pellett from University of Massachusetts who headed the Food and Agriculture mission to Iraq in 1995. I asked him who called him, who from the U.S. government asked for details about the horrific numbers. He said no one contacted him.
We have a small committee in CT, the Middle East Crisis Committee. We agonized over the pictures of the tiny babies, starving and dying in Iraq. We saw the video collected by the Ramsey Clark delegations and we heard from Kathy Kelly. We had one picture of a young woman and starved baby and put it onto a banner. “Stop Killing Iraqis” it said. We even rented billboard in the New Haven area with the same picture and message. Not much respose. Thousands saw the picture and the message, but almost none got in touch with us.
Iraqis evidently were children of a lesser god..
At the end of 1996 the U.N. started an “oil for food” program. Iraq would be allowed to sell oil, the money would be deposited in banks in New York and a U.N. committee would decide what Iraqi purchases would be allowed to go through. Supposedly billioons in goods got into Iraq, but it wasn’t nearly enough. So much had fallen apart over the years the food and the driblets of equipment only slowed down the killing.
Like gods the Sanctions Committee could determine life and death for Iraqis. The committee was obsessed with the concept of “dual use”. If there was any conceivable military use for an item, it was virtually impossible to bring it in. And the committee played games/ Father Simon Harak told how they would allow a vaccine in that required refrigeration, but then not allow in the parts for refrigerators so the vaccine would go bad.
In 1998 two top U.N. officials in Iraq resigned over the sanctions, Denis Halliday, and Hans von Sponeck. Later Jutta Burhardt the World Food Program representative in Baghdad quit in disgust.
This certainly raised spirits of human rights activists for a while. But the sanctions rolled on year after year and the children continued to die.
Finally Iraq was shocked and awed. The sanctions on imports ended once the Empire had Iraq safely within its talons.
There was a high profile investigation, not of the genocide by sanctions, but of the “oil for food” program. Politicians went into high dudgeon because a few U.N. officials were making money on the side. Outside of that one piece by Leslie Stahl on “60 Minutes” I can’t think of any other questioning of any official about the deaths caused by the sanctions.
Madeleine Albright went on to honor after honor. She wrote an autobiography book a few years ago and admitted on page that the “60 Minutes” interview made her look bad. She wrote another book about jeweled pins she collected. I suggested on a website she include a jeweled child’s skull in her collection. Today’s she’s Honorary Chair of the World Justice Project. Bill Clinton is more popular than ever. His wife starts wars for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Many people worked hard to expose the sanctions. Voices in the Wilderness broke the sanctions openly and braved (and ignored) tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Did it do any good? Hard to know. Maybe it made the terms of “oil for food” more liberal. Maybe not. Could we have done better? Hard to say. Saddam Hussein was a made to order devil. He never even admitted that the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands for fear it would undermine his people’s respect for him.
The images of the starving Iraqi children fade. There are always new horrors to take their place. Besides we got Bin Laden and it's fist bumping time.
An article on Iraq Genocide Memorial Day
By Stanley Heller
A few weeks ago U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry transmitted his first "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices". In his message he says, "The United States continues to speak out unequivocally on behalf of the fundamental dignity and equality of all persons."
There follows a detailed report on all the countries of the world. All the countries get a report card from the great defender of dignity and equality, the great father looking down on all the children
One country is excluded, the United States itself.
What utter gall for the U.S. government to judge other countries. After what it did in Iraq what nerve does it have to tell others how to behave?
Forget "Shock and Awe" and the decade of occupation. Look at the 13 years of sanctions from 1990 to 2003, 13 years of massive hunger, sickness and disease, and immense numbers of deaths. In 1995 an article in the UK medical journal the Lancet UN Food and Agricultural researchers estimated that 567,000 children had died from the sanctions. And the sanctions still had another eight years to run. Denis Halliday who resigned as Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations in protest over the sanctions estimated that the sanctions had killed over a million Iraqis. Who can forget the pictures of the starved children brought into the hospitals or children with cancers or other diseases who had no access to the medicines that would have save them.
But it wasn't just children who died, nor was it just the old and sick. Jenan Ezzat, the wife of the conductor of the Iraqi National Orchestra burned to death in front of him because of a faulty kerosene lamp. Iraqis used those antiquated lamps because sanctions cut off electricity for a good part of every day.
George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and the other authorities and politicians did this killing without any opposition from those in power. They claimed they were doing it to keep Saddam Hussein's "threat to the world" safely contained. The U.S. media for the most part kept quiet except for one major lapse. Someone on the "60 Minutes" TV program must have been outraged by the Lancet report and Leslie Stahl did an outstanding segment called "Punishing Saddam". She went to Iraq and walked in the hospitals empty of supplies and looked at the emaciated fly covered babies. Then she interviewed the then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright who was carrying out Clinton's policy. On May 12, 1996 the show was aired. Part of the interview included this interchange:
Leslie Stahl: We have heard that a half a million children have died. I'm mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. You know, is the price worth it?
Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think, we think the price is worth it
This was admission of mass murder.
Many, many government leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere were responsible for deliberately killing Iraqi civilians as a way of influencing Saddam Hussein. Yet, the only person I think who ever went to jail for the sanctions, was Dr. Rafil Dhafir. He wasn't imprisoned for creating the sanctions, but for breaking them. Dhafir was an upstate New York cancer doctor who founded a charity which sent money to Iraq. He was arrested in Feb. 2003 at the height of the hysteria about Iraq and the public was made to believe he was involved with acts of terrorism. He was never allowed bail, was found guilty of violating the sanctions and other white collar crimes like technical violations of the Medicare law. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison and is sitting to this day in a special Indiana high security prison.
Our committee in Connecticut was founded in 1982 over outrages done to Palestinians, but during the '90's we did what we could to oppose the sanctions. Several of us swore out a police complaint against Madeleine Albright in the late '90's when she spoke in Middletown CT at Wesleyan University. Some were arrested for interrupting when George H.W. Bush was being honored at another Connecticut college.
The hundreds of thousands killed by sanctions will never come back to life, but at least we can remember them. For the past several years we have called for the May 12, the date of Madeleine Albright's infamous admission, to be commemorated as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day. We have an old banner showing a starving Iraqi child that we unfurl and we write about what was done to Iraqis our site.
We hope eventually the memorial will be marked internationally as is the bombing of Hiroshima in many cities around the world. The genocide in Iraq wasn't a tragedy or a mistake. It was a massive crime and though we know the guilty will never be punished at least we should start compiling the names of those who took part in the atrocity and list them on the pages of shame.
One U.S. government action that is conceivable is the pardoning of Dr. Dhafir. He's been imprisoned now for ten years. He never had anything to do with terrorism or supporting Saddam's government. Whatever violations of U.S. law he committed surely have been paid for by him many times over the last decade and balanced by the lives he saved in Iraq. He should be set free.
Stanley Heller is Executive Director of the Middle East Crisis Committee
What Albright Said on "60 Minutes"
A letter by researchers of the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization in late 1995 included an estimate that 567,000 children had died from the sanctions.
On May 12, 1996 “60 Minutes” did a piece called “Punishing Saddam”. Leslie Stahl went to Iraq, was given free entry to hospitals and saw pitiful equipment, starving babies and flies. She interviewed then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright. This is the key quote:
Leslie Stahl: We have heard that a half a million children have died. I'm mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. You know, is the price worth it?
Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think, we think the price is worth it Stahl pressed on
Stahl: Even with the starvation?
Albright: I think Leslie it is hard for me to say this because I am a humane person, but my first responsibility is make sure that United States forces do not have to go and refight the Gulf War.
Albright never denied the charge that huge numbers of children had died because of the sanctions. Later in her autobiography she wrote:
I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. […] As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong. […] I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is no one’s fault but my own.
A classic non-denial denial. She doesn’t say that the sanctions didn’t kill the children only that poor Madeleine had fallen into a trap.
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