IRAQ: The United Nations estimates that a US war against Iraq could put more than 10 million Iraqis at risk from malnutrition and disease and in need of urgent assistance.
A 13-page "strictly confidential" contingency plan for aid to Iraq's 26.5 million people was drawn up last month by a senior UN task force with input from the UN Children's Fund, the World Food Programme, the World Heath Organisation and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. These agencies have called upon donors to provide $37 million in emergency aid and have begun stockpiling food, blankets, tents and other emergency supplies in countries neighbouring Iraq and elsewhere. Long-term aid could cost billions of dollars.
The UN predicted that warfare would immediately halt oil exports, close the country's main port at Umm Qasr, cut electrical power and road and rail communications, damage water supplies and sewage systems, and destroy the country's slender stocks of essential commodities. Infrastructure would be seriously degraded and facilities holding oil reserves would be significantly damaged.
The planners said that the distribution of rations would stop and diseases, including cholera and dysentery, could appear in "epidemic if not pandemic proportions". The World Health Organisation estimated that a war could inflict 100,000 traumatic injuries on civilians and indirectly affect an additional 400,000 people who could contract diseases as a result of the expected bombing of civilian infrastructure.
The planners said that as a result of the 1991 war and sanctions, the population was in no position to cope with an emergency, as was the case during the previous campaign. Prior to that conflict, the majority was "in full employment and had cash and material assets available to them to cope with the crisis".
In the intervening years, most have not been gainfully employed and have had to dispose of their assets, becoming "totally dependent on the government ... for a majority, if not all, basic needs." The UN assessment was that Iraqis "have no way of coping if they cannot access" government aid.
Those who drafted the report dismissed any comparison with the situation in Afghanistan following the US military intervention of 2001-02.
The population of Afghanistan is largely rural and self-reliant, while Iraq is an urbanised country dependent on the state for services and sustenance. Sixty per cent of the population, some 16 million people, rely on the monthly "food basket" for basic needs. Aware of the danger to this sector of the populace, the government has already issued a three-month "basket".
The UN estimated that 10.6 million Iraqis would be "in immediate need of humanitarian intervention" if there is a war: 2.2 million Kurds in the northern "safe haven," 5.4 million in the south, and 2 million internally displaced people from the central region and 900,000 refugees.
Aid agencies would also have to provide medical supplies since some items are in short supply or non-existent due to sanctions.
Some 5.2 million children under five and pregnant and lactating women "will be particularly vulnerable because of the likely absence of a functioning primary health care system in a post conflict situation," the report stated.
At least 3 million people will need therapeutic feeding and perhaps 2 million could require shelter.
The UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, ordered staff to draft the contingency plan after the Security Council adopted resolution 1441 which mandated the resumption of inspections for banned weapons of mass destruction.
His Canadian deputy, Ms Louise Frechette, is in charge of the effort to prepare for a possible humanitarian crisis.
A draft of the report was obtained by a Mennonite religious anti-war group which posted it on the web site of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq based at Cambridge University.
The UN had sought to keep the report secret.
