[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 45 (Thursday, March 20, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H2264-H2265]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             RECONSTRUCTION

  (Mr. MCDERMOTT asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include therein 
extraneous material.)
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, as the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war has 
begun, we must now turn our attention to the reconstruction. As we 
discuss the budget today, we must keep some facts in mind.
  In a country where 60 percent of the people are entirely dependent on 
the Oil-for-Food Program run by the United Nations, which was ended 2 
days ago, we are preparing to spend $12 billion a month bombing and $65 
million for food, water, sanitation, shelter and health.
  We have accepted full responsibility for the people of Iraq as of 
this day. We did the same for Afghanistan. We promised back in October 
of 2001, Bush and Blair said the conflict will not end, we will not 
walk away as the outside world has done before. The fact is we spent 
$6.5 billion bombing Afghanistan, and $300 million was all we would 
commit for the first year. Mr. Karzai was in this country the other day 
begging for aid. He got $50 million, and we told him $35 million has to 
go to build a hospital.
  I will include in the Record an article by George Monbiot.

                 A Scar on the Conscience of the World


 left behind to starve--a humanitarian disaster is engulfing Africa as 
        cash is poured into the war with Iraq and its aftermath

                          (By George Monbiot)

       There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption 
     of western politics than the disproportion between the money 
     available for sustaining life and the money available for 
     terminating it. We could, I think, expect that, if they were 
     asked to vote on the matter, most of the citizens of the rich 
     world would demand that their governments spend as much on 
     humanitarian aid as they spend on developing new means of 
     killing people. But the military-industrial complex is a 
     beast which becomes both fiercer and greedier the more it is 
     fed.
       As the United States prepares to spend some $12 billion a 
     month on bombing the Iraqis, it has so far offered only $65 
     million to provide them with food, water, sanitation, shelter 
     and treatment for the injuries they are likely to receive. A 
     confidential U.N. contingency plan for Iraq, which was leaked 
     in January, suggests that the war could expose around one 
     million children to ``risk of death from malnutrition.'' It 
     warns that ``the collapse of essential services in Iraq could 
     lead to a humanitarian emergency of proportions well beyond 
     the capacity of U.N. agencies and other aid organizations.'' 
     Around 60 percent of the population is entirely dependent on 
     the oil for food programme, administered by the Iraqi 
     government. This scheme was suspended by the U.N. yesterday, 
     leaving the Iraqis reliant on foreign aid. The money pledged 
     so far is enough to sustain the Iraqies for less than a 
     fortnight.
       It is hard to believe, however, that the U.S. Government 
     will leave them to starve once it has captured their country. 
     For the weeks or months during which Iraq dominates the news, 
     the U.S. will be obliged to defend them from the most 
     immediate impacts of the institutional collapse its war will 
     cause. Afterwards, like the people of Afghanistan, the Iraqis 
     will be first forgotten by the media and then deserted by 
     those who promised to support them.
       But even before the first troops cross the border, the 
     impending war has caused a global humanitarian crisis. As 
     donor countries set aside their aid budgets to save both 
     themselves and the United States from embarrassment under the 
     camera lights in Baghdad, they have all but ceased to provide 
     money to other nations. The world, as a result, could soon be 
     confronted by a humanitarian funding crisis graver than any 
     since the end of the Second World War.
       Every year, in November, the U.N. agencies which deal with 
     disasters launch what they call a ``consolidated appeal'' for 
     each of the countries suffering a ``complex emergency''. They 
     expect to receive the money they request by May of the 
     following year. The payments and promises they have extracted 
     so far chart the collapse of international concern for the 
     people of almost every nation except Iraq.
       In Eritrea, for example, the drought is so severe that the 
     water table has fallen by ten metres. Most of the nation's 
     crops have failed and grain prices have doubled. Seventy 
     percent of its 3.3 million people are now classified as 
     vulnerable to famine. The United

[[Page H2265]]

     Nations has asked the rich countries for $163 million to help 
     them. It has received $4 million, or 2.5 percent of the money 
     it requested.
       Burundi, where almost one-sixth of the inhabitants have 
     been forced out of their homes by conflict and natural 
     disasters, and which is now officially listed as the third 
     poorest nation on earth, has received 3 percent of its U.N. 
     request. Liberia, where rebels have rendered much of the 
     western part of the country uninhabitable, forcing some 
     500,000 people out of their homes, has been given 1.2 
     percent; Sierra Leone, where lassa fever is now rampaging 
     through the refugee camps, has received 1 percent; and 
     Guinea, which has recently taken 82,000 refugees from Cote 
     d'Ivoire, 0.4 percent. Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic 
     Republic of Congo have all received less than 6 percent.
       Much of the money for these invisible countries has come 
     from donor nations with relatively small economies, such as 
     Sweden, Norway, Canada and Ireland. ``The state of Africa'', 
     Tony Blair told his party conference in October 2001, ``is a 
     scar on the conscience of the world, but if the world 
     focused on it, we could heal it''. Well, let it now be a 
     scar on the conscience of Tony Blair.
       As a result of this unprecedented failure by the rich 
     nations to cough up, the people of the forgotten countries 
     will, very soon, begin to starve to death. The U.N. has 
     warned that ``a break in supplies'' to Eritrea ``is now 
     inevitable''. The World Food Programs has started feeding 
     fewer people there, but will run out of food within two 
     months. In Burundi it can, it says, continue feeding people 
     ``for another four weeks''. Beans will run out in Liberia 
     this month; cereals in May. One hundred thousand refugees in 
     Guinea could find themselves without food by August. Yet 
     neither of the two governments which are about to launch a 
     ``humanitarian war'' appear to be concerned by the impending 
     humanitarian catastrophes in the world's poorest nations.
       The aid crisis is now so serious that it is restricting 
     disaster relief even in nations which are considered by the 
     major powers to be geopolitically important. The U.N. 
     agencies have so far received just 2.9 percent of their 
     request for Palestine, and 8.4 percent of the money they need 
     in Afghanistan.
       The latter figure is, in light of the repeated promises 
     made by the nations prosecuting the war there, extraordinary. 
     ``To the Afghan people we make this commitment,'' Blair 
     pledged during the same speech in October 2001. ``The 
     conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the 
     outside world has done so many times before.'' Three months 
     later, the U.N. estimated that Afghanistan would need at 
     least $10 billion for reconstruction over the following five 
     years. The U.S., which had just spent $4.5 billion on bombing 
     the country, offered $300 million for the first year and 
     refused to make any commitment for subsequent years. This 
     year, George Bush ``forgot'' to produce an aid budget for 
     Afghanistan, until he was forced to provide another $300 
     million by Congress.
       The government, which has an annual budget of just $460 
     million--or around half of what the U.S., still spends every 
     month on chasing remnants of Al qaeda through the mountains--
     is effectively bankrupt. At the beginning of this month the 
     Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, flew to Washington to beg 
     George Bush for more money. He was given $50 million, $35 
     million of which the U.S., insists is spent on the 
     construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul. Karzai, in other 
     words, has discovered what the people of Iraq will soon find 
     out: generosity dries up when you are yesterday's news.
       If, somehow, you are still suffering from the delusion that 
     this war is to be fought for the sake of the Iraqi people, I 
     would invite you to consider the record of the prosecuting 
     nations. We may believe that George Bush and Tony Blair have 
     the interests of foreigners at heart only when they spend 
     more on feeding them than they spend on killing them.

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