- Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children aged under five
nearly doubled last year because of chaos caused by the US-led occupation,
a United Nations expert said yesterday.
-
- Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's special
expert on the right to food, said more than a quarter of Iraqi children
do not have enough to eat and 7.7% are acutely malnourished - a jump from
4% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion.
-
- Reporting to the commission's headquarters in Geneva,
the Swiss professor claimed the situation was "a result of the war
led by coalition forces".
-
- If confirmed, the estimates would be an indictment of
an occupation which was supposed to improve the lives of a population crushed
by Saddam Hussein.
-
- Billions of dollars-worth of aid flowed into Iraq from
the fall of Saddam Hussein regime's in April 2003. But the regime's collapse
and widespread violence destroyed jobs and made aid distribution difficult.
-
- Prof Ziegler based some of his analysis on a US study
in October 2004 which estimated that up to 100,000 extra Iraqis, mostly
women and children, had died since the invasion than would have been expected
to before the war.
-
- "Most died as a result of the violence, but many
others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions,
reflected in increasing child mortality levels," he said.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1448680,00.html
|
