Scott Portman arrived in northern Iraq in August 1991, a few months after the end of the gulf war. He headed the International Rescue Committee’s relief program for the Kurds and other minorities inside the UN safe haven for a year, then spent two years in charge of the education, agriculture, health-care, and village-reconstruction programs of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. One of his first tasks was to survey the towns and villages that had been destroyed in Saddam Hussein’s campaign to depopulate rural Kurdish land in the late 80s—to find out which ones people had returned to and what they needed to get them through the coming winter. He was shocked by what he saw. More than 4,000 villages had been destroyed, in an area 300 miles long and up to 100 miles wide.
“In Iraq I came in contact with a very palpable evil,” he says. “To let that system continue indefinitely is more intolerable to me than the idea of a war to end it.”
But only a few weeks after the new sanctions were imposed, Portman says, they were being broken. He remembers seeing a thousand trucks lined up at the Turkish border in late 1992. Some were headed to Kurdish territory with relief supplies, but most were rolling toward Mosul and other cities in Iraq to buy diesel fuel. At first Portman’s agency and the UN had paid their drivers to haul relief supplies, but soon the truckers were willing to do it for free—so long as they could fill up with diesel in Mosul on the way back. They kept showing up with bigger and bigger fuel tanks. “It was ridiculous,” he says. “There would be these trucks with enormous fuel tanks and the bed of the truck perched on top of them.” But no one seemed to care that the sanctions were being ignored. “The U.S. was willing to go along, and the Turks certainly liked it. It was good for the Turkish economy, and it helped make up for some of the economic losses from the sanctions.”
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Saddam, characteristically, used this trade not only to reward the obedient but also to punish the disloyal. In the fall of 1992 trucks carrying UN-purchased supplies began blowing up soon after they entered Kurdish territory. One day Portman reached a convoy of ten trucks shortly after they’d exploded. “The first one blew, and the other drivers stopped and jumped out,” he says. “The rest went off like popcorn.” Amazingly, no one was hurt. But over the next few months the relief operations lost a third of their trucks, including a $250,000 shipment of medicine—the entire allocation for the Kurdish region—and drivers began refusing to haul in supplies. The relief workers suspected the Iraqis. The Iraqis blamed Kurdish bandits. Finally, Portman says, a British colonel caught security officials at an Iraqi checkpoint dropping taped grenades into the trucks’ fuel tanks—the tape would slowly dissolve, and after the trucks were in Kurdish territory the grenades would explode. The Americans and Europeans spent four months building two new roads across the mountains and never lost another truck.
After the war the Iraqi government rapidly repaired roads and bridges but paid little attention to the country’s water pumps and pipes, power stations, or sanitation systems—which the coalition bombers had deliberately targeted in hopes of increasing the pressure on Saddam. The government, Portman says, also found money to shore up its power. “The Iraqi leadership’s highest priority is to fund the overlapping security services, tribal leaders, and systems of patronage that make up the infrastructure of repression in Iraq,” he says. “Maintaining absolute control over dissent matters far more than repairing the water, health, food distribution, or transportation infrastructure.” Rend Rahim Francke wrote in a 1995 issue of the Middle East Report that Saddam took particularly good care of the Republican Guard and other elite military and security units. “At the same time,” she wrote, “security and intelligence measures were further tightened and any suspected unrest within the military was eradicated through execution and collective punishment. Across the spectrum of society, reprisals against any disaffection increased in scope and severity.”
The oil-for-food program—the largest humanitarian relief program ever, though Portman calls it “a little like trying to conduct the Marshall Plan with Hitler in power”—was soon delivering much more food and medicine to Iraq. But contaminated water remained the primary cause of preventable diseases and deaths, and the electrical equipment and machinery the Iraqis said they needed to repair power plants and damaged water and sewer lines was often held up by the U.S. and Britain, which refused to allow the sale of any equipment that might have military uses. Sometimes the holds on these dual-use items were perverse, sometimes they were justified. In 1992 Portman had watched the Iraqi government make a deal with the Kurdish administration to quietly sell off huge amounts of heavy machinery such as bulldozers and front loaders to Iran—just the sort of machinery the Iraqis now wanted to buy. He saw lines of 50 to 60 of these machines—some on trucks, some chugging along under their own power—at the Iranian border. The U.S. persuaded the Kurds to stop playing go-between, but the next year the Iraqis were selling more equipment through a southern port of entry. “Anything that could be hauled to Iran that had a high capital value,” says Portman, “was sold across the border for hard currency.”
“This system is also a means of social control,” says Portman. “If you have a hungry population that’s dependent on you, you can control the rest of their lives. They control where people live. Everyone has to be registered to get a ration card, so you can’t move without the security system knowing. The ration cards are also a way of tracking relatives of deserters and dissidents.”
