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Wednesday, March 15 6:16 AM SGT

US CONGRESS REPORT SLAMS SANCTIONS ON IRAQ

WASHINGTON, March 14/00 (AFP) -

US-championed UN sanctions against Iraq bolster Saddam Hussein's regime while creating a humanitarian crisis, US congressional aides who traveled to Iraq charged in a report released Tuesday.

The document, detailing findings from what the staffers said was the first such visit since just after the 1991 Gulf War, was likely to provide ammunition to lawmakers who back legislation aimed at lifting the sanctions.

"It is members of Congress who are ultimately responsible" for US policy, said Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who went on the five-day trip in late July and early August 1999.

Last year, a bipartisan group of 70 representatives sent President Bill Clinton a letter urging the sanctions be lifted, citing what they said were UN estimates that the restrictions have led to the deaths of more than one million civilians, mostly children, from malnutrition and disease.

The staffers traveled to Iraq to evaluate the impact sanctions have on everyday Iraqis and US exports, as well as assess the public health effects of the US use of depleted-uranium ordnance during the Gulf War.

As well as hurting common Iraqis, the United States "have paid an economic, political and social price - in billions of dollars of direct costs and lost export revenue, in diminished influence with our allies ... and in a dangerously growing hostility to America by people throughout the Middle East," they concluded.

The staff said they learned from UN officials working in Iraq and citizens there that the sanctions, imposed after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, take a terrible toll on the nation's health, education and economic infrastructures despite an deal allowing Iraq to defray some humanitarian costs with oil sales.

Iraq is only authorized to export oil under strict UN supervision under an oil-for-food program. Several UN officials have recently resigned to protest what they say is the deal's failure to stem Iraq's humanitarian crisis.

"Program funds are barely enough for Iraqis' urgent and immediate physical needs, with nothing made available for intellectual needs. The result is complete intellectual deprivation," according to the report.

Moreover, sanctions have so taxed Iraq's once promising medical care system that hospitals lack basic equipment and medicine and children are dying from treatable diseases, the staffers wrote.

The report said that in addition to educated Iraqis heading abroad, crumbling schools and outdated textbooks, the sanctions have fostered growing extremism among younger Iraqis who take a harder line against the US and its allies than do Saddam Hussein and leaders of his Ba'ath Party.

"It is from these younger Ba'ath figures that pressure on Saddam Hussein is emerging from the right, challenging his 'too accommodating' stance towards the UN and the West," the report warned.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan indicated Tuesday in London that the United Nations may seek to further fine-tune sanctions against Iraq in a bid to diminish their effects on ordinary people.

In a report released Monday, Annan warned that Iraq's current oil output was unsustainable and recommended doubling to 600 million dollars the half-yearly allocation for its ailing oil industry from its UN-controlled sales of crude.