The cost in human suffering
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Aziz Nour is an Iraqi. In April 2000, after an absence of 20 years, he returned to his home country and witnessed first hand the desperate plight in which his compatriots find themselves, not least as a result of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations.

Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Second Gulf War, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq on 6 August 1990.

Those sanctions impose an almost complete embargo on trade with Iraq.

The embargo is not limited to weapons but includes thousands of items such as ambulances, books, cloth, hearing-aids, light bulbs, paint, washing-machines, etc.

The only relief from sanctions is an 'oil for food’ programme which permits Iraq to sell $5.2 billion worth of oil every six months. Thirteen per cent of that is earmarked for humanitarian supplies for the Kurdish region in the north and 53% can be used to buy humanitarian supplies for central and southern Iraq.

The international community acknowledges increasingly that after 10 years of sanctions the major victim of the embargo policy has not been Saddam Hussein’s regime but the civilian population of Iraq.

Aziz Nour saw the effects of such sanctions on Iraqis during a month-long visit to his birthplace.

Return to Nineveh

Aziz Nour

Dr Aziz Nour, 48, is the head of the Middle East Forum, on which CMS is represented. The Middle East Forum comes under the umbrella of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland.

Aziz was born ‘in the biblical city of Nineveh, also called Mosul, in northern Iraq’.

As a child he went to church school there, then to secondary school and the University of Mosul, from which he graduated in 1974 with a degree in Science.

He worked for a year as an assistant lecturer at the University of Basra and then came to do his PhD and post-doctorate training at London University. He trained in genetic engineering.

During the years until 1980 he went back to Iraq ‘perhaps, three times’. From 1980 to 2000 he lived and worked in England.

"After 20 years I decided to break out of my emotional straitjacket and go and see my country again, to witness the difference in it and see how I could contribute to the welfare of my family, friends and colleagues there, about whom I feel somewhat unqualified to speak because I was in a cushy environment, a laboratory or university environment in England while all my Iraqi friends and colleagues spent those years in a tank or in trenches, going through two wars - one with Iran and then the second Gulf War, in which Iraq had to face and fight a coalition of 33 countries and which has 'ended' in sanctions. My life being so different to theirs during those two decades, there’s the guilt of feeling opportunistic and hypocritical when I speak for them," says Aziz.

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