by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondence

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com)�The only way to stop the devastating loss of life that continues to cripple Iraq�including the preventable deaths from hunger and disease of more than 5,000 children under the age of five each month�is a quick end to U.S.-led sanctions, according to members of a delegation of Muslims and Arab Americans who just returned from Baghdad.

"Enough is enough," they insist. For more than 10 years, since the end of the Gulf War, the ordinary people of Iraq, but not the country�s political elites, have suffered under the harshest economic embargo in world history, representatives of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), American Muslim Council (AMC), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim Public Affairs Council, (MPAC), and Muslims Students Association (MSA) told reporters April 6.

"We have not punished the Nazis as much as we punished the Iraqi people. We have not punished Russia as much as we punished the Iraqi people. In fact we are helping Russia rebuild and recover, despite the fact that they are the nation that depleted the United States� resources and put us into a deficit for more than 50 years," said MAS representative Shaker Elsayed.

" Our message to the American public, to the policy makers is: 10 years is too long to punish an entire people," he said.

More than 1.5 million people, including 500,000 children under the age of five, have died as a result of the UN sanctions, imposed and maintained because of U.S. insistence, the delegation reported, citing UN figures.

Even the so-called "Oil for Food" program is "too little, too late," and has not eased the Iraqi suffering, the report states. Currently, the UN Sanctions Committee 661, which decides what goods are allowed or not allowed into Iraq, is holding up more than 1,600 contracts, including $2.9 billion worth of humanitarian supplies.

No aspect of Iraqi life has been spared the effects of the sanctions. Inflation has soared during the last 10 years, inflicting mass poverty on what was once one of the wealthiest, best educated, and most modern countries in the Arab world, according to Marvin Wingfield, who traveled there with a congressional delegation in 1990, before the Gulf War.

"I was impressed," said Mr. Wingfield, now director of Education and Outreach at ADC. "This is a country that is no longer a Third World country, I thought. It�s really going somewhere.

"But now with the war, the bombing, the sanctions for 10 years, all that has changed and Iraq has become one of the poorest countries in the world, and its society has been wrecked. The middle class has been wiped out, and the death toll on the civilian population are of such a scope that it can only be called genocidal," he said.

University professors, for example, earn the equivalent of $25 per month; a primary school teacher�s monthly salary is $2�the price of three eggs. The country�s health care system has broken down, and hospitals face massive shortages of basic medicines and supplies, such as antibiotics, anesthesia, syringes, and disinfectants, said members of the delegation.

There was a "pervasive stench of sewage," and the heart-wrenching sight of "children too weak to wake up from slumber," said a tearful Margaret Zaknoen, from MPAC.