The United Nations is drawing up contingency plans to feed 10 million civilians, including more than 1 million refugees, in the event of a war in Iraq, Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Kenzo Oshima said yesterday at U.N. headquarters.

Speaking to reporters after Secretary General Kofi Annan and Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette briefed Security Council diplomats on the humanitarian planning, Oshima said the contingency plan includes pre-positioning in countries near Iraq 10 weeks' worth of food for 450,000 people, water, shelter and emergency health kits for 240,000 people and winter kits for 118,000 people.  These are all initial needs, he added.

He said war would disrupt the country's infrastructure, creating fuel shortages and shutting down water treatment plants.  Ten million people may need food aid during and after the war and 50 percent of the population will be without potable water, he said.  "It is assumed that 2 million people may be internally displaced" and that there will be 600,000 to 1.45 million refugees and asylum seekers, Oshima added.

The United Nations has three basic planning scenarios -- light, medium and heavy, said Oshima.  The plan he outlined was a medium scenario.

Several times during the press conference, Oshima said this planning did not mean the United Nations felt a war is a foregone conclusion.  "The secretary general does not believe that war is inevitable.  [He] continues to believe that inspections can work, that all avenues should be explored to find a peaceful solution," he said.  "But it is also important to underline that it is the responsibility of the United Nations to be ready for any contingence in Iraq."

"It is simply a manner of prudence," he added.

In December, the United Nations asked for $37.4 million, of which $30 million has been pledged, he said.  The United States has pledged $15 million.  But this money is "only for preparedness measures and does not represent actual requirements that might arise should a conflict occur," he added.  In the case of war, the United Nations will have to ask donors for another $90 million, he said.

He said the civilian population "is already highly vulnerable in Iraq" with 1 million children under age 5 malnourished, 5 million people lacking access to safe drinking water and sanitation and household food reserves that can only last six weeks.  Since so many people depend on food rations distributed by the government, any disruption of rations would require humanitarian agencies to distribute 460,000 tons of food a month, he said.  "This would be a gigantic task," he said, adding that this is four times the amount of food the United Nations delivered to Afghanistan once that country's war was over.

These calculations do not take into account those who will die or be injured.  "The United Nations is about helping people and not making predictions about possible casualties," he said.  "We are not in a position to predict the number of people that may be injured or killed in any military conflict.  We have not made any planning assumptions in this regard."

Another issue not in the United Nations' calculations is what happens if weapons of mass destruction are used.  "It is a rather sensitive issue," said Oshima.  "The U.N. does not have the capacity beyond providing limited information or some limited technical expertise."  He added, "We would eventually have to rely on member states to assist populations."

While the United Nations envisions itself as the primary provider of humanitarian aid, Oshima added, "If and when the country comes under occupation, of course the occupying powers would have certain obligations under international humanitarian law," in particular, the Geneva Conventions.  "The primary principle under the convention is for the occupying power to permit the civilian population to live life as normally as possible" and to ensure the people under occupation have access to food and medicine, he said.

The Center for Economic and Social Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has studied the humanitarian situation in Iraq since 1991, said yesterday that the United Nations is not prepared for the "humanitarian disaster" that will result from an invasion of Iraq.

"It is not just irresponsible, but a violation of ethical and legal principles not to address the humanitarian consequences of the war in advance," said Roger Normand, CESR's executive director.

At a news conference just hours before Annan and Frechette made their presentation, Normand said, "It is impossible to conduct this war without doing extraordinary damage to innocent men, women and children in Iraq."

He said the $30 million pledged so far is "only one day's worth of supplies."

Basing his conclusions on the findings of a research team that was in Iraq Jan. 17-30 and on confidential internal U.N. memos on the contingency plans Normand said the team was given in Iraq, he said the United Nations and relief agencies "are not prepared to handle this disaster.  The Iraqi population is far more vulnerable than it was in 1991 due to 12 years of sanctions and due to a reliance for survival" on the U.N. oil-for-food program, the government-run food distribution system and "a very fragile infrastructure."

Those U.N. documents will be available on an Iraq section of the center's Web site, he added.

The CESR's report on its findings, The Human Cost of War in Iraq, says, "It seems safe to predict that the humanitarian crisis resulting from war in Iraq would far exceed the capacity of U.N. and international relief agencies."  Therefore, the report says, it is "essential" for the Security Council to answers numerous questions including whether there are plans to prevent an increase in malnutrition and disease, what will happen to the Iraqi government's food distribution system, why the humanitarian plans are being developed "without necessary coordination among key actors," and "will the U.S. military allow international relief agencies independent access to affected populations?"

Sarah Zaidi, CESR's research director, said the precedent of Afghanistan is not a good sign.  After that war, the United States "was also going to provide food, medicine and rehabilitate the whole system and provide quite a bit of aid.  They haven't delivered on that promise at all," she said, "so unless Iraq is different because of the oil ... I'm a bit of a skeptic."

Normand said the need will be to increase "the existing system of food distribution, not by replacing it with dropped [food] packets from the same planes that will be bombing the country."  That method was used in Afghanistan.

Normand said CESR is not "an antiwar organization per se.  It's an organization that bases all of its findings and conclusions on the United Nations Charter and international law."  He said the study concluded that "regardless of the arguments, legal and otherwise, about the resort to force, the costs of war will be unacceptable high" (Jim Wurst, UN Wire, Feb. 14). 

Interaction, the United States' largest alliance of relief organizations, also yesterday criticized U.S. plans to help Iraqi civilians in case of war (Slavin/Diamond, USA Today, Feb. 14).

U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq Ramiro Lopes da Silva warned in an interview published today that another war in Iraq could cause a catastrophe without precedent in the Middle East, accused the international community of a lack of solidarity and lamented that the sanctions regime continues to affect an already vulnerable population.

Da Silva told Jornal de Noticias that if war comes to Iraq, the U.N. "oil-for-food" program will be totally worthless.  "The Iraqi population, contrary to the impression one gets in Baghdad, is extremely fragile and vulnerable, as a result of the country's involvement in two wars," he said.  "The war with Iran forced the government to divert funds that were intended for the development of infrastructure -- Iraq had one of the best health care and education systems in the region," he added.  "After the Gulf War, the internal problems that arose and the sanctions regime ... the population suffered total degradation, along the same lines with the collapse of basic services."

According to da Silva, 17 million Iraqis are entirely dependent on the monthly rations they get from the oil-for-food program.  Despite the program, da Silva said 50 percent of pregnant women are anemic, 30 percent of newborns are undernourished and 5 million Iraqis lack access to potable water.  "Imagine the drama," he said, if conflict arrives and Iraqis en masse begin to use unsafe supplies of water.

In marked criticism of the sanctions, da Silva said that restrictions on imports have prevented Iraq from increasing agricultural production, which could return life to "normal" in the country.  "As humanitarians, after 12 years of sanctions, we can question the fact that the embargo has not pressured the regime the way the Security Council believed it would and the punitive measures have fallen mostly on the population," he said (Domingos de Andrade, Jornal de Noticias, Feb. 14, UN Wire translation).

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees denied yesterday reports that it had signed an agreement with Jordan to set up two refugee camps along the country's border with Iraq. 

"There have been a lot of speculations, but we have not signed any agreement with Jordan," UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler told the Jordan Times.  "We are in touch with the government and we meet regularly, just like in other country in the region."

International relief officials said, however, that the two sides have reached a framework agreement to set up the camps, but noted that the main difficulty remains in securing needed funds for such camps.  The UNHCR estimates that as many as 35,000 refugees could flow into Jordan and that taking care of them for six months would require up to $11 million.  During the Gulf War, about 1.2 million Iraqi transited through Jordan (Dina al-Wakeel, Jordan Times, Feb. 14).