A senior European Union official said yesterday it was time to look again at the international sanctions which have been in place against Iraq for more than seven years.
The EU Humanitarian Affairs Commissioner, Ms Emma Bonino, said the measures had left Iraq facing "unbearable hardships" and complained that aid bought under the UN's food-for-oil deal was taking too long to reach the people who needed it.
"The Iraqi experience gives rise to a number of questions about whether we should not reconsider the way economic sanctions are drawn up, decided and applied," she told a conference in London on how best to implement an expanded food-for-oil deal.
"We must remember that sanctions have humanitarian side-effects which affect innocent populations and which, if unchecked, can help to strengthen dictators," said Ms Bonino, who visited Iraq last August.
Baghdad, which dismissed the two-day conference as "evil", said some 1.5 million people had died because of medical supplies and food shortages since sanctions were imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Ms Bonino said political circumstances in Iraq had caused some of the problems, but added: "It would be unfair not to bear in mind that we, the international community, have also played a part in the disarray of Iraqi society."
The UN says the sanctions cannot be lifted until Baghdad shows it has destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction.
Ms Bonino said although the UN had been perfectly right to impose sanctions, it was the ordinary people rather than the leadership who were suffering.
"From a strictly humanitarian point of view, implementing the sanctions imposed on Iraq to the bitter end and leaving things at that will not do," she said.
Ms Bonino told the conference that given the problems experienced during the first food-for-oil deal, steps had to be taken to ensure the new expanded agreement did not founder in a mass of red tape and inefficiency. The talks focus on how to help the UN implement a new deal which allows Iraq to sell $5.3 billion (£3.78 billion) worth of oil every six months, up from $2 billion.
Britain hopes the conference will soften criticism from some Arab nations that the West is not interested in the Iraqi people's suffering.
The British International Development Secretary, Ms Clare Short, said one priority was to ensure enough food was supplied to central and southern Iraq. "With the volume of resources now available to the government of Iraq there is simply no reason why children should be starving. But they are, and we must help them." The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Mr Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, said the conference interfered with Iraq's internal affairs and he dismissed as "helpless and shameful" Britain's preparations for the talks.