A file photo of an undernourished Iraqi child.

GENEVA, March 31, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Malnutrition rates among Iraqi children have doubled and more than a quarter went hungry since the US-led invasion of the oil-rich country in 2003, a UN report unveiled.

Four percent of Iraqis under the age of five went hungry in the months after the occupation in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 8% last year, said the report, drafted by Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission’s special expert on the right to food.

Ziegler was quoted by the USA Today Wednesday, March 30, as telling the commission the results are to be blamed on the US-led invasion, which had been launched on claims of ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction -- none of which have been found so far.

The situation is “a result of the war led by coalition forces,” Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, adding that more than a quarter of Iraqi children don’t get enough to eat.

“The silent daily massacre of hunger is a form of murder,… It must be battled and eliminated,” ” Ziegler said.

Malnutrition, which is exacerbated by a lack of clean water and adequate sanitation, is a major killer of children in poor countries. Children who survive are usually physically and mentally impaired for life, and are more vulnerable to disease.

The US delegation did not respond to the report, and diplomats at the US mission to the UN’s European headquarters in Geneva also declined to comment, according to the American daily.

Ziegler also cited a US study in October 2004, estimating that as many as 100,000 Iraqis — many of them women and children — had died since the start of the US-led invasion, more than the number of Iraqis who would have normally died, based on the death rate before the invasion, which entered its third year this March.

“Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels,” said Ziegler, an outspoken Swiss sociology professor and former lawmaker whose previous targets have included Swiss banks, China, Brazil and Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Governments, the report said, must recognize their extra-territorial obligations towards the right to food and should not do anything that might undermine access to it of people living outside their borders.

That point is aimed clearly at the United States, but Washington, which has sent a large delegation to the Human Rights Commission, declined to respond to the charges, according to the BBC News Online.

Zeigler’s presentation compiled the findings of studies conducted by other specialists.

In reporting the 8 percent malnutrition rate among Iraqi youngsters, the Norwegian-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science said in November that the figure was similar to the levels in some African countries, the poorest on earth.

Iraq was generally regarded as having good nutrition rates in the 1970s and 1980s, but problems emerged when the UN Security Council imposed sanctions after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

A report by a London-based medical charity Medacat said last November that Iraqis would continue to suffer the brunt of the US-British invasion for years and “maybe generations” to come with the “alarming deterioration” of the health care system in the war-ravaged country.

It added that the invasion has caused “a further deterioration in the health of the Iraqi people and contributed to the chronic stress on the environment”.