Max van der Stoel, special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, says that internal blockades of food and emergency supplies to Kurdish populations in northern Iraq threaten a disaster "on the scale of Bosnia or Somalia." Characterizing the human rights situation in Iraq as "absurd," he points out that "here we have one of the most oil-rich states of the world, and still tens of thousands of Kurds are in danger of freezing to death."