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NEWS STORY
The
Guardian
February 7, 2003
By
John Pilger
Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is
dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls
in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a
plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a
cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of
Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40
per cent of the population in this area will get cancer:
in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards.
Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no
history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff
of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the
contamination, because we are not allowed to get the
equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even
to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We
suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans
and British in the Gulf War right across the southern
battlefields."
Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations
Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied
equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated
battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same time,
the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the
Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of
vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even pain-killers.
"For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We
see children die from the kind of cancers from which,
given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate."
Three children died while I was there.
Six other children died not far away on January 25,
last year. An American missile hit Al Jumohria, a street
in a poor residential area. Sixty-three people were
injured, a number of them badly burned. "Collateral
damage," said the Department of Defence in Washington.
Britain and the United States are still bombing Iraq
almost every day: it is the longest Anglo-American bombing
campaign since the second world war, yet, with honourable
exceptions, very little appears about it in the British
media. Conducted under the cover of "no fly zones", which
have no basis in international law, the aircraft,
according to Tony Blair, are "performing vital
humanitarian tasks". The ministry of defence in London has
a line about "taking robust action to protect pilots" from
Iraqi attacks - yet an internal UN Security Sector report
says that, in one five-month period, 41 per cent of the
victims were civilians in civilian targets: villages,
fishing jetties, farmland and vast, treeless valleys where
sheep graze. A shepherd, his father, his four children and
his sheep were killed by a British or American aircraft,
which made two passes at them. I stood in the cemetery
where the children are buried and their mother shouted, "I
want to speak to the pilot who did this."
This is a war against the children of Iraq on two
fronts: bombing, which in the last year cost the British
taxpayer £60 million. And the most ruthless embargo in
modern history. According to Unicef, the United Nations
Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is
more than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would
have died before sanctions. That is half a million
children dead in eight years. If this statistic is
difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up
to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly. "Even if not all
the suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors,"
says Unicef, "the Iraqi people would not be undergoing
such deprivation in the absence of the prolonged measures
imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."
Through the glass doors of the Unicef offices in
Baghdad, you can read the following mission statement:
"Above all, survival, hope, development, respect, dignity,
equality and justice for women and children." A black
sense of irony will be useful if you are a young Iraqi. As
it is, the children hawking in the street outside, with
their pencil limbs and eyes too big for their long thin
faces, cannot read English, and perhaps cannot read at
all.
"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my
experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior
representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy
rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to
modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing
to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street
children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had
reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to
measure the overall well-being of human beings, including
children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is
among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has
gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."
Anupama Rao Singh, originally a teacher in India, has
spent most of her working life with Unicef. Helping
children is her vocation, but now, in charge of a
humanitarian programme that can never succeed, she says,
"I am grieving." She took me to a typical primary school
in Saddam City, where Baghdad's poorest live. We
approached along a flooded street: the city's drainage and
water distribution system have collapsed. The head, Ali
Hassoon, wore the melancholia that marks Iraqi teachers
and doctors and other carers: those who know they can do
little "until you, in the outside world, decide". Guiding
us around the puddles of raw sewage in the playground, he
pointed to the high water mark on a wall. "In the winter
it comes up to here. That's when we evacuate. We stay as
long as possible, but without desks, the children have to
sit on bricks. I am worried about the buildings coming
down."
The school is on the edge of a vast industrial
cemetery. The pumps in the sewage treatment plants and the
reservoirs of water are silent, save for a few wheezing at
a fraction of their capacity. Many were targets in the
American-led blitz in January 1991; most have since
disintegrated without spare parts from their British,
French and German builders. These are mostly delayed by
the Security Council's Sanctions Committee; the term used
is "placed on hold". Ten years ago, 92% of the population
had safe water, according to Unicef. Today, drawn
untreated from the Tigris, it is lethal. Touching two
brothers on the head, the head said, "These children are
recovering from dysentery, but it will attack them again,
and again, until they are too weak." Chlorine, that
universal guardian of safe water, has been blocked by the
Sanctions Committee. In 1990, an Iraqi infant with
dysentery stood a one in 600 chance of dying. This is now
one in 50.
Just before Christmas, the department of trade and
industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to
protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow
fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of
under secretary of state for competition and consumer
affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The
children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they
are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction".
That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of
mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him.
A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as
co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after
34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant
Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite
of senior officials. He had made his career in
development, "attempting to help people, not harm them".
His was the first public expression of an unprecedented
rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "I am resigning," he
wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is
totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an
entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that . .
. Five thousand children are dying every month . . . I
don't want to administer a programme that results in
figures like these."
When I first met Halliday, I was struck by the care
with which he chose uncompromising words. "I had been
instructed," he said, "to implement a policy that
satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy
that has effectively killed well over a million
individuals, children and adults. We all know that the
regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for
economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been
strengthened by them. It is the little people who are
losing their children or their parents for lack of
untreated water. What is clear is that the Security
Council is now out of control, for its actions here
undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human
Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter
those responsible."
Inside the UN, Halliday broke a long collective
silence. Then on February 13 this year, Hans von Sponeck,
who had succeeded him as humanitarian co-ordinator in
Iraq, resigned. "How long," he asked, "should the civilian
population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for
something they have never done?" Two days later, Jutta
Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq,
resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate
what was being done to the Iraqi people. Another
resignation is expected.
When I met von Sponeck in Baghdad last October, the
anger building behind his measured, self-effacing exterior
was evident. Like Halliday before him, his job was to
administer the Oil for Food Programme, which since 1996
has allowed Iraq to sell a fraction of its oil for money
that goes straight to the Security Council. Almost a third
pays the UN's "expenses", reparations to Kuwait and
compensation claims. Iraq then tenders on the
international market for food and medical supplies and
other humanitarian supplies. Every contract must be
approved by the Sanctions Committee in New York. "What it
comes down to," he said, "is that we can spend only $180
per person over six months. It is a pitiful picture.
Whatever the arguments about Iraq, they should not be
conducted on the backs of the civilian population."
Denis Halliday and I travelled to Iraq together. It was
his first trip back. Washington and London make much of
the influence of Iraqi propaganda when their own,
unchallenged, is by far the most potent. With this in
mind, I wanted an independent assessment from some of the
550 UN people, who are Iraq's lifeline. Among them,
Halliday and von Sponeck are heroes. I have reported the
UN at work in many countries; I have never known such
dissent and anger, directed at the manipulation of the
Security Council, and the corruption of what some of them
still refer to as the UN "ideal".
Our journey from Amman in Jordan took 16 anxious hours
on the road. This is the only authorised way in and out of
Iraq: a ribbon of wrecked cars and burnt-out oil tankers.
Baghdad was just visible beneath a white pall of
pollution, largely the consequence of the US Air Force
strategy of targeting the industrial infrastructure in
January 1991. Young arms reached up to the window of our
van: a boy offering an over-ripe banana, a girl a single
stem flower. Before 1990, such a scene was rare and
frowned upon.
Baghdad is an urban version of Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring. The birds have gone as avenues of palms have died,
and this was the land of dates. The splashes of colour, on
fruit stalls, are surreal. A bunch of Dole bananas and a
bag of apples from Beirut cost a teacher's salary for a
month; only foreigners and the rich eat fruit. A currency
that once was worth two dollars to the dinar is now
worthless. The rich, the black marketeers, the regime's
cronies and favourites, are not visible, except for an
occasional tinted-glass late-model Mercedes navigating its
way through the rustbuckets. Having been ordered to keep
their heads down, they keep to their network of clubs and
restaurants and well-stocked clinics, which make nonsense
of the propaganda that the sanctions are hurting them, not
ordinary Iraqis.
In the centre of Baghdad is a monument to the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam Hussein started, with
encouragement from the Americans, who wanted him to
destroy their great foe, the Ayatollah Khomeini. When it
was over, at least a million lives had been lost in the
cause of nothing, fuelled by the arms industries of
Britain and the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union and the
United States: the principal members of the Security
Council. The monument's two huge forearms, modelled on
Saddam's arms (and cast in Basingstoke), hold triumphant
crossed sabres. Cars are allowed to drive over the helmets
of dead Iranian soldiers embedded in the concourse. I
cannot think of a sight anywhere in the world that better
expresses the crime of sacrificial war.
We stayed at the Hotel Palestine, once claiming five
stars. The smell of petrol was constant. As disinfectant
is often "on hold", petrol, more plentiful than water, has
replaced it. There is an Iraqi Airways office, which is
open every day, with an employee sitting behind a desk,
smiling and saying good morning to passing guests. She has
no clients, because there is no Iraqi Airways - it died
with sanctions. The pilots drive taxis and sweep the
forecourt and sell used clothes. In my room, the water ran
gravy brown. The one frayed towel was borne by the maid
like an heirloom. When I asked for coffee to be brought
up, the waiter hovered outside until I was finished; cups
are at a premium. His young face was streaked with
sadness. "I am always sad," he agreed matter-of-factly. In
a month, he will have earned enough to buy tablets for his
brother's epilepsy.
The same sadness is on the faces of people in the
evening auctions, where intimate possessions are sold for
food and medicines. Television sets are the most common
items; a woman with two toddlers watched their pushchairs
go for pennies. A man who had collected doves since he was
15 came with his last bird; the cage would go next.
Although we had come to pry, my film crew and I were made
welcome. Only once, was I the brunt of the hurt that is
almost tangible in a society more westernised than any
other Arab country. "Why are you killing the children?"
shouted a man from behind his bookstall. "Why are you
bombing us? What have we done to you?" Passers-by moved
quickly to calm him; one man placed an affectionate arm on
his shoulder, another, a teacher, materialised at my side.
"We do not connect the people of Britain with the actions
of the government," he said. Laith Kubba, a leading member
of the exiled Iraqi opposition, later told me in
Washington, "The Iraqi people and Saddam Hussein are not
the same, which is why those of us who have dedicated our
lives to fighting him, regard the sanctions as immoral."
In an Edwardian colonnade of Doric and Corinthian
columns, people come to sell their books, not as in a flea
market, but out of desperate need. Art books, leather
bound in Baghdad in the 30s, obstetrics and radiology
texts, copies of British Medical Journals, first and
second editions of Waiting For Godot, The Sun Also Rises
and, no less, British Housing Policy 1958 were on sale for
the price of a few cigarettes. A man in a clipped grey
moustache, an Iraqi Bertie Wooster, said, "I need to go
south to see my sister, who is ill. Please be kind and
give me 25 dinars." (About a penny). He took it, nodded
and walked smartly away.
Mohamed Ghani's studio is dominated by a huge crucifix
he is sculpting for the Church of Assumption in Baghdad.
As Iraq's most famous sculptor, he is proud that the
Vatican has commissioned him, a Muslim, to sculpt the
Stations of the Cross in Rome - a romantic metaphor of his
country as Mesopotamia, the "cradle of Western
civilisation". His latest work is a 20-foot figure of a
woman, her child gripping her legs, pleading for food.
"Every morning, I see her," he said, "waiting, with others
just like her, in a long line at the hospital at the end
of my road. They are what we have been forced to become."
He has produced a line of figurines that depict their
waiting; all the heads are bowed before a door that is
permanently closed. "The door is the dispensary," he said,
"but it is also the world, kept shut by those who run the
world." The next day, I saw a similar line of women and
children, and fathers and children, in the cancer ward at
the Al Mansour children's hospital. It is not unlike St
Thomas's in London. Drugs arrived, they said, but
intermittently, so that children with leukaemia, who can
be saved with a full course of three anti-biotics, pass a
point beyond which they cannot be saved, because one is
missing. Children with meningitis can also survive with
the precise dosage of antibiotics; here they die. "Four
milligrams save a life," said Dr Mohamed Mahmud, "but so
often we are allowed no more than one milligram." This is
a teaching hospital, yet children die because there are no
blood-collecting bags and no machines that separate blood
platelets: basic equipment in any British hospital.
Replacements and spare parts have been "on hold" in New
York, together with incubators, X-ray machines, and heart
and lung machines.
I sat in a clinic as doctors received parents and their
children, some of them dying. After every other
examination, Dr Lekaa Fasseh Ozeer, the oncologist, wrote
in English: "No drugs available." I asked her to jot down
in my notebook a list of the drugs the hospital had
ordered, but rarely saw. In London, I showed this to
Professor Karol Sikora who, as chief of the cancer
programme of the World Health Organisation (WHO), wrote in
the British Medical Journal last year: "Requested
radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics
are consistently blocked by United States and British
advisers [to the Sanctions Committee in New York]. There
seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents
could be converted into chemical or other weapons."
He told me, "Nearly all these drugs are available in
every British hospital. They're very standard. When I came
back from Iraq last year, with a group of experts I drew
up a list of 17 drugs that are deemed essential for cancer
treatment. We informed the UN that there was no
possibility of converting these drugs into chemical
warfare agents. We heard nothing more. The saddest thing I
saw in Iraq was children dying because there was no
chemotherapy and no pain control. It seemed crazy they
couldn't have morphine, because for everybody with cancer
pain, it is the best drug. When I was there, they had a
little bottle of aspirin pills to go round 200 patients in
pain. They would receive a particular anti-cancer drug,
but then get only little bits of drugs here and there, and
so you can't have any planning. It is bizarre."
In January, last year, George Robertson, then defence
secretary, said, "Saddam Hussein has in warehouses $275
million worth of medicines and medical supplies which he
refuses to distribute." The British government knew this
was false, because UN humanitarian officials had made
clear the problem of drugs and equipment coming
sporadically into Iraq - such as machines without a
crucial part, IV fluids and syringes arriving separately -
as well as the difficulties of transport and the need for
a substantial buffer stock. "The goods that come into this
country are distributed to where they belong," said Hans
von Sponeck. "Our most recent stock analysis shows that
88.8% of all humanitarian supplies have been distributed."
The representatives of Unicef, the World Food Programme
and the Food and Agricultural Organisation confirmed this.
If Saddam Hussein believed he could draw an advantage from
obstructing humanitarian aid, he would no doubt do so.
However, according to a FAO study: "The government of Iraq
introduced a public food rationing system with effect from
within a month of the imposition of the embargo. It
provides basic foods at 1990 prices, which means they are
now virtually free. This has a life-saving nutritional
benefit . . . and has prevented catastrophe for the Iraqi
people."
The rebellion in the UN reaches up to Kofi Annan, once
thought to be the most compliant of secretary-generals.
Appointed after Madeleine Albright, then the US
representative at the UN, had waged a campaign to get rid
of his predecessor, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, he pointedly
renewed Hans von Sponeck's contract in the face of a
similar campaign by the Americans. He shocked them last
October when he accused the US of "using its muscle on the
Sanctions Committee to put indefinite 'holds' on more than
$700 million worth of humanitarian goods that Iraq would
like to buy." When I met Kofi Annan, I asked if sanctions
had all but destroyed the credibility of the UN as a
benign body. "Please don't judge us by Iraq," he said.
On January 7, the UN's Office of Iraq Programme
reported that shipments valued at almost a billion and a
half dollars were "on hold". They covered food, health,
water and sanitation, agriculture, education. On February
7, its executive director attacked the Security Council
for holding up spares for Iraq's crumbling oil industry.
"We would appeal to all members of the Security Council,"
he wrote, "to reflect on the argument that unless key
items of oil industry are made available within a short
time, the production of oil will drop . . . This is a
clear warning." In other words, the less oil Iraq is
allowed to pump, the less money will be available to buy
food and medicine. According to the Iraqis at the UN, it
was US representative on the Sanctions Committee who
vetoed shipments the Security Council had authorised. Last
year, a senior US official told the Washington Post, "The
longer we can fool around in the [Security] Council and
keep things static, the better." There is a pettiness in
sanctions that borders on vindictiveness. In Britain,
Customs and Excise stops parcels going to relatives,
containing children's clothes and toys. Last year, the
chairman of the British Library, John Ashworth, wrote to
Harry Cohen MP that, "after consultation with the foreign
office", it was decided that books could no longer be sent
to Iraqi students.
In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under
secretary of state who speaks for Madeleine Albright. When
asked on US television if she thought that the death of
half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying,
Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we
think the price is worth it." When I questioned Rubin
about this, he claimed Albright's words were taken out of
context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a report
by the UN's World Health Organisation, which had estimated
half a million deaths. Advising me against being "too
idealistic", he said: "In making policy, one has to choose
between two bad choices . . . and unfortunately the effect
of sanctions has been more than we would have hoped." He
referred me to the "real world" where "real choices have
to be made". In mitigation, he said, "Our sense is that
prior to sanctions, there was serious poverty and health
problems in Iraq." The opposite was true, as Unicef's data
on Iraq before 1990, makes clear.
The irony is that the US helped bring Saddam Hussein's
Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq, and that the US (and
Britain) in the 1980s conspired to break their own laws in
order, in the words of a Congressional inquiry, to
"secretly court Saddam Hussein with reckless abandon",
giving him almost everything he wanted, including the
means of making biological weapons. Rubin failed to see
the irony in the US supplying Saddam with seed stock for
anthrax and botulism, that he could use in weapons, and
claimed that the Maryland company responsible was
prosecuted. It was not: the company was given Commerce
Department approval.
Denial is easy, for Iraqis are a nation of unpeople in
the West, their panoramic suffering of minimal media
interest; and when they are news, care is always taken to
minimise Western culpability. I can think of no other
human rights issue about which the governments have been
allowed to sustain such deception and tell so many
bare-faced lies. Western governments have had a gift in
the "butcher of Baghdad", who can be safely blamed for
everything. Unlike the be-headers of Saudi Arabia, the
torturers of Turkey and the prince of mass murderers,
Suharto, only Saddam Hussein is so loathsome that his
captive population can be punished for his crimes. British
obsequiousness to Washington's designs over Iraq has a
certain craven quality, as the Blair government pursues
what Simon Jenkins calls a "low-cost, low-risk machismo,
doing something relatively easy, but obscenely cruel". The
statements of Tony Blair and Robin Cook and assorted
sidekick ministers would, in other circumstances, be
laughable. Cook: "We must nail the absurd claim that
sanctions are responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi
people", Cook: "We must uphold the sanctity of
international law and the United Nations . . ." ad
nauseam. The British boast about their "initiative" in
promoting the latest Security Council resolution, which
merely offers the prospect of more Kafkaesque semantics
and prevarication in the guise of a "solution" and changes
nothing.
What are sanctions for? Eradicating Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction, says the Security Council resolution.
Scott Ritter, a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq for
five years, told me: "By 1998, the chemical weapons
infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed
by UNSCOM (the UN inspections body) or by Iraq in
compliance with our mandate. The biological weapons
programme was gone, all the major facilities eliminated.
The nuclear weapons programme was completely eliminated.
The long range ballistic missile programme was completely
eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, I would
say [it is] zero." Ritter resigned in protest at US
interference; he and his American colleagues were expelled
when American spy equipment was found by the Iraqis. To
counter the risk of Iraq reconstituting its arsenal, he
says the weapons inspectors should go back to Iraq after
the immediate lifting of all non-military sanctions; the
inspectors of the international Atomic Energy Agency are
already back. At the very least, the two issues of
sanctions and weapons inspection should be entirely
separate. Madeleine Albright has said: "We do not agree
that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning
weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted."
If this means that Saddam Hussein is the target, then the
embargo will go on indefinitely, holding Iraqis hostage to
their tyrant's compliance with his own demise. Or is there
another agenda? In January 1991, the Americans had an
opportunity to press on to Baghdad and remove Saddam, but
pointedly stopped short. A few weeks later, they not only
failed to support the Kurdish and Shi'a uprising, which
President Bush had called for, but even prevented the
rebelling troops in the south from reaching captured arms
depots and allowed Saddam Hussein's helicopters to
slaughter them while US aircraft circled overhead. At they
same time, Washington refused to support Iraqi opposition
groups and Kurdish claims for independence.
"Containing" Iraq with sanctions destroys Iraq's
capacity to threaten US control of the Middle East's oil
while allowing Saddam to maintain internal order. As long
as he stays within present limits, he is allowed to rule
over a crippled nation. "What the West would ideally
like," says Said Aburish, the author, "is another Saddam
Hussein." Sanctions also justify the huge US military
presence in the Gulf, as Nato expands east, viewing a vast
new oil protectorate stretching from Turkey to the
Caucasus. Bombing and sanctions are ideal for policing
this new order: a strategy the president of the American
Physicians for Human Rights calls "Bomb Now, Die Later".
The perpetrators ought not be allowed to get away with
this in our name: for the sake of the children of Iraq,
and all the Iraqs to come.
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