>From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Pilger On Iraq Sanctions
>Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2000 16:58:55 -0800
>
>Squeezed to death
>
>Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposed -
>most enthusiastically by Britain and the US. Three UN officials have
>resigned in despair. Meanwhile, bombing of Iraq continues almost daily. John
>Pilger investigates
>
>Saturday March 4, 2000
>The Guardian
>
>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
>
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