Depleted Uranium: The horrific legacy of Basra
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/newsi.hts?section=News+Focus&story_id=13698
Iraq: Children are born grotesquely deformed and cancer is rife, but the West
will still not investigate. What has it got to hide? asks Ron McKay
Publication Date: Jan 14 2001
FORTY-EIGHT hours after the Gulf war ended, an Iraqi Republican Guard tank
division was making for its base outside Basra along a narrow causeway over
Lake Hamar. It was one of five agreed exit routes for the defeated army to
take in its retreat. The ground war had lasted just 100 hours and there had
been 79 American deaths, eight of them among the 24th Division, commanded by
General Barry McCaffrey, whose armour and ordnance was lying about three
miles away from the causeway. Suddenly, and over-riding a warning from the
division operations officer, McCaffrey ordered an assault on the column.
Later he would claim that his troops had been fired on by the retreating
Iraqis, which is hotly denied by the Republican Guard commander. Apache
attack helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles and artillery units pummelled
the helpless column for hours. It was, as McCaffrey later commented, "one of
the most astounding scenes of destruction I have ever participated in." More
than 10 years later, the destruction can still be seen. What is left of the
division pokes rustily from the sand over several square miles. It is one of
the world's largest junkyards. And it could also be said to be the epicentre
of the controversy over depleted uranium. DU shells and rockets had ripped
into the column in the most prolonged use of this ordnance on any one spot in
the history of their invention. Six months ago, when I visited the site of
what has become known as the Battle of Rumaila, with a scientist carrying a
Geiger counter, the needle threatened to burst out of its casing as he
repeatedly ran it over sand and wreckage, gun barrels, tank parts and spent
DU detritus. Which may, of course, prove nothing. Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali is a
British-trained doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. He
works in Basra's main hospital. He showed me his maps of cancer and leukaemia
clusters which coincide with the most intensive use of DU weapons in the war.
Again, connection could be coincidental. The doctor also showed me the book
of horrors kept by the medical staff - photographs of the grotesque,
mis-shapen, stillborn children born in the hospital. There are kids with no
brains, some with one eye in the middle of the head, others with extra limbs.
It is the most diverse collection of malformations and deformities I have
ever seen - and, I suspect, any doctor anywhere outside of southern Iraq.
According to Dr Jawad there has been a four-fold increase in cancers in the
area where the use of uranium-tipped weapons was most severe. Two in a
hundred children in Basra are now being born with birth defects. If could be,
of course, as my old pal Doug Henderson has alluded, propaganda. When he was
a defence minister he poured doubt on any increase in cancers and birth
defects in southern Iraq. "The government has not seen any peer-reviewed
epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims ,"
he said. There is none, of course . Because the World Health Organisation,
invited by Iraq to start research into the cancers, was persuaded not to do
so by the British and US. And a group of Royal Society scientists tasked by
the British authorities to investigate the local effects of DU declined to
visit Iraq. Dr Kamil Mahdi, of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at
the University of Exeter, attended a seminar last February at the Foreign
Office where the then head of the Middle East section said that the ministry
was going to cooperate with the Department for International Development and
the WHO on research into the health effect of DU in southern Iraq. "When I
probed Ron White of DFID he said that it would only support research into the
health effects of the Iraqi regime's use of chemical weapons in Halabja in
1988," he says now. The Basra hospitals are full of young people suffering
from horrendous tumours, most of them not even born when the Gulf war ended.
Most are largely untreated because of the shortage of medicines, drips,
anti-coagulants and basic life-saving equipment. British and US ministers are
fond of quoting that there is no embargo on food or medicines, but the UN
sanctions committee in New York continually delays essential supplies . The
patients lie on sheetless beds because detergents are banned on the grounds
that they can be put to dual use - a crude bomb manufactured from a box of
Persil, presumably. One of those patients was Ali Mohammed, a soldier who
escaped the initial carnage of Rumaila. His belly was distended from a
massive tumour, and one testicle had been removed. Dr Jawad held up his
hands. "There's nothing we can do. Maybe if we had the drugs É maybe if we
had caught it earlier." Across the hot room - the air-conditioning equipment
has long since ground to a halt, replacement parts sanctioned - eight-year
old Hassan is lying comatose, blood spots on his pallid cheeks a tell-tale
sign of intestinal bleeding. He came from Kerbala, close to Iraqi military
bases blitzed with DU during the war. I found out later that it took him
about three weeks to bleed to death. Perhaps the upsurge in cancers is a
by-product of the burning oilfields set alight by Saddam's armies, or from
the direct hits on his chemical weapons factories. But there is a more likely
explanation lying on the sands, in the water table and in the blood . Gulf
war veterans know it. Other European governments suspect it. It is just
Britain and the US who refuse to even properly investigate. These victims are
Iraqis, of course, Muslims in a distant and hostile country. They are not
Europeans or Caucasians . But what is happening in Basra is likely to be
mimicked in Belgrade . It's only losers, of course, who go on trial for war
crimes.
