Iraq, Depleted Uranium And Crimes Against Humanity
On his visits to Iraq, John Pilger found a devastated country where sanctions imposed after the Gulf war have brought misery and death to more than a million. The last thing these people need, he argues, is more war
Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a plastic ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, 'the seeds of our death'. Dr Al-Ali is a cancer specialist at the city hospital and a member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. 'Before the Gulf war, we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer,' he said. 'Now its 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that's just in my department. That is 12 times the increase in cancer mortality. Our studies indicate 40% to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer -- in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease.
'We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper survey, or even test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We strongly suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war right across the southern battlefields.'
Along the corridor, I met Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician. At another time, she might have been described as an effervescent personality; now she, too, has a melancholy expression that does not change; it is the face of Iraq. 'This is Ali Raffa Asswadi,' she said, stopping to take the hand of a wasted boy I guessed to be about four years old. 'He is nine years,' she said. 'He has leukaemia. Now we can't treat him. Only some of the drugs are available. We get drugs for two or three weeks, and then they stop when the shipments stop. Unless you continue a course, the treatment is useless. We can't even give blood transfusions, because there are not enough blood bags ...'
I said to Dr Hassen: 'What do you say to those in the West who deny the connection between depleted uranium and the deformities of these children?' She replied: 'That is not true. How much proof do they want? There is every relation between congenital malformation and depleted uranium. Before 1991, we saw nothing like this at all. If there is no connection, why have these things not happened before? I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. It is almost exactly the same here. We have an increased percentage of congenital malformation, an increase of malignancy, leukaemia, brain tumours, the same.'
Under the economic embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council in 1990 and upgraded the following year, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to decontaminate its battlefields. The US army physicist responsible for cleaning up Kuwait was Professor Doug Rokke. Today he is also a victim. 'I have 5000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. The contamination was right throughout Iraq and Kuwait. With the munitions testing and preparation in Saudi Arabia, uranium contamination covered the entire region. What we're seeing now -- respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers -- are the direct result of the use of this highly toxic material. The controversy over whether or not it's the cause is a manufactured one. My own ill health is testament to that.'
Professor Rokke says there are two urgent issues to be confronted by people, 'those with a sense of right and wrong'. First, the decision by the United States and Britain to use a 'weapon of mass destruction' such as depleted uranium. He said: 'In the Gulf war, well over 300 tonnes were fired. An A-10 Warthog attack aircraft fired over 900,000 rounds. Each individual round was 300 grams of solid uranium 238. When a tank fired its shells, each round carried over 4500 grams of solid uranium. Moreover, we have evidence to suggest they were mixed with plutonium. What happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare.
'The second issue is the denial of medical care to American and British and other allied soldiers, and the tens of thousands of Iraqis contaminated. At international symposiums, I have watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Department of Defence and Ministry of Defence and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use depleted uranium; it was not their weapon. They simply don't know how to get rid of it from their environment. I watched them put their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities that are showing up; and I watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic.'
The UN Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has vetoed or delayed a range of vital medical equipment, chemotherapy drugs, even pain-killers. (In the jargon of denial, 'blocked' equals vetoed, and 'on hold' means delayed, or maybe blocked.) As of October 2001, 1010 contracts for humanitarian supplies, worth $3.85 billion, were 'on hold' by the Sanctions Committee. They included items related to food, health, water and sanitation, agriculture and education.
In Baghdad, walking along a line of people waiting for treatment at the hospital, my companion Denis Halliday had an extraordinary reunion. A courtly Irishman, who the previous year had resigned as the UN's co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in protest against the effects of the embargo on the civilian population, he had returned with me to Baghdad. Now he spotted a man and his daughter, and the three erupted with greetings.
'John, this is Saffa Majid and her father, Majid Ali. Saffa and I met two years ago in this hospital, when I was the UN chief in Iraq and she was in a very poor condition with leukaemia. And I was able, with the help of the World Health Organisation, to bring in drugs, on the quiet. They were enough for two years of treatment for this little girl. And today, she looks wonderful and her father says she has only to come once a month. Saffa was one of four I helped. Two girls died.
'To help them, I had to breach my own economic sanctions, so to speak, established by the Security Council, led by Washington and London. In this hospital, we have seen the evidence today of the killing that is now the responsibility of the Security Council member states, particularly Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They should be here to see the impact of what their decisions and their sustaining of economic sanctions mean.' Halliday had resigned after 34 years with the UN. He was then assistant secretary- general . '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 as that ... 5000 children are dying every month ... I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like these.
'I had been instructed,' he continued, '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.'
In 1991, the Security Council, in its Resolution 687, stated that, if Iraq renounced 'weapons of mass destruction' (nuclear, biological and chemical weapons) and ballistic missiles with a range of more than 150km, and agreed to monitoring by a UN Special Commission on Iraq (Unscom), the embargo would be lifted. In 1998, Unscom reported that, despite Iraqi obstruction in some areas, 'the disarmament phase of the Security Council's requirements is possibly near its end in the missile and chemical weapons areas'. On December 15, 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that it had eliminated Iraq's nuclear weapons programme 'efficiently and effectively'.
Scott Ritter, for five years a senior Unscom weapons inspector, agreed. 'By 1998, the chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by Unscom or by Iraq in compliance with our mandate,' he told me. '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.'
American researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller conclude that 'economic sanctions have probably already taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history'. In 1999, 70 members of the US Congress signed an unusually blunt letter to President Clinton, appealing to him to lift the embargo and end what they called 'infanticide masquerading as policy'. The Clinton administration had already given them their reply. In 1996, in an infamous interview on the American current affairs programme 60 Minutes, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, had been asked: 'We have heard that half a million children have died ... is the price worth it?' Albright replied: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.'
In the centre of Baghdad is a monolith that crowds the eye. It commemorates, or celebrates, the 1980-90 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam Hussein started, urged on by the Americans who wanted him to destroy their new foe in the region, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Cast in a foundry in Basingstoke, its two forearms, reputedly modelled on Saddam Hussein's, 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 that better expresses the crime of a sacrificial war and the business of making and selling armaments: America and Britain supplied both sides with weapons. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of parliamentary under-secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs perfectly suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were, he said, 'capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction'.
American and British aircraft operate over Iraq in what their governments have unilaterally declared 'no-fly zones'. This means that only they and their allies can fly there. The designated areas are in the north, around Mosul, to the border with Turkey, and from just south of Baghdad to the Kuwaiti border. The US and British governments insist the no-fly zones are 'legal', claiming they are part of, or supported by, the Security Council's Resolution 688. There is no reference to no-fly zones in Security Council resolutions, which suggests they have no basis in international law.
To be sure about this, I went to Paris and asked Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, secretary-general of the UN in 1992, when the resolution was passed. 'The issue of no-fly zones was not raised and therefore not debated: not a word,' he said. 'They offer no legitimacy to countries sending their aircraft to attack Iraq.' 'Does that mean they are illegal?' I asked. 'They are illegal,' he replied. The scale of the bombing in the no-fly zones is astonishing. During the 18 months to January 14, 1999, American air force and naval aircraft flew 36,000 sorties over Iraq, including 24,000 combat missions. During 1999, American and British aircraft dropped more than 1800 bombs and hit 450 targets. The cost to British taxpayers is more than £800 million. There is bombing almost every day. It is the longest Anglo-American aerial campaign since the second world war; yet it is mostly ignored by the British and American media.
During an interview with assistant secretary of state James Rubin, I asked: 'Don't you think it's ironic that for many years the US helped Saddam Hussein obtain these weapons of mass destruction?' 'No, I don't find that ironic,' he said. 'Iraq's regime is responsible, that's who's responsible. The US didn't gas the Kurds ... 'In the real world, real choices have to made, and it's our view that to allow Saddam Hussein unchecked access to hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue would be a grave and clear and present danger to the world. We have to weigh our profound sorrow at the tragic suffering of the people of Iraq against the national security challenge that Saddam Hussein would pose to the world if he weren't checked by the sanctions regime and the containment policy.'
When my documentary Paying The Price: Killing The Children Of Iraq went to air, triggering a significant public response, the Foreign Office produced a standard letter signed by Robin Cook (then the Foreign Secretary) or Peter Hain or an official. It exemplified the 'culture of lying' described by Mark Higson, the Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office during the arms-to-Iraq scandals of the 1980s. Almost every word was misleading or false. These ranged from 'sanctions are not aimed at the Iraqi people' to 'food and medicines have never been covered by sanctions'. One of the most persistent lies was, 'Saddam Hussein has in warehouses $275m worth of medicines and medical supplies, which he refuses to distribute.' The UN, right up to Kofi Annan, had refuted this. George Somerwill, the UN spokesman on Iraq, said: 'Not one of [the UN's] observation mechanisms has reported any major problem in humanitarian supplies being diverted, switched, or in any way misused.' There is little doubt that if Hussein saw political advantage in starving and otherwise denying his people, he would do so. It is hardly surprising that he has looked after himself, his inner circle and, above all, his military and security apparatus. His palaces and spooks, like the cartoon portraits of himself, are everywhere. Unlike other tyrants, however, he not only survived, but before the Gulf war enjoyed a measure of popularity by buying off his people with the benefits from Iraq's oil revenue. Having sent his opponents into exile or murdered them, more than any Arab leader he used the riches of oil to modernise the civilian infrastructure, building first-rate hospitals, schools and universities. So why does the suffering continue? It was a question I put to Halliday one evening. I asked him if the answer lay in Rubin's remark about the 'real world and the ideal world'.
'This is where the real world is represented,' he said. 'This is where democracy applies: one state: one vote. By contrast, the Security Council has five permanent members which have veto rights. There is no democracy there; it does not in any way represent the real world. Had the issue of sanctions on Iraq gone to the General Assembly, it would have been overturned by a very large majority. We have to change the UN, to reclaim what is ours. The genocide in Iraq is the test of our will. All of us have to break the silence: to make those responsible, in Washington and London, aware that history will slaughter them.'
John Pilge
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