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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.
By John Pilger
03/04/200 "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 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
© John Pilger http://www.johnpilger.com/
Copyright The Guardian
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