[PEN-L:2717] six thousand children dying every month"

["Frank Durgin" <fdurgin1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From World Socialist Web Site
               WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

               Former UN official calls for an
               end to sanctions on Iraq

               "You now have five or six thousand children dying
               every month"

               By Mike Ingram
               29 January 1999

               An audience of around 140 people in Sheffield,
               England were recently presented with a devastating
               exposé of the role of British and US imperialism in
               Iraq.

               The meeting last Sunday, entitled "Against
               sanctions on Iraq", was addressed by former
               United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq,
               Denis Halliday. It was part of a national tour by
               Halliday in the campaign for an end to sanctions
               against Iraq that he has pursued since resigning
               as head of the UN's "Oil for food programme" last
               Autumn. The meeting also heard from Ray
               Bristow, a veteran who suffers from Gulf War
               Syndrome and was exposed to radioactive uranium
               while serving in Kuwait.

               Bristow began his remarks to the meeting by
               declaring: "As an individual I am not a pacifist. I
               believe in the individuals' rights to protect
               themselves and I also believe that a nation has a
               right to defend itself. That is what I believe and
               that was the reason that I chose to serve. Over the
               last few years the nation that I chose to serve and
               the society that runs that nation has really opened
               my eyes to the fact that it wasn't the nation I
               thought it was."

               He went on to explain the horrific fate suffered in
               the gulf by British and Iraqi servicemen, as well as
               the civilian population of Iraq.

               Showing pictures of the Basra Road, Bristow said:
               "The Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait on the way to
               Basra were cut off at either end. Air attack after
               air attack went in and anything that moved was
               destroyed. The sky was so full of helicopters,
               shooting away, that the biggest fear of the pilots
               was that they would crash into each other. In the
               end, the pilots refused to go back and carry on. It
               was a turkey shoot. That is what was said. What
               we call the Basra Road, as I was told while in Iraq
               recently, they refer to as the Highway of Death."

               Bristow then spoke of his own situation. He
               explained the symptoms gulf war veterans were
               suffering: memory loss, lack of concentration,
               muscle and joint pain, chest pains and shortage of
               breath. "Another very common sign is what they
               call 'irritable bowel syndrome'," he said. "What this
               means to every gulf war veteran is that they have
               abdominal pains on practically a daily basis; pain
               which feels like being kicked in the abdomen, or
               somebody punching you in the stomach, or ripping
               your intestines out and tying them in knots. It
               means constant diarrhoea, unless it is controlled
               by medication.

               "Many veterans now need to wear nappies. Mood
               swings and irritability is very common, especially
               amongst those who do not understand the
               scientific evidence or who have not sought help. It
               results in violence or marriage breakdowns, violent
               crime. Unusual skin rashes, liver and kidney
               damage are also prevalent."

               Bristow referred constantly to a government
               cover-up of the effects suffered by veterans and
               their continued refusal to recognise Gulf War
               Syndrome. "Let's just talk about liver damage.
               Practically every gulf war veteran I know has an
               enlarged liver.... All the toxic things we were
               exposed to, it is quite obvious that our livers would
               be damaged. But for all gulf war veterans, their
               GPs [general practitioners] receive standard letters.
               The government actually writes to the GP and says
               'the common causes for enlarged livers are; alcohol
               abuse, obesity or diabetes'. We are talking about
               servicemen, so that is a push off. What an insult to
               write and say that.

               "The government went to great lengths to keep the
               use of uranium 238 quiet. When we started to get
               information about uranium and found a place
               where we could get tested, I was the first British
               person to be tested by an American professor. It
               was identified that I had been exposed to over 100
               times the safe level of uranium 238, or nuclear
               waste.

               "When it explodes, uranium dust is blown into the
               atmosphere. We were told that the only danger of
               being exposed is if you are within the immediate
               vicinity of the explosion. How that can be said
               beats me. I remained in Saudi Arabia throughout
               the war and never entered Iraq or Kuwait."

               To illustrate the amount of uranium used in the
               gulf, Bristow explained, "In 1968 a B52 bomber
               crashed. It was carrying an old fashioned-type
               atom bomb, which was a uranium weapon. To
               clean up this site was a multimillion-dollar
               exercise, with a multimillion-dollar compensation
               package. There would have been about 40 pounds
               of uranium in the warhead of an atom bomb.
               During the gulf war the Americans and the British
               used over 300 tons. Some of this was used in
               Saudi Arabia before the land war started, for
               trials. Saudi Arabia said clean it up, and it was
               cleaned up. Nothing has been cleaned up in Iraq.
               There is evidence that uranium has now filtered
               down into the water table in the South around the
               Basra area. It is affecting children, it is affecting
               the food chain, crops, farm animals--they have no
               water."

               Denis Halliday then told the meeting, "We have UN
               troops at the moment checking the DMZ
               [demilitarised zone] from both the Kuwaiti and the
               Iraqi side. There is no doubt in my mind that they
               are being exposed and that this problem is still
               alive and well. Uranium particles left over from this
               300 tons have leached into the soil, into the water
               system of Basra and other towns in the South and
               there are currently 4 or 5 million people living in
               that part of the country. It is going into the root
               crops. The vegetables that are grown in the South
               of Iraq then go to the market places in Baghdad
               and other central and northern cities.

               "The Ministry of Health is monitoring the impact
               on the Iraqi population. In Basra or Baghdad or up
               in the North of Iraq, malformation at childbirth is
               becoming a crisis situation. Incidence has risen
               dramatically since this 1990-91 exposure to
               radiation.

               "I resigned from the UN and some people think
               that was a mistake. There is a theory that if you
               stay inside you can do more. But after 34 years I
               feel I have been inside quite a long time. I needed
               the change and I needed to be free as a good civil
               servant.

               "In Iraq I was the manager of this so-called oil for
               food programme. This was established by the
               member states of the Security Council to try to
               resolve some of the humanitarian impact of the
               sanctions on Iraq. From the very beginning it had
               problems. It was under-funded, it does not provide
               the wherewithal--being oil revenues--to purchase
               even the basic foodstuffs or medicines that the Iraqi
               people require.

               "After eight years of sanctions you can imagine
               how depleted the health situation is of the great
               majority of the Iraqi people. The oil for food
               programme provides enough money to buy basic
               food and basic medicines. That excludes the
               antibiotics, the equipment needed to protect
               children from leukaemia or other more complicated
               cancers or other problems. They are not included
               in this programme. The money available is about 4
               to 5 billion US dollars per year. It seems a lot of
               money, a billion US dollars. If you have a
               population of 22 million, however, and you want to
               buy 1 kilo of cheese per person per month, this
               would cost approximately 1 billion dollars a year."

               Halliday said that the provisions made under the
               programme accounted only for the most basic food
               package, with no vegetables and no meat. "I
               wonder how many of us here would really like to
               eat that for five or six years? Some Iraqi's are
               fortunate. Maybe they can get vegetables from
               somebody who lives outside the city, although Iraq
               is an urban society. Of the 22 million I would guess
               that about 15 million are urban, meaning they
               don't have access to fresh produce.

               "Most Iraqi's today do not have the income to buy
               fresh fruit and vegetables and all the basics that
               you and I take for granted like eggs, chicken, or a
               piece of meat. Can you imagine how grim that has
               become over so many years, not just from the point
               of view of your palate, but from the point of view of
               your health?"

               Halliday said UN forces in Iraq were responsible for
               the virtual destruction of a civilised population.
               "Mothers in Iraq today are very malnourished.
               They give birth to small infants who are
               malnourished. These are not being breast-fed, but
               are taking baby formula which is over-diluted with
               water that is unsafe. Why is the water unsafe?
               Because the coalition forces, the same people who
               carried out the 'turkey shoot', deliberately
               destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Iraq. They
               deliberately went after the water fonts, the
               treatment distribution, the sewage systems, the
               cold stores, the hospitals, the clinics, the schools,
               the manufacturing plants. This has created
               massive unemployment.

               "All the things that make life manageable and
               hopeful for a great number of people were
               deliberately targeted, deliberately destroyed, and it
               has not been rebuilt."

               Halliday contrasted the Iraq of today with what
               had existed in the 1980s. "The impression you get
               today in Baghdad is of decay and negligence--a
               lack of a budget to keep the city clean, to put water
               in the pipes, to sustain an attractive reasonable
               place, which of course it was. In the 1980s Iraq
               enjoyed a very high standard of public health,
               education, a quality of life. The government
               invested billions of dollars in education, health and
               even cars and communication facilities.

               "The most vulnerable, orphans, widows--there
               were probably almost one million widows after the
               Iran-Iraq war--were getting direct food supplies,
               including 10 kilos of beef per month per family,
               and shoes and clothes and books and
               communications. That has collapsed.

               "This was a country that enjoyed a very high
               standard and which today is dreadfully depleted.
               Because of this health situation, you now have five
               or six thousand children dying every month. This
               is a UNISEF figure, not mine. It is also endorsed by
               the World Health Organisation, both of which I
               worked with in Iraq and are still there."

               Halliday said the responsibility for this situation
               rested with America, Britain and the UN. "We are
               responsible for this picture, we have got to accept
               that. Many say this is the fault of Saddam
               Hussein. That is easy and thus quite attractive, but
               it is too simple. We know that he is not a very
               attractive guy. He is a dictator, he is a miserable ...
               whatever you want to call him. But we are
               punishing the Iraqi people because we can't deal
               with this man. I don't think any of us can really
               justify that. We are knowingly killing thousands of
               children. We are denying them the very basics of
               life, safe milk, and medical care. They are dying
               from diarrhoea and the simplest problems because
               there is no medication. Between 20 and 30 percent
               of Iraqi children under five, or even more, are
               malnourished. Twenty-some percent of those will
               be chronically malnourished. Chronic malnutrition
               can lead to physical problems, mental disability or
               slowness of development."

               Halliday stressed the future problems facing the
               Iraqi people. "This will lead to a whole generation
               of Iraqi children having attention span problems,
               concentration problems. This is a crime of the
               future. We are destroying Iraq's future. Sadly, I
               have to acknowledge that this is a deliberate
               approach. We have now got Albright, the US
               secretary of state, going on television in New York
               and saying, 'Yes, we are sorry but we do have to
               kill thousands of the children. It's the only way we
               can contain Saddam Hussein.' It is an incredible
               statement.

               "I would classify sanctions as war, because the
               results certainly look like war to me." Halliday
               added that the actions of the coalition forces in the
               gulf contravened the UN's own conventions. "Some
               of you will know there are Geneva Conventions and
               protocols which govern the management of
               warfare. A certain irony, I always think, but
               nevertheless it does exist. But when it comes to
               sanctions, these conventions do not apply. They
               have been completely ignored.

               "One aspect of these conventions is that civilian
               targets should not be targeted by military activity.
               What did we see? The coalition forces bombed
               civilian targets. The sanctions are specifically
               targeted on men, children and women. It is a
               complete breach of that convention. How can that
               possibly be justifiable?

               "We are familiar with mortality rates, perhaps
               malnutrition. You have seen those photographs of
               children in hospital. I have been there. I got
               involved in November 1997 with a small ward of
               four children with leukaemia. There are thousands
               of children suffering, but you can't deal with
               thousands. You can deal sometimes with four. So I
               decided, as a gift to myself, I would try to solve the
               problems of these four children. I managed,
               through some connections, to get the drugs from
               Jordan and Turkey for the children to be given
               care for their leukaemia for a two-year period. By
               the time I got back to the hospital--it took six
               weeks--two of the children were dead. The other
               two, hopefully, are still alive and on these drugs.
               But it hit me; this is what is happening.

               "And the doctors who run these hospitals, can you
               imagine the agony they go through, knowing they
               can't really help these children? You saw the
               intensive care, the paediatric intensive care
               facilities; there is nothing these men and women
               can do. They see it every day. The mothers sit
               there beside their children. It is just a horrible
               situation."

               Halliday then turned his attention to what he
               termed the "social consequence" of the sanctions.
               "After the Iran-Iraq war, you already had many
               single parent families. Many of them and many of
               the families with two parents have sold their
               houses, their property and furniture, just to keep
               food on the table. Children are being taken out of
               school and asked to beg on the streets. Others are
               turning to street crime because there is no other
               option. Women, young girls or daughters, are
               being put into prostitution because that is another
               way to bring money into the family. Women who
               hope to get married have no hope. The men are
               not there, there is no money. Professional women
               have given up their careers in order to go into
               sweatshops and make simple things, because that
               is where the money is. Ten thousand teachers
               have quit because there is no money to pay
               salaries. Fixed income people have been badly hit
               by devaluation of the dinar and inflation crises.

               "The middle class and the professional classes, the
               people who you may have thought might change
               the system of government in Iraq, are extremely
               hard hit. There is no possibility, in my view, of any
               democratic government emerging. It just cannot
               happen. That can only happen when the sanctions
               are removed, when life goes back to normal and
               people are confident that their children will live
               because there is medical attention; that parents will
               live longer because of the medical attention; that
               there are schools, jobs, all the things you and I
               take for granted. Then maybe we will see political
               change which could be very positive."

               Halliday concluded by calling for the total lifting of
               sanctions. "People will say, 'Oh my god, you must
               be crazy! Saddam Hussein will take the money, he
               will rebuild his army and he will attack either
               Kuwait or somewhere else.' I don't buy that.... Give
               Iraq its oil revenues. Give them credit to rebuild the
               infrastructure that is so fundamental to a society.
               Give them the money to rebuild the economy and
               get this country back to normal."

               UN oil for food coordinator denounces Iraq
               sanctions
               [8 October 1998]
               United Nations maintains sanctions:
               Another vote to starve Iraq
               [1 May 1998]
               Albright's big lie:
               How the US has "protected" the Iraqi people
               [24 February 1998]

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