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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 Iraqis 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 UNICEF 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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