IRAQ - THE GREAT COVER UP
by
John Pilger
Originally published in The New Statesman
22nd January 2001
Most victims of depleted uranium are not soldiers, but civilians, many of them children. John Pilger reports on what one doctor calls "another Hiroshima."
On the eve of an election campaign, the
Blair government is attempting,with mounting desperation, to suppress a scandal
potentially greater than the arms-to-Iraq cover-up. This is the deaths of hundreds
ofthousands of people, perhaps many more, caused by decisions taken in Whitehall and
Washington. Moreover, the evidence of deceit and lying points to at least two Cabinet
ministers and three junior ministers. At its centre is the unerring, wilful destruction of
a whole society, Iraq, the aim of which is to keep the regime in Baghdad weak enough tobe
influenced by the west and yet strong enough to control its ownpeople. This is
longstanding Anglo-American policy. Contrary to the propaganda version about protecting
Iraq's ethnic peoples, the objective is to prevent a Kurdish secession in the north and
the establishment of a Shi'ite religious state in the rest of the country, while
maintaining the west's dominance of the region and its access to cheap oil.
The victims of this policy are 20 million Iraqis, uniquely isolated from the rest
of humanity by an economic embargo whose viciousness has been compared with a medieval
siege. The word "genocide" has been used by experts on international law and
other cautious voices, such as Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary general of
the United Nations, who resigned as the UN's senior humanitarian official in Iraq, and
Hans von Sponeck, his successor, who also resigned in protest. Each had 34 years at the UN
and were acclaimed in their field; their resignations, along with the head of the World
Food Programme in Baghdad, were unprecedented.
After more than a decade of sanctions, no one on the Security Council wants them,
except the United States and Britain. The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, has
called them "cruel, because they exclusively punish the Iraqi people and the weakest
among them, and ineffective, because they don't touch the regime". Had Saddam Hussein
said on television "..we think the price is worth it...", referring to UNICEF's
figure of half a million child deaths, he would have been called a monster by the British
government. [Former US Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright said that. Whitehall
remained silent.
The Blair government has played the traditional role of Washington's proxy with particular
enthusiasm. The latest Security Council resolution, 1284, was drafted by British officials
in New York. They are said to be proud of it. Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister,
constantly refers to it as "Iraq's way out". In fact, it is a specious set of
demands, requiring the return of weapons inspectors, but not offering any guarantee that
sanctions will be suspended if the regime complies. Last year, Jon Davies, then head of
the Iraq desk at the Foreign Office, admitted the "lack of clarity in exactly what
the provisions will be". The suspicion all along, says Dr Eric Herring, the Bristol
University specialist, is that "US and British policy is one of continually moving or
hiding the goalposts so that compliance [by Iraq] becomes impossible and so that the
sanctions cannot be lifted".
In recent months, in the columns of the New Statesman and the Guardian, [British Foreign
Office minister] Peter Hain has defended a sanctions regime that, says UNICEF, is a
principal cause of the deaths of at least 180 children every day. Hain's articles and
letters are scripted by Foreign Office officials using the familiar, weasel lexicon that
denied British support for the Khmer Rouge, the use of Hawk aircraft in East Timor and the
illegal shipment of weapons parts to Britain's favourite 1980s tyrant, Saddam Hussein. Sir
Richard Scott's inquiry acknowledged their "culture of lying".
You get a sense of the scale of lying from Hain's latest letter to the NEW STATESMAN (15
January), in which he claimed that "about $16bn of humanitarian relief was available
to the Iraqi people last year". Quoting UN documents, Hans von Sponeck replies in
this issue (page 37) that the figure was actually for four years and that, after
reparations are paid to Kuwait and the oil companies, Iraq is left with just $100 a year
with which to keep one human being alive. That Hain does not appear even to question the
competence of those who write his disinformation is remarkable. That he allows the
bureaucracy of a rapacious order he once opposed to invoke his anti-apartheid record is a
bleak irony. That he is said privately to have serious doubts about sanctions, which he
rejected for Zimbabwe, saying they would "hurt the ordinary people, not the
elite", is a measure of his ambition, and perhaps explains why he refuses to engage
his critics, preferring rhetoric and abuse. Each time he calls a principled, informed
critic, such as Halliday and von Sponeck, "a dupe of Saddam Hussein", there is
an echo of the apartheid regime calling a young Hain "a dupe of communism".
The sanctions issue is one of three related scandals involving epic suffering and loss of
life. The truth about the effects of depleted uranium in shells fired in the 1991 Gulf war
and Nato's 1999 attack on Yugoslavia, is that the Americans and British waged a form of
nuclear warfare on civilian populations, disregarding the health and safety of their own
troops. This was largely to test the Pentagon's post-cold war strategy of "all-out
war". On 9 January, John Spellar, the Defence Minister, told the House of
Commons that the conclusion of many years of research showed "there is no evidence
linking DU to cancers or to the more general ill health being experienced by some Gulf
veterans". This echoes Peter Hain, who said there had been "no credible research
data". In fact, the data is credible and voluminous, dating back to the development
of the atomic bomb in 1943, when Brigadier General Leslie Groves, the head of the
Manhattan Project, warned that particles of uranium used in ammunition could cause
"permanent lung damage". In 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority warned that, if
particles from merely 8 per cent of the DU used in the Gulf were inhaled, there could be
"300,000 potential deaths". Spellar claimed there had been no rise in the number
of kidney ailments or cancers among veterans of the Gulf war. The Ministry of Defence has
been told by the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association of a dramatic increase in
both diseases among veterans. Last year, Speller said: "We are unaware of anything
that shows depleted uranium has caused any ill health or death of people who served in
Kosovo or Bosnia." Again, this was false. Nato's own guidelines
include: "Inhalation of insoluble depleted uranium dust particles has been associated
with long-term health effects including cancers and birth defects." It was only after
six Italian soldiers, who had served in Kosovo, died from leukaemia, that the scandal
caused panic in Nato, with the Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, contradicting himself,
saying DU posed a "limited risk", then "no risks", then, bizarrely,
that it is "protecting British forces".
For the Iraqi people, however, the cover-up continues. What has been striking about
the political and media reaction over the past fortnight is that most of the victims of
depleted uranium have rated barely a mention. Yet Tony Blair himself was made aware of
their suffering when he was sent, in March 1999, UN statistics, published in the British
Medical Journal, showing a sevenfold increase in cancer in southern Iraq between 1989 and
1994. It is in southern Iraq that the theoretical figure of "500,000 potential
deaths" can be applied, in a desert landscape where the dust gets in your eyes, nose
and throat, swirling around people in the street and children in playgrounds. In Basra's
hospitals, the cancer wards are overflowing. Before the Gulf war, they did not exist.
"The dust carries death," Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of
Britain's Royal College of Physicians, told me."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 are living
through another Hiroshima. Of course, we don't know the precise source of the
contamination, because we are not allowed [under sanctions] to get the equipment to
conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level in our bodies. We
suspect depleted uranium. There simply can be no other explanation."
The Sanctions Committee in New York has blocked or delayed a range of cancer
diagnostic equipment and drugs, even painkillers. Professor Karol Sikora, as chief of the
cancer programme of the World Health Organisation, wrote in the British Medical Journal:
"Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently
blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee]. There seems to
be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could be converted into chemical or other
weapons." Professor Sikora told me: "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." Although there have since been improvements in some areas, more than 1,000
life-saving items remain "on hold" in New York, with [UN Secretary General] Kofi
Annan personally appealing for their release "without delay".
I interviewed Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army health physicist who led the
"clean-up" of depleted uranium in Kuwait. He now has 5,000 times the permissible
level of radiation in his body, and is ill. "There can be no reasonable doubt about
this," he said. "As a result of the heavy metal and radiological poison of DU,
people in southern Iraq are experiencing respiratory problems, breathing problems, kidney
problems, cancers. Members of my own team have died or are dying from cancer . . . At
various meetings and conferences, the Iraqis have asked for the normal medical treatment
protocols. The US Department of Defense and the British Ministry of Defence have refused
them. I attended a conference in Washington where the Iraqis came looking for help. They
approached myself, officials of the Defense Department and the British MoD. They were told
it was their responsibility; they were rebuffed."
The third strand in the cover-up is the killing of Iraqi civilians by RAF and American
aircraft in the "no-fly zones". As Hans von Sponeck points out in his letter,
these violate international law. In a five-month period surveyed by the UN Security
Sector, almost half the casualties were civilians. I interviewed eyewitnesses to one of
the attacks described in the UN report. A shepherd family of six - a grandfather, the
father and four children - were killed by a British or American pilot, who made two passes
at them in open desert. Pieces of the missile lay among the remains of their sheep. United
Nations staff - not the Iraqi government - confirmed in person the facts of this atrocity.
The Blair government has spent £800m bombing Iraq.
In his 15 January letter to the NS, Peter Hain described my reference to the
possibility that he, along with other western politicians, might find themselves summoned
before the new International Criminal Court as "gratuitous". It is far from
gratuitous. A report for the UN Secretary General, written by Professor Marc Bossuyt, a
distinguished authority on international law, says that the "sanctions regime against
Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing human rights law" and "could raise
questions under the Genocide Convention". His subtext is that if the new court is to
have authority, it cannot merely dispense the justice of the powerful. A growing body of
legal opinion agrees that the court has a duty, as Eric Herring wrote, to investigate
"not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and sanctions which have violated the
human rights of Iraqi civilians on a vast scale by denying them many of the means
necessary for survival. It should also investigate those who assisted [Saddam Hussein's]
programmes of now prohibited weapons, including western governments and companies."
Last year, Peter Hain blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of culpable
British companies Why? A prosecutor might ask why, then ask who has killed the most number
of innocent people in Iraq: Saddam Hussein, or British and American murderous
policy-makers? The answer may well put the murderous tyrant in second place.