The Great War for Civilisation (150 page)

“Don't worry,” the ministry man says, and produces an identity card. The boy grins. “The battles were all around us here—we didn't even stay in the house because we knew it would not give us cover. But we didn't leave. The wrecked tanks are over there.” Far beyond the barbed wire surrounding the farm, beyond a stand of trees and another plantation, the rusting victims of General Rhame's attack are settled deep in the damp earth. Imad's mother has appeared beside us, a scarf around her head, a black dress tugged by the breeze. She is holding a pale green tomato in her hand. “Please,” she says. “It is for you.”

The tomato is small, plucked from the bush in front of us, a poisoned fruit— according to the Basra doctors—from a poisonous war, grown on a dangerous stem, bathed in foetid water. “The soldiers died on this road,” she says, gesturing towards the highway behind us which leads south-west towards Safwan and the new Kuwaiti frontier. “The battles went on for hours. People still get killed—two boys were blown up by mines over there last July.” The outline of a collapsed trench shows the fatal spot. But it is other deaths that we have come about. Are the Adwans worried about their land? Do they know what the doctors say about it? Imad's mother has heard of cancer cases in the farmlands but none in her family.

It is then that Hassan Salman walks up to us. He grows tomatoes and onions on the other side of the road. He has a distinguished face, brown from the sun, and is wearing a gold-fringed robe. When we mention cancer, he frowns. “Yes, we have had many cancer cases here,” he says. “I think it happened because of the fires and what happened during the battles. The tanks were just down the road.” He pauses. “My daughter-in-law died of cancer around fifty days ago. She was ill in the stomach. Her name was Amal Hassan Saleh. She was very young—she was just twenty-one years old.”

Official Western government reaction to the growing signs of DU contamination was pitiful. When I first reported from Iraq's child cancer wards in February and March 1998, the British government went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. I still treasure a sarcastic letter from Lord Gilbert at the Ministry of Defence, who told
Independent
readers that my account of a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqi child cancer cases would—“coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk”—be regarded as “a wilful perversion of reality.” According to his Lordship, particles from the DU-hardened warheads—used against tank armour—are extremely small, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and “become difficult to detect, even with the most sophisticated monitoring equipment.” Now I have to say that over the months, I had gathered enough evidence to suggest that—had this letter come from anyone other than his Lordship—its implications would be mendacious as well as misleading.

So let's start with a far more eloquent—and accurate—letter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 by Paddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEA Technology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Mr. Bartholomew's letter, of which I obtained a copy—I called him later and he confirmed he was the author, but would make no other comment— refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance official called J. Y. Sanders on the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait by depleted-uranium ammunition. In an accompanying “threat paper,” Mr. Bartholomew notes that while the hazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination of these weapons “are small when compared to those during a war,” they nonetheless “can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are
a risk to both the military and the civilian population
” (my emphasis). The document, marked “UK Restricted,” goes on to say that “U.S. tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, U.S. aircraft many 10s of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000 lbs of DU . . . if the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor . . . calculates
500,000
potential deaths
” (again, my emphasis).

Mr. Bartholomew added in his 1991 paper that while “this theoretical figure is not realistic, however it does indicate a significant problem.” And he continues:

The DU will spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in various sizes and quantities . . . it would be unwise for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long periods and this would obviously be of concern to the local population if they collect this heavy metal and keep it. There will be specific areas in which many rounds will have been fired where localised contamination of vehicles and the soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population.

Mr. Bartholomew's covering letter says that the contamination of Kuwait is “emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner,” adding that the AEA's regional marketing director (Alastair Parker) might send a copy of the “threat paper” to the UK ambassador in Kuwait. AEA Technology could “clean up” the depleted uranium under a contract with the Kuwait government. Needless to say, no one had bothered to suggest a clean-up in Iraq, where so many children were dying of unexplained cancers. Why not? And why did Lord Gilbert write his extraordinary and deeply misleading letter to
The Independent
in March of 1998? Here's a clue. It comes in a letter dated 21 March 1991, from a U.S. lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Major Larson at the organisation's “Studies and Analysis Branch” and states that:

There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DOD [Department of Defense] proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability.

So there it is. Shorn of the colonel's execrable English, the message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are acceptable until we—the West—invent something even more lethal to take its place. No wonder, then, that an official British government review of the UK's Ministry of Defence radioactive waste management at the British firing range for DU ammunition in the Lake District in December 1997 detailed the extraordinary lengths taken to protect local British villages. They included firing shells into tunnels with a filtered extract system, pressure-washing the surfaces and sealing up the contaminated residues in cemented drums. Lord Gilbert did not tell
Independent
readers about that in his letter to the paper. So much for the “wilful perversion of reality.”
¹⁶⁰

If governments did not care about the Iraqi children, however, British people did.
The Independent
launched an appeal for the medicines these children so desperately needed, and within weeks our generous readers had donated more than $250,000 for us to buy cancer drugs and medical equipment to take to Iraq. At last, it seemed, we could
do
something, rather than just write angry articles about the plight of these pariah children. But could we? Were we going to save lives, or merely prolong suffering?

It was mundane work. In October 1998 we employed refuse carts and a squad of sweating Iraqis to heave our boxes of medicinal supplies from a refrigerated truck that we had backed into the broken loading bay of a Baghdad hospital; across town at the Mansour hospital, we had to use a stretcher to transport the 5,185 kilograms of medicine, stuffing the painfully expensive vincristine into the director's personal fridge. It was a bit of an anticlimax, until I saw the children in the wards upstairs. Weeping with pain or smiling in innocence of their fate, the cancer children of Iraq—in Mosul and Basra as well as Baghdad—were at last receiving help. “Have you brought something for me?” a little girl asked as a doctor told her that all the drugs must be shared equally.

In one corner of the Mansour cancer ward, Hebba Mortaba lay in a patterned blue dress, a hideous tumour distorting her tiny figure. When her mother lifted the dress, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerous abscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlier abdominal mass—only to find, alien-like, that another grew in its place. During the 1991 war, Hebba's suburb of Basra was bombed so heavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She was now just nine years old and, so her doctors told me gently, would not live to see her tenth birthday.

Given UN sanctions and then Saddam Hussein's own ban on medicine imports, it was in truth something of a miracle that our truck made it across the Iraqi desert, finally shepherded around the country's hospitals by CARE's two indomitable Iraqi representatives, Margaret Hassan and Judy Morgan. The UN at first fulminated about the length of time that it might take to clear our medicines through the sanctions commission—until we told them that we would take the medicines whether they liked it or not, at which point, on 15 June, clearance was given in twenty-four hours. The office of the Iraqi president was almost equally obtuse, delaying and prevaricating and ignoring our shipment request until September, when Saddam Hussein gave his personal approval—another example of that disturbing coincidence of intention between the West and the dictator in Baghdad.

“The members of the [Security Council] Committee have no objection to the sending of the specified items . . .” the UN's pompous letter had concluded, as if they were doing us a favour. The documentation at the UN accurately referred to the medical payment as “readers donations from
Independent
newspaper.” But the fifty-eight cartons and boxes, flown from Heathrow to Amman by Royal Jordanian Airlines and then trucked the 800 kilometres to Baghdad by Iraqi driver Rahman Jassem Mohamed—cloxacillin and ampicillin vials, cytarabine and vincristine, methotrexate and dexamethasone ampoules and syringes and gloves and blood solutions—were successfully distributed to children's hospitals across Iraq.

But were we in time? The truth should be told. Most of the children whose suffering I had recounted were already dead—even the boy whose portrait became the symbol and logo of
The Independent
's appeal. I had taken a photograph of Latif Sattar from Babylon, the five-year-old with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma who was playing with a toy car and smiling beneath the bald dome of his head when I met him the previous February. I took his picture close-up as he lay on his bed in a knitted pullover, his eyes staring at me. But the records of the paediatric hospital in Baghdad show that he died on 7 April 1998. Then there was leukaemia victim Samar Khdair, the beautiful girl whose photograph appeared in my paper the day after Latif's. She was the child who lay in her nightie, her father pressing a yellow compress to her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut with pain. Again, the hospital file provided no comfort. It recorded how Samar suffered a relapse through lack of drugs and blood products. But she fought on—only to die on 20 September 1998, just days before the drugs paid for by our readers arrived in Baghdad.

Most of the tiny children I was now seeing in Iraq would die too. “When the cancers reach this stage, there is not much we can do,” Dr. al-Ali told me frankly when I reached Basra and talked to him again. “But you must understand what your people have done—they have helped to prolong these small lives, and to improve the quality of life of these children. They are going to die in one month, two months, two years . . . Yes, perhaps a few will live . . . believe me, it is worth bringing your drugs here.” I go on scribbling the names of the soon-to-be-dead in my notebook. Nour Shehab and Halah Saleh are ten and Haitham Ahmed is eight. Tiba Favel is only eighteen months old. Moustapha Jaber is eight and Dhamia Qassem is thirteen. All have acute leukaemia except for Moustapha, who has lymphoma.

It was impossible to visit these cancer wards again without a feeling of great indignation. Even now, when the children had the drugs they needed for leukaemia, blood platelets for them were not being made fast enough in Iraq because the machine that separated the blood needed maintenance. UN sanctions had broken the back of the hospital system. We in the West—we, in the most literal sense of the word—were responsible for all this, we who accepted the UN sanctions against Iraq, the sanctions that were clearly killing these children and that, equally clearly, were not harming Saddam Hussein. But there was also reason for exasperation.

For although the U.S. and British administrations understandably tried to keep the two groups of victims separate, the American and British soldiers suffering from what had become known as Gulf War Syndrome appeared to be suffering from almost identical cancers and leukaemia and internal bleeding as the children of Iraq. The explosion of cancers in Iraq largely affected the Shiite community, and it was therefore no surprise that, seven years after the war, Saddam Hussein's regime had made no mention of it—yet again, Clinton, Blair and Saddam had made common cause in a total failure to explain the calamity. But even as I was touring the cancer wards of Basra and Baghdad, Tony Flint, the acting chairman of the British Gulf Veterans' and Families' Association, was warning that the very same DU shells could be responsible for cancers that had so far killed at least thirty British veterans. A day later, the American National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of U.S. veterans' groups, announced that as many as 40,000 American servicemen might have been exposed to depleted uranium dust on the battlefield.