The Great War for Civilisation (151 page)

In October 1998, Phil Garner telephoned me to ask how he could make contact with the doctors treating Iraq's child cancer victims. He had been reading my reports on the growing evidence of links between cancers and depleted uranium shells. During the 1991 Gulf War, Garner was in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. He wasn't in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms of Britain's “friendly fire” casualties, men who were accidentally attacked by U.S. aircraft that were using depleted-uranium rounds. And now he was suffering from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines, and had a lump on the right side of his neck. What does this mean? I knew all about these lumps. I had seen them on the necks of the Iraqi children.

In Basra again, I watch the anguish of a parent. “Oxygen, for God's sake get some oxygen—my son is dying.” It is an almost animal wail from the man on the staircase of the paediatric hospital, tears running from his eyes, shaking uncontrollably. In the small room at the top of the stairs, his son, Yahyia Salman, is crying with fear, desperate to breathe. A leukaemia relapse—especially in the sulphurous heat of southern Iraq—is a thing of panic. “Stop shouting, we have another oxygen bottle,” Dr. Jenane Khaleb admonishes the father, pursing her lips with a mixture of irritation and concern. But the man will not be consoled. “My God, what am I going to do?” he cries as a technician with a ratchet begins to unscrew the top of another massive, dented black oxygen bottle. The little boy's eyes move across the room, towards the doctor, towards me and his father. This is not the moment to tell the child that his hospital now has all the drugs it needs for leukaemia. The boxes of vincristine and vials of cefuroxine, ampoules of metoclopramide, of surgical gloves and syringes arrived less than twenty-four hours ago. But Yahyia Salman has gone a long way down the road towards death.

So has two-year-old Youssef Qassem in the next room and Halah Saleh who, just ten years old, is suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The doctors show me these children with infinite weariness, and I can understand why. They have received so many visitors and so many promises of help. At least ours was honoured. Dr. Khaleb asks, very carefully, if the Basra hospital received the same amount of drugs as other hospitals in Baghdad and Mosul. I understand the purpose of her question: it was the Shiites here in the south who rose against the Iraqi government in 1991 and there are those in Baghdad who have never forgiven them.

Dr. Khaleb says nothing of this. Yes, I insist,
The Independent
's medicines were pre-packed before leaving Heathrow to ensure that every area of Iraq received an equal share. And she smiles as she reads through the drug manifest which I have brought with me. It is the first smile I have seen on this trip to Basra. For the doctors here are overwhelmed as much by the implications of their discoveries as they are by lack of medicine. The increase in child cancer in these southern provinces—it is now October 1998—is in places reaching ferocious heights.

While in some areas an average of only 3.9 children in every 100,000 are suffering from cancer, the districts of Harthe and Gurne now produce statistics of 71.8 and 41.8 respectively. There was heavy bombing in these suburbs in 1991 and the words “depleted uranium” are heard in every ward; even the parents now know the meaning of the phrase. Dr. Jawad al-Ali is stupefied. “I don't know how to explain the implications of this to you but I am now seeing terrible things,” he said. “One of our medical students who has just graduated, Zeineddin Kadam, has cancer and he will die in a few days. The wife of one of our orthopaedic surgeons died just a week after a diagnosis of acute leukaemia—she died less than a month ago when she thought she merely had an appendix problem. They found part of her small intestine was gangrenous.”

Dr. al-Ali opens another thick file of notes. “Of fifteen cancer patients from one area, I have only two left. I am receiving children with cancer of the bone— this is incredible. I have just received a fifteen-year-old girl, Zeinab Manwar, with leukaemia—she will live only a year. My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer of the breast—one of them was only fourteen years old—this is unheard of!”

Dr. Akram Hammoud, director of the paediatric hospital, is no less appalled. “Almost all the children here will die in a few months,” he says. “We have one family with three children, all of whom have Hodgkin's lymphoma. What can have done this? Before the war, we received in this hospital about one cancer patient a week—now I am getting an average of forty a week. This is crazy. We are getting patients with carcinoma cancer below the age of twenty—one of my patients is twenty-two, another eighteen. One of the symptoms of leukaemia is bleeding from the nose—now every child that has a nosebleed is brought here by panic-stricken parents.” The doctors are careful in talking about depleted uranium. They do not want their patients—or their own observations—to be used for propaganda, however justifiably, but they know of the 1990 American military report which states that cancers, kidney problems and birth defects are among the health effects of uranium particle contamination.

“Even the common cold in Basra is changing its features,” Dr. al-Ali says. “It takes longer to cure here now and we get advanced cases, sometimes associated with encephalitis.” He reopens his file. “In 1989, we received 116 cancer patients in the whole area; last year, the figure was 270. Already in the first ten months of this year, it's 331. No one will give us the equipment to test the soil. Probably we are all polluted.”

The British government responded to the new evidence of child cancers in Iraq with the same lethargy and indifference as Lord Gilbert. “The Government is aware of suggestions in the Press, particularly by Robert Fisk of the
Independent
, that there has been an increase in ill-health—including alleged deformities, cancers and birth defects—in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) based ammunition by UK and U.S. forces during the 1990/91 Gulf conflict,” the British minister for the armed forces, Doug Henderson, wrote in December 1998. “However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter.” I liked the bit about “peer-reviewed epidemiological research data” because, of course, there weren't any—nor would there be. Even when the Royal Society was asked to investigate the effects of depleted uranium, its researchers didn't visit Iraq.
¹⁶¹
The evidence, as shameful as it was shocking, had little effect. At a Christian service in 2000 to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the wartime RAF and American fire-bombing of Dresden, the bishop of Coventry, Colin Bennetts, declared that Britain had to accept responsibility for the death and deformity of children in Iraq as a result of allied bombing during and after the 1991 Gulf War. While criticising Saddam Hussein's “evil,” the bishop said that the child victims of Iraq “were conceived and born around the time of the Gulf War. They were born with hideous physical deformities. Many are also suffering from infantile leukaemia. There is very strong evidence to suggest that all this was caused by the depleted uranium in our weapons.” Yet still the Americans and British refused to acknowledge any such guilt. In just three years' time, they were to use depleted uranium yet again— once more, against Iraq.

What did all this say about our pretensions for the future, about our desperate, fantasy hope—if we ever did invade Iraq and destroy Saddam's regime—that these people would greet us as liberators? Iraqis might take satisfaction at the overthrow of their dictator. But punished by twelve years of brutal sanctions, bombed repeatedly by allied aircraft over the same period under the spurious notion that enforcement of the “no-fly” zones would protect them, dusted over by the poison of our depleted-uranium munitions, twice in just over a decade, would they really come to greet and love us—the new occupiers who had so punished them, who had humiliated them and persecuted them over so many years?

By the late Nineties, my reports from Iraq have now become a diary. I am overwhelmed by what we are doing—what we have done—to this country. How can Iraqis in Baghdad contemplate the future when they have to live by selling their last possessions in the Soukh Midan? One day in February 1998, I found at least a hundred ill-kempt men and a few women standing in the drizzle below the magnificent magenta cupola of the Jama'a al-Qushla mosque. At their feet lay the most pitiable things on display at any of the world's bazaars: a collection of rusting bath fittings and old car parts, some torn leather shoes, nuts and bolts and moth-eaten rugs, used shirts, second-hand socks and a broken television set lying forlornly in a puddle, its massive brown wooden fittings and tiny screen mindful of a pre-Baathist age. A woman in a soiled black chador looked up at me. Her name was Leila, she said. “Our money is worthless—only God can help us.”

Sohad still had money, the middle-class wife of a former diplomat whose home overlooked the banks of the great brown greasy Tigris River. She was eighty-one, and a long stay in India taught her the Hindu virtue of sublime patience. “All of us have changed these past seven years,” she said with an air of finality. “We are accepting life as it is. If we can't get proper medicine, we will go back to old medicine. I had a knee problem. This friend of ours produced a medicine for me from an old herbal formula that the Chinese invented two thousand years ago and I drank a cup of it every morning and now my knee is better.”

Sohad's sister was eighty-five. “We live from day to day, from hour to hour. This is part of our changed life—for us, planning is now a luxury. I am not in control, so why bother about it? Now I just want to have a flower in my life, a flower from our garden to look at during the day.” In the hall of their old home is a spread of sepia photographs of Turkish grandfathers, some of them dressed in the tunics and scabbards of the Ottoman army—the army that Private Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment fought in Mesopotamia and that the doomed Australian Gunner Frank Wills fought at Gallipoli. “This is how we get our strength,” Sohad said. “It comes from our Arab and Georgian and Kurdish and Turkish origins.” I met another old lady of great dignity that same day, a woman who had just sold almost all her baccarat glasses. “I bought these glasses on my first visit to Paris in 1947,” she said. “But now I needed the money, so I said ‘to hell with it'—we had it for a great time and enjoyed it, so I let it go. For ‘peanuts' I sold it. I have only a jug and a carafe left.”

Yes, Iraqis are a proud people, but the poor have a special, demented vacuum in which they must live. Across the estuary calm of the Tigris, Baghdad continued to moulder away, its pavements veined with weeds, bushes growing in the cracks of the city underpasses, its great railway yards packed with rusting, empty carriages. Even the portraits of Saddam Hussein had become bleached by seven summer suns. As the sanctions ate into the fabric of every soul—except the soulless centre of the regime itself—an army of beggars deployed across the streets.

The children and women who came beating on the doors and windscreen of my car in the centre of Baghdad were pleading for money and food. One small boy, tears coursing through the mud on his face, no more than four years old, barefoot and dressed in a worn, oversize leather jacket with a dozen holes ripped into it, banged his hands against the car passenger window. “Give me money!” he shrieked, kicking the door, staring at me through the glass and wrinkling his eyes to imitate tears. Or was it imitation? On the pavement an hour later, three more children attacked Lara Marlowe of the
Irish Times
and myself, older this time, grabbing at our coats, screaming “money” until we gave them a dollar. They grabbed our bags for more until we pushed them from us, cursing them for their assault. Would Madeleine Albright have given them a dollar? Or would she have lectured them on the iniquities of their leader and the need for UN sanctions, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the immorality of weapons of mass destruction? In the only decent coffee shop near my hotel, they were playing a scratched tape of Doris Day. “
Que sera sera
,” she sang, as the beggars watched through the windows. “Whatever will be, will be—the future's not ours to see . . .”

On my way to Basra from Baghdad with Lara, I hand a beggar girl a 250-dinar note—scarcely 14 cents—only to see her thrown to the road by her friends, the money torn from her dirty fist. Basra is now a pit of desolation. In front of Fatima Hassan's house, a tide of pale blue and creamy-white liquid streams gently through an open sewer. Her iron front door cannot hide the stench, nor the sound of the screaming, shoeless children in the street. Jumping the sewer—leaping across this little canyon of filth—is a pastime for the kids of the suburb of Dour Sheoun. Stand outside Fatima's door and they run towards you, blistered, whey-faced, with large eyeballs, the irises ivory-white with malnutrition. A woman—a bright, pretty woman in a black robe with a white headband—introduces us to her eight-year-old daughter Roula, then suddenly says: “Please take her with you.” Sundus AbdelKader is just thirty-three—and she is ready to give away her own child.

Fatima has five children. Her husband was a car-painter in Kuwait before Saddam invaded the emirate; he stayed on for eight months after its liberation, still working but unpaid by his Kuwaiti employers. Now he sells sandwiches. “We don't eat eggs or milk,” she says. “We can't afford to eat meat. We drink the tap-water—we don't boil it. This little boy of mine has trouble breathing, this one has a swollen stomach because of the water. We go to the hospitals but the doctors say there is no medicine. Wherever we go, they say there is no medicine.”