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Iraqi
girl in a hospital with Leukemia. Photograph by Alan Pogue
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When
Martti Ahtisaari, then Special Rapporteur to the UN, visited
Iraq in March 1991 just after the end of the Gulf War, he wrote,
“Nothing we had heard or read could have prepared us for this
particular devastation - a country reduced to a pre-industrial
age for a considerable time to come.”
UN
reports on Iraq’s water, electricity, health care, and
education in 1989 described Iraq as near First World standards.
The country was regarded as having the most sophisticated
medical facilities in the Middle East. The embargo, implemented
on Hiroshima Day 1990 to pressure Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait,
had an almost instant negative impact. Iraq imported a broad
range of items, 70 percent of everything, from pharmaceuticals
to film, educational materials to parts for the electricity
grid, water purifying chemicals to everything necessary for
waste management; and at the consumer level also, almost
everything that a developed society takes for granted was
imported.
With
all trade denied, the Iraqi dinar (ID), worth US$3 in 1989,
became virtually worthless: ID 250, formerly US$750 did not even
buy a postage stamp in neighboring Jordan. Staple foods
multiplied up to 11,000-fold in price. With no trade,
unemployment spiraled and many - in a country where obesity had
been a problem
- faced hunger and deprivation. The US and UK-driven UN
sanctions, in fact, mirrored a pitiless Middle Ages siege. With
Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait the embargo should have been
lifted, but a further relentless US and UK-driven “war of
moving goal posts” began, and the majority of children in Iraq
- who are fourteen years old now - have never known a normal
childhood. Even birthday parties,`eid celebrations - and
Christmas and Easter celebrations for Christians -became
victims; few had the money for the feast or the gifts.
In
a country where obesity had been a problem, many faced hunger and
deprivation. |
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Ten
months after the war, I stood in the pediatric intensive care
unit of Baghdad’s formerly flagship Pediatric Teaching
Hospital. A young couple stood, faces frozen with terror, as a
nurse tried frantically to clear the airway of their perfect,
tiny, premature baby. There was no suction equipment. “It is
at a time like this, all your training becomes a reflex
action,” remarked my companion, Dr. Janet Cameron, from
Glasgow, Scotland, “and in a unit like this, you know exactly
where everything will be - but there is nothing here.” The
fledgling life turned from pink to an ethereal grey, to blue,
flickered, and went out. Since then, over a million lives have
gone out due to “embargo related causes,” a silent holocaust
initiated on Hiroshima Day.
Doctors
were remarking in bewilderment at the rise in childhood cancers
and in birth deformities, which they were ironically comparing
with those they had seen in textbooks after the nuclear testing
in the Pacific Islands in the 1950s. In 1991, only the United
States’ and the United Kingdom’s top military planners knew
that they had used radioactive and chemically toxic depleted
uranium (DU) weapons against the Iraqis. Just weeks later, the
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency wrote a “self initiated”
report and sent it to the UK government, warning that if
“fifty tonnes of the residual DU dust” had been left “in
the region” there would, they estimated, be half a million
extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (i.e., the year
2000).
The
Pentagon eventually admitted to an estimate of 325 tons; some
independent analysts estimate as much as 900 tons. Estimates of
the added burden of last year's illegal invasion are that up to
a further 2,000 tons of the residual dust remain to poison
water, fauna, flora and to be inhaled by the population and the
occupiers, causing cancers and genetic mutations in the
yet-to-be-conceived. DU remains radioactive for 4.5 billion
years. Some scientists estimate that it will still
be
poisoning the earth, the unborn, the newborn “when the sun
goes out.” Iraq, the land of ancient Mesopotamia - like
Afghanistan and the Balkans - has become a silent potential
weapon of mass destruction for the population and geographical
neighbors.
Ironically,
as cancers spiraled, the UN Sanctions Committee added to its
limitless list of items denied to Iraq, treatment for cancers
(and heart disease) since they contain minute amounts of
radioactive materials. Iraqi scientists, they argued, might
extract the radioactive materials from these medications and
make weapons from them. One exasperated expert commented,
“Even were the technology available - and it is not - one
would probably need to extract the radioactivity from every pill
and intravenous treatment on earth, to make one crude device.”
So little Iraqis, in their irradiated land, could only suffer
the most lethal effects of radiation but were denied all of the
therapeutic ones in the name of “we the people of the United
Nations” - a United Nations to which, incidentally, Iraq was
one of the first signatories.
In
the West, 70 percent of cancers are now largely curable or with
long remissions. In Iraq they are almost always a death
sentence. On another early
visit after the war, I went to a ward where just two small boys,
aged three
and five lay alone, in an attempt to isolate them. They had
acute myeloid leukemia and hopelessly compromised immune
systems, rendering them vulnerable to any infection. The
three-year-old, whose name translated as “the vital one,”
was covered with bruises from the leaking capillaries bleeding
internally and rigid with pain. There was not even an aspirin
available. His eyes were full of unshed tears and I realized he
had taught himself not to cry - sobs would rack his agonized
little body further.
“I now know it is actually possible to die of shame.” |
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Leaving,
I stooped to stroke the face of the five-year-old, who was in an
identical condition. In a gesture that must have cost more than
could ever be imagined, he reached and clutched my hand tightly,
as do children everywhere, responding to affection. I left the
ward, leaned against a wall and prayed that the ground would
open and swallow me. I wrote at the time, “I now know it is
actually possible to die of shame.”
Families
would sell all they had to buy cancer and other vital medication
on the black market, and since hospitals no longer had the
requisite equipment to test it, could not even check to ensure
it was safe. I remember an enchanting three-year-old, the bane
of the doctors, his energy levels and mischief belying his
precarious health. As I was talking to Dr. Selma Haddad, a man
burst through the door and thrust a small packet into her hand.
She looked at it, then said to me, “This is his uncle, he is
the last one in the family with anything left to sell. He has
sold all he has for 500 milligrams of medication. This child
needs 800 milligrams a month, for a year.”
When,
occasionally, pitiful amounts of medication came in, doctors
gave half the needed dose so the next patient would have some,
too - rendering effectiveness virtually nil. They would
meticulously write the patient's protocol (dosage, medication,
amount, time to administer) on used paper, writing between the
lines, and between the between, on cardboard, on anything (paper
was vetoed by the UN Sanctions Committee) then solemnly write
under each item, N/A, N/A, N/A - not available. Sometimes just
one would be available - in half a dose.
I
remember Ali, eighteen months, lying nearly unconscious in his
mother's arms in the packed child cancer clinic. “With bone
marrow transplant, we could do something, but there is
nothing,” said Dr. Haddad. The mother begged and pleaded, but
beds and even palliative care were for the glimmer of chances,
not for the small no-hopers, such was the total destruction of a
fine, free, sophisticated health service. Leaving the hospital,
I found Ali's mother sitting on the ground, leaning against one
of the great white entrance pillars, in her black abaya,
her tears streaming onto his small, still face.
“How
do you cope?” I asked Dr. Haddad on one visit: doctors who
have all the skills and knowledge yet no ability to treat those
they care so passionately about. She thought for a moment, then
said quietly, “I take them all home with me, in my heart.”
In a way, she said, the older children were the hardest. She sat
on Ezra’s bed, holding her hand and stroking her hair. “They
know they are going to die.” Ezra was beautiful, 17 years old,
and the cancer had paralyzed her central nervous system. But it
had not prevented her crying. She had been crying for three
weeks, because she wanted to go home, to complete her studies,
to go to university and graduate. Most of all, she wanted to
live. As I left, her grandmother grabbed my hand, “Please,”
she begged, “take her with you, make her better.” Parents,
grandparents, made the same plea, again and again. They did not
ask where you were from, who you were, or for their beloved
back, just, Please, take him or her and make them well again.
“I asked death, ‘What is greater than you?’ Death replied, ‘Separation of lovers is greater than me,’” was one of his collected phrases. He was 13. |
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Then
there was Jassim. In the same ward as Ezra, he lay with his huge
eyes and glossy hair, listlessly viewing the barren ward. He had
been selling cigarettes on the streets of Basra to support his
family until he became ill. “This is Felicity and she writes
for a living,” said Dr. Haddad. Jassim was transformed; he
glowed and showed me the poems he spent his days writing, when
he still had the energy. He collected phrases, too, to
incorporate where he thought appropriate. I told him all writers
collect words and phrases, they are our tools. He glowed again,
delighting that he was being understood and that his instincts
were guiding him correctly along his passionate path. “I asked
death, ‘What is greater than you?’ Death replied,
‘Separation of lovers is greater than me,’” was one of his
collected phrases. He was 13.
One
of his poems was called “The Identity Card.” In translation,
it reads:
The
name is love,
The
class is mindless,
The
school is suffering,
The
governorate is sadness,
The
city is sighing,
The
street is misery,
The
home number is one thousand sighs.
He
watched my face for reaction. Lost for words, eventually I said,
“Jassim, if you can write like this at thirteen, think what
you will do at twenty.” I asked him if I could incorporate his
poem in articles from that visit and said I would send them back
to him, so he would see it in print. Some weeks later, I did
just that and sent cuttings back to him with a friend and
imagined him glowing again. He had fought and fought, but lost
his battle just before my friend arrived. He never saw his poem
in print and became just another statistic in the “collateral
damage” of sanctions by the most inhuman regime ever overseen
by the United Nations, which arguably condemned the UN
Convention of the Rights of the Child - the most widely signed
convention in history - to the dust, to the mass of graves of
Iraq's children, resulting from the embargo years.
Continue>>
Felicity
Arbuthnot is
a journalist and activist who has visited Iraq on numerous
occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written and broadcast
widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several
awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John
Pilger's award-winning
documentary - Paying
the Price Killing the Children of Iraq
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