I refer to Brian McAndrews' posting concerning the Red Cross report of injuries in Iraq.
For some years I've been helping a scheme in Iran which assists children who have been orphaned because their parents have been executed because they are Christian or belong to a faith other than Islam. In fact, a couple of Iranian doctors will be coming to see me next week about a hospital extension to their scheme because not only are many children being orphaned by the thugs appointed by Iranian clerics but they are also dying because there isn't any health welfare for non-Islamics. Many children only survive because they are fed surreptiously by kind neighbours who are looking over their shoulders all the time to avoid being noticed by the religious police. If they fall seriously ill then the neighbours can't help and the children have no chance of survival. Believe me (apropos Robert D. Kaplan's superficial article in Atlantic Monthly), the regime in Iran is more nearly akin to the old regimes of Stalin and Ceaus�escu in Russia and Romania than Saddam's rule in Iraq ever has been and ever could be. (The Christians in Baghdad are fearful of Saddam being overthrown because they are afraid that they will be killed either by the Sunni or the Shia Muslims. Saddam is a nasty man but nowhere near as nasty as the clerics in Iran or Saudi Arabia.) And now Bush's brave troops are charging into small towns safely inside their tanks with their powerful guns and his brave airmen are dropping cluster bombs from above on civilian populations. We cannot believe any of the propaganda that the Americans or the Iraqis feed to us but surely we can believe reports such as this one from the Red Cross. Bush, whose daddy got him out of army service in Vietnam is, in my book, quite as evil as Saddam for giving the go-ahead -- and encouraging -- the massacres now going on. At least the British troops around Basra are using their common sense and experience acquired from the last 30 years of armed occupation of Northern Ireland. They are being cautious on the whole. They have even been known to play football with a team of Iraqi young men (and lost 9-3, I'm pleased to say!) But the American troops are too frequently acting like madmen. We know of some incidents such as the carload of women and children that was shot up by a trigger-happy soldier and several killed. How many more monstrous things have been happening that we don't know about? Apropos the other article that Brian posted, surely there will come a time fairly soon where the supine Democrats in America will at last find their voice. If I were an American I would be a Republican on economic matters but, surely, are there not even a few Republicans who might dare to tell the truth about this savagery? The present time reminds me so much of the McCarthy era in America. I can only think that massive opposition to Bush will rise up at some stage. If there are further reports from the Red Cross and independent observers along the lines of this one -- and I am sure that there are bound to be -- surely this revulsion cannot be long delayed. Keith Hudson At 13:15 05/04/03 -0500, you wrote: <<<< Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians Canadian Press Updated: Thurs. Apr. 3 2003 10:41 PM ET OTTAWA � Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw "incredible" levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad. Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad. "There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone. "We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening." Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of "bombs, projectiles." "At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad. "There will be investigations I am sure." Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day. Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said. But the pattern in Hilla was completely different. "In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror." At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said -- far beyond its capacity. "Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all." The city is no longer accessible, he added. Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad. "We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major road has become a zone of combat." The Red Cross was able to claim one significant success this week: it played a key role in re-establishing water supplies at Basra. Power for a water-pumping station had been accidentally knocked out in the attack on the city, leaving about a million people without water. Iraqi technicians couldn't reach the station to repair it because it was under coalition control. The Red Cross was able to negotiate safe passage for a group of Iraqi engineers who crossed the fire line and made repairs. Basra now has 90 per cent of its normal water supply, said Huguenin. Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto, N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary. The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca � Copyright 2002 Bell Globemedia Inc. >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
