Iraq: Tragic reminder to prosecute the war criminals
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<http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80301:
iraq-tragic-reminder-to-prosecute-the-war-criminals&catid=39:opinion-a-analy
sis&Itemid=132>
John Pilger
THE dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the deserts fingers. It
gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school
playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it
carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, the seeds of our death. An
internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital in
Basra, Dr Ali, told me that in 1999 and today his warning is irrefutable.
Before the Gulf war, he said, we had two or three cancer patients a
month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40
to 48 percent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years
time to begin with, then long after.
Thats almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we
have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic
effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden
have mutated and cant be eaten.
Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo
album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuro-plastoma.
Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years,
she said. Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have
studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital
malformations is the same.
Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted
uranium shells used by the Americans and the British in the Gulf War were
the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War
battlefield across the border in Kuwait said: Each round fired by an A-10
Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4 500 grams of solid uranium. Well over
300 tonnes of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.
Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the
Iraqi doctors argue that the epidemic speaks for itself. The British
oncologist, Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health
Organisation in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: Requested
radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently
blocked by United States and British advisers (to the Iraq Sanctions
Committee). He told me, We were specifically told (by the WHO) not to talk
about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to
get involved in politics.
Recently, Hans von Sponeck, the former Assistant Secretary-General of the
United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me:
The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern
Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and
environmental dangers.
Today, a WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted jointly with
the Iraqi Ministry of Health, has been delayed. Covering 10 800
households, it contains damning evidence, says a ministry official, and,
according to one of its researchers, remains top secret. The report says
that birth defects have risen to a crisis right across Iraqi society where
DU and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen
years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports phenomenal
multiple cancers in entire families.
Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a
non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the
two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F.
Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as
Fitzgerald wrote, smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into
their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up
the mess.
The mess left by George W. Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war,
the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich.
Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse presidential library and
museum and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their mess is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to
the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs estimate of 4,5 million children who
have lost both parents.
This means a horrific 14 percent of Iraqs population are orphans, he
wrote. An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them
widows. Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in
Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and
abuse into millions of homes.
In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side Gareth Peirce, Britains
greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his
propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet.
For Blair, she wrote: Human beings presumed to hold (Islamist) views, were
to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently . . . in Blairs
language a virus to be eliminated and requiring a myriad of
interventions (sic) deep into the affairs of other nations. The very
concept of war was mutated to our values versus theirs. And yet, says
Peirce, the threads of emails, internal government communiqués reveal no
dissent.
For Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to
Guantanamo, was the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective.
These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But
who will demand it?
In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of our
values is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?
This article is reproduced from www.johnpilger.com. Follow John Pilger on
twitter @pilgerwebsite
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