- They smiled as they were dying. One little girl in a
Basra hospital even put on her party dress for The Independent's portrait
of her. She did not survive three months.
-
- All of them either played with explosive fragments left
behind from US and British raids on southern Iraq in 1991 or were the children
unborn at the time of men and women caught in those raids. Even then,
the words "depleted uranium" were on everyone's lips. The Independent's
readers cared so much that they contributed more than £170,000 for
medicines for these dying children. Our politicians cared so little that
they made no enquiries about this tragedy and missed a vital clue to the
suffering of their own soldiers in the Balkans eight years later.
-
- In March 1998, Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali trained in Britain
and a member of the Royal College of Physicians showed me his maps of
cancer and leukaemia clusters around the southern city of Basra and its
farming hinterland, the killing fields of the last days of the 1991 Gulf
War that were drenched in depleted uranium dust from exploding US shells.
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- The maps showed a four-fold increase in cancers in those
areas where the fighting took place. And the people from those fields and
suburbs where the ordnance were fired were clustered around Dr Ali's cancer
clinic in Basra. Old men, young women with terrible tumours, whole families
with no history of cancer suffering from unexplained leukaemias.
-
- They stood there, smiling at me, wanting to tell their
stories. Their accounts, tragically, were the same. They had been close
to the battle or to aerial bombing. Or their children had been playing
with pieces of shrapnel after air raids or their children born two years
after the war had suddenly began to suffer internal bleeding. Of course,
it could have been one of Saddam's bombed chemical plants or the oil fires
that were to blame. But a comparison of the location of cancer victims
to air raids, right across Iraq from Basra and Kerbala to Baghdad, are
too exact to leave much doubt. And tragic did not begin to describe the
children's "wards of death" in Baghdad and Basra.
-
- Ali Hillal was eight when I met him he was to live less
than two months more lived next to a television broadcasting transmitter
and several factories at Diala, repeatedly bombed by Allied aircraft in
February 1991. He was the fifth child of a family that had no history of
cancers he now had a tumour in his brain. His mother, Fatima, recalled
the bombings. "There was a strange smell, a burning, choking smell,
something like insecticide," she told me.
-
- Little Youssef Abdul Raouf Mohammed came from Kerbala,
close to Iraqi military bases bombed in the war. He had gastro-intestinal
bleeding. There were blood spots in his cheeks, a sure sign of internal
bleeding. Ahmed Fleah had already died in the children's ward, bleeding
from his mouth, ears, nose and rectum. He took two weeks to bleed to death.
-
- About the same time, the first British "Gulf War
syndrome" victims were telling of their suffering. It was often identical
to the stories told in Arabic that I listened to in Iraqi hospitals.
Something terrible happened in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War,
I reported. But the British Government now so anxious to allay fears for
the health of British soldiers who have been in contact with depleted uranium
shells in the Gulf and in the Balkans put their collective nose in the
air.
-
- Doug Henderson, then a defence minister and later to
be such a public supporter of Nato's bombing of Kosovo wrote in an extraordinary
letter that "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 [sic] deformities, cancers and
birth defects in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use
of depleted uranium-based ammunition by UK and US forces during the 1990-91
Gulf conflict.
-
- "However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed
epidemiological research date on this population to support these claims
and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter."
-
- And there Mr Henderson lost interest. Had he been able
to see Hebba Mortaba, the tiny girl in Basra whom I met with a tumour the
size of a football pushing up from her stomach, perhaps his reply would
have been more serious. Many of the other children in this purgatorial
hospital were bald and suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. All came from
heavily-bombed areas of Iraq. A few knew they were dying; some told me
they would recover. None of them did. When in 1998 I visited the killing
fields outside Basra, the burned-out Iraqi tanks still lay where they had
been attacked by Major General Tom Rhame's US First Infantry Division,
bombed amid the farms and streams.
-
- Many of the local farmers had relatives dying of unexplained
cancers. One of them, Hassan Salman, walked up to me through the long grass,
a man with a distinguished face, brown from the sun. "My daughter-in-law
died of cancer just 50 days ago," he said. "She was ill in the
stomach. Her name was Amal Hassan Saleh. She was very young she was just
21 years old. A woman walked out of a tomato field and offered me an over-large
pale green tomato, a poisoned fruit according to the Basra doctors, from
a poisonous war, grown on a dangerous stem, bathed in fetid water.
-
- Yes, of course, it made good propaganda for Saddam. Yes,
of course, he gassed the Kurds who had gone over to Iran's side in the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Yes, of course, the Iraqis later laid on a propaganda
showcase of statistics for their dying and mock funerals for the infant
dead. But the children I met were dying and have died. Their leukaemia
was real and growing. One Baghdad doctor had just watched a child patient
die when I went to visit him. He sat in his chair in his clinic with his
head in his hands, the tears flowing down his face. This was not propaganda.
-
- In Basra, in the poorest part of the city still, ironically,
regularly attacked by the USAF and RAF I asked a random group of women
about the health of their families. "My husband has cancer,"
one said. Sundus Abdel-Kader, 33, said her aunt had just died suddenly
of leukaemia. Two other women interrupted to say that they had younger
sisters suffering from cancer. And so it went on, in a society where merely
to admit to cancer is regarded as a social stigma. Why had so many Iraqis
especially children suddenly fallen victims, I asked myself, to an explosion
of leukaemia in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War?
-
- Of course, the victims were Iraqis. They were Muslims.
They lived and died in a far-away country. They were not Caucasians or
Nato soldiers. But I do wonder if I'm going to have to tour the children's
wards of Bosnia and Serbia in the years to come, and see again the scenes
I witnessed in Iraq. Or perhaps the military wards of European countries.
That's why I asked Nato just after the Kosovo bombing in 1999 for the locations
of depleted uranium munition explosions. The details, I was told, were
"not releasable".
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