Unmasked
War Against Iraqi Children
By Ghali Hassan
04 August, 2004
Countercurrents.org
"Why do'
they' hate us?" George W. Bush, September 2001.
A
humanitarian crisis has been looming in Iraq since the 1991 U.S. war
due to shortage of drinking water and increase in waterborne diseases
that kill children. Despite abundant supplies of water from the Tigris
and Euphrates, and the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway formed by the confluence
of the two rivers,
because of the destruction to Iraq's infrastructure and the genocidal
sanctions imposed on Iraq by the U.S-UN.
During the 1991
U.S. war on Iraq the country's eight multi-purpose dams had been repeatedly
hit, simultaneously wrecking flood control, municipal and industrial
water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. Four of seven major
pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage
facilities - 20 in Baghdad, resulting in sewage pouring into the Tigris.
Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq.
According to a new
report by the London-based health organisation MEDACT, the British affiliate
of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW),
"lack of access to safe drinking water, and human waste backed
up and out of drains led to infectious diseases like cholera, typhoid".
While Iraq had built one of the most advanced health systems in the
developing world before the U.S. war in 1991, that war and the monstrous
sanctions had a disastrous impact on Iraq's performance. One in eight
children fewer than five, died before their fifth birthday; one in four
was chronically malnourished; a quarter of all newborns were underweight;
while maternal mortality stood at 294 for every 100,000 births, roughly
the same level as Peru and Bangladesh. The report expressed particular
concern for the health of young children, babies and the weak (1).
In 2001, Professor
Thomas Nagy of the School of Business and Public Management at George
Washington University investigated the U.S. Government "declassified"
documents of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that "proving"
beyond a doubt that, the malevolent intent to target sites of vital
civilian importance in the first U.S. war on Iraq (2). Professor Nagy
cites macabre foreknowledge of the effects of bombing water purification
and sewage treatment facilities, which provide clean water to the Iraqi
people.
The four "declassified"
DIA documents are available on the Internet. One documents stated clearly:
"Conditions are favourable for communicable disease outbreaks,
particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing. Infectious
disease prevalence in major Iraqi urban areas targeted
by coalition bombing (Baghdad, Basrah) undoubtedly has increased since
the beginning of Desert Storm. Current public health problems are attributable
to the reduction of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water
purification and distribution, electricity, and the decreased ability
to
control disease outbreaks"(3).
This document, "Disease
Outbreaks in Iraq", lists the "most likely diseases during
next 60-90 days (in descending order), Diarrheal diseases (particularly
children), Acute respiratory illnesses (colds and influenza), Typhoid,
Hepatitis A (particularly children), Measles, diphtheria, and pertussis
(particularly children), Meningitis, including meningococcal (particularly
children), Cholera (possible, but less likely). The Documents adds:
"MOST LIKELY DISEASES DURING THE FOLLOWING 90-180 DAYS, Diarrheal
diseases (particularly children), Acute respiratory illnesses (colds),
Typhoid, Hepatitis A (particularly children), Conjunctivitis (Eye infections),
Measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children), Coetaneous
leishmaniasis, Meningococcal meningitis (particularly children), Malaria,
Cholera (possible, but less likely)". Why the U.S. and its allies
targeted the Iraqi children in particular?
The other document,
"Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," is dated January 22,
1991 and stated: "Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment
and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily
mineralised and frequently brackish to saline". It continues: "With
no
domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some
essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent UN sanctions
to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result
in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This
could
lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". As
reported in The Sunday Herald on 17 September 2000 "Water-borne
diseases in Iraq today are both endemic and epidemic. They include typhoid,
dysentery, hepatitis, cholera and polio (which had previously been eradicated),
along with a
litany of others"(4).
Furthermore, Professor
Nagy noted: "As these documents illustrate, the United States knew
sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of
Iraq". Indeed Professor Nagy wrote: "The U.S. government intentionally
used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after
the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis,
mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. And it was more
concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the
actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis".
According to Pentagon
officials, that was the intention. In a June 23, 1991, Washington Post
article, Pentagon officials stated that Iraq's electrical grid had been
targeted by bombing strikes in order to undermine the civilian economy.
"People say, 'You didn't't recognize that it was going to have
an
effect on water or sewage,'" said one planning officer at the Pentagon.
"Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions-help out the Iraqi
people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was
to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
Article 54 of the
Geneva Convention states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy,
remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the
civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking
water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific
purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population
or to the adverse party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve
out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."
"This is precisely
what the United States government did, with malice aforethought",
Professor Nagy noted: "It destroyed, removed, or rendered useless
Iraq's drinking water installations and supplies. The sanctions, imposed
for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute
a violation of the Geneva Convention. They amount to a systematic effort
to, in the DIA's own words, "fully degrade" Iraq's water sources"(2).
Iraq cannot legally
import or export any goods outside the UN sanctions system. Chlorine
and essential equipment parts needed to repair and clear the water system
have been banned from entering the country under the UN "hold"
system, which was imposed by the U.S-UK members of the Security Council.
Ohio Democrat Representative
Tony Hall has written to American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
saying he shares concerns expressed by UNICEF about the "profound
effects the deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems
on children's health". Diarrhoeal diseases he says are of "epidemic
proportions" and are "the prime killer of children under five".
"Holds on contracts for water and sanitation are a prime reason
for the increase in sickness and death". Of 18 contracts, wrote
Hall, all but one on hold were placed by the government in the US. However,
Madeleine Albright was one of the architects of this genocidal policy
on Iraq. She thought, "the price is worth it". That was exactly
what the Nazis thought of Jewish
children.
Professor Joy Gordon
of Fairfield University who analysed large amount of UN data on the
effect of the sanctions, wrote in November 2002 Harper's Magazine: "In
early 2001, the United States had placed holds on $280 million in medical
supplies, including vaccines to treat infant hepatitis, tetanus,
and diphtheria, as well as incubators and cardiac equipment. The rationale
was that the vaccines contained live cultures, albeit highly weakened
ones. The Iraqi government, it was argued, could conceivably extract
these, and eventually grow a virulent fatal strain, then develop a missile
or other
delivery system that could effectively disseminate it. UNICEF and U.N.
health agencies, along with other Security Council members, objected
strenuously. European biological-weapons experts maintained that such
a feat was in fact flatly impossible. At the same time, with massive
epidemics
ravaging the country, and skyrocketing child mortality, it was quite
certain that preventing child vaccines from entering Iraq would result
in large numbers of child and infant deaths"(5). The UN has estimated
that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions,
and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason.
No one can say that the United States didn't't know what it was doing.
The deliberate killing of Iraqi children is an act of war crimes and
those Western perpetrators should be indicted for war crimes.
The humanitarian
crises in Iraq are increasing as a result of the invasion and occupation
of Iraq by U.S. forces. In March 2004, a fact-finding mission by the
Belgian NGO Medical Aid for the Third World found that even the devastating
effects of the US-UK sanctions have not been overcome, including
their veto of medicines, and that infant mortality is apparently increasing
and general health declining because of deteriorating living conditions:
lack of access to food, potable water, or medical aid and hospitals,
and a sharp decline in purchasing power - largely the result of the
remarkable failures of what should have been one of the easiest military
occupations ever against a defenceless nation.
An Iraqi political
group, the Struggle Against Hegemony Movement, published its finding
on Monday, says more than 37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between
the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003. The
finding is consistent with earlier findings by Western groups.
A high UN official
has raised the spectre of a serious humanitarian crisis (i.e. lots of
people dying) in Basra this summer due to lack of drinking water as
people need for a population of 1.3 million, and the temperature has
soared to 50 C / 122 F: "We are confronting a potential serious
humanitarian crisis," Ross Mountain, acting special representative
of the U.N. Secretary General for Iraq, told Reuters in Amman on 30
July 2004.
Still not satisfied
with the destruction of Iraq's water, the U.S. handed Iraq water systems
to Bechtel, an American firm with a controversial history of water privatisation
in the Developing World. Bechtel is attempting to control not only the
process of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, but also control over the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers themselves. Bechtel has been embroiled in
a lawsuit with Bolivia for their plan to privatise the water there,
which would drastically raise the cost of clean water for the poorest
people in the country. Bechtel presence in Iraq is a recipe for disaster
For thousands of
years, the Tigris and the Euphrates has been the lifeline of the Iraqi
people. It was here, in the Tigris and Euphrates River basin that the
world's first cities, with perhaps as many as 50,000 inhabitants appeared.
The cradle of ancient civilisations. Along with monumental architecture
and the beginnings of writing. Epic literature codes of laws, and contributions
to astronomy and mathematics all followed in succeeding millennium.
What rights do Americans have to commit such heinous crimes against
the history of humanity and the Iraqi people?
Furthermore, Western
contractors are cutting into billions of dollars set aside for 90 planned
water projects, allowing them to supply only half of the potable water
originally expected, Nasreen Berwari, the "minister" of municipalities
and public work in the appointed Iraqi government told The New York
Times on 26 July 2004. So far, the US have only spent a total of $366
million of the $18.4 billion Iraq "reconstruction" package
that have been handed to US corporations.
People in the West,
particularly Americans, have been carefully screened (by Fox News, NBC
and the likes) from seeing any sign of vast devastation, suffering and
genocides caused by their government wars of aggression and committed
in their names. How many more thousands of Iraqi children have to
die in order to awake the consciences of Westerners liberals? The liberal
and mainstream media of the West, whose main concerns are "morality"
and "human rights", live in silence when the genocide of Iraqi
children perpetrated by Western leaders.
The media attention
is now devoted to Sudan, "[w]e are shown starving babies now, but
no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we
attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red Cross always said
it must be - politically neutral. Anything else is just an old-fashioned
colonial war - the reality of killing, and the escalation of violence,
disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism", writes John
Laughland of Sanders Research Associates in the UK.
For Iraq to recover
'liberation' is urgently needed- in Iraq, in Palestine and in every
country where colonial powers are becoming entrenched.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted
on:
[email protected]
Notes:
(1) MEDACT (2003).
Continuing Collateral Damage: The Health and
Environmental Costs of War on Iraq.
http://www.medact.org/tbx/pages/sub.cfm?id=775
(2) Thomas J. Nagy (2001). The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the
U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply. The Progressive, September.
(3)
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia
/19950901/950901_0pgv072_90p.htm
l
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia/19950901
/950901_511rept_91.html
(4) Felicity Arbuthnot
(2000). Allies deliberately poisoned Iraq public
water supply in Gulf War. http://www.sundayherald.com
/print10837
(5) Joy Gordon (2002). Cool War, Harper's Magazine, November.
http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html