The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  It is then that Hassan Salman walks up to us. He grows tomatoes and onions on the other side of the road. He has a distinguished face, brown from the sun, and is wearing a gold-fringed robe. When we mention cancer, he frowns. “Yes, we have had many cancer cases here,” he says. “I think it happened because of the fires and what happened during the battles. The tanks were just down the road.” He pauses. “My daughter-in-law died of cancer around fifty days ago. She was ill in the stomach. Her name was Amal Hassan Saleh. She was very young—she was just twenty-one years old.”

  Official Western government reaction to the growing signs of DU contamination was pitiful. When I first reported from Iraq’s child cancer wards in February and March 1998, the British government went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. I still treasure a sarcastic letter from Lord Gilbert at the Ministry of Defence, who told Independent readers that my account of a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqi child cancer cases would—“coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk”—be regarded as “a wilful perversion of reality.” According to his Lordship, particles from the DU-hardened warheads—used against tank armour—are extremely small, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and “become difficult to detect, even with the most sophisticated monitoring equipment.” Now I have to say that over the months, I had gathered enough evidence to suggest that—had this letter come from anyone other than his Lordship—its implications would be mendacious as well as misleading.

  So let’s start with a far more eloquent—and accurate—letter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 by Paddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEA Technology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Mr. Bartholomew’s letter, of which I obtained a copy—I called him later and he confirmed he was the author, but would make no other comment— refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance official called J. Y. Sanders on the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait by depleted-uranium ammunition. In an accompanying “threat paper,” Mr. Bartholomew notes that while the hazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination of these weapons “are small when compared to those during a war,” they nonetheless “can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk to both the military and the civilian population” (my emphasis). The document, marked “UK Restricted,” goes on to say that “U.S. tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, U.S. aircraft many 10s of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000 lbs of DU . . . if the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor . . . calculates 500,000 potential deaths” (again, my emphasis).

  Mr. Bartholomew added in his 1991 paper that while “this theoretical figure is not realistic, however it does indicate a significant problem.” And he continues:

  The DU will spread around the battlefield and target vehicles in various sizes and quantities . . . it would be unwise for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long periods and this would obviously be of concern to the local population if they collect this heavy metal and keep it. There will be specific areas in which many rounds will have been fired where localised contamination of vehicles and the soil may exceed permissible limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population.

  Mr. Bartholomew’s covering letter says that the contamination of Kuwait is “emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner,” adding that the AEA’s regional marketing director (Alastair Parker) might send a copy of the “threat paper” to the UK ambassador in Kuwait. AEA Technology could “clean up” the depleted uranium under a contract with the Kuwait government. Needless to say, no one had bothered to suggest a clean-up in Iraq, where so many children were dying of unexplained cancers. Why not? And why did Lord Gilbert write his extraordinary and deeply misleading letter to The Independent in March of 1998? Here’s a clue. It comes in a letter dated 21 March 1991, from a U.S. lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Major Larson at the organisation’s “Studies and Analysis Branch” and states that:

  There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should assure their future existence (until something better is developed) through Service/DOD [Department of Defense] proponency. If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability.

  So there it is. Shorn of the colonel’s execrable English, the message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are acceptable until we—the West—invent something even more lethal to take its place. No wonder, then, that an official British government review of the UK’s Ministry of Defence radioactive waste management at the British firing range for DU ammunition in the Lake District in December 1997 detailed the extraordinary lengths taken to protect local British villages. They included firing shells into tunnels with a filtered extract system, pressure-washing the surfaces and sealing up the contaminated residues in cemented drums. Lord Gilbert did not tell Independent readers about that in his letter to the paper. So much for the “wilful perversion of reality.”160

  If governments did not care about the Iraqi children, however, British people did. The Independent launched an appeal for the medicines these children so desperately needed, and within weeks our generous readers had donated more than $250,000 for us to buy cancer drugs and medical equipment to take to Iraq. At last, it seemed, we could do something, rather than just write angry articles about the plight of these pariah children. But could we? Were we going to save lives, or merely prolong suffering?

  It was mundane work. In October 1998 we employed refuse carts and a squad of sweating Iraqis to heave our boxes of medicinal supplies from a refrigerated truck that we had backed into the broken loading bay of a Baghdad hospital; across town at the Mansour hospital, we had to use a stretcher to transport the 5,185 kilograms of medicine, stuffing the painfully expensive vincristine into the director’s personal fridge. It was a bit of an anticlimax, until I saw the children in the wards upstairs. Weeping with pain or smiling in innocence of their fate, the cancer children of Iraq—in Mosul and Basra as well as Baghdad—were at last receiving help. “Have you brought something for me?” a little girl asked as a doctor told her that all the drugs must be shared equally.

  In one corner of the Mansour cancer ward, Hebba Mortaba lay in a patterned blue dress, a hideous tumour distorting her tiny figure. When her mother lifted the dress, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerous abscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlier abdominal mass—only to find, alien-like, that another grew in its place. During the 1991 war, Hebba’s suburb of Basra was bombed so heavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She was now just nine years old and, so her doctors told me gently, would not live to see her tenth birthday.

  Given UN sanctions and then Saddam Hussein’s own ban on medicine imports, it was in truth something of a miracle that our truck made it across the Iraqi desert, finally shepherded around the country’s hospitals by CARE’s two indomitable Iraqi representatives, Margaret Hassan and Judy Morgan. The UN at first fulminated about the length of time that it might take to clear our medicines through the sanctions commission—until we told them that we would take the medicines whether they liked it or not, at which point, on 15 June, clearance was given in twenty-four hours. The office of the Iraqi president was almost equally obtuse, delaying and prevaricating and ignoring our shipment request until September, when Saddam Hussein gave his personal approval—another example of that disturbing coincidence of intention between the West and the dictator in Baghdad.

  “The members of the [Security Council] Committee have no objection to the sending of the specified items . .
.” the UN’s pompous letter had concluded, as if they were doing us a favour. The documentation at the UN accurately referred to the medical payment as “readers donations from Independent newspaper.” But the fifty-eight cartons and boxes, flown from Heathrow to Amman by Royal Jordanian Airlines and then trucked the 800 kilometres to Baghdad by Iraqi driver Rahman Jassem Mohamed—cloxacillin and ampicillin vials, cytarabine and vincristine, methotrexate and dexamethasone ampoules and syringes and gloves and blood solutions—were successfully distributed to children’s hospitals across Iraq.

  But were we in time? The truth should be told. Most of the children whose suffering I had recounted were already dead—even the boy whose portrait became the symbol and logo of The Independent’s appeal. I had taken a photograph of Latif Sattar from Babylon, the five-year-old with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who was playing with a toy car and smiling beneath the bald dome of his head when I met him the previous February. I took his picture close-up as he lay on his bed in a knitted pullover, his eyes staring at me. But the records of the paediatric hospital in Baghdad show that he died on 7 April 1998. Then there was leukaemia victim Samar Khdair, the beautiful girl whose photograph appeared in my paper the day after Latif’s. She was the child who lay in her nightie, her father pressing a yellow compress to her forehead, her eyes squeezed shut with pain. Again, the hospital file provided no comfort. It recorded how Samar suffered a relapse through lack of drugs and blood products. But she fought on—only to die on 20 September 1998, just days before the drugs paid for by our readers arrived in Baghdad.

  Most of the tiny children I was now seeing in Iraq would die too. “When the cancers reach this stage, there is not much we can do,” Dr. al-Ali told me frankly when I reached Basra and talked to him again. “But you must understand what your people have done—they have helped to prolong these small lives, and to improve the quality of life of these children. They are going to die in one month, two months, two years . . . Yes, perhaps a few will live . . . believe me, it is worth bringing your drugs here.” I go on scribbling the names of the soon-to-be-dead in my notebook. Nour Shehab and Halah Saleh are ten and Haitham Ahmed is eight. Tiba Favel is only eighteen months old. Moustapha Jaber is eight and Dhamia Qassem is thirteen. All have acute leukaemia except for Moustapha, who has lymphoma.

  It was impossible to visit these cancer wards again without a feeling of great indignation. Even now, when the children had the drugs they needed for leukaemia, blood platelets for them were not being made fast enough in Iraq because the machine that separated the blood needed maintenance. UN sanctions had broken the back of the hospital system. We in the West—we, in the most literal sense of the word—were responsible for all this, we who accepted the UN sanctions against Iraq, the sanctions that were clearly killing these children and that, equally clearly, were not harming Saddam Hussein. But there was also reason for exasperation.

  For although the U.S. and British administrations understandably tried to keep the two groups of victims separate, the American and British soldiers suffering from what had become known as Gulf War Syndrome appeared to be suffering from almost identical cancers and leukaemia and internal bleeding as the children of Iraq. The explosion of cancers in Iraq largely affected the Shiite community, and it was therefore no surprise that, seven years after the war, Saddam Hussein’s regime had made no mention of it—yet again, Clinton, Blair and Saddam had made common cause in a total failure to explain the calamity. But even as I was touring the cancer wards of Basra and Baghdad, Tony Flint, the acting chairman of the British Gulf Veterans’ and Families’ Association, was warning that the very same DU shells could be responsible for cancers that had so far killed at least thirty British veterans. A day later, the American National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of U.S. veterans’ groups, announced that as many as 40,000 American servicemen might have been exposed to depleted uranium dust on the battlefield.

  In October 1998, Phil Garner telephoned me to ask how he could make contact with the doctors treating Iraq’s child cancer victims. He had been reading my reports on the growing evidence of links between cancers and depleted uranium shells. During the 1991 Gulf War, Garner was in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. He wasn’t in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms of Britain’s “friendly fire” casualties, men who were accidentally attacked by U.S. aircraft that were using depleted-uranium rounds. And now he was suffering from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines, and had a lump on the right side of his neck. What does this mean? I knew all about these lumps. I had seen them on the necks of the Iraqi children.

  In Basra again, I watch the anguish of a parent. “Oxygen, for God’s sake get some oxygen—my son is dying.” It is an almost animal wail from the man on the staircase of the paediatric hospital, tears running from his eyes, shaking uncontrollably. In the small room at the top of the stairs, his son, Yahyia Salman, is crying with fear, desperate to breathe. A leukaemia relapse—especially in the sulphurous heat of southern Iraq—is a thing of panic. “Stop shouting, we have another oxygen bottle,” Dr. Jenane Khaleb admonishes the father, pursing her lips with a mixture of irritation and concern. But the man will not be consoled. “My God, what am I going to do?” he cries as a technician with a ratchet begins to unscrew the top of another massive, dented black oxygen bottle. The little boy’s eyes move across the room, towards the doctor, towards me and his father. This is not the moment to tell the child that his hospital now has all the drugs it needs for leukaemia. The boxes of vincristine and vials of cefuroxine, ampoules of metoclopramide, of surgical gloves and syringes arrived less than twenty-four hours ago. But Yahyia Salman has gone a long way down the road towards death.

  So has two-year-old Youssef Qassem in the next room and Halah Saleh who, just ten years old, is suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The doctors show me these children with infinite weariness, and I can understand why. They have received so many visitors and so many promises of help. At least ours was honoured. Dr. Khaleb asks, very carefully, if the Basra hospital received the same amount of drugs as other hospitals in Baghdad and Mosul. I understand the purpose of her question: it was the Shiites here in the south who rose against the Iraqi government in 1991 and there are those in Baghdad who have never forgiven them.

  Dr. Khaleb says nothing of this. Yes, I insist, The Independent ’s medicines were pre-packed before leaving Heathrow to ensure that every area of Iraq received an equal share. And she smiles as she reads through the drug manifest which I have brought with me. It is the first smile I have seen on this trip to Basra. For the doctors here are overwhelmed as much by the implications of their discoveries as they are by lack of medicine. The increase in child cancer in these southern provinces—it is now October 1998—is in places reaching ferocious heights.

  While in some areas an average of only 3.9 children in every 100,000 are suffering from cancer, the districts of Harthe and Gurne now produce statistics of 71.8 and 41.8 respectively. There was heavy bombing in these suburbs in 1991 and the words “depleted uranium” are heard in every ward; even the parents now know the meaning of the phrase. Dr. Jawad al-Ali is stupefied. “I don’t know how to explain the implications of this to you but I am now seeing terrible things,” he said. “One of our medical students who has just graduated, Zeineddin Kadam, has cancer and he will die in a few days. The wife of one of our orthopaedic surgeons died just a week after a diagnosis of acute leukaemia—she died less than a month ago when she thought she merely had an appendix problem. They found part of her small intestine was gangrenous.”

  Dr. al-Ali opens another thick file of notes. “Of fifteen cancer patients from one area, I have only two left. I am receiving children with cancer of the bone— this is incredible. I have just received a fifteen-year-old girl, Zeinab Manwar, with leukaemia—she will live only a year. My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer of the breast—one of them was only fourteen years old—this is unheard of!”

  Dr. Akram Hammoud, director of th
e paediatric hospital, is no less appalled. “Almost all the children here will die in a few months,” he says. “We have one family with three children, all of whom have Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What can have done this? Before the war, we received in this hospital about one cancer patient a week—now I am getting an average of forty a week. This is crazy. We are getting patients with carcinoma cancer below the age of twenty—one of my patients is twenty-two, another eighteen. One of the symptoms of leukaemia is bleeding from the nose—now every child that has a nosebleed is brought here by panic-stricken parents.” The doctors are careful in talking about depleted uranium. They do not want their patients—or their own observations—to be used for propaganda, however justifiably, but they know of the 1990 American military report which states that cancers, kidney problems and birth defects are among the health effects of uranium particle contamination.

  “Even the common cold in Basra is changing its features,” Dr. al-Ali says. “It takes longer to cure here now and we get advanced cases, sometimes associated with encephalitis.” He reopens his file. “In 1989, we received 116 cancer patients in the whole area; last year, the figure was 270. Already in the first ten months of this year, it’s 331. No one will give us the equipment to test the soil. Probably we are all polluted.”

  The British government responded to the new evidence of child cancers in Iraq with the same lethargy and indifference as Lord Gilbert. “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 deformities, cancers and birth defects—in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) based ammunition by UK and U.S. forces during the 1990/91 Gulf conflict,” the British minister for the armed forces, Doug Henderson, wrote in December 1998. “However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter.” I liked the bit about “peer-reviewed epidemiological research data” because, of course, there weren’t any—nor would there be. Even when the Royal Society was asked to investigate the effects of depleted uranium, its researchers didn’t visit Iraq.161 The evidence, as shameful as it was shocking, had little effect. At a Christian service in 2000 to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the wartime RAF and American fire-bombing of Dresden, the bishop of Coventry, Colin Bennetts, declared that Britain had to accept responsibility for the death and deformity of children in Iraq as a result of allied bombing during and after the 1991 Gulf War. While criticising Saddam Hussein’s “evil,” the bishop said that the child victims of Iraq “were conceived and born around the time of the Gulf War. They were born with hideous physical deformities. Many are also suffering from infantile leukaemia. There is very strong evidence to suggest that all this was caused by the depleted uranium in our weapons.” Yet still the Americans and British refused to acknowledge any such guilt. In just three years’ time, they were to use depleted uranium yet again— once more, against Iraq.