``Children screamed for
water and were forced to drink sewage’’
The title quotation
is from an eye-witness account by a 14 year-old Palestinian boy of the Israeli
attack on Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank (The Times, April 9 2002). The report
of the water shortage is corroborated by Jenin doctors' statements that ``15
babies were sick after their mothers fed them powdered milk and sewage run-off
from streets where bodies were left to rot for days (The Guardian, April 12
2002). We cannot know what has happened to those children and babies but under
a military siege with medicine and food in short supply it is hard not to fear
for them and their families. This is not ``collateral damage.'' It is the entirely
predictable outcome of the deliberate Israeli policy of destroying water and
power supplies, bulldozing pumps, pipes, water tanks, electricity cables and of
maintaining a state of siege.
The current, feeble
criticism by the UK government of Israeli state terrorism, such as this attack
on basic civilian infrastructure in the Occupied Territories, is almost
entirely hypocritical for many reasons, an obvious one being that the UK is
itself helping to hold helpless and vulnerable children under a military siege
in which they are denied access to clean drinking water. This is the siege on
Iraq, a siege many times more deadly than that in the Occupied Territories,
inhumane as that is. If we are horrified by what Israel is doing in Jenin, then
there are almost no words left to describe how we should feel about what we
have done and are continuing to do in Basra.
In the 1991 Gulf
War the US/UK dropped 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq. The country's entire
civilian economic infrastructure was targeted and largely destroyed. The IDF
uproots power cables with tanks. The British Navy blows up power stations with
Cruise missiles. By March 1991, US/UK bombing had obliterated Iraq's electrical
power production, oil production and refining capability and communications
systems. The effect of this compounded the direct destruction and damage of
dams, water treatment plants, plants producing chemicals for purification,
pumping stations, pipes and wells to devastate the water and sanitation sector.
There were no spare parts, no chemicals, no fuel for tankers, no fuel to boil
water, no transport nor pay for qualified staff, no access to help from foreign
companies who installed equipment that needed repair and no way to communicate
across the country to coordinate remedial efforts.
The failing power
supply was, and still is, particularly damaging. Iraq is a flat country and its
water system relies completely on pumping capability. When the power fails, the
pumps that maintain the pressure in the system fail and sewage and other debris
are sucked back into the water supply, through cracked and damaged pipes.
The UN mission to
Iraq in March 1991 reported that ``nothing that we had seen or read had quite
prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the
country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the
economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly
urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have
been destroyed or rendered tenuous.'' The tone of the whole report is one of
deep shock and extreme urgency, calling repeatedly for immediate international
action to reconstruct the smashed infrastructure and try to save the lives of thousands
of extremely vulnerable people in dire need of food, medical aid, clean water
and electricity especially with the extreme temperatures of the Iraqi summer
only a few weeks away. What was the US/UK response? Maintain the siege. The
first, miserably inadequate, ``oil for food'' programme was only offered to
Iraq in August 1991 well after tens of thousands of children had already died,
to ``spin'' away any public outcry at the humanitarian disaster and US/UK
policy.
The Harvard Study
Team, an independent organisation of ten public health specialists, physicians
and lawyers, toured Iraq in April and May 1991 and estimated that during the
war and the immediate aftermath roughly 47,000 children died as a result of
malnutrition, disease and the collapse of medical service provision. The spread
of disease is a predictable outcome of the destruction of water and power
systems particularly in a country where summer temperatures often reach 50C. In
fact, the US military itself studied the impact on public health of water
system destruction and sanctions on Iraq. The Harvard Study Team observed ``people
collecting water from broken pipes surrounded by pools of murky water or even
directly from drainage ditches''. Loss of electricity and bombing also caused
sewage to spill into streets and rivers. For Basra's million inhabitants the
sanitation in 1995 was probably the worst in the country with, huge areas of
sewage water, sometimes green with algae and sometimes showing visible faecal
material. By 1997, every day saw over 100 tons of raw sewage being pumped into Iraq's
major rivers, especially in the south, whose flat terrain required more
expensive treatment plants with lifting stations.
Iraqi people,
impoverished by the economic collapse due to sanctions, were unable to afford bottled
water and turned to the polluted rivers, spawning a host of communicable
diseases, malnutrition and excess child deaths. According to UNICEF, the
devastation caused by the bombing and sanctions contributed to the deaths of
half a million children under the age of five between 1990 and 1998.
This situation
continues to the present. The UN Secretary-General stated in his September 2000
report on the oil-for-food programme, ``In the area of water and sanitation, infrastructural
degradation is evident across the subsectors, from water treatment to water
distribution. [...] In the absence of key complementary items currently on hold
and adequate maintenance, spare parts and staffing, the decay rate of the
entire system is accelerating.'' So, the water and sanitation sector, crucial
to child health and child survival, is decaying even further. The oil-for-food programme is not halting
that deterioration, in fact the rate of decay
is actually accelerating. In a press briefing on 30th November 2001, Tun
Myat, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq said, ``The biggest killer of
children is not lack of food or medicine but of water and sanitation - clean
water and sanitation are absolutely necessary for the children of the
country.''
All serious sources
of information on Iraq concur that until the economic blockade is lifted, the
necessary rebuilding cannot occur and the children of Iraq will continue to
suffer. In a report in March 1999 the UN Humanitarian Panel on Iraq concluded:``
The humanitarian situation in Iraq will continue to be a dire one in the
absence of a sustained revival of the Iraqi economy, which in turn cannot be
achieved solely through remedial humanitarian efforts.''
The child deaths,
preventable disease, malnutrition and consequent mental stunting, crushing
poverty, unemployment, breakdown of civil society, hopelessness and despair
have continued for over eleven years and we still impose this genocidal
military blockade, enforced by warships patrolling the seas, on the children of
Iraq.
The reports of the
suffering of Palestinians under Israeli attack are important and necessary, but
where are the reports about the suffering of Iraqi families that we have
caused? The UK government continues to deny the millions of children in Iraq
their human rights and repeatedly threatens the Iraqi people with yet more violence,
even nuclear weapons (e.g. ``Bush's nuke bandwagon'' The Guardian 27th March
2002) while bleating weakly about Israel's use of ``excessive force''. To call
this hypocrisy is something of an understatement. However, hypocrisy is a minor
fault compared to the major crime of genocide, which is what UK policy in Iraq
amounts to. Also, the actions of Sharon in the Occupied Territories and Blair
in Iraq are closely connected, springing as they do from the same immoral root.
Blair and Sharon are both acting in accordance with policy made in Washington
for the benefit of the ruling elite. One of the central tenets of that policy
is and has been for many decades that control of the vast natural resources of
the Arabian peninsular should not fall into the hands of the people of the
region. Palestinians, Iraqi children and Israeli citizens, who should all have
a share of those resources, are instead deemed expendable in the violent struggle
to maintain that control in the hands of the tiny minority of loyal US clients.
Indeed, the dead of Basra, Jenin and Haifa are more accurately described as
targets and not merely accidental victims of Western imperial policy.
References and
further reading
See, for example,
``Starving Iraq: one humanitarian disaster we can stop’’ by the Campaign
Against Sanctions on Iraq. http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/briefing/pamp_ed1.html.
For more information on sanctions, see also http://welcome.to/voicesuk
[1] Martti
Ahtisaari, Report to the UN Secretary-General on humanitarian needs in Kuwait
and Iraq, 20th March 1991. http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/info/undocs/s22366.html
[2] Sadruddin Aga
Khan, Report to the UN Secretary-General on humanitarian needs in Iraq, 15th
July 1991. http://www.casi.org.uk/overflow/undocs/sadruddin1.pdf
and http://www.casi.org.uk/overflow/undocs/sadruddin2.pdf
[3] Report of the
Harvard Team, New England Journal of Medicine, 325 pp. 977 - 980. 1991
[4] US military
Defence Intelligence Service documents, ``Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities" and ``Disease Information’’ Jan. 22, 1991, ``Disease
Outbreaks in Iraq’’ Feb 21 1990 [sic]). These can be accessed by following the
instructions at the end of http://www.progressive.org/0901/nagy0901.html
[5] UN Food and
Agriculture Organization. Technical Cooperation Programme: Evaluation of
Food and Nutrition Situation in Iraq, 1995.
[6] Unicef report:
Situation Analysis of Children and Women in Iraq - 1997. April 1998.
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