arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

By Felicity Arbuthnot
Freelance Journalist – London 08/04/2004

When Martti Ahtisaari, then Special Rapporteur to the UN, visited Iraq in March 1991 just after the end of the Gulf War, he wrote, “Nothing we had heard or read could have prepared us for this particular devastation - a country reduced to a pre-industrial age for a considerable time to come.”

UN reports on Iraq’s water, electricity, health care, and education in 1989 described Iraq as near First World standards. The country was regarded as having the most sophisticated medical facilities in the Middle East. The embargo, implemented on Hiroshima Day 1990 to pressure Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, had an almost instant negative impact. Iraq imported a broad range of items, 70 percent of everything, from pharmaceuticals to film, educational materials to parts for the electricity grid, water purifying chemicals to everything necessary for waste management; and at the consumer level also, almost everything that a developed society takes for granted was imported.

With all trade denied, the Iraqi dinar (ID), worth US$3 in 1989, became virtually worthless: ID 250, formerly US$750 did not even buy a postage stamp in neighboring Jordan. Staple foods multiplied up to 11,000-fold in price. With no trade, unemployment spiraled and many - in a country where obesity had been a problem - faced hunger and deprivation. The US and UK-driven UN sanctions, in fact, mirrored a pitiless Middle Ages siege. With Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait the embargo should have been lifted, but a further relentless US and UK-driven “war of moving goal posts” began, and the majority of children in Iraq - who are fourteen years old now - have never known a normal childhood. Even birthday parties,`eid celebrations - and Christmas and Easter celebrations for Christians -became victims; few had the money for the feast or the gifts.

Ten months after the war, I stood in the pediatric intensive care unit of Baghdad’s formerly flagship Pediatric Teaching Hospital. A young couple stood, faces frozen with terror, as a nurse tried frantically to clear the airway of their perfect, tiny, premature baby. There was no suction equipment. “It is at a time like this, all your training becomes a reflex action,” remarked my companion, Dr. Janet Cameron, from Glasgow, Scotland, “and in a unit like this, you know exactly where everything will be - but there is nothing here.” The fledgling life turned from pink to an ethereal grey, to blue, flickered, and went out. Since then, over a million lives have gone out due to “embargo related causes,” a silent holocaust initiated on Hiroshima Day.

Doctors were remarking in bewilderment at the rise in childhood cancers and in birth deformities, which they were ironically comparing with those they had seen in textbooks after the nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in the 1950s. In 1991, only the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s top military planners knew that they had usedradioactive and chemically toxic depleted uranium (DU) weapons against the Iraqis. Just weeks later, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency wrote a “self initiated” report and sent it to the UK government, warning that if “fifty tonnes of the residual DU dust” had been left “in the region” there would, they estimated, be half a million extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (i.e., the year 2000).

The Pentagon eventually admitted to an estimate of 325 tons; some independent analysts estimate as much as 900 tons. Estimates of the added burden of last year's illegal invasion are that up to a further 2,000 tons of the residual dust remain to poison water, fauna, flora and to be inhaled by the population and the occupiers, causing cancers and genetic mutations in the yet-to-be-conceived. DU remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. Some scientists estimate that it will still be poisoning the earth, the unborn, the newborn “when the sun goes out.” Iraq, the land of ancient Mesopotamia - like Afghanistan and the Balkans - has become a silent potential weapon of mass destruction for the population and geographical neighbors.

Ironically, as cancers spiraled, the UN Sanctions Committee added to its limitless list of items denied to Iraq, treatment for cancers (and heart disease) since they contain minute amounts of radioactive materials. Iraqi scientists, they argued, might extract the radioactive materials from these medications and make weapons from them. One exasperated expert commented, “Even were the technology available - and it is not - one would probably need to extract the radioactivity from every pill and intravenous treatment on earth, to make one crude device.” So little Iraqis, in their irradiated land, could only suffer the most lethal effects of radiation but were denied all of the therapeutic ones in the name of “we the people of the United Nations” - a United Nations to which, incidentally, Iraq was one of the first signatories.

In the West, 70 percent of cancers are now largely curable or with long remissions. In Iraq they are almost always a death sentence. On another early visit after the war, I went to a ward where just two small boys, aged three and five lay alone, in an attempt to isolate them. They had acute myeloid leukemia and hopelessly compromised immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to any infection. The three-year-old, whose name translated as “the vital one,” was covered with bruises from the leaking capillaries bleeding internally and rigid with pain. There was not even an aspirin available. His eyes were full of unshed tears and I realized he had taught himself not to cry - sobs would rack his agonized little body further.

Leaving, I stooped to stroke the face of the five-year-old, who was in an identical condition. In a gesture that must have cost more than could ever be imagined, he reached and clutched my hand tightly, as do children everywhere, responding to affection. I left the ward, leaned against a wall and prayed that the ground would open and swallow me. I wrote at the time, “I now know it is actually possible to die of shame.”

Families would sell all they had to buy cancer and other vital medication on the black market, and since hospitals no longer had the requisite equipment to test it, could not even check to ensure it was safe. I remember an enchanting three-year-old, the bane of the doctors, his energy levels and mischief belying his precarious health. As I was talking to Dr. Selma Haddad, a man burst through the door and thrust a small packet into her hand. She looked at it, then said to me, “This is his uncle, he is the last one in the family with anything left to sell. He has sold all he has for 500 milligrams of medication. This child needs 800 milligrams a month, for a year.”

When, occasionally, pitiful amounts of medication came in, doctors gave half the needed dose so the next patient would have some, too - rendering effectiveness virtually nil. They would meticulously write the patient's protocol (dosage, medication, amount, time to administer) on used paper, writing between the lines, and between the between, on cardboard, on anything (paper was vetoed by the UN Sanctions Committee) then solemnly write under each item, N/A, N/A, N/A - not available.

I remember Ali, eighteen months, lying nearly unconscious in his mother's arms in the packed child cancer clinic. “With bone marrow transplant, we could do something, but there is nothing,” said Dr. Haddad. The mother begged and pleaded, but beds and even palliative care were for the glimmer of chances, not for the small no-hopers, such was the total destruction of a fine, free, sophisticated health service. Leaving the hospital, I found Ali's mother sitting on the ground, leaning against one of the great white entrance pillars, in her black abaya, her tears streaming onto his small, still face.

“How do you cope?” I asked Dr. Haddad on one visit: doctors who have all the skills and knowledge yet no ability to treat those they care so passionately about. She thought for a moment, then said quietly, “I take them all home with me, in my heart.” In a way, she said, the older children were the hardest. She sat on Ezra’s bed, holding her hand and stroking her hair. “They know they are going to die.” Ezra was beautiful, 17 years old, and the cancer had paralyzed her central nervous system. But it had not prevented her crying. She had been crying for three weeks, because she wanted to go home, to complete her studies, to go to university and graduate. Most of all, she wanted to live. As I left, her grandmother grabbed my hand, “Please,” she begged, “take her with you, make her better.” Parents, grandparents, made the same plea, again and again. They did not ask where you were from, who you were, or for their beloved back, just, Please, take him or her and make them well again.

Then there was Jassim. In the same ward as Ezra, he lay with his huge eyes and glossy hair, listlessly viewing the barren ward. He had been selling cigarettes on the streets of Basra to support his family until he became ill. “This is Felicity and she writes for a living,” said Dr. Haddad. Jassim was transformed; he glowed and showed me the poems he spent his days writing, when he still had the energy. He collected phrases, too, to incorporate where he thought appropriate. I told him all writers collect words and phrases, they are our tools. He glowed again, delighting that he was being understood and that his instincts were guiding him correctly along his passionate path. “I asked death, ‘What is greater than you?’ Death replied, ‘Separation of lovers is greater than me,’” was one of his collected phrases. He was 13.

One of his poems was called “The Identity Card.” In translation, it reads:

The name is love,
The class is mindless,
The school is suffering,
The governorate is sadness,
The city is sighing,
The street is misery,
The home number is one thousand sighs.

He watched my face for reaction. Lost for words, eventually I said, “Jassim, if you can write like this at thirteen, think what you will do at twenty.” I asked him if I could incorporate his poem in articles from that visit and said I would send them back to him, so he would see it in print. Some weeks later, I did just that and sent cuttings back to him with a friend and imagined him glowing again. He had fought and fought, but lost his battle just before my friend arrived. He never saw his poem in print and became just another statistic in the “collateral damage” of sanctions by the most inhuman regime ever overseen by the United Nations, which arguably condemned the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child - the most widely signed convention in history - to the dust, to the mass of graves of Iraq's children, resulting from the embargo years.

Children that survived, wrote Professor Magne Raundalen, possibly the world's foremost expert on children in war zones, who heads the Centre for Crisis Studies, in Bergen, Norway, were “amongst the most traumatised child Population” on earth. And there was no chance of recovery. Count Hans von Sponeck, who resigned as UN Co-ordinator in Iraq, like his predecessor Denis Halliday (who had cited the sanctions he was there to oversee as generating “the destruction of an entire nation, it is as simple and terrifying as that”), spoke of not only of medical and nutritional problems, but “intellectual genocide.”

School books were vetoed. All professionals - doctors, engineers, architects -qualified from 1989 course material. An Iraqi doctor qualifying in 2003 was fourteen years behind in clinical developments, though never in commitment.

Children, Iraq's future, were also marooned in the academia of the 1980s. Isolation was searing. On one visit, this writer was asked for a radio interview and the usual ground rules were laid down: no politics. It was a pleasant half-hour of history, culture - and only mildest current politics. Then the presenter said that all guests were asked to select a piece of music and dedicate it to whom they wished. (“We like to think of ourselves as Baghdad's BBC Radio 3.”) I chose Stevie Wonder's “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and dedicated it to the children of Iraq.

The next day I had a crash course in human relations. I was repeatedly stopped in the street, whispered to at a conference, by people from all walks of life. Was I the lady on the radio last night? On affirmation, the comment was always virtually the same: “Thank you so much, we are so isolated, my wife (or husband) was in tears, I was in tears, my children…thank you.” And no, I know orchestration; this was not.

Several years ago, I talked to the young who should have had all before them - a social mixture, between 18 and 21 years old - and asked them about their hopes, dreams and fears. None had a dream. “I dream of having enough milk for my baby,” said a young mother. “I am too tired to dream,” said a youth who had dreamed of being a doctor, but was working in a smelt, in the searing heat of a Baghdad summer, to help support his family. A vibrant, beautiful young woman from a formerly privileged family waited until her mother had left the room and whispered, “Nothing awaits us, only death.” She was 18.

And for much of the country there were the often daily, ongoing bombings of the patrolling by the United States and United Kingdom of the “no fly zones” or misnamed “safe havens” in the north and south, an illegal exercise not sanctioned by the United Nations. For reasons unknown, aircraft returning to their bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia routinely bombed flocks of sheep - and with them the child shepherds who minded them.

An abiding memory is of watching a tiny illiterate woman, who had lost her three children -the youngest 5 and the oldest 13 - her husband and father-in-law to one of these bombings, as she walked with leaden feet to their graves in a tiny dusty cemetery near the northern city of Mosul. She sat hunched, fetal, on the smallest grave, that of five-year-old Sulaiman. Their flock of nearly 200 sheep were also blasted to pieces on a barren plain where they would have been visible for exactly what they were. “We searched all day for parts to bury,” said a villager who had rushed down to help, on hearing the bombing. Then he lowered his eyes and whispered, “There was so little recognizable, we still don't know whether the graves contain all human or some sheep remains.”

Asked why flocks of sheep were being bombed, the British Ministry of Defence - surreally - responded, “We reserve the right to take robust action, when threatened.” At St. Matthew's Monastery on Mount Maqloub, which overlooks the plain, the priest in charge commented of the bombings, “Every day, there are new widows, new widowers, new orphans.” Then he said solemnly, “Please, will you tell your Mr. Tony Blair that he is a very, very bad man.” The ancient monastery is Iraq's Lourdes, where people of all religious beliefs bring their sick to the site of the saint's believed burial, to benefit from the healing powers legend holds he still possesses from the grave. The ongoing grief and carnage on the plains below were in contrast to all the monks and monastery stood for. The gentle, sorrowful admonition from a spiritual soul was especially poignant.

Forgotten, too, are the major bombing blitzes over the years. In 1993 there were two massive attacks on Baghdad: one a good-bye from outgoing George Bush Senior and the other a hello from incoming William Jefferson Clinton. The second one killed, among others, the talented artist Laila Al-Attar. Days later I stood by the crater that had been her home. “When they lifted her out, she looked like a beautiful broken doll,” a friend said quietly. Al-Attar ran the Museum of Modern Art. She was also the artist responsible for the mosaic face of George Bush Senior on the steps of the Al-Rashid Hotel. The death of her and her family by a precision guided missile can, of course, only be a freak coincidence.

The year 1996 saw further bombings, as did 1998. All the planners predicted the '98 bombing would begin on February 23, “the darkest night”: maximum cloud cover for the planes. That day I went to interview Leila, yet another of the embargo’s victims with a tragic tale to tell. Her large front room was empty: she had sold all her furniture to survive and provide. As we talked, the room filled up with neighborhood children, creeping in, quiet as proverbial mice, sitting on the floor, watching my every move - a stranger and foreigner was a treat in isolated

Iraq. When I left, dusk was falling, and they followed me out to the battered car (spare parts vetoed), about 50 of them, between maybe 3 and 13 years old.

As we pulled away, they ran beside the car in a joyous wave, laughing, waving, and blowing kisses. When they could no longer keep up, I looked back: they had formed a little group in the center of the road, still laughing, waving, and blowing kisses. Photographer Karen Robinson and I looked at each other, stricken, and said in unison, “We are going to bomb them tonight…” I went back to my hotel, lay on the bed, and wept.

In the event, public protest halted a February blitz. In December, Prime Minister Blair stood in front of a resplendent Christmas tree outside 10 Downing Street and announced a seasonal gift for Iraq: a four-day onslaught on a decimated country, where nearly half the population were under 16 years and the average nutritional values were below those of Eritrea.

February 2000 saw another attack, another hello, from another George Bush. An elegant school principal broke down in front of me, encapsulating the pain and desperation: “My son is a doctor in Washington, why are they doing this to us?” She sobbed. Earlier, a 10-year-old pupil had told me, poignantly, “When there is a bombing, my father goes and stands outside the gate to protect us and our home.”

In July 2001, a shameful admission was extracted from Benon Sevan, head of the United Nations Iraq Program: the money allotted for food for Iraqis was US$100 per capita per year, less than that allotted for the United Nation’s sniffer dogs used in de-mining in northern Iraq.

In spite of the grinding misery for most of the embargo years, one event changed the national psyche. In 1999, Baghdad International Airport re-opened, with the those of Mosul and Basra, rebuilt with creativity and inventiveness. The United Nations, under pressure from the United States, did all it could to prevent international flights. Lloyd's of London mysteriously withdrew insurance; airlines were threatened that if they flew to Baghdad, they would be denied landing rights in the United States. In one case - a flight from Athens to Baghdad, arranged by former Greek First Lady, Margarita Papandreou - the United nations demanded the names and occupations of all passengers. Assured by the United Nations that it was entirely confidential to them, the passengers agreed. In less than three minutes, Madam Papandreou's phone rang: It was the US Embassy complaining about some names on the passenger list. Like others, though, the flight finally arrived. “There are tears in our eyes, every time a plane lands,” remarked an Iraqi friend. Isolation had been as grinding as deprivation.

Iraqi Airways was integral to the national psyche. Many of its offices stayed open during the embargo years, even though its aircraft were stranded throughout the Middle East. International flight manuals, too, were vetoed, so courteous staff perused August 1990 schedules and then solemnly said it might be more accurate to telephone Jordan. With the airports opening, and a single proud Iraqi Airways plane again flying between Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, the collective consciousness visibly changed, pride and hope returned. Shop windows began to sparkle again, traders rose at dawn and hosed the pavements, stock was dusted and rearranged, shutters, blinds, and buildings were repainted and refurbished, and the arts again flourished.

Francois Dubois, heading the UN Development Program, had a passion for Iraq equaling that of Halliday and von Sponeck. A fluent Arabic speaker, he had spent the years of the Lebanese civil war there, then headed for the complexities of Iraq. Almost single-handed, he encouraged, funded, and advised the restoration of art galleries, sculpture exhibits, music, and theater. Where artistic life had sunk under the weight of everyday living, it was rekindled and nourished, and it flourished. Few could afford to buy exhibits, but the spirit grew again and haunting beauty was born again. Creativity flourished at every level - inventive architecture, superb woodwork. Iraqis were looking forward and outward again.

A week before last year's invasion, in Mosul, I watched the joyous flocks of birds sweep and sing across the corniche in peach-streaked dawns and dusks. As I left for Baghdad, I jumped at the sound of a bird of a different kind, the roar of a low-flying aircraft, having come within minutes of annihilation from the US and UK bombings on several occasions. The driver and translator laughed and pointed skywards with a tangible pride. “It is ours, ours,” they said as the sun glinted on the great white form with its green Iraqi Airways insignia.

Less than a month later, I sat in London with a sociology professor from Mosul University as she drew her breath in horror as Saddam's statue toppled, his head pulled along the street. It was not the destruction of Saddam's image, but of what - like many statues and monuments built in the mists of time - made Mesopotamia. It was destruction of future history. Flicking channels, we watched as Mosul University, Museum, and Library were looted, ransacked, burned. “No, no, not my university, not my home…” She was inconsolable and incredulous. Then came the scenes of Baghdad Airport: “secured,” destroyed, with a great white broken bird, the green insignia just visible, lying on the runway. The airport immediately became a symbol of repression, not freedom, Iraq's own Guantanamo, with the imprisoned largely unaccounted for. Reports are that 300 people are also buried there, equally unaccounted for. The great, regal, centuries- old palm groves that fringed the road and perimeters have been bulldozed, like Palestine's olives.

There is a memorial in Basra to Iraq Airways. It reads, “Iraqi Airways - 1947-1990.” Iraqi Airways rose from the ashes, like Iraq itself has done after so many invasions. Both surely will again. In the phoenix year of Iraqi Airways, I gained an interview with Tareq Aziz on behalf of Middle East International. It included a modern history lesson: “Iraqis are very quick to revolt, as they did in 1921, 1931, 1947, 1957 and 1968,” he said (neatly omitting the US-encouraged uprising of 1991). Watching ominous recent “liberation”-linked events, one is tempted to add “and 2004.”

Ironically, it is the residents of Sadr City, who were bribed by the Americans to fill the square as the statue fell, who are now leading the uprising against them. Viceroy Bremer and the planners of this dangerous, feckless oil grab would have done well to have read up on Iraq's modern history.

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited Iraq on numerous occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written and broadcast widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John Pilger's award-winning documentary - Paying the Price Killing the Children of Iraq