A-Infos (en) Who is really waging biological war in the Gulf?

[Platformist Anarchism <platform@geocities.com>]

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A study last year by the Harvard medical group 
put the number of Iraqi children dead or ill 
because of sanctions at half a million. "I have 
watched children dying here from renal failure 
because we didn't have baking soda."

Sick and dying in their hospital beds, the 
pitiful victims of sanctions and Saddam

By Maggie O'Kane

The Guardian Thursday February 19, 1998

There is a new weapon in the Western powers' 
line-up against the Iraqi dictator, Saddam 
Hussein. It is not as hi-tech as the stealth 
bomber, it lacks the punch of the cruise missile 
and it can only be seen under a microscope. 
Travelling on the back of the female sand-fly, 
it strikes hardest in the spring.

On the second floor of al-Quadisiya hospital on 
the outskirts of Baghdad, the children's ward 
has on show some of the collateral damage from 
this new microscopic weapon. Kena Azar is six 
months old and wrapped up so only his head is 
peeping from a pink-and-cream blanket.

The parasite moved first into his bone marrow, 
to eat the cells that make his blood, and now it 
has taken over his liver and spleen. He is 
sleeping easily, for this parasite kills without 
pain.

The hospital, with its scruffy foam mattresses, 
battered metal beds and grubby sheets, does not 
have the pentostan medicine that Kena needs to 
help his six-month-old body fight.

"He has a 10 per cent chance of living. Before 
the sanctions and with the medicine, it would 
have been 90 per cent," says the consultant, Dr 
Alia Sultan.

In the 1960s leishmaniasis, known as the "black 
plague", was common in Iraq. Now it's back. A 
shortage of insecticides (banned under United 
Nations sanctions), and the collapse of the 
sanitation system with the absence of spare 
parts (because of the sanctions), have seen the 
sand-fly flourish again.

In the bed beside Kena lies Saleema Jura's 
second-born child, who is recovering from 
gastro-enteritis, the most common infection in 
Iraqi children, caused by bad sanitation. Ms 
Jura, aged 30, calls the doctor over and begs 
him gently to help her eldest son, Ali, aged 
four, who is at home.

She shows a piece of paper with the name of 
another unobtainable medicine. "Please help me, 
if there is anything I can give to my baby. He 
was walking and talking and everything, then he 
got this infection and now he can't move his 
legs or speak any more."

Dr Sultan explains that Ali has a viral 
infection of the brain that is untreatable in 
Iraq. "He needs physiotherapy, speech therapy, 
things we don't have any more."

As the doctor walks away Ms Jura turns suddenly 
and says: "You can tell all those people abroad 
that Ali really was talking and playing. Then 
all of a sudden he got this and I have nothing 
to give him. That is what your people have done 
to my child."

She is crying now and without warning picks up 
her child and leaves the ward, signing herself 
out to go home to her elder son.

Dr Sultan says: "Last week a woman came in with 
a very weak child suffering from diarrhoea and 
vomiting. I told her she had to admit herself 
and the child, because the mothers have to stay 
since we don't have the staff.

"She told me she could not admit herself to the 
hospital. I will have to let him die, she said, 
I have four children at home to keep alive."

The economic sanctions weapon, used for the past 
seven years in the belief that it will compel 
President Saddam to comply with UN resolutions 
on disarmament, has led to a six-fold increase 
in infant mortality, according to the UN 
Children's Fund (Unicef).

A study last year by the Harvard medical group 
put the number of Iraqi children dead or ill 
because of sanctions at half a million. In 10 
out of 15 beds in this children's ward at al-
Quadisiya hospital - just one of Baghdad's 12 
hospitals - at least half are here because of 
sanctions.

There is despair in this hospital: absolute 
despair. Dr Ali Rasim, aged 32, the 
paediatrician on the ward, says: "I have watched 
children dying here from renal failure because 
we didn't have sodium bicarbonate - that's 
baking soda."

In the premature delivery suite, the incubators 
are patched with sky-blue supermarket bags; 
there are no bulbs in the incubators' overhead 
lights and a mother is holding an oxygen tube, 
as thick as a pencil, under the nose of her 3lb 
baby who has a head the size of an apple.

"There are no oxygen masks left for the babies, 
and these are the thinnest tubes we have," says 
Dr Rasim, almost apologetically.

In the next ward a nine-month-old boy in a pink 
jumper is whimpering as his mother is forced to 
tie his arm to the metal bed frame with string. 
There is no other way to hold the intravenous 
drip.

Dr Juad Rashid, the hospital's consultant 
paediatrician, says: "In all my seven years of 
training, I only saw one case of typhoid - now 
I'm seeing them every week. We will have an 
epidemic by the summer."

Britain and the United States continue to be the 
strongest supporters of economic sanctions and 
all that comes with them - now, the rebirth of 
the sand-fly and her black plague.

"I am a soldier without a weapon," says Dr 
Rashid. "The rockets and missiles that are 
coming for our children are viruses and 
epidemics, and I have nothing to fight for them 
with. Why are you making war on our children?"


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