Iraq August 2001
08 Nov 2003
A report on the August 2001 sanction breaking delegation.
Identifying as an anti-capitalist, support for a national economy isn’t always the obvious choice of direct action for me, but of course the suppression of the Iraqi economy is calculated to serve the oil-guzzling interests of the multinational corporate economy at the expense of ordinary people. I went to Iraq in August 2001 to break the sanctions which have wrecked Iraqi people’s lives.
While I knew, on an intellectual level, the enormous scale of suffering which has been inflicted on the Iraqi people through the sanctions, to experience it for myself was devastating. In the first hospital we visited, the first child we met was a tiny girl called Fadma who, at 9 months old, weighed just three kilos. Her limbs were little wider than my thumbs and she rattled with the effort of every breath.
The children’s wards were full of kids with gastro-intestinal diseases. In a country where, in 1990, the main childhood health problem was obesity, now children die of diarrhoea. The water purification plants cannot be adequately repaired under the Oil For Food Programme. Though there have recently been increases in the output of safe drinking water, other problems sabotage the improvements.
The water pipes are corroded and in need of replacement, so that clean drinking water gets contaminated by raw sewage in neighbouring pipes. The electricity frequently cuts out, so that water being pumped up the pipes flows back down, then back up once the power returns, and so on, up and down, picking up more contamination all the time, until it reaches families unsafe to drink.
As bottled water costs the equivalent of a month’s wages for a public sector worker, there is no alternative to drinking the unsafe water. The hospitals rehydrate the children and send them home to the same toxic environment as before. With each attack their immune systems get weaker until eventually they stop coming back.
Leukaemia has proliferated. The doctor showed us their charts. They use a UK treatment protocol and, prior to the sanctions, in 1990, had a similar cure rate to this country for childhood leukaemia – about 70%. That figure now stands around 90% in this country. In Iraq it is zero. There was a beautiful woman about my age in a bright pink headscarf, cradling her stick thin daughter. When I gave the daughter a toy – a bright yellow cuddly Woodstock - her mother began to cry: a moan of desperation rising to a howl. "What I will do with this toy when she is dead? It is to remember her by?" The mothers all knew, at the moment of diagnosis, that their children were going to die.
A young woman called Alia told us she’d been allowed to go home, but had had a relapse and had to return. She wanted to hang out with her friends, finish school and take up her place at teacher training college. Amid all this death there are still dreams, still drawings of trees and rainbows. But because the supply of drugs is erratic, the treatment isn’t fully effective. A particular item might be available for the first two weeks, then it runs out, as another becomes obtainable. Some cannot be found for any money, even in Jordan.
A woman removed her son’s shirt and flapped ineffectually at his burning body with a piece of cardboard. His name was Abbas and his eyes were dazed, unfocussed. The doctor explained that he needed a platelet transfusion, but there weren’t enough bags to give him, because the bags they receive through the "Oil For Food" programme are often damaged and unusable. Manufacturers know they can offload substandard goods through the scheme, because it is so cumbersome that quality control is unworkable.
Abbas’s mother began gently slapping his face, trying to stop him slipping away. His arms were twitching. The doctor explained that this was a sign that his brain was haemorrhaging. He was going into a coma. His mother scooped up his body, trying to take him back within her; trying to breathe some life back into him. The doctor turned away, impotent.
But it was the thalassaemia unit which really tore me to bits. Thalassaemia is an extreme and congenital form of anaemia, most prevalent in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Blood transfusions can keep sufferers alive for a while, but bone marrow transplants are the only effective treatment. The doctors have the expertise to do the transfusions, but neither the equipment nor the sterile environments to carry them out. "Without bone marrow transplant," said the doctor, "before they are fifteen they will all die."
The tiny room where we found ourselves was filled with children receiving transfusions. Two toddlers, bright eyed with life and mischief, giggled on the first bed, putting the tubes into their mouths. Moving from bed to bed, each child was a little older, a little sicker than the last; a little yellower, more translucent, less engaged with their environment. In the last bed lay a boy of perhaps eleven, his fragile neck unable to hold his head, clearly dying, even as the blood flowed into his veins. Looking around the room was like looking through the years, watching those two babies die. Their only chance is that the sanctions end in time for a bone marrow transplant to save them.
There is, of course, much more to the situation than the children and the hospitals: they are merely the most graphic illustration of the consequences of sanctions. The desert highway from Jordan to Baghdad was littered with torn tyres, We didn’t understand what they meant until we spent a few hours protesting at the UN building in Baghdad. We saw three cars wrecked in accidents caused by bald tyres bursting, careening wildly across the road until a wall or another car brought them to a standstill. Two of the cars were taxis and their drivers’ entire livelihoods. We met a man whose wife was killed when one of the cheap paraffin lamps that people use during power cuts blew up and set their home on fire. Every aspect of normal life is utterly precarious for most Iraqi people.
There isn’t any social welfare, nor any insurance: the money isn’t worth anything after twelve and a half years of rampant inflation. We met a woman called Muna who ran a money exchange. She showed us the old one Dinar notes. They had a waxy feel, like our banknotes. The 250 Dinar notes that we found ourselves counting out in sheaves for the most basic of provisions are just printed on paper. "If you wash it," said Muna, "it will come off." Savings of £5000 before the sanctions would be worth about 50 pence now.
The air raid sirens went off in Mosul and we made to get under the tables in the café. Noticeably, no one around us was batting an eyelid. No one but us even seemed to hear the wailing. "So what? They bomb all the time." The war didn’t end in 1991.
We met a family in the southern marshlands whose thirteen year old son, Omran, was killed while herding goats in a field on the first day of his school summer holiday. A US bomb dropped from a few thousand feet and tore his head off. We sat with his family in their mudbrick-and-reed village listening as they told us, through interpreters, of the size of the crater left by the missile, in the cracked marshlands. What kind of military target was Omran?
Omran’s father, a bent old man leaning on a stick, said, "We are ready to fight the American soldiers." But the American soldiers are not there. They are thousands of feet above when they drop their bombs on shepherd boys and their flocks. I don’t know why. I can’t explain. I can’t believe that their commanders ordered them to go out and kill a child and some sheep, or felt that would be an efficient way to spend the fortune it costs to put an aircraft up and drop a bomb. I can’t believe they were flying over and decided to take a target practice on a child and some animals in a field. But it happened and happened and goes on happening – not just to Omran.
That’s what war means. The coalition forces bombed a civilian air raid shelter – Al Amariya - on Valentines Day 1991, killing 409 women, children and old people. The first weapon ripped a hole through the roof, taking out the electricity so the doors wouldn’t open, and bursting the boiler pipes, flooding the lower level. The second weapon was dropped through the hole made by the first – a thermobaric weapon: essentially a fireball which sucks out all the oxygen, pulling the eyeballs from their sockets, burning and suffocating. It boiled the water flooding the lower level, flaying alive the people trapped in there, leaving a four foot high scum of skin on the walls, where it remains today.
We talk about what Saddam Hussein does to "his own people". So some over-privileged white men got together a few years ago and drew lines on a map, separating people, to serve their own ends. We are all each other’s people. We all feel the same pain, the same fear, the same loss. What freedom and justice were we fighting for when we turned the sanctuary of our own people into a furnace?
Hazim, holding court in his computer shop, told us in perfect university English that he rarely sells a computer and when he does, he barely makes a profit. He carries on coming in because he has nothing else to do. Everything is available in the shops, more or less, but nobody has the money to buy it. Before the sanctions, he told us, most families had computers, washing machines, air conditioning, a car, enough money for a month’s holiday in Europe during the hottest part of the year.
Now people sell their books on the street in the Friday book market, because they’ve already sold everything else. The stalls are a plethora of languages and interests: great works of English literature, books of art, architecture, history, fiction, politics, the Abba songbook, engineering and medical textbooks in Polish, English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic. Before sanctions, education was free and compulsory through secondary level, free through university and scholarships were available – several hundred a year – to study for higher degrees abroad. By contrast under sanctions the Ministry of Education had trouble importing pencils for schoolkids to learn to write with, and I, for one, am grateful: otherwise those rascally kids would only sit on the floor (for lack of classroom furniture) peeling them of their wood to make nuclear reactor cores.
.
A small boy poked his head round Hazim’s shop doorway and spoke to him in Arabic. Hazim shooed him away and said "That boy is a shoeshine. Before there were a few, but unemployed men. Never children. The children were in school." We’d made friends with two fourteen year old boys called Ahmed and Saif, gorgeous, smiling children, streetwise beyond their years, who cleaned shoes to support their families. They wouldn’t take outright charity, but payment over the odds was acceptable. We all got our sandals brushed five times a day.
The combined deprivation wrought on children by malnutrition and the lack of educational materials is creating a mental stunting whose effects will be felt for generations. We met Gazwan, a medical engineer who told us that even those who go to school are often unable to concentrate for hunger.
Ahmed escorted us to the bus station when we left Baghdad. We joked, in our ad hoc mime/English/Arabic that we were going to kidnap him and take him with us. "Yay," he cheered. "Go to school." That’s what sanctions mean. Derelict childhoods. Derelict lives.
The mental hospital in Baghdad was overflowing with people who had lost their minds in all the horror. Incidence of neurotic diseases has increased exponentially since sanctions were imposed – schizophrenia, manic depressiveness, post traumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic anxiety and so on. The drug supply is erratic: patients are no sooner stabilised on one medication than it runs out and they have to start again.
Three hundred women were crammed into one of four wings, cared for by just three nurses. There were bare concrete rooms opening onto a scorched concrete courtyard, where the women simply stood, hollow and waiting. There is nothing for many women to do in Iraq – once they have lost their jobs, and unable to protect and even properly feed their children, and deprived of money or opportunity for leisure – even for books to read, they are losing their minds.
The doctors and other public sector workers we met told us their wages had risen over the past year from just under £2 a month to a bit over £10, because of money coming in from cross-border oil trading outside the auspices of the UN. A packet of Aspirin costs £2, so it’s still far from a living wage, but it is a lifeline.
As Hazim explained, whole industries have ceased to exist, notably the leisure industry, with closed down travel agencies and airline offices lining every street in Baghdad, for want of anyone with any money to spend. No one has money, so jobs are lost, so fewer people have money, and so it goes on: a vicious, violent spiral of poverty.
And yet, wherever we went, we were welcomed, given delicate glasses filled with sugar and a little tea on top. "We know that people are not the same as governments."
There is still art, poetry, music. A sculptor called Mohammed Ghani showed us his row of people, hunched under the immense weight of huge blocks on their heads, each marked to represent a day of the week: the weight of everyday life under sanctions. "But they are not lie down," Mohammed declared. "Scratch him, scratch him, but they are not give in."
But as Gazwan pointed out, "One day, your children will have to explain this to ours."
All weapons are boomerangs.
By Jo Wilding
While I knew, on an intellectual level, the enormous scale of suffering which has been inflicted on the Iraqi people through the sanctions, to experience it for myself was devastating. In the first hospital we visited, the first child we met was a tiny girl called Fadma who, at 9 months old, weighed just three kilos. Her limbs were little wider than my thumbs and she rattled with the effort of every breath.
The children’s wards were full of kids with gastro-intestinal diseases. In a country where, in 1990, the main childhood health problem was obesity, now children die of diarrhoea. The water purification plants cannot be adequately repaired under the Oil For Food Programme. Though there have recently been increases in the output of safe drinking water, other problems sabotage the improvements.
The water pipes are corroded and in need of replacement, so that clean drinking water gets contaminated by raw sewage in neighbouring pipes. The electricity frequently cuts out, so that water being pumped up the pipes flows back down, then back up once the power returns, and so on, up and down, picking up more contamination all the time, until it reaches families unsafe to drink.
As bottled water costs the equivalent of a month’s wages for a public sector worker, there is no alternative to drinking the unsafe water. The hospitals rehydrate the children and send them home to the same toxic environment as before. With each attack their immune systems get weaker until eventually they stop coming back.
Leukaemia has proliferated. The doctor showed us their charts. They use a UK treatment protocol and, prior to the sanctions, in 1990, had a similar cure rate to this country for childhood leukaemia – about 70%. That figure now stands around 90% in this country. In Iraq it is zero. There was a beautiful woman about my age in a bright pink headscarf, cradling her stick thin daughter. When I gave the daughter a toy – a bright yellow cuddly Woodstock - her mother began to cry: a moan of desperation rising to a howl. "What I will do with this toy when she is dead? It is to remember her by?" The mothers all knew, at the moment of diagnosis, that their children were going to die.
A young woman called Alia told us she’d been allowed to go home, but had had a relapse and had to return. She wanted to hang out with her friends, finish school and take up her place at teacher training college. Amid all this death there are still dreams, still drawings of trees and rainbows. But because the supply of drugs is erratic, the treatment isn’t fully effective. A particular item might be available for the first two weeks, then it runs out, as another becomes obtainable. Some cannot be found for any money, even in Jordan.
A woman removed her son’s shirt and flapped ineffectually at his burning body with a piece of cardboard. His name was Abbas and his eyes were dazed, unfocussed. The doctor explained that he needed a platelet transfusion, but there weren’t enough bags to give him, because the bags they receive through the "Oil For Food" programme are often damaged and unusable. Manufacturers know they can offload substandard goods through the scheme, because it is so cumbersome that quality control is unworkable.
Abbas’s mother began gently slapping his face, trying to stop him slipping away. His arms were twitching. The doctor explained that this was a sign that his brain was haemorrhaging. He was going into a coma. His mother scooped up his body, trying to take him back within her; trying to breathe some life back into him. The doctor turned away, impotent.
But it was the thalassaemia unit which really tore me to bits. Thalassaemia is an extreme and congenital form of anaemia, most prevalent in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Blood transfusions can keep sufferers alive for a while, but bone marrow transplants are the only effective treatment. The doctors have the expertise to do the transfusions, but neither the equipment nor the sterile environments to carry them out. "Without bone marrow transplant," said the doctor, "before they are fifteen they will all die."
The tiny room where we found ourselves was filled with children receiving transfusions. Two toddlers, bright eyed with life and mischief, giggled on the first bed, putting the tubes into their mouths. Moving from bed to bed, each child was a little older, a little sicker than the last; a little yellower, more translucent, less engaged with their environment. In the last bed lay a boy of perhaps eleven, his fragile neck unable to hold his head, clearly dying, even as the blood flowed into his veins. Looking around the room was like looking through the years, watching those two babies die. Their only chance is that the sanctions end in time for a bone marrow transplant to save them.
There is, of course, much more to the situation than the children and the hospitals: they are merely the most graphic illustration of the consequences of sanctions. The desert highway from Jordan to Baghdad was littered with torn tyres, We didn’t understand what they meant until we spent a few hours protesting at the UN building in Baghdad. We saw three cars wrecked in accidents caused by bald tyres bursting, careening wildly across the road until a wall or another car brought them to a standstill. Two of the cars were taxis and their drivers’ entire livelihoods. We met a man whose wife was killed when one of the cheap paraffin lamps that people use during power cuts blew up and set their home on fire. Every aspect of normal life is utterly precarious for most Iraqi people.
There isn’t any social welfare, nor any insurance: the money isn’t worth anything after twelve and a half years of rampant inflation. We met a woman called Muna who ran a money exchange. She showed us the old one Dinar notes. They had a waxy feel, like our banknotes. The 250 Dinar notes that we found ourselves counting out in sheaves for the most basic of provisions are just printed on paper. "If you wash it," said Muna, "it will come off." Savings of £5000 before the sanctions would be worth about 50 pence now.
The air raid sirens went off in Mosul and we made to get under the tables in the café. Noticeably, no one around us was batting an eyelid. No one but us even seemed to hear the wailing. "So what? They bomb all the time." The war didn’t end in 1991.
We met a family in the southern marshlands whose thirteen year old son, Omran, was killed while herding goats in a field on the first day of his school summer holiday. A US bomb dropped from a few thousand feet and tore his head off. We sat with his family in their mudbrick-and-reed village listening as they told us, through interpreters, of the size of the crater left by the missile, in the cracked marshlands. What kind of military target was Omran?
Omran’s father, a bent old man leaning on a stick, said, "We are ready to fight the American soldiers." But the American soldiers are not there. They are thousands of feet above when they drop their bombs on shepherd boys and their flocks. I don’t know why. I can’t explain. I can’t believe that their commanders ordered them to go out and kill a child and some sheep, or felt that would be an efficient way to spend the fortune it costs to put an aircraft up and drop a bomb. I can’t believe they were flying over and decided to take a target practice on a child and some animals in a field. But it happened and happened and goes on happening – not just to Omran.
That’s what war means. The coalition forces bombed a civilian air raid shelter – Al Amariya - on Valentines Day 1991, killing 409 women, children and old people. The first weapon ripped a hole through the roof, taking out the electricity so the doors wouldn’t open, and bursting the boiler pipes, flooding the lower level. The second weapon was dropped through the hole made by the first – a thermobaric weapon: essentially a fireball which sucks out all the oxygen, pulling the eyeballs from their sockets, burning and suffocating. It boiled the water flooding the lower level, flaying alive the people trapped in there, leaving a four foot high scum of skin on the walls, where it remains today.
We talk about what Saddam Hussein does to "his own people". So some over-privileged white men got together a few years ago and drew lines on a map, separating people, to serve their own ends. We are all each other’s people. We all feel the same pain, the same fear, the same loss. What freedom and justice were we fighting for when we turned the sanctuary of our own people into a furnace?
Hazim, holding court in his computer shop, told us in perfect university English that he rarely sells a computer and when he does, he barely makes a profit. He carries on coming in because he has nothing else to do. Everything is available in the shops, more or less, but nobody has the money to buy it. Before the sanctions, he told us, most families had computers, washing machines, air conditioning, a car, enough money for a month’s holiday in Europe during the hottest part of the year.
Now people sell their books on the street in the Friday book market, because they’ve already sold everything else. The stalls are a plethora of languages and interests: great works of English literature, books of art, architecture, history, fiction, politics, the Abba songbook, engineering and medical textbooks in Polish, English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic. Before sanctions, education was free and compulsory through secondary level, free through university and scholarships were available – several hundred a year – to study for higher degrees abroad. By contrast under sanctions the Ministry of Education had trouble importing pencils for schoolkids to learn to write with, and I, for one, am grateful: otherwise those rascally kids would only sit on the floor (for lack of classroom furniture) peeling them of their wood to make nuclear reactor cores.
.
A small boy poked his head round Hazim’s shop doorway and spoke to him in Arabic. Hazim shooed him away and said "That boy is a shoeshine. Before there were a few, but unemployed men. Never children. The children were in school." We’d made friends with two fourteen year old boys called Ahmed and Saif, gorgeous, smiling children, streetwise beyond their years, who cleaned shoes to support their families. They wouldn’t take outright charity, but payment over the odds was acceptable. We all got our sandals brushed five times a day.
The combined deprivation wrought on children by malnutrition and the lack of educational materials is creating a mental stunting whose effects will be felt for generations. We met Gazwan, a medical engineer who told us that even those who go to school are often unable to concentrate for hunger.
Ahmed escorted us to the bus station when we left Baghdad. We joked, in our ad hoc mime/English/Arabic that we were going to kidnap him and take him with us. "Yay," he cheered. "Go to school." That’s what sanctions mean. Derelict childhoods. Derelict lives.
The mental hospital in Baghdad was overflowing with people who had lost their minds in all the horror. Incidence of neurotic diseases has increased exponentially since sanctions were imposed – schizophrenia, manic depressiveness, post traumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic anxiety and so on. The drug supply is erratic: patients are no sooner stabilised on one medication than it runs out and they have to start again.
Three hundred women were crammed into one of four wings, cared for by just three nurses. There were bare concrete rooms opening onto a scorched concrete courtyard, where the women simply stood, hollow and waiting. There is nothing for many women to do in Iraq – once they have lost their jobs, and unable to protect and even properly feed their children, and deprived of money or opportunity for leisure – even for books to read, they are losing their minds.
The doctors and other public sector workers we met told us their wages had risen over the past year from just under £2 a month to a bit over £10, because of money coming in from cross-border oil trading outside the auspices of the UN. A packet of Aspirin costs £2, so it’s still far from a living wage, but it is a lifeline.
As Hazim explained, whole industries have ceased to exist, notably the leisure industry, with closed down travel agencies and airline offices lining every street in Baghdad, for want of anyone with any money to spend. No one has money, so jobs are lost, so fewer people have money, and so it goes on: a vicious, violent spiral of poverty.
And yet, wherever we went, we were welcomed, given delicate glasses filled with sugar and a little tea on top. "We know that people are not the same as governments."
There is still art, poetry, music. A sculptor called Mohammed Ghani showed us his row of people, hunched under the immense weight of huge blocks on their heads, each marked to represent a day of the week: the weight of everyday life under sanctions. "But they are not lie down," Mohammed declared. "Scratch him, scratch him, but they are not give in."
But as Gazwan pointed out, "One day, your children will have to explain this to ours."
All weapons are boomerangs.
By Jo Wilding