NUCLEAR WARFARE IN IRAQ
pad
up Kuwait, told me: "I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have
5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my
team are now dead.
"We face an issue to be confronted by people in the West, those with a
sense of right and wrong: first, the decision by the US and Britain to
use a weapon of mass destruction: depeleted uranium. When a tank fired
its shells, each round carried over 4,500g of solid uranium. What
happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738
------------------------------------------------------------
Focus: Inside Iraq - The Tragedy of a People Betrayed
Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It
rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in
your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school
playgrounds, consuming children kicking a plastic ball; and it
carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, 'the seeds of our death'...
23 February 2003
Dr Al-Ali is a cancer specialist at Basra's hospital and a member of
Britain's Royal College of Physicians. He has a neat moustache and a
kindly, furrowed face. His starched white coat, like the collar of his
shirt, is frayed.
"Before the Gulf War, we had only three or four deaths in a month from
cancer," he said. "Now it's 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and
that's just in my department. That is a 12-fold increase in cancer
mortality. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the
population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin
with, then long afterwards. That's almost half the population.
"Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the
disease. We don't know the precise source of the contamination,
because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper
survey, or even test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We
strongly suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and
British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields.
Whatever the cause, it is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are
new to us.
"The mushrooms grow huge, and the fish in what was once a beautiful
river are inedible. Even the grapes in my garden have mutated and
can't be eaten."
Along the corridor, I met Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician. At
another time, she might have been described as an effervescent
personality; now she, too, has a melancholy expression that does not
change; it is the face of Iraq. "This is Ali Raffa Asswadi," she said,
stopping to take the hand of a wasted boy I guessed to be about four
years old. "He is nine. He has leukaemia. Now we can't treat him. Only
some of the drugs are available. We get drugs for two or three weeks,
and then they stop when the shipments stop. Unless you continue a
course, the treatment is useless. We can't even give blood
transfusions, because there are not enough blood bags."
Dr Hassen keeps a photo album of the children she is trying to save
and those she has been unable to save. "This is Talum Saleh," she
said, turning to a photograph of a boy in a blue pullover and with
sparkling eyes. "He is five-and-a-half years old. This is a case of
Hodgkin's disease. Normally a patient with Hodgkin's can expect to
live and the cure can be 95 per cent. But if the drugs are not
available, complications set in, and death follows. This boy had a
beautiful nature. He died."
I said, "As we were walking, I noticed you stop and put your face to
the wall." "Yes, I was emotional ... I am a doctor; I am not supposed
to cry, but I cry every day, because this is torture. These children
could live; they could live and grow up; and when you see your son and
daughter in front of you, dying, what happens to you?" I said, "What
do you say to those in the West who deny the connection between
depleted uranium and the deformities of these children?" "That is not
true. How much proof do they want? There is every relation between
congenital malformation and depleted uranium. Before 1991, we saw
nothing like this at all. If there is no connection, why have these
things not happened before? Most of these children have no family
history of cancer.
"I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. It is almost exactly the
same here; we have an increased percentage of congenital malformation,
an increase of malignancy, leukaemia, brain tumours: the same."
Under the economic embargo imposed by the United Nations Security
Council, now in its 14th year, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise
to decontaminate its battlefields from the 1991 Gulf War.
Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army physicist responsible for cleaning
up Kuwait, told me: "I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have
5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my
team are now dead.
"We face an issue to be confronted by people in the West, those with a
sense of right and wrong: first, the decision by the US and Britain to
use a weapon of mass destruction: depeleted uranium. When a tank fired
its shells, each round carried over 4,500g of solid uranium. What
happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare."
In 1991, a United Kingdom Atomic Eneregy Authority document reported
that if 8 per cent of the depleted uranium fired in the Gulf War was
inhaled, it could cause "500,000 potential deaths". In the promised
attack on Iraq, the United States will again use depleted uranium, and
so will Britain, regardless of its denials.
Professor Rokke says he has watched Iraqi officials pleading with
American and British officials to ease the embargo, if only to allow
decontaminating and cancer assessment equipment to be imported. "They
described the deaths and horrific deformities, and they were
rebuffed," he said. "It was pathetic."
The United Nations Sanctions Committee in New York, set up by the
Security Council to administer the embargo, is dominated by the
Americans, who are backed by the British. Washington has vetoed or
delayed a range of vital medical equipment, chemotherapy drugs, even
pain-killers. (In the jargon of denial, "blocked" equals vetoed, and
"on hold" means delayed, or maybe blocked.) In Baghdad, I sat in a
clinic as doctors received parents and their children, many of them
grey-skinned and bald, some of them dying. After every second or third
examination, Dr Lekaa Fasseh Ozeer, the young oncologist, wrote in
English: "No drugs available." I asked her to jot down in my notebook
a list of drugs the hospital had ordered, but had not received, or had
received intermittently. She filled a page.
I had been filming in Iraq for my documentary Paying the Price:
Killing the Children of Iraq. Back in London, I showed Dr Ozeer's list
to Professor Karol Sikora who, as chief of the cancer programme of the
World Health Organisation (WHO), wrote in the British Medical Journal:
"Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics
are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the
Sanctions Committee]. There seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that
such agents could be converted into chemical and other weapons.
Nearly all these drugs are available in every British hospital. They
are very standard. When I came back from Iraq last year, with a group
of experts I drew up a list of 17 drugs deemed essential for cancer
treatment. We informed the UN that there was no possibility of
converting these drugs into chemical warfare agents. We heard nothing
more.
"The saddest thing I saw in Iraq was children dying because there was
no chemotherapy and no pain control. It seemed crazy they couldn't
have morphine, because for everybody with cancer pain, it is the best
drug. When I was there, they had a little bottle of aspirin pills to
go round 200 patients in pain. They would receive a particular
anti-cancer drug, but then get only little bits of drugs here and
there, and so you can't have any planning. It's bizarre."
I told him that one of the doctors had been especially upset because
the UN Sanctions Committee had banned nitrous oxide as "weapons dual
use"; yet this was used in caesarean sections to stop bleeding, and
perhaps save a mother's life. "I can see no logic to banning that," he
said. "I am not an armaments expert, but the amounts used would be so
small that, even if you collected all the drugs supply for the whole
nation and pooled it, it is difficult to see how you could make any
chemical warfare device out of it."
Denis Halliday is a courtly Irishman who spent 34 years with the UN,
latterly as Assistant Secretary-General. When he resigned in 1998 as
the UN's Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq in protest at the effects
of the embargo on the civilian population, it was, he wrote, "because
the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the
process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple as that ...
Five thousand children are dying every month ... I don't want to
administer a programme that results in figures like these."
Since I met Halliday, I have been struck by the principle behind his
carefully chosen, uncompromising words. "I had been instructed," he
said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of
genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a
million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime
– Saddam Hussein – is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on
the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little
people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of
untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out
of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the
Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will
slaughter those responsible."
In the UN, Mr Halliday broke a long collective silence. On 13
February, 2000, Hans Von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as
Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Baghdad, resigned. Like Halliday, he had
been with the UN for more than 30 years. "How long," he asked, "should
the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for
something they have never done?" Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head
of the World Food Programme in Iraq, another UN agency, resigned,
saying that she, too, could no longer tolerate what was being done to
the Iraqi people.
The resignations were unprecedented. All three were saying the
unsayable: that the West was responsible for mass deaths, estimated by
Halliday to be more than a million. While food and medicines are
technically exempt, the Sanctions Committee has frequently vetoed and
delayed requests for baby food, agricultural equipment, heart and
cancer drugs, oxygen tents, X-ray machines. Sixteen heart and lung
machines were put "on hold" because they contained computer chips. A
fleet of ambulances was held up because their equipment included
vacuum flasks, which keep medical supplies cold; vacuum flasks are
designated "dual use" by the Sanctions Committee, meaning they could
possibly be used in weapons manufacture. Cleaning materials, such as
chlorine, are "dual use", as is the graphite used in pencils; as are
wheelbarrows, it seems, considering the frequency of their appearance
on the list of "holds".
As of October 2001, 1,010 contracts for humanitarian supplies, worth
$3.85bn, were "on hold" by the Sanctions Committee. They included
items related to food, health, water and sanitation, agriculture and
education. This has now risen to goods worth more than $5bn. This is
rarely reported in the West.
When Denis Halliday was the senior United Nations official in Iraq, a
display cabinet stood in the foyer of his office. It contained a bag
of wheat, some congealed cooking oil, bars of soap and a few other
household necessities. "It was a pitiful sight," he said, "and it
represented the monthly ration that we were allowed to spend. I added
cheese to lift the protein content, but there was simply not enough
money left over from the amount we were allowed to spend, which came
from the revenue Iraq was allowed to make from its oil."
He describes food shipments as "an exercise in duplicity". A shipment
that the Americans claim allows for 2,300 calories per person per day
may well allow for only 2,000 calories, or less. "What's missing," he
said, "will be animal proteins, minerals and vitamins. As most Iraqis
have no other source of income, food has become a medium of exchange;
it gets sold for other necessities, further lowering the calorie
intake. You also have to get clothes and shoes for your kids to go to
school. You've then got malnourished mothers who cannot breastfeed,
and they pick up bad water.
What is needed is investment in water treatment and distribution,
electric power for food processing, storage and refrigeration,
education and agriculture." His successor, Hans Von Sponeck,
calculates that the Oil for Food Programme allows $100 (£63) for each
person to live on for a year. This figure also has to help pay for the
entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power
and water.
"It is simply not possible to live on such an amount," Mr Von Sponeck
told me. "Set that pittance against the lack of clean water, the fact
that electricity fails for up to 22 hours a day, and the majority of
sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of trying to
get from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make
no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use
the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."
The cost in lives is staggering. A study by the United Nations
Children's Fund (Unicef) found that between 1991 and 1998, there were
500,000 deaths above the anticipated rate among Iraqi children under
five years of age. This, on average, is 5,200 preventable under-five
deaths per month.
Hans Von Sponeck said, "Some 167 Iraqi children are dying every day."
Denis Halliday said, "If you include adults, the figure is now almost
certainly well over a million." A melancholia shrouds people. I felt
it at Baghdad's evening auctions, where intimate possessions are sold
to buy food and medicines. Television sets are common. A woman with
two infants watched their pushchairs go for pennies. A man who had
collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird; the cage
would go next.
My film crew and I had come to pry, yet we were made welcome; or
people merely deferred to our presence, as the downcast do. During
three weeks in Iraq, only once was I the brunt of someone's anguish.
"Why are you killing the children?" shouted a man in the street. "Why
are you bombing us? What have we done to you?" Through the glass doors
of the Baghdad offices of Unicef you can read the following mission
statement: "Above all, survival, hope, development, respect, dignity,
equality and justice for women and children."
Fortunately, the children in the street outside, with their pencil
limbs and long thin faces, cannot read English, and perhaps cannot
read at all. "The change in such a short time is unparalleled, in my
experience," Dr Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in
Iraq, told me.
"In 1989, the literacy rate was more than 90 per cent; parents were
fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of
street children was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the
basic indicators we use to measure the overall wellbeing of human
beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it
is among the bottom 20 per cent."
Dr Singh, diminutive, grey-haired and, with her precision, sounding
like the teacher she once was in India, has spent most of her working
life with Unicef. She took me to a typical primary school in Saddam
City, where Baghdad's majority and poorest live. We approached along a
flooded street, the city's drainage and water distribution system
having collapsed since the Gulf War bombing. The headmaster, Ali
Hassoon, guided us around the puddles of raw sewage in the playground
and pointed to the high-water mark on the wall. "In the winter it
comes up to here. That's when we evacuate.
We stay for as long as possible but, without desks, the children have
to sit on bricks. I am worried about the buildings coming down." As we
talked, an air-raid siren sounded in the distance.The school is on the
edge of a vast industrial cemetery. The pumps in the sewage treatment
plants and the reservoirs of potable water are silent, save for a few
wheezing at a fraction of their capacity. Those that were not bombed
have since disintegrated; spare parts from their British, French and
German manufacturers are permanently "on hold".
Before 1991, Baghdad"s water was as safe as any in the developed
world. Today, drawn untreated from the Tigris, it is lethal. Just
before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London
restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children
against diphtheria and yellow fever.
Dr Kim Howells told Parliament why. His title of Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State for Competition and Consumer Affairs perfectly
suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were, he said,
"capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction".
American and British aircraft operate over Iraq in what their
governments have unilaterally declared "no fly zones". This means that
only they and their allies can fly there. The designated areas are in
the north, around Mosul, to the border with Turkey, and from just
south of Baghdad to the Kuwaiti border. The US and British governments
insist the no fly zones are "legal", claiming that they are part of,
or supported by, the Security Council's Resolution 688.
There is a great deal of fog about this, the kind generated by the
Foreign Office when its statements are challenged. There is no
reference to no fly zones in Security Council resolutions, which
suggests they have no basis in international law.
I went to Paris and asked Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the
Secretary-General of the UN in 1992, when the resolution was passed.
"The issue of no fly zones was not raised and therefore not debated:
not a word," he said. "They offer no legitimacy to countries sending
their aircraft to attack Iraq." "Does that mean they are illegal?" I
asked. "They are illegal," he replied.
The scale of the bombing in the no fly zones is astonishing. Between
July 1998 and January 2000, American air force and naval aircraft flew
36,000 sorties over Iraq, including 24,000 combat missions. In 1999
alone, American and British aircraft dropped more than 1,800 bombs and
hit 450 targets. The cost to British taxpayers is more than £800m.
There is bombing almost every day: it is the longest Anglo-American
aerial campaign since the Second World War; yet it is mostly ignored
by the British and American media. In a rare acknowledgement, The New
York Times reported, "American warplanes have methodically and with
virtually no public discussion been attacking Iraq ... pilots have
flown about two-thirds as many missions as Nato pilots flew over
Yugoslavia in 78 days of around-the-clock war there."
The purpose of the no fly zones, according to the British and American
governments, is to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shi'a in the
south against Saddam Hussein's forces. The aircraft are performing a
"vital humanitarian task", says Tony Blair, that will give "minority
peoples the hope of freedom and the right to determine their own
destinies".
Like much of Blair's rhetoric on Iraq, it is simply false. In nothern
Kurdish Iraq, I interviewed members of a family who had lost their
grandfather, their father and four brothers and sisters when a
"coalition" aircraft dive-bombed them and the sheep they were tending.
The attack was investigated and verified by Hans Von Sponeck who drove
there especially from Baghdad. Dozens of similar attacks – on
shepherds, farmers, fishermen – are described in a document prepared
by the UN Security Section.
The US faced a "genuine dilemma" in Iraq, reported The Wall Street
Journal. "After eight years of enforcing a no fly zone in ... Iraq,
few military targets remain. 'We're down to the last outhouse,' one US
official protested. 'There are still some things left, but not many.'"
There are still children left. Six children died when an American
missile hit Al Jumohria, a community in Basra's poorest residential
area: 63 people were injured, a number of them badly burned.
"Collateral damage," said the Pentagon. I walked down the street where
the missile had struck in the early hours; it had followed the line of
houses, destroying one after the other. I met the father of two
sisters, aged eight and 10, who were photographed by a local wedding
photographer shortly after the attack. They are in their nightdresses,
one with a bow in her hair, their bodies entombed in the rubble of
their homes, where they had been bombed to death in their beds. These
images haunt me.
I flew on to New York for an interview with Kofi Annan, the
Secretary-General of the United Nations. He appears an oddly diffident
man, so softly spoken as to be almost inaudible.
"As the Secretary-General of the United Nations which is imposing this
blockade on Iraq," I said, "what do you say to the parents of the
children who are dying?" His reply was that the Security Council was
considering "smart sanctions", which would "target the leaders" rather
than act as "a blunt instrument that impacts on children". I said the
UN was set up to help people, not harm them, and he replied, "Please
do not judge us by what has happened in Iraq."
I walked to the office of Peter van Walsum, the Netherlands'
ambassador to the UN and the chairman of the Sanctions Committee. What
impressed me about this diplomat with life-and-death powers over 22
million people half a world away was
that, like liberal politicians in the West, he seemed to hold two
diametrically opposed thoughts in his mind. On the one hand, he spoke
of Iraq as if everybody were Saddam Hussein; on the other, he seemed
to believe that most Iraqis were victims, held hostage to the
intransigence of a dictator.
I asked him why the civilian population should be punished for Saddam
Hussein's crimes. "It's a difficult problem," he replied. "You should
realise that sanctions are one of the curative measures that the
Security Council has at its disposal ... and obviously they hurt. They
are like a military measure." "Who do they hurt?" "Well, this, of
course, is the problem ... but with military action, too, you have the
eternal problem of collateral damage." "So an entire nation is
collateral damage. Is that correct?" "No, I am saying that sanctions
have [similar] effects. We have to study this further."
"Do you believe that people have human rights no matter where they
live and under what system?" I asked. "Yes." "Doesn't that mean that
the sanctions you are imposing are violating the human rights of
millions of people?" "It's also documented the Iraqi regime has
committed very serious human rights breaches ..."
"There is no doubt about that," I said. "But what's the difference in
principle between human rights violations committed by the regime and
those caused by your committee?" "It's a very complex issue, Mr
Pilger."
"What do you say to those who describe sanctions that have caused so
many deaths as 'weapons of mass destruction' as lethal as chemical
weapons?" "I don't think that's a fair comparison." "Aren't the deaths
of half a million children mass destruction?" "I don't think that's a
very fair question. We are talking about a situation caused by a
government that overran its neighbour, and has weapons of mass
destruction."
"Then why aren't there sanctions on Israel [which] occupies much of
Palestine and attacks Lebanon almost every day of the week? Why aren't
there sanctions on Turkey, which has displaced three million Kurds and
caused the deaths of 30,000 Kurds?" "Well, there are many countries
that do things that we are not happy with. We can't be everywhere. I
repeat, it's complex." "How much power does the United States exercise
over your committee?" "We operate by consensus." "And what if the
Americans object?" "We don"t operate."
There is little doubt that if Saddam Hussein saw political advantage
in starving and otherwise denying his people, he would do so. It is
hardly surprising that he has looked after himself, his inner circle
and, above all, his military and security apparatus.
His palaces and spooks, like the cartoon portraits of himself, are
everywhere. Unlike other tyrants, however, he not only survived, but
before the Gulf War enjoyed a measure of popularity by buying off his
people with the benefits from Iraq's oil revenue. Having exiled or
murdered his opponents, more than any Arab leader he used the riches
of oil to modernise the civilian infrastructure, building first-rate
hospitals, schools and universities.
In this way he fostered a relatively large, healthy, well-fed,
well-educated middle class. Before sanctions, Iraqis consumed more
than 3,000 calories each per day; 92 per cent of people had safe water
and 93 per cent enjoyed free health care. Adult literacy was one of
the highest in the world, at around 95 per cent. According to the
Economist's Intelligence Unit, "the Iraqi welfare state was, until
recently, among the most comprehensive and generous in the Arab
world."
It is said the only true beneficiary of sanctions is Saddam Hussein.
He has used the embargo to centralise state power, and so reinforce
his direct control over people's lives. With most Iraqis now dependent
on the state food rationing system, organised political dissent is all
but unthinkable. In any case, for most Iraqis, it is cancelled by the
sense of grievance and anger they feel towards the external enemy,
western governments.
In the relatively open and pro-Western society that existed in Iraq
before 1991, there was always the prospect of an uprising, as the
Kurdish and Shia rebellions that year showed. In today's state of
siege, there is none. That is the unsung achievement of the
Anglo-American blockade.
The economic blockade on Iraq must be lifted for no other reason than
that it is immoral, its consequences inhuman. When that happens, says
the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, "the weapons inspectors
must go back into Iraq and complete their mandate, which should be
reconfigured. It was originally drawn up for quantitative disarmament,
to account for every nut, screw, bolt, document that exists in Iraq.
As long as Iraq didn't account for that, it was not in compliance and
there was no progress.
"We should change that mandate to qualitative disarmament. Does Iraq
have a chemical weapons programme today? No. Does Iraq have a
long-range missile programme today? No. Nuclear? No. Biological? No.
Is Iraq qualitatively disarmed? Yes. So we should get on with
monitoring Iraq to ensure they do not reconstitute any of this
capability."
Even before the machinations in the UN Security Council in October and
November 2002, Iraq had already accepted back inspectors of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. At the time of writing, a new
resolution, forced through the Security Council by a Bush
administration campaign of bribery and coercion, has seen a contingent
of weapons inspectors at work in Iraq. Led by the Swedish diplomat
Hans Blix, the inspectors have extraordinary powers, which, for
example, require Iraq to "confess" to possessing equipment never
banned by previous resolutions. In spite of a torrent of disnformation
from Washington and Whitehall, they have found, as one inspector put
it, "zilch".
An attack is next; we have no right to call it a "war". The "enemy" is
a nation of whom almost half the population are children, a nation who
offer us no threat and with whom we have no quarrel. The fate of
countless innocent lives now depends on vestiges of self-respect among
the so-called international (non-American) community, and on free
journalists to tell the truth and not merely channel and echo the
propaganda of great power.
It is seldom reported that UN Security Resolution 687 that enforces
the embargo on Iraq also says that Iraq's disarmament should be a step
"towards the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from
weapons of mass destruction ..." In other words, if Iraq gives up, or
has given up, its doomsday weapons, so should Israel. After 11
September 2001, making relentless demands on Iraq, then attacking it,
while turning a blind eye to Israel will endanger us all.
"The longer the sanctions go on," said Denis Halliday, "[the more] we
are likely to see the emergence of a generation who will regard Saddam
Hussein as too moderate and too willing to listen to the West."
On my last night in Iraq, I went to the Rabat Hall in the centre of
Baghdad to watch the Iraqi National Orchestra rehearse. I had wanted
to meet Mohammed Amin Ezzat, the conductor, whose personal tragedy
epitomises the punishment of his people. Because the power supply is
so intermittent, Iraqis have been forced to use cheap kerosene lamps
for lighting, heating and cooking; and these frequently explode. This
is what happened to Mohammed Amin Ezzat's wife, Jenan, who was
engulfed in flames.
"I saw my wife burn completely before my eyes," he said. " I threw
myself on her in order to extinguish the flames, but it was no use.
She died. I sometimes wish I had died with her." He stood on his
conductor's podium, his badly burnt left arm unmoving, the fingers
fused together.
The orchestra was rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and there
was a strange discord. Reeds were missing from clarinets and strings
from violins. "We can't get them from abroad," he said. "Someone has
decreed they are not allowed." The musical scores are ragged, like
ancient parchment. The musicians cannot get paper.
Only two members of the original orchestra are left; the rest have set
out on the long, dangerous road to Jordan and beyond. "You cannot
blame them," he said. "The suffering in our country is too great. But
why has it not been stopped?"
It was a question I put to Denis Halliday one evening in New York. We
were standing, just the two of us, in the great modernist theatre that
is the General Assembly at the UN. "This is where the real world is
represented," he said.
"One state, one vote. By contrast, the Security Council has five
permanent members which have veto rights. There is no democracy there.
Had the issue of sanctions on Iraq gone to the General Assembly, it
would have been overturned by a very large majority.
"We have to change the United Nations, to reclaim what is ours. The
genocide in Iraq is the test of our will. All of us have to break the
silence: to make those responsible, in Washington and London, aware
that history will slaughter them."
pad
> shepherds, farmers, fishermen ? are described in a document prepared