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TFF
in Baghdad
By
Scilla
Elworthy
Director, Oxford Research Group,
UK
TFF
associate
January 24, 2003
LETTER FROM
BAGHDAD
Dear Friends,
From 3rd- 8th January 2003 a group of NGO
representatives and former UN officials was able to meet
with cabinet ministers in Baghdad including Deputy Prime
Minister Tariq Aziz, Foreign Minister Nagi Sabri and Oil
Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid, as well as to talk with
doctors, teachers and scientists. We had the opportunity
to meet ordinary Iraqis and visit sites recently
inspected for weapons of mass destruction. The aim was to
contribute to efforts to prevent war and to gather
information not available in the western press,
particularly with regard to the human situation.
Attached is a brief summary of a very intense series
of visits, as well as suggestions responding to the
frequent question asked by citizens of western countries
"What can we do to help prevent war?"
Please circulate these documents as widely as
possible, asking NGOs and individuals to act quickly on
the practical suggestions offered. Your help will be very
valuable.
With warm wishes,
from
Margarita Papandreou, former First Lady of
Greece
Scilla Elworthy, Director, Oxford Research
Group, UK
Denis Halliday, former Assistant
Secretary-General of the UN and UN Humanitarian
Co-ordinator in Iraq
Christian Harleman, the Transnational
Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden
Jan Oberg, Director, the Transnational
Foundation, Sweden
Zeynep Oral, Winpeace and Peace Initiative,
Turkey
Omaima Rawas, peace activist and Vice President
of the Syrian Arabic League, Syria
Fotini Sianou, President, Women's Committee,
European Trade Union Confederation
**********************
NEWS FROM
BAGHDAD
- a visit to Iraq 3rd &endash; 8th January
2003
including meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz, Foreign Minister Nagi Sabri and Oil Minister Amer
Mohammed Rashid, as well as conversations with ordinary
Iraqis in the street and visits to sites.
1. Attitudes of Iraqis today. We experienced an
extraordinary mixture of fatalism, faith and defiance in
the El-zahrawi tearoom. Watching Saddam Hussein's Army
Day speech on television, we talked with people at
random, many of whom spoke English. They said that twice
now world opinion has predicted that Iraq would collapse
&endash; after the Gulf War in 1991, and in 1998 when 350
cruise missiles hit the country &endash; and once again
they will survive. Yes, their children are afraid. Yes,
the teenagers do not know if it is worth studying
seriously or not. No, they will not go to the shelters.
They do not talk so much of US or UK aggression but
rather of Bush and Blair: until now, they have not
resented the people of the countries about to bomb them,
nor the civilizations, but the leaders. However that
trend seems to be changing with the Iraqis increasingly
holding the people of the UK and the US responsible for
their countries' policies. In the words of Dr. Hoda
Ammash "People here bear every respect for western
people and western civilization. We respect your
technological advancement, and your values. We know that
westerners are being given the opportunity to learn about
Arabic civilizations. Yet hatred is being manufactured,
by some, to engineer a clash of civilizations."
2. Food reserves. Iraqi households have been
given three months' (and now a further two months') food
rations in order to get it out of the main storage sites
to prevent warehouses being bombed. The food distribution
programme, according to Denis Halliday (former Assistant
Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN
Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq (1997-98), is one of
the most efficient in history, involving 49,000 food
distribution agents and minimizing corruption through a
system whereby if 100 people complain about an agent, he
or she is removed. Iraqis are also stock-piling water but
have no suitable large containers. People with gardens
are being asked to dig wells.
Under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme only about half
the oil revenues can be used for buying food and other
necessities for the population of the centre and South of
the country; the rest being used for compensation to
Kuwait, food for the Iraqi Kurds in the North, and the
costs of the UN programme including the UNMOVIC weapons
inspections.
Halliday concludes: "The twelve year sanctions
regime has become a weapon of mass destruction, built on
the massive damage to civilian infrastructure by US
bombing and resulting in the deaths of over one million
people since 1991, over half of whom are
children."
According to UNICEF 25% of Iraqi babies are born
weighing 2kgs or less, a key indicator of famine. One
million children under 5 suffer acute or chronic
malnutrition.
3. Shelters. Everyone we spoke to said they
would not use the 34 shelters provided for civilians in
Baghdad because of the 1991 bombing of Al-Amarya shelter
when 408 out of 422 women and children in the shelter
were burned to death.
4. Weapons Inspectors. Dr. Sami Al-Araji, a
nuclear engineer and Director General of Planning at the
Ministry of Industry, is facilitating the work of the
UNMOVIC inspectors. Everywhere we went there was a
remarkable willingness to co-operate with the
inspections, but patience is being tested. During our
visit there was a routine inspection near the University
of Baghdad where there are 6 science centres. The
inspectors wanted to investigate one of these, but froze
the entire complex meaning that nearly 3,000 people could
not move for six hours, even though their place of work
was not under inspection. This meant that toddlers were
left uncollected at nursery schools. Not even the Iraqi
Ambassador to the UN, there for a visit, was allowed to
leave.
A professor of microbiology at the University of
Baghdad told us that during 1991-98 inspectors
re-examined the university every three weeks, searching
minutely. "They enter exam halls where students are
doing their finals and search under their chairs."
Iraqi people thought the inspections would last 2-3
years, and then they could go back to normal life. It is
now 12 years since the inspections started, they are more
intense than ever, and there is no end in sight.
We visited the al-Dawrah Foot and Mouth Vaccine
Institute which was high on the list in the UK Government
dossier (published September 2002) of biological weapons
sites. Since 1994 the site has been inspected 60 times,
it has been closed since 1995, when all the equipment was
destroyed or removed and there were cameras everywhere
connected to the former UNSCOM Monitoring Centre in
Baghdad. The place was wrecked.
5. Civil and political rights. Since Oct 2002,
laws and regulations have been or are being revised as
follows:
- Amendments to the constitution to allow for a
multi-party system.
- Abolition of special 'security violations' courts
which had no rights of appeal
- Abolition of laws requiring cutting off hands of
thieves
- Amnesty for political prisoners
- Exiles not linked to intelligence services may now
return to Iraq with the right to criticise the
government
- Reduction of fee for exit visa from Iraq from $200
to $10.
6. Oil. Current Iraqi production is approx 3
million barrels per day (current world production approx
77 million) but it has the second largest reserves in the
world. If controls were lifted, and with infrastructure
investment, with its immense reserves of easily
extractable oil Iraq has the potential to supply 10% of
the world's oil needs, and to continue to do so for at
least a century (since less than 1% of reserves are being
used up each year). Iraqis are very conscious of the
energy needs of the western economies - the US has to
import 60% of its oil needs - and know that the main
reason for military invasion is to gain control of its
vast reserves of oil. Iraqi ministers fear that if the US
were to control Iraq's oil production, it would
manipulate the economies not only of the Far East, but
also of Europe. Iraq takes a long-term view, wants a
stable oil price, and would like to adopt normal trading
relations rather than be subject to crises, threats and
manipulation.
7. Depleted Uranium (DU). Water-borne and
air-borne dust from DU shells, used by the US and the UK
in the 1991 Gulf war, is spreading over vast areas of
Iraq but the government has no way of detecting the
direction of the spread because airborne radiation
sensing equipment is prohibited. People are developing
cancers by consuming meat and milk from animals grazing
in polluted areas. Cancers of all kinds are increasing
dramatically in Iraq particularly amongst women with
breast cancer and leukaemia. Members of our delegation
have visited hospitals in Iraq since 1991 and observed
that current conditions in the hospitals have worsened.
Equipment needed for treatment lies idle because the
computerized controls have been removed due to sanctions.
There is one nurse for every 16 beds where previously
there was one for every two beds. Every child has a
mother or grandmother giving full time care. Omar, three
years old has a plastino plastoma*, which attacks
kidneys and then destroys the brain and nervous system:
his head is enlarged to twice normal size, his face
swollen unrecognizably out of shape and his eyes blind.
His mother sits with him like a madonna, waiting for her
child to die. Tiny Aia ('Miracle') was born with a second
head, a brain sack attached to the back of her own head,
a condition known as meningoceal* and not seen in
Iraq before the mid-1990s. Dr. Ahmed Fadeh of the Baghdad
Children's Hospital told me there are unlimited cases he
simply can't treat because his equipment is worn out or
lacks spares, and he has not got the drugs or even the
suture thread that he needs because of sanctions.
*this was told to us phonetically in a hurry, we
are not sure of the correct spelling
8. Implications for the future. This visit was
a shock treatment in learning what it feels like to be an
Iraqi. This is an ancient people with a civilization 7000
years old (Iraqis point out that the United States is
barely 300 years old), an economy that until the 1980s
was a model for the entire Middle East, and with a free
health service that was ahead of the National Health
Service in the UK. The streets are now rubble-strewn,
most of the middle class have left, and people are
selling their household goods on street corners in order
to survive. The currency has devalued 6000 (six thousand)
% in 20 years; in 1981 one dinar bought three US dollars,
today one US dollar buys about 2000 dinars. To pay a
modest hotel bill for 6 days, you need a pile of dinar
notes two meters high. Twelve years of sanctions, which
were intended to make the Iraqi people revolt against
their leadership, have had the opposite effect giving
Saddam Hussein total control over his people through food
rationing. Sanctions have simply disabled Iraqi people
through hunger and the wholesale disintegration of their
infrastructure. Rather than rebel against Saddam Hussein,
they feel defiance towards Bush and Blair which their
leader can constantly reinforce, since their sense of
honour is continuously provoked. The humiliation is very
deep and very dangerous. In these circumstances a war and
subsequent occupation of Iraq will no doubt fuel the
fires of hatred and terror, and consequently the risk of
attacks on the West.
For more information see websites: www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk
www.transnational.org
WHAT YOU CAN
DO
Time is short. The UNMOVIC inspectors are due to
report on 27th January 2003. Military preparations
indicate that an attack may begin in early February. A
pre-emptive attack will be a clear-cut violation of the
UN Charter and international law. Medical and public
health experts in the UK (1) estimate that between 48,000
and 260,000 civilians could be killed in the first 3
months of conflict, and that if WMD are used, there could
be up to 4 million dead.
What can be done to move towards a genuine solution of
this conflict other than war and occupation?
1.The free press and NGOs must speedily step up their
analysis and reporting to challenge disinformation
about the realities in Iraq. Please distribute this
report to all your media contacts.
2. Whenever you hear a news broadcast on Iraq
which does not mention something about ordinary people,
call them to ask for some human interest stories. Iraq is
not one man, it is 26 million fellow citizens. They have
points of views, hopes, fears and dreams like all of
us.
3. The European Union has a substantial
potential role to play. A consistent well-structured
mediation process could be offered, either through key
Arab states, or in the form of a meeting between the most
senior representatives of the United States and of Iraq
to 'explore whether all avenues short of war have been
exhausted'. This meeting would need to be announced
before 27th January, perhaps to take place mid-February.
It would need to take place in a very safe environment
and employ state-of-the-art conflict resolution
techniques. (2) These moves could be supported by France
and by Germany in their chairmanship of the UN Security
Council in January and February 2003 respectively. Urge
your EU government to support such an initiative, and
copy your letter to Prime Minister Costas Simitis of
Greece, 15 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, 10674 Athens,
mail@primeminister.gr
which has the current presidency of the European
Union.
4. If you are yourself willing, go to Baghdad to
become part of the Civilian Protection that has
already begun with contingents from Spain, the US and
Austria. 5000 people are needed to stay at civilian sites
such as electricity, water and telecommunications
facilities to try to prevent them being bombed.
Individuals taking this course of action should be aware
of the serious risks involved. Contact either Voices in
the Wilderness www.nonviolence.org
or www.iraqpeaceteam.org
or Dr. Al-Hashimi, President of the Iraqi Organisation
for Friendship, Peace and Solidarity in Baghdad,
Silm@uruklink.net
Fax: + 964 1 537 2933 or + 964 1 8853298.
5. Call your foreign office to ask it you have an
embassy in Baghdad. Many governments do not have
any representation and thus cannot collect first hand
facts and impressions on which to base an independent
analysis. Neither Britain nor the US has an embassy in
Baghdad, and communications have to go through the Polish
embassy.
6. Ask your parliamentary committee for foreign
affairs whether they have visited Iraq to see for
themselves and if not, why not. Ask them to talk to Iraqi
people at all levels.
7. Make it known that the 12-year sanctions
regime has had the opposite effect to that intended;
it has put Saddam Hussein in total control of the Iraqi
people, through the rationing programme.
8. Prime ministers and presidents worldwide need to
understand the strength and urgency of public
opposition to this proposed attack, so that they will
actively support mediation rather than allowing
themselves to be bribed or bullied into supporting an
attack. See George Monbiot's article 'Act now against
war' http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,869807,00.html
for ideas on how to get the message across, through
non-violent civil disobedience. He suggests disrupting
the speeches of ministers, blocking the roads down which
they must travel, blockading important public buildings,
or airports from which troops take off.
9. Urge your government to support the development of
a new security regime for the whole region, honouring UN
SC Resolution 687 requiring that the Middle East shall
become a zone free of weapons of mass
destruction.
Footnotes
1. See Collateral Damage: the Health and Environmental
Costs of War on Iraq issued by the International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient
of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
2. Expert practitioners could be used such as
William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, who ran
the successful Camp David meeting for President Carter
between Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat.
©
TFF & the author 2003
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