I showed a list of barred drugs given to me by Iraqi doctors to Professor Karol Sikora, who as chief of the cancer programme of the World Health Organisation, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers (to the UN Sanctions Committee). There seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could be converted into chemical and other weapons.” He told me: “Nearly all these drugs are available in every British hospital. It seems crazy they couldn’t have morphine. When I was in Iraq, in one hospital they had a little bottle of aspirin pills to go around 200 patients in pain.” No one doubts that if the murderous Saddam Hussein saw advantage in deliberately denying his people humanitarian supplies, he would do so; but the UN, from the Secretary General himself, has said that, while the regime could do more, it has not withheld supplies.
Denis Halliday, the assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, resigned in protest at the embargo which he described as “genocidal”. Halliday was responsible for the UN’s humanitarian programme in Iraq. His successor, Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in disgust. Last November, they wrote: “The death of 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. The US and UK governments’ delayed clearance of equipment and materials is responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad.”
Those who speak these facts are abused by Blair ministers as apologists for Saddam Hussein – so embroiled is the government with the Bush administration’s exploitation of America’s own tragedy on September 11. This has prevented public discussion of the crime of an embargo that has hurt only the most vulnerable Iraqis and which is to be compounded by the crime of attacking the stricken nation. Unknown to most of the British public, RAF and American aircraft have been bombing Iraq, week after week, for more than two years. The cost to the British taxpayer is £800million a year. The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a “dilemma” because “few targets remain”. “We’re down to the last outhouse,” said a Pentagon official.
IN any attack on Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s escape route is virtually assured – just as Osama bin Laden’s was. The US and Britain have no wish to free the Iraqi people from a tyranny the CIA once described as its “greatest triumph”. The last thing they want is a separate Kurdish state and another allied to the Shi’ite majority in neighbouring Iran. They want another Saddam Hussein: one who will do as he is told.
On March 13, the Foreign Office entertained Brigadier-General Najib Salihi, a former commander of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and chief of the dreaded military intelligence who took part in the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Now funded by the CIA, the general “denies any war crimes”. Not that he would ever face arrest in the West. At the Foreign Office, he is known as a “rapidly rising star”. He is their man, and Washington’s man.
The British soldiers who take part in an invasion have every right to know the dirty secrets that will underpin their action, and extend the suffering of a people held hostage to a dictatorship and to international power games over which they have no control. Two weeks ago, the Americans made clear they were prepared to use “low yield” nuclear weapons, a threat echoed here by Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon.
When will Europe stand up? If the leaders of the European Union fall silent, too, in the face of such danger, what is Europe for? In this country, there is an honourable rallying cry: Not In Our Name. Bush and Blair must be restrained from killing large numbers of innocents in our name – a view, according to the polls, shared by a majority of the British people. An arms and military equipment embargo must be enforced throughout the region, from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Ariel Sharon’s Israel. Above all, the siege of both the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples must end now.
Found here
Will
Loading comments...