http://www.salam.org/policy/canceringulf.html
The evidence is there. We caused cancer in the
Gulf
By Robert Fisk
October 16, 1998, The Independent
PHIL GAMER telephoned me this week to ask how he could make
contact with the doctors treating Iraq's child cancer victims. He
had been reading our series on the growing evidence of links
between cancers in Iraq and the use of depleted uranium shells by
American and British forces during the 1991 Gulf War.
During the conflict, Gamer was in the Royal Army Medical
Corps. He was not in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms
of Britain's "friendly fire" casualties - men who were
attacked by US aircraft using depleted uranium rounds. And now he
suffers from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines and has
a lump on the right side of his neck.
I know what those lumps on the neck look like. This month I've
seen enough Iraqi children with tumours on their abdomen to feel
horror as well as anger. When Hebba Mortaba's mother lifted her
little girl's patterned blue dress in the Mansour hospital in
Baghdad, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerous
abscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlier
abdominal mass only to find, monster-like, that another grew in
its place.
During the 1991 war, Hebba's suburb of Basra was bombed so
heavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She is now just nine
years old and, so her doctors told me gently, will not live to
see her 10th birthday.
When I first reported from Iraq's child cancer wards last
February and March - and visited the fields and farms around
Basra into which US and British tanks fired thousands of depleted
uranium shells in the last days of the war - the British
Government went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. I
still treasure a letter from Lord Gilbert, Minister of State for
Defence Procurement, who told Independent readers that my account
of a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqi
child cancer cases would, "coming from anyone other than
Robert Fisk", be regarded as "a wilful perversion of
reality." According to his Lordship, particles from the DU
hardened warheads - used against tank armour - are extremely
small, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and
"become difficult to detect, even with the most
sophisticated monitoring equipment." Over the past few
months I've been sent enough evidence to suggest that, had this
letter come from anyone other than his Lordship, its implications
would be mendacious as well as misleading.
Let us start with an equally eloquent but far more accurate
letter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 by
Paddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEA
Technology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Mr Bartholomew's letter - of which I have obtained a copy -
refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance official
on the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait by
depleted uranium ammunition. An accompanying "threat
paper" by Mr Bartholomew, in which he notes that while the
hazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxic
contamination from these weapons "are small when compared to
those during a war", they nonetheless "can become a
long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk
to both military and civilian population".
The document, marked "UK Restricted" goes on to say
that "US tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, US aircraft many tens
of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank
ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000lb of DU...if
the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International
Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor...calculates
500,000 potential deaths."
"The DU will spread around the battlefield and target
vehicles in various sizes and quantities ... it would be unwise
for people to stay close to large quantities of DU for long
periods and this would obviously be of concern to the local
population if they collect this heavy metal and keep it." Mr
Bartholomew's covering letter says that the contamination of
Kuwait is "emotive and thus must be dealt with in a
sensitive manner".
Needless to say, no one has bothered even to suggest a
clean-up in southern Iraq where Hebba Mortaba and other child
victims are dying. Why not? And why doesn't the Government come
clean and tell us what really happened?
Here is a clue. It comes in a letter dated 1 March 1991 from a
US lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to a
Major Larson at the organisation's Studies and Analysis Branch
and states that: "There has been and continues to be a
concern (sic) regarding the impact of DU on the environment.
Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on
the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable
and thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators proved
their worth during our recent combat activities, then we should
assure their future existence (until something better is
developed)."
So there it is. Shorn of the colonel's execrable English, the
message is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition are
acceptable until we - the West - invent something even more
lethal to take its place.
So with tens of thousands of 1991 Gulf War veterans suffering
unexplained and potentially terminal illnesses and with thousands
of Iraqi civilians, including children unborn when the war ended,
now suffering from unexplained cancers, I can only repeat what I
wrote last February: that something terrible happened at the end
of the Gulf War about which we have still not been told the
truth. As former acting Sergeant Tony Duff of the Gulf War
Veterans put it to me yesterday, "a lot of things we are now
calling victories about the Gulf War will be seen one day as
atrocities - I wonder whether this is why the powers that be
don't want this DU thing to come out?"
And what exactly is this awful secret which we are not allowed
to know? Is it, as Professor Malcolm Hooper, professor of
medicinal chemistry at Sunderland University remarks, the result
of the US-British bombing of Saddam Hussein's Sarin and Tabun
poison gas factories (around 900 facilities were bombed, it now
turns out). Or is it the secret DU factor?
I don't know whether this can be classed as a war crime. But
anyone who thinks there's no connection between our use of
depleted uranium ammunition in the 1991 Gulf War and the tide of
sickness that has followed in its wake must also believe in
Father Christmas.
Does Lord Gilbert believe in Father Christmas, I wonder?
