DUSTORMS
OF
DEPLETED URANIUM

By Mike Ferner

AT THE SAFWAN, IRAQ BORDER CHECKPOINT WITH KUWAIT - Congressional Medal of Honor winner and Viet Nam vet, Charlie Liteky, reflecting on his peace mission to this outpost today, said, "I feel very glad to be here doing what we can for peace, but it's the people here who are taking all the risks."

That statement, mentioned casually in the lobby of Basra's modest Al-Iyoon Hotel, was true enough. But the dust storm that descended on this southernmost section of Iraq within minutes of Liteky's comment, dimming even the hotel corridors, gave us a gritty taste of what life has been like here since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Dust storms are of course common here, and some members of this Iraq Peace Team (IPT) delegation had weathered them in other places. But perhaps nowhere else on Earth is the dust so deadly. That's because DU, or depleted uranium, was the weapon of choice used here 12 years ago-over 300 tons of it.

DU, a radioactive, carcinogenic by-product of nuclear reactors, is used to make armor-piercing bullets. Its heavy weight lets it cut through tanks and armoured personnel carriers like a hot knife through butter. Unfortunately for combat soldiers and hapless civilians living in former war zones, it emits alpha particles that are particularly effective in causing cancer once they get inside the body. DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

And getting inside the body is exactly what DU seems to be doing since bursting onto the scene here.

UN statistics published in the British Medical Journal describe a sevenfold increase in cancer in southern Iraq between 1989 and 1994. Cancer specialist Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a member of the Royal College of Physicians in Britain, and a cancer specialist at Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra, reported that Iraqi medical studies show that "more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer in five years' time." She added that "most of my own family now has cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We are living through another Hiroshima... We suspect depleted uranium. There simply can be no other explanation."

Combined with more than a decade of harsh economic sanctions, Iraqis continue to get sick and die from a war most Americans thought was incredibly short in duration and "surgical" in its execution.

Dr. Doug Rokke, Professor of Nuclear Physics and an Army health physicist on the command staff of the 1991 Persian Gulf depleted uranium cleanup team has said, "DU is the stuff of nightmares. It is toxic, radioactive and pollutes for 4500 million years. It causes lymphoma, neuropsychotic disorders and short-term memory damage. In semen, it causes birth defects... This whole thing is a crime against God and humanity." Of the original 100 primary members of Dr. Rokke's team, 30 have since died, and many of the others, including Rokke who has 5000 times the permissible level of radiation in his body, have serious health problems.

After today, Dr. Rokke's words have taken on much greater significance.

Today is the second day the Iraq Peace Team has spent in the Basra and Safwan area, in its continuing effort to promote peace and prevent another war against Iraq.

See
www.iraqpeaceteam.org
for more information

 

Members of the Iraq Peace Team display photographs of Iraqi civilians vulnerable to invasion in the DMZ at the Iraq-Kuwait border. The wrecks of vehicles destroyed with depleted uranium weapons by U.S. pilots over the past 12 years litter a junkyard in the southern Iraqi desert near Safwan village. The U.S. has fired more than 300 tons of radioactive and carcinogenic uranium into Iraq since 1991.