Focus: Inside Iraq - The Tragedy
of a People Betrayed
from John Pilger's latest book, 'The New Rulers of the World'
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 ñ Saddam Hussein ñ 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 ñ on shepherds, farmers, fishermen ñ 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."
all photos:
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/index2.html
This is an edited extract
from John Pilger's latest book,
'The New Rulers of the World'
published
next month by Verso, as a fully updated paperback at £8
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738
