NEWS FROM BAGHDAD

From 3rd- 8th January 2003 Scilla Elworthy, Director of Oxford Research Group, joined a group of NGO representatives and former UN officials 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.

They 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.

The group included:
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
Zeynab 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

The following is a brief summary of the main points emerging from the visit. (click here for a PDF. version)

1. Attitudes of Iraqis today.
We experience a mixture of fatalism, faith and defiance in the Elzahrawi Café. 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 - after the Gulf War in 1991, and in 1998 when 350 cruise missiles hit the country - 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: they do not resent the people of the countries about to bomb them, nor the civilizations, but the leaders.

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 it 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 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 the 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. The inspections are now into their 12th year, 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.
Crime and corruption has increased substantially in Iraq over the 20 years, but no figures are available. In the case of Iraq today, there is no question that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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 blastoma*, 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, terror and attacks on the West.