Distant Voices (23 page)

The Clark Commission will concentrate on the body of international law codified in the 1977 Geneva Protocols subjoined to the Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949, which expressly prohibits attacks on ‘objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas . . . crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works'. Article 56 states that ‘dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such an attack may cause the release
of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population . . .'

In the announcement of its formation the commission noted that there is ‘abundant
prima facie
evidence to support their allegation of war crimes . . . the US Air Force between January 16 and February 27 carried out the most sophisticated and violent air assault in history against a virtually defenseless people. A deliberate policy of bombing civilians and civilian life-sustaining facilities has resulted in the destruction of the Iraqi economy and urban infrastructure'.
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The evidence will draw on a range of sources, including the report of an investigating team commissioned by the UN Secretary General which says that, due to the bombing, ‘Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age' and left in a ‘near apocalyptic state' with ‘even sewage treatment and purifying plants brought to a virtual standstill'.
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We have had only glimpses of this, notably in the
New Statesman and Society
and the
Guardian.
There has been just one indelible image of the war's horror: a photograph published in the
Observer
of an Iraqi petrified in death on the Basra road.
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According to the Clark Commission, between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqis were killed; yet we are left with just this one icon. Why?

Why have we not seen a single frame of film of the Iraqi trenches after they were cluster-bombed and Napalmed? Why have we not seen the bulldozing of bodies into mass graves? This image is the one that those who prosecuted the war fear most. They know it will evoke the memory of bodies bulldozed into pits in the Nazi concentration camps. Official film exists. Will it go the way of the visual record of what was done to the people of Hiroshima and which was classified ‘secret' for 23 years?

‘Do we even care', wrote Linda Schabedly, in a letter to the
Guardian,
‘about the other version of reality that exists beyond the media?'
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It is a central question, to which the answer is that a great many people do care but are denied the ‘other version of reality', just as they were denied it
during the war itself. Through the narrow focus of those supportive and protective of the state, the misgivings of the public are trivialised or silenced.

Maintaining this one version is essential to British policy in the region, with its sub-imperial posturing by the latter-day Lord Palmerston, Douglas Hurd, who began his ministerial life at the Foreign Office by travelling to Baghdad as a ‘high-level salesman' of weapons to Saddam Hussein. Many people must now wonder if they can believe a government that cannot even tell the truth about the ‘friendly fire' deaths of nine British servicemen.
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Yet the Ministry of Defence used the ‘feelings of families' to justify much of its exaggerated censorship during the war. Where truth has emerged, it has come from those who are driven by humanitarian concerns, who assume no obligation to side with the state. This is especially true of the voluntary aid organisations, like Oxfam.

In September 1990 Oxfam was threatened by the Department of Trade and Industry that ‘breaching sanctions is a serious offence' for which ‘the maximum penalty is up to seven years' imprisonment or an unlimited fine or both'. The threat was repeated just before Oxfam's team – led by Jim Howard – left for Iraq in March 1991.
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It was immediately clear to Howard and his colleagues, on arrival in Iraq, that sanctions must at least be partially lifted if tens of thousands of people were to survive; contamination of water alone is decimating young children. With the Save the Children Fund, Oxfam reported that Baghdad had no uncontaminated running water, no refrigeration, no fuel and no food-processing capacity. ‘The unavailability of powdered milk', says the report, ‘spells nutritional and health disaster for children . . . the spread of diseases such as cholera and typhoid in the present conditions is inevitable.'
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UN Resolution 661, passed on August 6 last year, stated that the following items are exempt from sanctions: ‘Supplies considered strictly for medical purposes and humanitarian food stuffs.' As Dr Eric Hoskins of the Gulf Peace Team has graphically pointed out, this Resolution has been disregarded
and ‘Iraqi civilians have been dying of starvation and disease in their thousands . . . because of lack of basic food and medicines . . . Never before in history has a government been prohibited from purchasing and importing food and medicine for its own people.'
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The silence over Iraq is even greater over those countries directly and indirectly affected by the Gulf War. The people of the developing world, according to US Secretary of State James Baker, live in ‘an era full of promise . . . one of those rare transforming moments in history'.
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The people themselves will have grave doubts about the word ‘promise' – except of course in an ironic sense – but they will not argue that their lives are undergoing ‘one of those rare transforming moments'.

The scale of this transformation is comprehensively documented in a remarkable study submitted to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in March 1991. Entitled
The Economic Impact of the Gulf Crisis on Third World Countries
, it was sponsored by Britain's principal non-government development agencies, such as Oxfam, Save the Children Fund and Christian Aid.
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In stark, prosaic terms it describes a vision of the poor world in the wake of the Gulf War. ‘At least 40 developing countries are facing the equivalent of a natural disaster,' it says. ‘Fourteen of these countries are deeply impoverished sub-Saharan African countries, which were suffering famine before the war started.' They include Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia and Mozambique. Moreover, the effect of the war is being felt in countries as distant as Jamaica and Paraguay, countries which are already suffering the consequences of the recession in the developed north, the debt crisis and falling prices for many commodities.

The war delivered two body blows to the poor. In the region itself hundreds of thousands of workers from developing countries were trapped or had to flee for their lives; their savings, possessions and livelihoods were destroyed or abandoned. Millions of people were dependent on receiving support from relatives working in the Gulf. Many more
millions, says the report, ‘have seen their poverty deepened and their opportunities curtailed by the wider effects of the crisis'. For example, between August 1990 and January 1991, when war seemed imminent, the price of oil averaged $30 a barrel, almost twice its previously stable price. In Uganda, public transport has been severely curtailed or become so expensive that thousands of people now have to walk great distances to work, schools and hospitals.

In countries as far apart as Bangladesh and Botswana, the sudden rise in kerosene prices means that many poor families can no longer afford fuel for their lamps. The poor, who tend to cook with kerosene, thus bear a disproportionate share of the oil price increase. In Pakistan, fuel is being rationed and petrol prices have risen by 40 per cent; travel costs in all major cities have doubled and now amount to about a quarter of a worker's monthly earnings.

In addition, demand for developing countries' exports has been seriously affected, in some countries almost wiped out. Jordan has suffered a total loss of exports to Kuwait and Iraq. Other countries have suffered a loss of aid as rich states, such as Saudi Arabia, bear much of the cost of the war and of ‘compensatory payments' to affected countries such as Egypt.

In those countries that did not join the coalition, or opposed the American-led war, the effects have been catastrophic. Yemen has lost 10 per cent of its Gross National Product; a 1 per cent loss is the United Nations' economic criterion for defining a natural disaster. On top of this, Yemen has lost 75 per cent of its exports and services.

Jordan has borne the greatest relative cost, estimated at a quarter of its Gross National Product: a ‘natural disaster' twenty-five times over. Jordan has also lost 75 per cent of its exported goods and services. According to a UNICEF report last December:

Typically, families are poor because the father works in erratic, menial jobs for very low wages, and cannot rely on a regular monthly income. In the last three months
[during the build-up to the war], many families have slipped into poverty because the main breadwinner suddenly found himself unemployed due to the impact of the Gulf crisis, especially in tourism, transit trade, shipping and construction.

Like Jordan, Sudan ‘backed the wrong side', according to Washington; and with nine million people now at risk from famine, the Sudanese ‘haven't seen anything yet', in the words of one Western ambassador in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Since August last year, the rising cost of fuel has added 46 per cent to the cost of air-lifting food to stricken southern Sudan. In Sri Lanka, which before the war sent 100,000 migrant workers to the Gulf, along with much of its tea exports, the poverty that was always present has taken on a ‘new dimension', according to a Sri Lankan friend just returned. The development agencies say that the cost of compensating these countries is ‘manageable for the world community'. They point out that the Overseas Development Institute in London estimates that $12 billion is needed to compensate the most seriously affected countries; and that this figure is considerably less than the debt that the Americans ‘forgave' Egypt in return for its support.

This year the World Bank will mark a record net income: the kind of mammoth money that could alleviate both the effects of the Gulf War
and
the famine in Africa. The Bank is run from Washington by the developed countries under the constant influence and manipulation of the United States. It is said to be the banking version of the United Nations. Article 50 of the UN Charter provides for compensation to member states affected by Security Council decisions.

The money is there. More than $62 million was found to pay for bombs dropped by American B52 aircraft on Iraq. This was the equivalent of Oxfam's entire budget for 1990. And £105 million was found to replace five British Tornado aircraft which crashed or were shot down during the war. This would have bought enough grain to feed for one month all the twenty million people likely to starve in Africa this
year. And £3 million was found to train one Tornado pilot. This would have provided 25,000 Eritrean families with enough seeds and tools to recover from the current drought.
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Perhaps only those who can trigger such misery while expressing pride in their actions can then ascend to the moral high ground. Douglas Hurd said recently that there was ‘more to gain' than the just cause of Kuwait. ‘It is about the sort of world in which we wish to live,' he said. ‘In the late twentieth century, nations must be able to conduct affairs by a code more worthy of rational human beings than the law of the jungle . . .'

In 1990 the British Government gave to famine relief in Africa about the equivalent of two days' British military operations in the Gulf War.
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In 1991 the figure was less. At the same time the British arms industry has been stimulated by the war and secretly encouraged by the Government. The Ferranti company, for example, has negotiated a secret deal to supply ‘smart' missiles to Gulf states. Such is the ‘sort of world in which we wish to live'.

April to June 1991

IT IS ONE
year since the United States and its ‘coalition' allies attacked Iraq. The full cost had now been summarised in a report published by the Medical Educational Trust in London.
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Up to a quarter of a million people were killed or died during and immediately after the attack. As a direct result, child mortality in Iraq has doubled; 170,000 under-fives are expected to die in the coming months. This estimate is described as ‘conservative'; UNICEF says five million children could die in the region.

More than 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes, and Iraq's electricity, water, sewage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure have been ‘substantially destroyed', producing ‘conditions for famine and epidemics'. Add to this the equivalent of a natural disaster in 40 low- and middle-income countries.
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How were these historic events set in train? Forgotten facts tell us much. On October 29, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker declared, ‘After a long period of stagnation, the United Nations is becoming a more effective organisation. The ideals of the United Nations Charter are becoming realities.' Within a month Baker had tailored the ideals of the UN Charter entirely to suit American interests. He had met the foreign minister of each of the 14 member countries of the UN Security Council and persuaded the large majority to vote for the ‘war resolution' – 678 – which had no basis in the UN Charter. Such a vote, remarked Yemen's UN
ambassador Abdallah al-Ashtal, was inconceivable without ‘all kinds of pressures – and inducements'.
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