The Great War for Civilisation (219 page)

148
Al-Assadi's purgatory had only just begun. At first housed in unsanitary refugee camps in southern Iran, he later moved to Qom, where he was associated with the Iraqi opposition Al-Wahda party. But the Iranian authorities suspected the group was an American espionage network and al-Assadi was beaten into videotaping a false confession that he was trying to overthrow the Iranian government. In 1996—five years after his escape from Basra—he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment but briefly freed, he said, when he agreed to collaborate with the Iranians. Given fifteen days' leave from jail, he bribed his way across the border to Kurdish-held northern Iraq, received residency papers from Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party, then set off across the Tigris River to Syria and on to Lebanon, where the author met him in 1998 as he desperately sought UN assistance to travel to Europe. He eventually left for Finland to live with his brother.

149
Among the most interesting developments at the Beirut conference—in light of America's later invasion and occupation of Iraq—was the performance of the secret anti-Saddam Dawa party. Widely regarded as the most influential Shia opposition group in the country—Saddam certainly thought so—its principal delegate from Tehran, Abu Bital al-Adib, promised to abide by a parliamentary constitution under which the party would stand in a general election. Coming from a group which—despite its own denials—had tried to kill the emir of Kuwait and had bombed the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, this desire for democracy was little short of extraordinary. U.S. hostages in Beirut were being held captive in return for the freeing of the Dawa men imprisoned after the attack on the emir. Yet when the United States was desperate to hold elections in Iraq in 2005, few parties were more enthusiastic to take part in the poll than the same Dawa party.

150
There were other eerie voices within the administration at this time. A
Washington Post
report on 14 April 1991 quoted an anonymous (of course) official saying that “the thing that could make it like Vietnam was to go into Iraq and get bogged down, establishing a new government, protecting a new government against a hostile population. That would be a recipe for disaster.” Ouch.

151
They did. For some unaccountable reason, Hodgson—a first-rate journalist and a good friend—failed to tell them.

152
The existence of Iraqi “raping rooms” became the object of an unnecessary controversy when the exiled writer Kanan Makiya claimed in 1993 that he had in his possession an official document which proved that rape was used as a political weapon. The card index, issued by the Iraqi “General Security Organisation,” contained the name Aziz Salih Ahmad and apparently described his activity as “Violation of Women's Honour.” Several of Makiya's critics—themselves no supporters of Saddam—claimed that he had misinterpreted the card and that the activity indicated Ahmad's crime rather than his job; in other words, that this was a surveillance note written by the police rather than an employment card. The evidence suggests that Makiya's critics are right. But ex-prisoners have described how female relatives of Saddam's opponents were raped in front of them—my own first report on this during the Iran–Iraq War was the reason for that excoriating letter to
The Times
from the Iraqi ambassador in London—and I found evidence of the Dahuk police dungeons two years before Makiya produced the card index paper. However, whenever I later referred to rape in Iraqi prisons, I was accused of using Makiya as my source. An academic feud now obscured the reality of “raping rooms”—which did really exist in Saddam's regime, however casually chosen the victims may have been.

153
This indifference to the Geneva Convention did not apply, however, when Iraq paraded captured British pilots on television during the war, some of whom appeared to have been beaten. American and British officials then insisted on absolute observance by the Baghdad regime of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners-of-war. Some pilots bore the marks of their emergency ejection from their aircraft, although RAF crews later gave graphic accounts of their mistreatment at the hands of Iraq's security goons.

154
The evidence of massive human suffering was now overwhelming. A UN humanitarian panel on sanctions reported in 1999 that “the gravity of the humanitarian situation of the Iraqi people is indisputable and cannot be overstated. Irrespective of alleged attempts by the Iraq authorities to exaggerate the significance of certain facts for political propaganda purposes, the data from different sources as well as qualitative assessments of bona fide observers and sheer common sense analysis of economic variables converge and corroborate this evaluation.” UNICEF reported in August 1999 that “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s,
there would have been half a million
fewer deaths
of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998” (emphasis in original).

155
For example, the Iraqi National Spinal Cord Injuries Centre—set up with the help of a Danish team during the Iran–Iraq War to look after seriously wounded soldiers—lacked medicine and supplies throughout the period of sanctions. Staff were forced to re-sterilise gauze and catheters and were not permitted to receive new medical textbooks and journals.

156
There was to be a macabre return to this personal abuse against the Kuwaiti royal family at Saddam's own macabre and American-arranged first trial hearing in Baghdad in 2004 when he accused the “animals” in the Kuwaiti government of trying to impoverish Iraqi women to become “whores.”

157
Even on
The Independent on Sunday
, where a nervous night sub-editor—seeing yet another “crisis” story on the agency wires on the night of 9 October—“pulled” my own sceptical report from the paper after the first edition for fear that war would have started by breakfast-time. It was the only occasion on which this happened to a report of mine in the paper, whose editors agreed next day that there wasn't much point in asking a journalist to reflect his doubts about exaggerated reporting if those same exaggerations were to cause us to suppress the story.

158
The two best independent accounts of Ritter's work and of the CIA's infiltration of UNSCOM were published by
The New Yorker
: Peter J. Boyer's “Scott Ritter's Private War,” on 9 November 1998, from which the above quotation is taken, and Seymour M. Hersh's “Saddam's Best Friend: How the CIA made it a lot easier for the Iraqi leader to rearm,” on 5 April 1999.

159
Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma three months earlier, he had received two cycles of cytotoxins. “But the third cycle is partial because he's getting only cyclophosphamide adriamycin as a substitute for vincristine,” Dr. Ismael said. What Latif needed is produced by a company in Germany called Astra Medica. “We received twenty vials of this ten days ago. Before that, the patients' families were buying it for 160,000 dinars—more than two years' salary for many Iraqis. But still we can't get enough. Latif needs the treatment as long as his malignancy continues.”

160
Readers wishing to learn more about DU munitions should refer to the voluminous reports of Swords into Ploughshares and—on the effect of pre-2003 sanctions as well as DU—to the regular bulletins of
Voices in the Wilderness UK
of 16b Cherwell Road, Oxford OX4 1BG.

161
This same scandalous indifference towards the effects of DU was to be repeated just over two years later when, in January 2001, reports began to emerge from Bosnia that hundreds of Serbs—living close to the site of U.S. Air Force depleted-uranium bombings in 1995—were suffering and dying from unexplained cancers. When I travelled to Bosnia to investigate these deaths, I found that up to 300 Serbian men, women and children living close to the site of a 1995 DU bombing of a military base in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici had died of cancers and leukaemias over the following five years—they lay next to each other in an extended graveyard at Bratunac in eastern Bosnia, the town to which they had travelled as refugees. One frozen winter's morning in Bratunac, I interviewed twelve-year-old Sladjana Sarenac, who had picked up a bomb fragment outside her home in Hadjici. Her story was eerily and painfully familiar. “It glittered and I did what all children do,” she said. “I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and soil in the garden. Within two months I got a kind of yellow sand under my fingernails and then the nails started to fall out.” Sladjana had been seriously ill ever since. Her nails had repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes, she had suffered internal bleeding, constant diarrhoea and vomiting, enduring a thirty-hour coma and a calvary of Yugoslav hospitals. It was the same old story. NATO said they had no evidence of the ill-effects of DU munitions in Bosnia but wanted to know if any existed; yet when offered the opportunity to investigate such reports, they showed no interest in doing so. On 17 January 2001, I appealed in
The Independent
for any NATO doctors in Bosnia to get in touch with me on my temporary Sarajevo telephone number, offering to take them to Bratunac and to introduce them to Sladjana. The phone never rang. The Iraqis were Muslims and the Serbs were Orthodox Christians—most of them hostile to Bosnia's Muslim community—but they shared one characteristic: in 1991 and 1995, they were both, respectively, our “enemy” and thus could be ignored. Similarly, the UN was left to carry out an inconclusive survey of DU use during the 1999 Kosovo war after which the American military admitted that it had “lost count” of the number of DU rounds used during the NATO bombardment of Serbia. (See the author's reports in
The Independent
, 4 October and 22 November 1999.)

162
Only six months before the attacks on the United States, it is fascinating to see that bin Laden was regarded as a secondary threat, lumped in with Russian criminals and nuclear expertise from the former Soviet Union. Saddam's regime—which had no weapons of mass destruction at all—was still touted as the greatest danger. Once Afghanistan was bombarded and Osama had escaped, the same scenario was reintroduced by Messrs. Bush and Blair in 2002. But then again, Osama bin Laden's existence was not likely to generate the obscene profits in weapons sales procured at Abu Dhabi and other arms fairs in the Middle East.

163
Palestinians were still trying to discover the nature of a gas canister now regularly used by Israelis, containing what they called “brown smoke.” Obviously feared by Palestinian protesters, it was described as having a far more potent effect even than the Federal Laboratories Pennsylvania-made gas. At least one “brown smoke” gas canister which I examined in Bethlehem was covered in Hebrew markings and carried the code 323 1-99. It did not appear to be of U.S. manufacture.

164
During my investigations, I was given a genuine end-user certificate from the state of Oman in the Gulf, already signed by the authorities. If I had wished to transport arms to the Middle East, I had only to write in the weapons of my choice for the shipment to be “legal.”

165
Michael Hitchcock, a press officer for the Department of Trade and Industry, told me in 1987 that “our policy is we don't discuss whether a company has applied and been granted a licence because it was for civil use. We would consult the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office if we thought it necessary.”

166
The Israelis learned how to sell weapons by learning how to change their shape. Their first conflict—their war of independence, which drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel—was fought with the help of two Sherman tanks, two elderly Cromwells and ten French tanks made around 1935. The Israelis modified the gun barrels to lengthen their range and fitted pieces of new armour to the structure. By the 1950s, they were still buying up battlefield junk from the wreckage of the Second World War, including tanks from Italy and even the Far East. Many were simply cannibalised to re-create whole working tanks for the country's new army. Some of the Shermans, painstakingly upgraded, later fought in the 1967 Middle East war and even the 1973 conflict. They were then discarded—as gifts to Israel's brutal proxy “South Lebanon Army” militia, and to Uganda.

167
Israel, according to former army officers in Tel Aviv, shipped 2,000 Kalashnikov rifles and hundreds of RPG-7 anti-tank rockets to Nicaragua in 1983, all captured from PLO guerrillas during Israel's invasion of Lebanon the previous year.

168
In 1994, the Cameron Commission of Inquiry was appointed to look into alleged arms transactions between Armscor, the South African state weapons procurement body, and Christian militia groups between 1983 and 1993. After the Lebanese war ended in 1990, the Phalange were accused of sending surplus arms to Croatia and Slovenia at the height of the Balkans conflict, an accusation that became all too credible when the Yugoslav navy, which was in Serbian hands, seized a vessel carrying the weapons through the Adriatic, stored them in a warehouse in the port of Bar and then sent a bill to the Phalange for storage charges. According to the Lebanese government, the weapons included four French-made Gazelle helicopter gunships, several patrol boats, artillery shells and multi-barrelled rocket-launchers.

169
I have referred readers in the Preface to my own book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the
Nation
; those who want to understand the wider context to the Israeli killing of almost 200 Lebanese civilians in April 1996, including the massacre at Qana, can turn to the new British and American editions of the book, especially pp. 669–89.